When I am World President, people will not be stupid.
Let me rephrase that: When I am World President, people will have ready access to all pertinent information. And do what I tell them into the bargain.
Inhabitants of Australia’s largest city (it has rained every day, heavily, for over a week) will laugh hollowly at a report from the BBC about the drought .
Yes folks, it’s the wettest drought on record. There is no denying that farmers are having a hard time of it. Farmers who grow – in this arid climate – crops such as rice. And cotton. That, um, use a lot of water. More than any other crop, in fact0. While apple growers celebrate a bumper harvest .
Meantime, urban terrorists citizens, who already behave as if it’s a police state (there are signs in every shop saying that it is a ‘condition of entry’ that you present your personal bags for inspection when requested. Not ‘requested by police’ – no, the checkout girl can ask. And people comply! I politely decline. I might live in a penal colony, but I refuse to be treated like a criminal), are being instructed to make further cuts in their water use. Never mind the social impact of this (the trains stink), my fast red sports car needs a wash:
More seriously, if you build a house and do not allow all rainwater that falls on your property to soak into the ground (by, for example, incorporating a ground-level rain storage tank) it used to be that you had to pay a charge – a tax (disclaimer: this particularly odd piece of legislation might have been repealed. Can’t find anything about it on teh intarwebs). And the population, scared of God-knows-what, is firmly opposed to any recycling of water at all.
But.
“The reality is that water is used wisely in the cities for a range of purposes, including high value-added industrial and commercial uses. Over the past 20 years there has been a substantial reduction in per capita urban consumption. Sydney, for example, has been able to accommodate an additional 700,000 people without using more water. In 2001, the urban-based manufacturing and services sector produced 89 percent of the nation’s gross value added. Agriculture, forestry and fisheries accounted for 2 percent. Yet in 2001 agriculture used 67 percent of Australia’s water.” [1]
Why would Australia want to spend so much, in social as well as economic terms, to save a drop in the proverbial ocean? Because people will do as they are told. Because it’s a damned sight easier to introduce taxes and legislation to piss off the famed Aussie Battlers than it is to seriously rethink the nation’s agricultural policy (most of Australia’s water-rich crops are exported. I’ve not seen cotton clothes made in Australia, nor ever bought Australian-grown rice).
And people might whine that it is a knee-jerk reaction to blame the cotton and rice farmers for Australia’s water shortage, but the fact of the matter is that there is a sparse fertile strip here, and when there is a glut of water, it should not be squandered for the sake of money, but managed for the dry times.
Rather than think seriously about stewardship and managing resources, a year ago the then Prime Minister urged Australians to pray for rain . When you pray you should be careful what you ask for, because less than two months later followed some quite spectacular floods .
And then, all good Aussies whined that the rain was ‘falling in the wrong places’. Away from the dams. Away from the catchment areas. Just as it has this year, in Sydney, the rain came down and the floods came up, and washed out to sea. I’ll remind you that this is Australia, where they built dams relatively recently and actually had the chance to locate the capital city somewhere that wasn’t dry, barren, and full of kangaroos.
What, I ask myself, is wrong with these people?
And then. And then.
The users of the dirtiest coal in the world, the biggest-engined cars (well, all right, maybe the Merkins have that honour) in the world, sitting on the most uranium in the world, don’t have the political will to do anything about climate change (which will probably actually increase global rainfall, but only in places where it is already wet. Like Manchester).
There is talk of building desalination plants to solve the water shortage (Australia, about the size of the continental US, is surrounded by sea. That’s a lot of potential potable water). These use energy. And in Australia we make energy by burning coal. That leads to global warming. Which makes more rain fall in the ‘wrong’ place.
Head hits desk
Like the rice and the cotton, we’re exporting the bloody uranium (that we can use to make ‘clean’ energy) to China. That epitome of stability, human rights and environmental respect.
I think … I think I need another drink. And seeing as the beer’s crap here (with notable exceptions ), it’ll have to be whisky. No CO2 in that, right?
0 Rice requires twice as much water as any other crop in Australia, followed by cotton (which requires half that amount).
How much Australia reminds us of our own dear Queen.
Large, dry, shadow of her former glory?
What?
Just how much water policy in Oz is like that of Blighty. The country is flooded, but nobody stores water, so that hosepipe bans are in force. That there are plenty of schemes to save water domestically but no incentive to implement them. So after a couple of dry weeks it’s water shortages and standpipes in the streets. You know the sort of thing.
I thought that was Yorkshire Water’s fault.
Not just them. Thames water, for example, loses 900,000,000 litres every day simply through its leaky pipework.
This past year, the US state of Georgia was preparing to sue the state of Tennessee for access to the Tennessee River, citing a two hundred year old surveying error that placed the border a mile too far south. Georgia wanted access to the river so they could divert water to the city of Atlanta, whose resevoir was nearly dry.
Then it started raining and now we’ve got floods.
In my city (Portland, Maine) our water treatment system functions quite well…unless there’s a storm, upon which it gives up and dumps everything directly into Casco Bay, giving us a lovely smell. We’ve just proposed a bond package to upgrade it, but I thought I’d join in the chorus of water stories.
There’s talk in London of banning concrete gardens (or as we say back home, ‘yards’) to prevent flooding. Since I live at sea level and the Thames Barrier is looking less statuesque by the week, I think it’s a good idea. But good God, do we really need flooding to make people realize that concreting over your garden is a stupid idea?
‘Yards’? That’s an old English term, too. My grandparents had a ‘yard’. Enough room for a coal shed, a greenhouse, some tomatoes.
Grass? Posh folk had grass. (The house backed onto the local football ground, that was as close as we could afford to get to grass in those days).