A residential property in Grants Pass.
Planet
Money, you asked for conspiracy theories.
Mine is about the environmental fad of saving water, regardless of local
conditions, supplies, or needs. This started
in the ‘80s, with people telling us that only 2% of the water on Earth is
fresh, and we must therefore conserve it, that it is a precious resource. It is not precious, it is vital to life and
healthy living, and now it is overpriced by the unit in many, if not most,
places in this country and around the world.
Governments in
the United States and throughout the world have taken it upon themselves to
ration water by price, instituting low base rates and high unit prices, the
opposite of previous water pricing, which was all base rate.
California
cities have led the way, with tiered pricing, charging more per unit for higher
tiers of use, the opposite of normal business pricing. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/us/a-thirsty-california-puts-a-premium-on-excess-water-use.html?_r=0
That
practice has spread to Oregon, including my city of Grants Pass, encouraged by state
officials. High unit rates have spread
to sewer rates, with units based on winter water use, putting downward pressure
on household water use. My sewer bill jumped
from $20 to $40 when these unit rates were instituted, and this year it jumped
to $75, because I had 7 people living in my house last winter.
It is a quiet
war on irrigation and use of sprinklers particularly. Their battle cry is “Evaporation is waste!” My landscape management teacher, in 2000,
told us that half of sprinkler water evaporates; evaporation is waste; we were
due for a drought; and to sell customers on drip systems. In my 18 years of gardening professionally, I
did so for the first 10 and sooner and later lived to regret it. Drip and all other water-saving irrigation
devices are delicate and don’t water completely or well, which is their point.
The war on
irrigation is a direct attack on gardening, and landscape maintenance codes
have not been enforced well for 20 years, mainly due to the property bubble,
filling city councils with bankers, speculators and developers, none of whom
want to maintain properties at all, much less to code. Weeds grow, bloom and
seed unchecked on many properties, making it harder for gardeners to maintain
their own places.
The ignored
collateral damage of all this water saving is the budgets and lives of the poor
and middle class, who are provided cheap access to water with a low base rate
but must pay through the nose to use it.
They can’t afford to water lawns, trees and shrubs, or grow food. What good does it do to let us buy vegetable
seeds with food stamps, if we can’t afford to grow them? In the ‘80s, we paid only a base rate for
water, and could use all we needed or wanted.
But if the
poor can’t garden, then they won’t garden for you. They’ll work fast food. Those who would hire gardening help are
finding that weeders are hard to find. Grants
Pass is dry, dusty, and prone to weed fires, where it used to be clean, green
and well kept. Even though poverty was
high and wages were low in the ‘80s, we all lived more beautifully.
Evaporation is not waste; it is part of the water cycle. It cools, humidifies and makes rain. It is the easiest way to share water with neighbors
and other localities downwind, and to make rain in and around the place it from
which it evaporates.
Indeed, it
is hard to waste water in a city with a good sewage system and a good river
with a storage dam. Water that goes down
sewage pipes is cleaned to drinking water standards and returned to the river. Irrigation water either goes into the ground,
recharging the water table; into the air to make rain, or into and through the
plants, and transpired to make rain.
Even the plants we grow eventually give up their water to the cycle.
We on West
Coast who live near rivers are blessed with clean rivers running west, into the
prevailing wind, which blows our water vapor uphill, where it condenses and
rains, filling our creeks and rivers.
The more we use sprinklers, the more rain we make.
When I read
the above article about California water boosting rainfall in the Colorado
River drainage, I did a study of rainfall and temperature in Grants Pass zip
code, June-September, 1983-2012.
I lived here
from late ’84 to ‘86, which, thanks to this fad, was probably the height of
sprinkler irrigation in California and Oregon.
We had wet thunderstorms every weekend in midsummer, though not usually
wet enough to skip watering. We didn’t
have many dry lightning storms that started fires and had no fires or smoke
near Grants Pass. Watching the local
news, I saw that Medford had more and larger midsummer storms than Grants Pass,
and Klamath Falls had more than Medford, which fits with each city in turn
adding to the water in the air with sprinklers as it condenses and falls from blowing
uphill from the west.
We had a
drought in ‘86 and were told not to water lawns or wash cars. Everyone suffered equally, and paid equally
for water, and our slight suffering ended with the fall rains. That year, we had 103 days without rain, because we weren't watering lawns.
My study
showed that the first decade, 1983-1992, had larger top rain events in July and
August than in June and September; 1993-2003 reversed that; and 2003-2013
reversed it further. Highest monthly
temperatures also tended to increase, but lowest lows also decreased. The amount of midsummer rain dropped nearly an inch per month per decade.
Between 1987
and 2000, I lived in Arizona. I saw the
cooling effects of irrigation in their cotton and corn fields, 10 degrees
cooler in the fields than up the road in Bullhead City. I saw the thunderstorms, torrential rains and
flash floods; cold nights and
hot days; the tempering effect of humidity and rain during their monsoons; and even
brush fires. Fires, floods and weather
and temperature extremes are common to deserts and droughts, not a consequence
of a slowly warming climate.
We have
changed the climate. First we made it
wetter and cooler between the 1960s and 1980s by widespread sprinkler
irrigation, and then made it drier and hotter since the ‘80s by making
water use too expensive, mainly in the cities.
The resulting drying and warming has been blamed on trace gases like CO2 and methane, measured
in parts per million and billion, respectively.
The former has been ignored as natural variation, rather than looking at
the role of water vapor, 1%-4% of the atmosphere, and the way we keep it wetter and cooler when we use sprinklers and work the water cycle.
Why would the enviro powers-that-be push this deceptive and absurd water-saving agenda? To gain their goal of carbon taxes, their holy grail. But the semi-desert cities in California, Oregon, Greece, Spain, Italy and Australia that were turned into gardens and then let dry out every summer are starting to burn up (even in winter in California and the Great Plains) from all the dry weeds that these water-saving policies have grown, along with the dry forests and grasslands around them.
