This Episode of #PlanetMoney About California Farming and Water is a #MustListen but it Made Me Really Angry

I love podcasts but have a hard time catching up with them. Sometimes I find myself weeks or months behind after not listening for a while, so this podcast was posted back on July 22, 2015. Listen to it here or read the transcript.

This episode of PLANET MONEY, an always entertaining money-covering podcast often covers the topic of economics in a very approachable way. The reporters on the NPR-produced podcast come across as balanced, well-educated people. Which is great, but sometimes they come across as too balanced. Sometimes, there simply aren’t even two sides to a story.

 In a nutshell (preemptive pun not intended), this episode is about how pistachio farmers in California are dealing with the huge drought. Specifically, it deals with how nut farmers, are among the only entities in California that are able to dig far enough down to reach receding water levels that are now out of reach for the wells of some California residents. One reporter asked a water scientist where things were headed in this area of California and he referred to the Mad Max movies.

 Yikes.

The episode goes on to explain why farmers are still planting nut trees during this crazy drought despite a gallon of water being required to grow a single pistachio. Turns out, it’s the drought. See, the drought is making nuts scarce so the price is going up and so that makes farmers want to plant more trees so they can sell more nuts while the price is high. It makes good financial sense, right? Except, California is running out of water thanks to a historically bad drought… and because of farmers who are planting more nut trees. See, agriculture is pretty much the biggest drinker of water. But hey, you know, economics.

Maybe there’s something more important than economics? Not according to the NPR reporters who work on PLANET MONEY.

UnderpaidGenius.com: Water Is The New Oil (ThePete: like we needed something else to fight over?)

underpaidgenius:

At the end of the era of oil we will see an explosion of activities where energy-intensive craziness takes over. Like shipping water from Alaska to India, for a penny a gallon?

Fresh water is set to be the next “big oil” of the world, with supplies in some areas growing exceedingly tight. Technologies from smart metering to irrigation management to purification all seem to be slower to reach areas like India than tankers of exported water. However, while businesses are dashing to find a profit in water exportation, water management will need to become far more popular globally if we’re to avoid a worldwide water shortage.

S2C is set to start shipping water within eight months, using tankers that have a “Ozonating” system onboard to keep the water clean. The shipping of the water alone sounds incredibly energy intensive. According to the release:

[T]his first hub will include a berth for a Suezmax vessel (156,000 cubic meters/41Million USG), an offloading system to a dedicated tank farm and a distribution complex for packaged water. Within 18 months after that we will be able to switch to a very large class vessel (302,833 cubic meters/80 Million USG), as both the ship and the berth for her will be completed within this time frame. Contracts for the distribution hub and ships are being finalized.

The company will be able to sell from its hub bulk fresh water by way of smaller ships that can deliver to shallower ports, like Umm Qasr in Iraq (located within 4 days of India’s west coast). S2C will also sell fresh water in 20-foot containers with flexi-tanks (4623 USG) suitable for pharmaceutical/high tech manufacturing and packaged water (18.9 and 10L) for the consumer markets anywhere containers are delivered in south and west Asia from India.

While water exportation sounds inefficient and potentially environmentally dangerous, it is getting little opposition from Alaskans.

The problem is that Alsakans don’t really own the water in this sense. The premise of existing water rights is that the water will be used locally, will ultimately return to the local aquifers and then to the local ecosystem. It certainly was never considered that local water rights would lead to the water being transported to another continent.

I guess even 9 billion gallons doesn’t seem like much water, so I wonder how much of a benefit is actually involved for India?

Yeah, this water thing has been on my radar for a while now. Back in 2003 I wrote about a water dispute between border towns on the US/Mexico border.  More recently, in 2008, I wrote about a number of water-related issues like, the 100th anniversary of water treatment, a great Canadian miniseries called H20, my own tangential connection with water, and how generally water is not a big enough focus in the current scheme of things.  Two years later, it still isn’t. 

However, seeing other folks post about water gives me a bit of hope. :)

Colbert: Clean Water Curing 50% of Diseases

This clip comes from the March 20, 2008 episode of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report" and features guest Dean Kamen and his latest invention--a water purifier that can clean virtually *any* type of water with none of the standard filters or parts associated with the expensive/cumbersome water purifiers currently available. According to a March 31, 2008 article at Wired.com (here: http://blog.wired.com/…-save.html ):

The Slingshot is a water purifier which uses vapor compression distillation to pull water out of anything remotely wet. It does this using just 2% of the power of alternatives, and can supply 1,000 liters of fresh water a day from nothing more than ditchwater and piss.

The article goes on to say that the device gets it's power from a generator that can run on anything that burns, including cow dung.

And to think most of the news has been worried about Obama's pastor, or Hillary lying about being under sniper-fire with Sinbad.

Meanwhile, Dean Kamen has unveiled a device that could save millions of lives--possibly hundreds of millions of lives around the world.

When I first saw this story on "Colbert" it literally brought tears to my eyes, thinking of all the good it could do. I wonder what other stories like this the media is effectively burying.
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