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Drought Sends U.S. Water Agency Back to Drawing Board
By CORAL DAVENPORT
Drew Lessard stood on top of Folsom Dam and gazed at the Sierra Nevada,
which in late spring usually gushes enough melting snow into the
reservoir to provide water for a million people. But the mountains were
bare, and the snowpack to date remains the lowest on measured record.
“If there’s no snowpack, there’s no water,” said Mr. Lessard, a regional
manager for the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that built and
operates a vast network of 476 dams, 348 reservoirs and 8,116 miles of
aqueducts across the Western United States.
For nearly a century, that network has captured water as it flows down
from the region’s snowcapped mountains and moves to the farms, cities
and suburbs that were built in the desert. But as the snow disappears,
experts say the Bureau of Reclamation — created in 1902 by President
Theodore Roosevelt to wrest control of water in the arid West — must
completely rebuild a 20th-century infrastructure so that it can
efficiently conserve and distribute water in a 21st-century warming world.
Brown’s Arid California, Thanks Partly to His FatherMAY 16, 2015
“The bureau is headed into a frightening new world, an uncertain new
world,” said Jeffrey Mount, an expert on water resource management with
the Public Policy Institute of California.
For most of the 1900s, the bureau’s system — which grew into the largest
wholesale water utility in the country — worked. But the West of the
21st century is not the West of Roosevelt. There are now millions more
people who want water, but there is far less of it. The science of
climate change shows that in the future, there will be less still.
“We have to think differently,” said Michael Connor, the deputy
secretary of the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of
Reclamation. “It’s not enough just to conserve water. We need to rethink
these projects. We have a lot of infrastructure, but a lot of it doesn’t
work very well anymore. We need to undertake what amounts to a giant
replumbing project across the West.”
Mr. Connor said that in the future, the nation’s water agency would have
to put climate change at the center of its mission.
President Obama has already started to grapple with that change. Under
orders from the White House, the Bureau of Reclamation has begun studies
on the impact of global warming on 22 Western water basins and is
drawing up multidecade plans to begin rebuilding its Western water
management systems.
But a new water infrastructure across half of the United States could
cost taxpayers billions of dollars — at a moment when Republicans are
still focused on cutting taxes and lowering government spending. In
Congress, the Republican majority has targeted climate change research
as well as federal policies intended to stop climate change.
full:
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/06/us/california-drought-sends-us-water-agency-back-to-drawing-board.html
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http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/ecology/harvey_oconnor.htm
In an essay "Is Sustainable Capitalism Possible" that appears in a
collection "Is Capitalism Sustainable" edited by Martin O'Connor (no
relation), he defines both the first and second contradictions of
capitalism.
The first contradiction is generated by the tendency for capitalism to
expand. The system can not exist in stasis such as precapitalist modes
of productions such as feudalism. A capitalist system that is based on
what Marx calls "simple reproduction" and what many greens call
"maintenance" is an impossibility. Unless there is a steady and
increasing flow of profits into the system, it will die. Profit is the
source of new investment which in turn fuels technological innovation
and, consequently, ever-increasing replacement of living labor by
machinery. Profit is also generated through layoffs, speedup and other
more draconian measures.
However, according to O'Connor, as capital's power over labor increases,
there will be contradictory tendency for profit in the capitalist system
as a whole to decrease. This first contradiction of capital then can be
defined as what obtains "when individual capitals attempt to defend or
restore profits by increasing labor productivity, speeding up work,
cutting wages, and using other time-honored ways of getting more
production from fewer workers." The unintended result is that the
worker's loss in wages reduces the final demand for consumer commodities.
This first contradiction of capital is widespread throughout the United
States and the other capitalist countries today. No amount of capitalist
maneuvering can mitigate the effects of this downward spiral. Attempts
at global management of the problem are doomed to fail since the
nation-state remains the instrument of capitalist rule today, no matter
how many articles appear in postmodernist venues about "globalization".
The second contradiction of capital arises out of the problems the
system confronts in trying to maintain what Marx called the "conditions
of production". The "conditions of production" require three elements:
*human labor power* which Marx called the "personal conditions of
production", *environment* which he termed "natural or external
conditions of productions" and *urban infrastructure*, the "general,
communal conditions of production".
All three of these "conditions of productions" are being undermined by
the capitalist system itself. The form this takes is conceived in an
amorphous and fragmented manner as the environmental crisis, the urban
crisis, the education crisis, etc. When these problems become
generalized, they threaten the viability of capitalism since they
continue to raise the cost of clean air and water, raw materials,
infrastructure, etc.
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