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.
Fair Use, no copyright infringement intended.
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
