Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  Palestinian and Israeli officials continued to meet: Postel, “Sharing the River out of Eden,” 64.

  “When one man drinks”: Cited in Elhance, 122.

  costs, however, were staggering: Craig A. Smith, “Saudis Worry as They Waste Their Scarce Water,” New York Times, January 26, 2003. Allan, 85.

  exhausted about 60 percent: Pearce, 61.

  slashed wheat production: Brown, “Aquifer Depletion.”

  10-quart toilets: Smith, “Saudis Worry as They Waste Their Scarce Water.” See also Pearce, 61.

  414–415. Arabian aquifer may be scraping bottom: Patrick E. Tyler, “Libya’s Vast Pipe Dream Taps into Desert’s Ice Age Water,” New York Times, March 2, 2004.

  Yemen: Yemen, ancient home of the Sabaean kingdom and source of precious myrrh and frankincense, was in danger of becoming a failed state amok with religious jihadists, political insurgencies, and anarchic social conflicts over scarce freshwater that had left dozens dead in recent years. The groundwater tables supplying Yemen’s life-giving wells were plunging by six feet a year in the countryside and by 15 feet a year in its major cities; its capital, Sanaa, was expected by the World Bank to run dry by 2010, with no solution in sight. Meanwhile, Yemen’s 22 million mostly poor, restive citizens were expected to double within a generation—making the country a constant source of potential regional and international destabilization.

  subway-sized tunnels buried six feet: Tyler, “Libya’s Vast Pipe Dream Taps into Desert’s Ice Age Water” McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 155. See also Pearce, 45–48. Like Saudi Arabia and Yemen, Libya was an effectively waterless land with scant rainfall and no surface rivers or lakes that withdrew seven times more freshwater from groundwater sources than its total renewable supply.

  largest known fossil water deposit: Earth’s biggest aquifers are the Sahara’s Nubian sandstone aquifer, with 50 billion acre-feet under Libya, Egypt, Chad, and Sudan; South America’s Guarani aquifer, with 40 billion acre-feet lying beneath 400,000 square miles of Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay; the Ogallala, in the United States; and the North China Plain.

  Occidental Petroleum magnate Armand Hammer: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 155.

  pipeline blowouts: Tyler, “Libya’s Vast Pipe Dream Taps into Desert’s Ice Age Water.”

  less than half of the food needs: Pearce, 45–48.

  Chapter Sixteen: From Have to Have-Not: Mounting Water Distress in Asia’s Rising Giants

  diminishing groundwater reserves for their irrigated agriculture: India, Pakistan, and China together accounted for 45 percent of global groundwater use; the other leading groundwater user was the United States, but only a small portion of its agriculture depended upon it.

  “an era of severe water scarcity”: Quoted in Somini Sengupta, “In Teeming India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul Sludge,” New York Times, September 29, 2006.

  “survival of the Chinese nation”: Wen Jiabao, quoted in “Drying Up,” Economist, May 19, 2005, 46.

  “Hindu rate of growth”: Das, 4.

  Narmada River valley: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 161–162; Postel, Last Oasis, 55–56; Specter, 68.

  the commission concluded: Pearce, 134–135; Katherine Kao Cushing, “The World Commission on Dams Report: What Next?” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2002–2003, 152.

  421–422. “so that the specter of food shortages”: Manmohan Singh, quoted in Somini Sengupta, “In Fertile India, Growth Outstrips Agriculture,” New York Times, June 22, 2008. On Indian wheat farmers’ water use, see Economist, “Awash in Waste,” April 11, 2009.

  store no more than a couple of months’ protection: World Bank.

  small tube wells: Marcus Moench, “Groundwater: The Challenge of Monitoring and Management,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2004–2005, 88; Pearce, 36–37.

  India relies on groundwater mining: Pakistan, however, relied more on groundwater as a percentage of its total water use.

  being mined twice as fast: Brown, “The Effect of Emerging Water Shortages on the World’s Food,” in McDonald and Jehl, 82.

  Coca-Cola and Pepsi: Peter H. Gleick and Jason Morrison, “Water Risks That Face Business and Industry,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 146; Saritha Rai, “Protests in India Deplore Soda Makers’ Water Use,” New York Times, May 21, 2003.

  Indian government report: Sengupta, “In Teeming India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul Sludge.” New Delhi had 5,600 miles of water pipes, which lost an estimated 25 percent to 40 percent to leaks.

  poor are effectively subsidizing: Peet, 8; Specter, 63.

  newly installed meters broke down: Gleick and Morrison, 148.

