New Republic, Nick Martin
<https://newrepublic.com/authors/nick-martin>/December 9, 2020
Wall Street Vultures Are Ready to Get Rich From Water Scarcity
The basis of all human life is now officially on the market. Call it
the No Future futures index.
DAVID MCNEW/GETTY IMAGES
Bloombergreported
<https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-06/water-futures-to-start-trading-amid-growing-fears-of-scarcity?sref=w8mEqFdc>on
Sunday that California water futures are now officially on the Wall
Street markets, with the United States–based CME Group heading up the
2021 contracts connected to the state’s billion-dollar water market. The
“commodity” was most recently going for $496 per acre-foot with the main
purchasers of the futures—which were firstannounced
<https://www.cmegroup.com/media-room/press-releases/2020/9/17/cme_group_to_launchfirst-everwaterfuturesbasedonnasdaqvelescalif.html>by
CME in September—expected to be large-scale water consumers, chiefly
utility companies and the states’ Big Ag corporations. (California is
home to the largest agriculture market in the nation.) “Climate change,
droughts, population growth, and pollution are likely to make water
scarcity issues and pricing a hot topic for years to come,” RBC Capital
Markets managing director and analyst Deane Dray told Bloomberg. “We are
definitely going to watch how this new water futures contract develops.”
We’ve officially reached a new phase of the Mad Maxification of America.
“Mni wiconi”—Lakota for “Water is life”—is not just a snappy slogan
popularized by the Standing Rock movement. It’s a fact of human
existence. The move to sell water futures in California stands as a
foreboding indicator of the transformation of water from basic right
into a luxury good. It’s a frightening expansion of a reality that
already exists for poor, Black, Latinx, and Native communities across
the country, fromFlint
<https://newrepublic.com/article/150032/abandonment-flint>, Michigan,
toNavajo Nation
<http://www.takepart.com/feature/2016/04/22/native-american-water-settlements>.
Welcome to the future.
Back in 2012,/MIT News/profiled
<https://news.mit.edu/2015/sourcewater-spot-market-water-0716>the head
of the company Sourcewater, which at the time had introduced the idea of
creating an online exchange for gas and oil companies to quickly and
easily source and purchase the water necessary to keep up with the
rampant domestic fracking boom. These companies needed water but didn’t
want to pay a ton for its transportation; Sourcewater helped them
accomplish that. And because American businesspeople have been
conditioned to bow down to middlemen who help drive down costs,
Sourcewater was viewed as a success story. Read through the/MIT
News/piece and you’ll find all the circus-like twists necessary to
justify the company’s purported innovation. “Reducing the amount of
truck travel via the new online marketplace also brings environmental
benefits,” the outlet wrote of a company created to help facilitate
fracking.
One year after Sourcewater’s big breakthrough, in 2013, the federal
governmentsupposedly finished
<https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-where-water-is-life-those-on-the-pine-ridge-reservation-go-thirsty>its
part of a pipeline called the Mni Wiconi, designed to pump water from
the Missouri River to tribal citizens and rural communities in western
South Dakota. Up to that point, due to both the theft of Lakota lands
and four subsequent damming infrastructure projects in the mid-twentieth
century, many on the Oglala Lakota reservation, as well as those living
on the Rosebud and Lower Brule reservations, had been forced to rely on
fresh water deliveries by truck.
Yet, even after the pipeline system was in place, it remained
ineffective in spreading water to the tribal citizens in need, according
to a2019 report
<https://www.hcn.org/articles/tribal-affairs-where-water-is-life-those-on-the-pine-ridge-reservation-go-thirsty>from/High
Country News/: “In reservation towns and villages, the new pipeline
water is fed into old community water systems—some of which date to the
1960s, with pipes made of potentially hazardous asbestos-cement. The Mni
Wiconi’s builders pledged but failed to replace those antiquated
systems.” But for the 15 majority-white communities in the areas, as
well as local white ranchers—whose county carried an annual per-capita
income three times that of the Oglala community—the water pipeline
worked just fine: “All the water flowing through Mni Wiconi pipes to
those users is from the Missouri River, and their pipeline connections
are funded by fees they pay to a not-for-profit, the West
River/Lyman-Jones RuralWater
<https://www.theguardian.com/environment/water>System.”
The same year that/High Country News/published its feature,
Sourcewaterhauled
<https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190904005034/en/Sourcewater-Inc.-Announces-7.2-Million-Series-A-Funding>in
a tidy $7.2 million Series A investment andjoined
<https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/While-China-India-Russia-and-the-United-States-14398157.php>the
space race of companies looking to provide satellite images of potential
water sources to their extractive industry clientele.
These stories are the same kind of nightmare fuel as the new water
futures market; it’s just they’re rarely paired together in mainstream
coverage. The growth of companies like Sourcewater and CME, which exist
to make a quick buck on the world’s emergencies and ill-fated economic
pursuits, or austerity regimes like those that oversaw the crisis in
Flint, are different faces of the same disaster: A future in which a
select few hoard a necessary resource and relative like water is
actually already here. That might be the scariest part about any of it.
Nick Martin <https://newrepublic.com/authors/nick-martin>@nicka_martin
<https://twitter.com/nicka_martin>
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