Report on Business Reports on Water
by Lloyd Alter, Toronto on 03.31.08
We don't usually find much of interest for TreeHugger readers in the Globe and Mail's Report on Business magazine, and their content is usually behind a stupid subscription fence. However this month they have three important articles on water, declaring it "The Decade's most important business Issue."
John Lorinc (known to TreeHuggers for The New City) writes The Battle of the Bottle - "Critics decry water bottlers' use of a public good for private profit. The industry would just like to offer a new flavour to you. And to your child. And to your dog" He describes some of the battles over local water and continues "The water critics accuse the big bottlers of siphoning off natural resources, as at [local source] Aberfoyle. But the rap sheet also includes the various ways that bottled water turns the natural into the unnatural, adding packaging waste (about half of all sales are in single-serving bottles); greenhouse gas emissions (for instance, from shipping millions of bottles of "natural artesian" water from Fiji to the United States); and health risks." ::ROB Magazine
Andrew Nikiforuk, (known to TreeHugger for Hydrocarbon Hurricane) writes Liquid Asset: Could the oil sands, Canada's greatest economic project, come undone simply because no one thought about water?
"Here in Canada, we tend to think that while water scarcity, drying rivers and toxic lakes may be huge global problems, they really only affect places like China and the Middle East. But the rapid development of Alberta's oil sands, coupled with accelerating population growth and climate change, has turned arid Alberta into Canada's ground zero for water. Our history is all about exploiting our abundance of natural resources, and Alberta is the embodiment of the frontier's boundless promise. Could our tradition of taming the landscape finally have been arrested by something as humble as H20?" ::ROB Magazine
Finally, Eric Reguly writes about
Big eau Everyone knows who the oil superpowers are. But what about blue oil? (Hint: Make that bleu)
As a soldier, Napoleon III, the nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte, was pretty much a dud. He started the Franco-Prussian War and was captured in the Battle of Sedan in 1870, a catastrophe that brought his long reign as France's emperor to a swift and inglorious end. But as a social engineer, Napoleon III was something of a whiz. His civic planner, Baron Haussmann, rebuilt Paris. The medieval slums were cleared and replaced with grand boulevards. Parks and sewage systems were created. The rail network was vastly expanded.
Biographies rarely mention Napoleon III's other accomplishment in social engineering: He is the father of privatized water. ::ROB Magazine
Water is not a commodity it is a right! Every person, animal, plant etc. has a right to water. Say NOOOOOOOO to corporations trying to push to privatize all clean water. This is just wrong! If the rich and the corporations OWN the water, they will OWN the people because people can not survive without fresh water.
Imagine governments selling the rights to water to corporations. These corporations will let the poor die of thirst in order to turn a profit and when the government of that country tries to step in, the corporation will use their rights under NAFTA and other bullshit corporate protection policies to "protect themselves" from financial hardship. We can not allow the privatization of all fresh water supplies, otherwise we will all lose and more people will die.
There is enough fresh water to go around, it is just a matter of keeping it fresh (without polution for corporations) and allowing people the right to access it. Even if that means helping them access it by investing in the necessary infrastructure.
I will never buy another bottled water as long as I live!
I do not agree that fresh water is a right. It is a finite natural resource that people may eventually exhaust (which has already happened in many places). That said, I do not think it should be privatized either.
Privatization comes in many forms. One of the more egregious is desalinization. We had a situation in S. Calif. where a company sold the city of Huntington Beach a system that essentially was like their failed version from Florida... We shall see if this same company fixes the technical problems it had (has) and dodges (hides) the environmental issues of sucking in ocean animals (killing them) and pumping out water with the salinity of the Great Salt Lake... into one area over time. And, will this venture be good, in general, for the off shore environment of their beaches - a beloved beach for surfers.... All of this with the increased cost of fuel (desal is very energy hungry, even when it's in-flow cooling water is from a local coal/oil fired electric plant - ah, yes ... that, too) and all the profits the City thought it would get from selling this water to its neighbors.....
Here is a small history lesson... care of Google..
The Company and it's first projects before Huntington Beach;
http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:6NHK8Ao-4LsJ:www.signonsandiego.com/news/northcounty/20040129-9999_1n29desal.html+Poseidon+desalination+plant+florida&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=3&gl=us&client=safari
http://www.water-technology.net/projects/tampa/
Huntington Beach and its decision;
http://www.surfcity-hb.org/CityDepartments/planning/major/poseidon.cfm
http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/homepage/abox/article_1020891.php