  Ritu Praser: Sengupta, “In Teeming India, Water Crisis Means Dry Pipes and Foul Sludge.”

  India’s sanitation: Gleick and Morrison, 148.

  surface and ground water supply is polluted: Meena Palaniappan, Emily Lee, and Andrea Samulon, “Environmental Justice and Water,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2006–2007, 128.

  pesticide plant in Bhopal: Somini Sengupta, “Decades Later, Toxic Sludge Torments Bhopal,” New York Times, September 29, 2006.

  Gangotri glacier: Emily Wax, “A Sacred River Endangered by Global Warming,” Washington Post, June 17, 2007; “Melting Asia,” Economist, June 7, 2008, 29. Similarly, the Kashmir valley’s sole year-round water source, the Kolahoi glacier, had shrunk by half a mile in the twenty years since 1985. “How Green Was My Valley?” Economist, October 23, 2008. On a positive note, in early 2009 India broke its domestic political logjam and agreed to move forward cooperatively on the Ganges with Nepal, the mountainous upriver state where half its waters originated but which itself had only one-twentieth of the basin’s population.

  round of informal dialogues: The diplomatically quiet Abu Dhabi Dialogue, under World Bank auspices, brought together the often-rival neighbors for three meetings between 2006 and mid-2008.

  one-third fall in agricultural output: Economist, “Melting Asia,” 29.

  Indus is not a giant river: McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 159.

  Indus is badly overdrawn: Erik Eckholm, “A River Diverted, the Sea Rushes In,” New York Times, April 22, 2003.

  scant thirty days’ capacity: World Bank.

  Punjabi cropland: Moench, 88. Today, groundwater pumping is an indispensable source of the country’s heavily irrigation-dependent agriculture; indeed, on a per person basis, no major nation in the world outside the Middle East was more addicted to its depleting groundwater for its survival.

  Sindhis are bitterly complaining: Eckholm, “River Diverted, the Sea Rushes In” Erik Eckholm, “A Province Is Dying of Thirst, and Cries Robbery,” New York Times, March 17, 2003.

  residents routinely boil: Michael Wines, “For a Sickening Encounter, Just Turn On the Tap,” New York Times, October 31, 2002.

  overran the pivotal Buner district: Pakistan’s semiautonomous mountainous northwestern Pashtun-tribe-dominated provinces were already host to the Muslim fundamentalist extremists like Afghanistan’s Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda. Their breakout into Pakistan proper posed perilous potential repercussions for India and the world. Carlotta Gall and Eric Schmidt, “U.S. Questions Pakistan’s Will to Stop Taliban,” New York Times, April 24, 2009.

  brink of war: Postel, Last Oasis, 85; Elhance, 167, 174–175.

  shortfall will be equal to its total usage: John Pomfret, “A Long Wait at the Gate to Greatness,” Washington Post, July 27, 2008.

  430–431. peaked out in the late 1990s: Brown, “Aquifer Depletion.” On famine numbers, see Mirsky, 39.

  meat consumption increased two and a half times: “Sin Aqua Non,” Economist, April 11, 2009.

  projects on the Yellow River: Ma, China’s Water Crisis, ix, 39. The large-scale waterworks were common to both the Communists and their Nationalist predecessors. In 1934 the Nationalist government had dredged and almost entirely rebuilt the span of the Grand Canal between the Yangtze and the Huai rivers and installed ship
locks for medium-sized steamers. Between 1958 and 1964, Mao’s Communist government did even more extensive work so it could handle larger ships.

  water use quintupled: Jim Yardley, “Under China’s Booming North, the Future Is Drying Up,” New York Times, September 28, 2007.

  If the human costs seemed high: “China’s Growing Pains,” Economist, August 21, 2004, 11. See also Jim Yardley, “At China’s Dams, Problems Rise with Water,” New York Times, November 9, 2007. In the quarter century after 1978, per capita living standards rose about sevenfold; some 400 million were lifted out of poverty and a huge middle class was born. The 23 million dislocations come from Premier Wen’s 2007 work report to the National People’s Congress; Palaniappan, Lee, and Samulon, 134, cite the critics’ estimates of 40 to 60 million displacements.

  staircase of dams and 46 hydroelectric power plants: Ma, 8–11, 39.

