Conjoined Conspiracies: Saving Water; Blaming Carbon

It is hard not to notice a conspiracy when it has been staring you in the face for ten years.  I've been fighting two nonscience eco-fads for at least that long, and yet have only lately admitted that they are joined at the hip, one dependent on the other.  Saving water and trace gas warming, AKA global warming, AKA climate change, were both popularized in the '80s and both are pushed by the same people.  The former has provided supposed proof for the latter.

The goal of both eco-fads is a carbon tax. Saving water has dried out and heated up our world; this foreseeable result has been blamed on trace gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, measured in parts per million and billion, tiny fractions of the air, heating up and drying out our world.  Fights over water saving have been quietly suppressed; the fight over trace greenhouse gases and the push for a carbon tax has been noisy and very divisive.  The magician has been telling us to look at one hand, while the other was doing the trick.

We have already changed the climate twice, the first time by watering farms and cities with sprinklers between the '50s and the '80s.  The effect become noticeable in the '70s and '80s, but we didn't notice it then; we considered the resulting moisture, rain and coolness to be the norm.  Since the '80s, we have changed it back to dryer and hotter with water-saving water rates, rationing by price, in most of our cities, large and small.

Not that everyone promoting these fads was in on the conspiracy.  It makes great use of people who buy plausible-sounding theories that fall apart when one really thinks about them, and rate consultants and scientists who chase government and grant funding.  I bought into both fads in the '80s but was not alarmed; I didn't want to water and mow a lawn and welcomed global warming as stopping the next ice age.  Conservation is supposedly a good thing, and so we thought that conserving water was the thing to do, once it was brought up in a drought year.

Water-saving alarmists talked to city councils, cities talk to and copy each other; and states tend to follow their cities.  All over the industrialized world, cities started rationing water by price.  California cities led the way, raising water unit charges and lowering base rates to allow customers cheap access to water but making people pay through the nose to use it.  As those rates have been raised and keep rising, cities and their surrounding countryside have been drying out and burning in summer and even in winter in California, as weeds grow, seed out and dry out where green grass formerly dominated city landscapes.

I stopped believing in trace gas warming when I realized that the million in parts per million was being ignored and converted parts per million into percentages.  A large rise in a very small fraction is still a very small fraction.  The absolute amount of carbon dioxide may have increased 60% since the beginning of the industrial revolution.  But as a percentage of the atmosphere, it has increased only 0.012%, twelve thousandths of a percent, in that 250 years, which does not seem to be enough to appreciably warm the planet.  Nor have its proponents ever accounted for the fact that warming increases rotting, and carbon dioxide and methane are products of rot.  Are increased gases warming the air, or has warming increased these gases?

I've also noted the way that trace gas warming proponents dismiss, belittle, and vilify those who disagree with their theory.  They are not scientists; they are political activists, and even Science News writers, who would normally quote a scientist critic of a theory by name, do not in the case of trace gas warming, but they do push “climate change” wherever they can fit it into an article.  The more ignorant its proponents are of real science, the more they appeal to authority instead of answering objections.

And then there is Bill McKibben, one of its more famous proponents, being interviewed ten years ago on public radio, telling me, in answer to my pointing out the small fraction of CO2 and how little it has increased as a portion of the atmosphere, "Carbon dioxide is the difference between Venus in Mars!"  The host did not question that, and I was already cut off from answering.  But my daughter pointed out that the real difference is size and distance from the sun.  Both planets have a very similar proportion of CO2 in their atmospheres, 97% and 96%, very different from Earth at 0.04%.

It wasn't until after 2008 that I realized what a disaster water saving is, as properties in Grants Pass and other cities started going dry and creeks dried up in midsummer that used to run all year.  My water bill, already high, doubled when Grants Pass instituted tiered rates on single family homes in 2006, just before the recession started.  A couple of years later, city staff asked the Council to raise the base rate because water-saving tiered rates had worked too well and the city was having trouble paying the overhead.  Base and unit rates have continued to rise as use has decreased.

Rationing water by price has been disastrous for the poor, as most people prefer to live one or two to a house if they can afford it, while poorer people live many to a house to share expenses.  They not only cannot afford to garden their yards and grow food; they are socked in water and sewer bills for having more people in their house, while richer folks on small lots pay less per unit than poorer folks for their lesser use, thanks to low base and high unit prices.  Young families are hit especially hard, as children need more baths and laundry, dirty more dishes, and contribute no income.

Thousands of homes have burned in California in recent years as wildfires burn into cities that used to be safe.  Wildfire smoke has become the major pollutant in the west, with more fires smoking us every year and now burning through cities.  We have had wildfire disasters all over the Western world; Greece, Spain and Australia, where semi-desert "Mediterranean" climates have turned from garden spots to dry weedy messes, burning at a spark.

We have been told that only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh water, and that we must save it wherever we can, so it doesn't run out as our population grows.  They say that evaporation is waste and that sprinklers evaporate up to half of the water they throw, so we need to use drip and plant natives that need little water.  They said that lawns take more water and chemicals than other plants, which is not true, but lawns definitely need sprinklers. 

This is a war on sprinkler use, because sprinklers put a lot of water in the air, on plants and on the ground, and all of this evaporates and cools the area.  It has become a war on gardening and even farming, with people telling us how much water it takes to grow a single almond in California.  And yet the rich can use all they are willing to pay for, making inequality far more visible.

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But evaporation is not waste; it is the beginning of the water cycle.  It cools, humidifies and makes clouds and rain.  That 2% of Earth's water that runs off the land is constantly renewed by evaporation of salt water and fresh, condensing into clouds that shade us and precipitating fresh water as it rains.  The more we throw water in the air and all over plants and the ground, the more rain it can make.  Acting as though water is abundant makes it so, at least West of the Rockies.

