It has started. Arizona governor Bill Richardson opened the first salvo by suggesting that the Northeast should ’share’ their water with the Southwest. Apparently we’re ‘awash’ in it and they desperately need it to justify building more golf courses , growing more lawns in desert lands and building more McMansions. Now that the Colorado is running dry and their aquifers are empty, they are looking north and covetously eyeing the Great Lakes.

Only one problem. Richardson is running for President and he can’t win without the Northeast so he quickly backed off from his comments. This kind of thing only reinforces that we need a comprehensive water rights policy that is national and international. Alabama and Florida are fighting over watershed rights that transcend state and national boundaries. California and the Southwestern states are doing the same and Mexico can only look on as less and less water flows downstream to them.

No one is advocating the real changes that must be made:

• Immediately put a moratorium on any new construction that cannot show rights to at least 50 years worth of water supplies not currently claimed by others
• Drought areas must impose permanent mandatory water conservation plans on all sectors including businesses
• Long term water reclamation, storage, transportation and generation strategies must be developed and funded
• Rates for water use must immediately be raised two-fold to put the nation on an emergency notice that is a looming national problem
• Raised taxes on excess water use should be funneled into long term water conservation and reclamation strategies

This is a real time problem. And no one, especially the politicians, is doing anything about it.

Residents of Atlanta, Georgia may open their taps in the next month and have nothing come out. 14,500 lawn and landscape workers have been laid off because there is no water. The state has done nothing to deal with the crisis except for asking residents to ‘take shorter showers’. (!) Real estate developers have built like crazy and were never required to prove there was enough water to support the development.

North Carolina today asked its residents to halve their water use through Halloween so the state can evaluate its ability to handle a water crisis.

300,000 Southern Californians (update- make that 500,000) flee fires that cannot be fought because of Santa Ana winds, extreme drought conditions and large amounts of dead, dry brush. Thousands of homes will be lost.

The Great Lakes are down seven inches from their normal levels due to very dry winters. Each inch of loss means that 8000 tons of raw materials that drive manufacturing in the region cannot be shipped this year because of the danger of shipping running aground.

In Canada’s West glaciers are rapidly disappearing. These glaciers supply the lakes and rivers that are the primary water sources for huge farms. The permafrost on the mountains is melting so that snow runoff, instead of running into the streams, is being absorbed by the ground, accelerating the losses to the water sources.

The Colorado river is drying up. It is the only supply of water for the entire South West including much of Mexico as underground aquifers are no longer viable. Yet there have been 300 hundred golf courses built in the region in the last five years.

These stories are all current today. In each case there is no man-made solution, no emergency action we can take to fix the problem. Nor are we doing anything about this- not a thing. We are building housing like crazy in areas that have no regional water sources. A study released today shows that carbon emissions worldwide have risen drastically since 2000, much faster than expected. Again, we are doing nothing.

No matter how rich we are here in North America, we cannot sustain life without water. We have no infrastructure to produce water where there is no natural source and building such an infrastructure would mean mustering hundreds of billions of dollars and a solid political consensus that understands the emergency nature of the problem. Not much chance of that taking place.

I have friends who tell me they can’t read this blog too often because it is depressing. I have held off on blogging because there is too much climate change news every day. It is obvious that this thing is upon us full force yet there is still denial at the very center of power. We have to reach these people somehow and get their attention. Perhaps having dry faucets in the thousands of McMansions around Atlanta will wake a few people up.

This trailer is a compelling brief look at a film that may eclipse An Inconvenient Truth in relevance right now. I am not a celebrity cause fan but by all reviews de Caprio has made a very important film that is frightening, provocative and relentlessly positive in its belief that we can change the world for the better. I can’t wait to see it.

Last week I was at a business meeting on the 24th floor of a building in downtown Rochester (NY). The meeting room had floor to ceiling windows. Rochester doesn’t have a lot of tall buildings so the view was unfettered and we could see miles with Lake Ontario to the north and the Bristol Hills to the south. The vista you see from high above Rochester is one of a green city in the literal sense. It looks more like a forest perforated by the occasional taller building than an urban area because we have a very active city forestry department and many large deciduous trees. It is a beautiful perspective that debunks this area’s reputation as having terrible weather- yes we get snowy winters but the spring, summer and fall (which are lengthening) are the best in the country due to a great balance of rainfall, median temps and a lack of extreme weather events.

The environmental greening of Rochester is another story. In comparison to many cities we are not in bad shape. Air pollution is limited to the occasional high ozone alert (there’s one out today due to the heat). This is a car city but traffic and commutes are minimal- the longest commute across the county should average less than a half hour. Eastman Kodak, once our largest employer, was also the single largest polluter in New York State due primarily to the fact that they were a chemical company. Now, with 60,000 less employees and digital technology, they are in the process of demolishing their old plants. They imploded two last week and have taken down nearly 40 buildings that could not be reused. Long term this means the Genesee river which neatly divides the city will be able to return to a more pristine state.

Given these advantages the city and county needs a comprehensive Green Region Plan. Gas is going to rise precipitously in the not too distant future as the oil wars heat up and destabilize world supplies even more. It is time for us to convert our perfect location and assets into a global example of the greening of a city.

Some aspects of a plan might include:
- A visionary overhaul of mass transit. We are building a state of the art bus terminal designed by Moshe Safdie downtown. The obvious next step is to create a light rail axis through the terminal that follows our major highways all the way out to the malls that conveniently mark our county borders. This would turn downtown back to a center city and eliminate much dependence on cars. Buses would serve as neighborhood connections.
- Move building codes to green standards and begin adding roof gardens to all commercial buildings
- We have an amazing bike/walk trail network, in part due to the Erie Canal that crosses the county. You can literally ride north/south and east/west across the entire county without riding on a road. This network is being greatly expanded with trails along the river from downtown to Lake Ontario and waterfront trails along the lakefront. Three season bicycle commuting is practical now.
- Energy. Wind farms are popping up in the outlying counties but are not practical in the urban areas. What we should be exploring are geothermal plants. These can be built on a small footprint, require no fuel, emit nothing and can run continuously forever (no storage issues). Theoretically one could power the downtown area. Why these plants are not being aggressively pursued is a mystery to me.

To be cont’d…