  “When the Yellow River is at peace”: Quoted in Gifford, 105.

  shadow of its intended magnificence: Ma, 10.

  dry area grew steadily: Ibid., 11, 12.

  river would be rationed: Pearce, 108, 112.

  have to drill three times deeper: Yardley, “Under China’s Booming North, the Future Is Drying Up.”

  reservoir was declared unfit for drinking: Marq De Villiers, “Three Rivers,” in McDonald and Jehl, 47.

  capital will eventually have to move: Ma, 136.

  bottom will be hit around 2035: Yardley, “Under China’s Booming North, the Future Is Drying Up” Ma, viii. The northern plain originally had 60 billion cubic meters of nonrenewable groundwater. Reliance on groundwater was increasing across China as a whole, reaching one-fifth of the nation’s water supply.

  Half the lakes: Pearce, 109.

  potential new cropland was destroyed: Diamond, Collapse, 364, 365. Erosion pauperized the soil for agriculture, clogged irrigation canals and navigable river channels, and increased the risks of major flooding. Some one-fifth of all China’s land, north and south, suffered major soil erosion.

  Genghis Khan’s memorial tomb: De Villiers, 49; Ma, 31.

  replanting a “green wall” of trees: Diamond, Collapse, 368, 369. In the 2,000 years leading up to 1950, major dusters occurred on average every thirty-one years. From 1950 to 1990, they hit once every two years; from 1990, they struck almost every year. A big one in May 1993 killed a hundred people. The green wall project was budgeted at $6 billion.

  dust mixes with thick clouds of sooty, polluted air: Jim Yardley, “China’s Path to Modernity, Mirrored in a Troubled River,” New York Times, November 19, 2006.

  desiccation of northern China: Ma, 19. The headwaters of the Yellow had dried up, and had reduced water flows, just like the lower reaches from the mid- to late 1980s.

  436–437. “Swimming”: Mao Zedong (1956), quoted in Ma, 57.

  hydropower megabases: China has exploited only about one-fourth of its hydropower potential.

  “hidden dangers”: Wang Xiaofeng, speaking at the September 25 forum at Wuhan, composite quotes cited in Lin Yang, “China’s Three Gorges Dam under Fire,” Time, October 12, 2007, http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1671000,00.html; Yardley, “At China’s Dams, Problems Rise with Water” Jane Macartney, “Three Gorges Dam Is a Disaster in the Making, China Admits,” Times (London), September 27, 2007, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/article2537279.ece.

  3 to 4 million people would have to be relocated: Howard W. French, “Dam Project to Displace Millions More in China,” New York Times, October 2, 2007.

  water in the Zipingpu reservoir: Sharon LaFraniere, “Scientists Point to Possible Link between Dam and China Quake,” New York Times, February 6, 2009.

  dogged private environmental whistle-blower: Joseph Kahn, “In China, a Lake’s Champion Imperils Himself,” New York Times, October 14, 2007.

  promised to restore China’s major lakes: Keith Bradsher, “China Offers Plan to Clean Up Its Polluted Lakes,” New York Times, January 23, 2008.

  unfit for human consumption: Data from 2005 Chinese Ministry of Water Resources, cited in Gleick and Morrison, 147.

  one-fifth of wastewater is treated: Diamond, Collapse, 364.

  curtailed for want of adequate river volumes: “Drying Up,” Economist, May 19, 2005. In the northwest, some factories were permanently closed due to water shortages.

  reliance on groundwater has doubled: Yardley, “Under China’s Booming North, the Future Is Drying Up.”

  one-third of its land is severely degraded: De Villiers, 48.

  Chinese official requests to excise: “Don’t Drink the Water and Don’t Breathe Air,” Economist, January 24, 2008. In 2006 China had recorded 60,000 pollution-related domestic disturbances.

  Hu’s Green GDP report: Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes,” New York Times, August 26, 2007.

  cost of environmental loss: Economist staff, “A Ravenous Dragon: Special report on China’s quest for resources,” Economist, March 5, 2007, 18; David Barboza, “China Reportedly Urged Omitting Pollution-Death Estimates,” New York Times, July 5, 2007.

  uses three to 10 times more water: Yardley, “Under China’s Booming North, the Future Is Drying Up.”

  consume 42 times more water: Diamond, Collapse, 362.

  immense dams on the upper basins of the Mekong and the Salween: Jim Yardley, “Seeking a Public Voice on China’s ‘Angry River,’” New York Times, December 26, 2005; Seth Mydans, “Where a Lake Is Life Itself, Dam Is a Dire Word,” New York Times, April 28, 2003; Ma, x. The plans included 13 dams on the heretofore undammed Nu River—called the Salween in Myanmar—including one of the world’s biggest that would produce more hydroelectricity than Three Gorges. The dams on the Mekong and its tributaries would threaten the unusually powerful, oscillating flow of Tonle Sap—causing the tidal lake’s size to expand and contract fourfold—which was vital to Cambodia’s livelihood, as well as the volume and quality of the river reaching Vietnam.

