Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Though new regulations in areas such as virtual water await political action, Australi-
ans took steps to reinvent their irrigation system. In 2009, Australia's prime minister,
Kevin Rudd, launched a $1.3 billion plan to limit the amount of water extracted from
the Murray-Darling Basin, buy water rights from farmers, begin monitoring water use,
integrate ground and surface water supplies, impose rationing, raise water prices, ban
car washing and garden watering, and invest in water infrastructure.
“For the first time the cities are focused on their worries about the future water sup-
ply,” New South Wales
Senator Bill Hefernan
said in 2006. “Everyone has taken for
granted that you turn the tap on and water comes out. I think they now can see that that
might not necessarily be the case.”
• • •
In the United States, the relationship between climate change and water supply has not
become a politically salient topic. During the Bush years, Congress bickered over legis-
lation aimed at reducing greenhouse gases, such as the carbon cap-and-trade proposal,
which would put a price on carbon emissions and allow permits to emit the gases to be
auctioned. Cap and trade is the mechanism most favored by the Obama White House
for limiting carbon emissions. In March 2009, the EPA administrator,
Lisa Jackson
, re-
leased an official opinion stating that global warming poses a danger to public health.
Congress began to lay the groundwork for legislative changes, which many in the GOP
contended were based on flawed science. The conflict made a consensus impossible, and
in July 2010 legislation designed to limit global warming died in the US Senate.
Despite the political gridlock, the scientific consensus is that global warming will
profoundly affect the water supply in coming years and will force people to make diffi-
cult decisions about how to manage it. The demands of urban and rural users and the
ecosystem will have to be balanced. As the population soars, we will need to ensure
long-term food and energy supplies. To adapt to new conditions, we will need to devel-
op new strategies and technologies.
Many of the water policies of the twentieth century will become obsolete in the
twenty-first. But before addressing new approaches for the future, I went to the desert
West, to see how we collected, transported, and used water in the past.
Nations have traditionally responded to a lack of water by building hydro-infrastruc-
ture, from digging simple ditches to erecting vast dams, to capture runoff in wet periods
and store it for times of need. The next conceptual and technical leap was to devise
ways to move water from its source (a river, lake, or aquifer) to where it was in high de-
mand (a farm, a factory, a growing city). In America, especially in the West, grandiose
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