AncienTrails

A Desert Region Selling Fresh Water To Minnesota?

70  bar rises 29.97 0mpn NNE dew-point 67 sunrise 6:21  sunset 8:12  Lughnasa

Waning Gibbous Corn Moon

A California Aqueduct (note the evaporation problem)

A while back the commodification of drinking water, that is selling it in plastic bottles, got to me.  I no longer buy it for home and only occasionally outside the house, flying being a notable exception.  It was a little unusual for me to buy 3 24-packs on Sunday, but the Niagara Drinking Water was 3 24-packs for 9.99.  A real bargain.  Anyhow I bought them for the Woolly event last night.

While drinking one, I read the label.  It has Niagara Drinking Water over a representation of a large falls.  There’s also a rainbow there.  When I saw Ontario on the label, that seemed to make sense, Ontario being on the north side of the falls.  Then I looked closer.  No, it wasn’t that Ontario.  It was Ontario, California!

Whoa.  Since southern California gets 20% of its water from the Colorado (the rest coming from a combination of the Sierra snow pack, groundwater aquifer pumping and other in-state water projects), it means two interesting things.  One, an area that is essentially a desert exports water to the rest of the US, at least as far away as Minnesota.  Second, it is plausible that 20% of the water shipped from California to Minnesota 24 plastic bottles to the case came from diversions of the Colorado River.  This is not to mention the obvious irony of sending fresh water from a desert region to a region with 16,000 fresh water lakes and shoreline on the second largest body of freshwater in the world.

This is a crime against the planet, the intellect, common sense and the already fragile water supplies of the West.  Wish I’d read the label before I forked over my 9.99.

In addition to the above I just found this on the Politics in the Zeros website:

“Water use in California consumes significant amounts of electrical energy. Preliminary estimates indicate that total energy used to pump and treat this water exceeds 15,000 GWh per year, or at least 6.5 percent of the total electricity used in the State per year.

Water use results in such large energy costs primarily because so much of the State’s water demand is located far from available sources, and the moving of water is inherently energy intensive.”

Sort makes you wonder who is in charge?