  1997 U.N. Watercourses Convention: Turkey and Burundi, both upriver riparians, were the other two treaty rejecters. Many other countries abstained and the treaty was never ratified. However, it became part of the growing body of customary principles governing international water issues. Its two main principles, evolved over three decades, were that all riparians were entitled to equitable utilization of the watercourse’s resources and that countries would not behave in ways that significantly harmed other river states. A third, less-well-established principle held that countries would not act in any way that foreclosed another riparian’s future use of the river’s resources—a placeholder principle aimed at protecting late-developing, poor countries against overexploitation by early users.

  “Southern China has too much water”: Mao Zedong, quoted in Ma, 143.

  eastern and central routes began: Erik Eckholm, “Chinese Will Move Waters to Quench Thirst of Cities,” New York Times, August 27, 2002; Ma, 136–137, 143–144; Kathy Chen, “China Approves Large Project to Divert Water to Dry North,” Wall Street Journal, November 26, 2002.

  travel by tunnel under the Yellow River: Pearce, 219–221.

  The diversion project: David Lague, “On an Ancient Canal, Grunge Gives Way to Grandeur,” New York Times, July 24, 2007; Eckholm, “Chinese Will Move Waters to Quench Thirst of Cities.” By 2007 progress was being made—some of the stench had cleared, small fish life had returned, and urban renewal was visible along rehabilitated stretches—but many experts remained incredulous that it could be restored to an environmentally healthy state.

  Pumping water across the mountains: Eckholm, “Chinese Will Move Waters to Quench Thirst of Cities” Ma, 144.

  fall as much as a third below its farming needs: Economist, “Ravenous Dragon,” 18.

  Chapter Seventeen: Opportunity from Scarcity: The New Politics of Water in the Industrial Democracies

  each North American uses: Economist, “Sin Aqua Non,” April 11, 2009.

  three centuries of increasing twice as fast: Mill
ennium Ecosystem Assessment, 107.

  American water withdrawals peaked in 1980: U.S. Geological Survey, “Estimated Use of Water in the United States in 2000.”

  U.S. water productivity: Gary H. Wolff and Peter H. Gleick, “The Soft Path for Water,” in Gleick, World’s Water, 2002–2003, 19. All figures are in constant 1996 dollars.

  Japan’s economic productivity per unit of water: Specter, 70. Japan’s water use per $1 million of water fell from 50 to 13 million liters between 1965 and 1989.

  soft-path efficiency approach: The soft path concept was originally proposed by the influential Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute in the mid-1970s in response to the oil crisis. He argued that the West’s chief response should be to reduce energy demand through greater efficiency, thereby lowering supply needs and breaking the long-standing correlation between growth and the absolute level of energy consumption. The soft path to water, based on similar reasoning, was elaborated by Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute, with acknowledgment of his intellectual debt to Lovins.

  10 agricultural workers or 100,000 high-tech jobs: Gleick, “Making Every Drop Count,” 45.

  profligate farming practices: Peter H. Gleick, cited in Timothy Egan, “Near Vast Bodies of Water, the Land Still Thirsts,” New York Times, August 12, 2001; “Pipe Dreams,” Economist, January 9, 2003; Douglas Jehl, “Thirsty Cities of Southern California Covet the Full Glass Held by Farmers,” New York Times, September 24, 2002.

  Bass brothers: Charles McCoy and G. Pascal Zachary, “A Bass Play in Water May Presage Big Shift in Its Distribution,” Wall Street Journal, July 11, 1997; “Flowing Gold,” Economist, October 10, 1998; Brian Alexander, “Between Two West Coast Cities, a Duel to the Last Drop,” New York Times, December 8, 1998.

  internecine battles: The first battle was with the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which controlled almost all of San Diego’s access to water and didn’t want to lose its largest client.