Water is like money.  When people become afraid to use money, recessions and depressions happen and deepen.  When they become afraid to water, either because of price or supply, irrigation drought sets in, increasing the fear for the supply and making the drought worse.

Indeed, it is hard to waste water where we have water and sewer treatment plants and a good river.  Water that goes down the sewer is cleaned to drinking water standards and put back in the river.  Water that sinks into the ground renews the water table.  Water that is evaporated, transpired and breathed out makes clouds and rain.

It is even harder to waste irrigation water on the west side of the Rockies and other western mountain ranges on other continents.  The western edge of any continent tends to be dry because the eastern side of oceans are cold and create little evaporation, as water does not evaporate below 40 degrees F.  But we are blessed with clean, cold rivers that run into the prevailing western wind, which blows our evaporated irrigation water upstream and uphill, making rain to fill creeks and rivers, just like the drawings of the water cycle.  Water can make this circuit many times over a summer. Some of that water blows over the Rockies to the Great Plains and the Southwest, sharing water with other states.  Sprinkler-aided farming in the Great Plains moistens and cools summers in Chicago with clouds and rain.

Water is the most powerful force in our weather.  Water is the most abundant greenhouse gas, at 1%-4% of the air, and holds heat through the night and in winter by its sheer thermal mass and cloud blanketing.  You can feel the difference that water makes when it varies up to 400%.  A rainy or snowing winter day is warmer than a clear one, as heat escapes into space when it's clear, and heat is released as water vapor becomes liquid water, and more heat is released as water becomes ice.  It cools summer days by evaporation, cloud shading, fog, rain, and dew.  Water is the great moderator of our climate, and yet is involved in our biggest disasters, blizzards and hurricanes.

When "global warming" started, we were told that excess CO2 and methane would warm winters, higher latitudes and nights more than summers, the tropics, and days.  After 2000, "global warming" became "climate change," which had the twin vices of being both less specific and more frightening.  We were told that extreme weather was increasing, which it was.

Temperature extremes, heavy storms, flash floods and fires are symptoms of drought, of desert conditions prevailing as we returned our highly gardened cities in the dry West of every continent to semi-desert conditions, which are far more dangerous than real deserts, as semi-deserts grow a lot more weeds to dry out and burn.  Even hurricanes are strengthened, as less and warmer water flows from cities down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, warming it and revving up the storms that enter it, like Hurricane Michael.

Beavers made Western climes moister and rainier by building dams on creeks that make ponds that grow trees around them, slowing down creeks and allowing water to soak into the ground and grow the trees they eat.  They make ditches to transport wood from those trees to their ponds, which spreads the water further and grows more trees.  Trees transpire and make rain, which spreads the water further still.  When the trappers killed them for their fur, early in Western exploration, many of these places quickly became desert, and the ranchers and settlers that came after the trappers did not know what had been lost as tumbleweeds took over the West.

We, like beavers, make our own habitats and changed climates in our favor by building dams and using water for irrigation, and like the beaver, we didn't realize what we were doing when we were doing it.  But we can bring beavers back to the West, and we can talk to our city councils and bring back the kind of water rates that made gardening our cities possible, those that follow the normal business practice of charging less per unit the more units we buy.

Most of the cost of providing clean water is overhead, fixed costs: plant; people; maintenance, and debt service.  Very little of it is unit cost, which varies with the number of units cleaned and delivered: electricity for pumping; chemicals, and filters or filter cleaning.  This is what we were told by city staff when they asked the Council to raise the base rate to stabilize the plant finances after a few years of tiered rates cutting usage, which was supposed to pay the overhead.

When I first lived in Grants Pass for 2 years in the '80s, we paid $25 per month for water and sewer, combined.  The city was clean, green, and beautiful.  We had wet thunderstorms nearly every weekend over the summer of '85.  In '86, we had low snowpack in the mountains and drought was declared.  We were told not to water our lawns or wash cars.  We grew vegetables and fruit and suffered brown lawns equally.  We had 103 days of no rain that summer, and 98 the next, as the low snow drought continued and then passed.  And still, the ‘80s was a wet decade overall, because nearly everyone in dry climates was watering in summer when they could.

Remembering that decade, in 2013 I did a study of rainfall and temperatures in the Grants Pass zip code in summers that covered 1983-2012.  In the first decade, we had larger rain events in July and August than in June or September.  The following decade, that reversed as the base rate was lowered and unit prices introduced in the late ‘90s; the third decade, when tiered rates were introduced in 2006, reversed it further.  July and August rainfall dropped by 0.9 inches per decade as water unit rates rose and use dropped.  Both trends have continued, as prices rose and use dropped.

Monthly high temperatures rose with each decade along with water prices.  The base rate did not stay low but had to be raised repeatedly to continue to cover the overhead as we used less water.  Unit prices rose as well with the Consumer Price Index, as we all paid more individually to use less water collectively, from 82 cents top rate to $1.40, before the recent rate raises to start paying for a new water treatment plant. They are now $1.49 and set to rise 5% per year for 5 years.

We must demand that they put all the overhead back in the base rate and only unit cost in the unit price, both increased, not by the CPI, but by increased expenses.  This system creates the most stable plant finances and lowest rates and allows us to use the water we are paying for access to, for watering our cities and keeping them and the surrounding countryside safe from wildfire.

If talking to them fails, we can sue them.  Both Oregon and California law requires that any public entity, when setting rates for a service, must charge no more than the cost of providing that service to each customer, individually.  The customer is the household, not its residents. Paying for fixed costs with a fixed price and only marginal unit costs with a single unit rate pays exactly what it costs to provide each customer with all the water they want to use, at a rate that allows all of us to use as much as we want.

Email the Grants Pass City Council and Mayor: mayorcouncil@grantspassoregon.gov