A conspiracy for Planet Money: saving water

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.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/crop-irrigation-could-be-cooling-midwest 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/watering-fields-california-boosts-rainfall-southwest

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.