Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
“The focus should be on these types of guidelines, not water allo-
cation, because [since] each state has its own system for regulating
the withdrawal of surface water and groundwater, it would be a mis-
take to push for a national system that would standardize withdrawal
among all fi fty states,” says Kramer. “For one thing, it's politically
impractical, and secondly, it would cause so much disruption in water
systems around the country that it wouldn't be worth the effort.”
Instead, Kramer suggests changes such as improving established
national plumbing standards with a goal of greater water-use effi -
ciency across all states. Low-water fl ush toilets are a good example.
Some states may want to promote ultra-effi cient 1.1-gallon fl ush toi-
lets as compared with the national low-water 1.6-gallon standard.
“Right now, if a state or community wants to institute a standard
that's more aggressive than the national plumbing standard, they're
not preempted from doing that. But there's no incentive to do it,
either,” he adds.
Getting consensus on water is a tough task. Mumme, also a well-
known international water treaty negotiator, recounts how diffi cult
it can be:
In 2002, I chaired a water summit in El Paso sponsored by
Representative Sylvester Rojas's 16th District in Texas. Rojas had
been perennially frustrated by the difficulty in getting all the par-
ties on the same page to target or identify legislative measures that
could bring some coherence and rationality to the use of water on
the Rio Grande and in the groundwater basins associated with it.
My argument was that a smart move would be to have some sort
of Mexico and United States agreement with a definition or set of
warning signs about pending water scarcity in the river based on
climate, water usage, and a variety of other things. That way, if an
alert on the river were issued, all the different users who rely on the
river's water could curtail their use for a set time until the river was
out of the stress zone.
We couldn't even get an agreement on that because there's so
much competition for the water resources that different users feel
they're going to lose if they don't control the process.
Right now, we're planning by disaster. I don't want to be an
alarmist, but I think that disaster is fairly imminent.
