Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It Review
I was torn between a four and a five and came down on the side of five because this is a real book with real facts and real interviews and it covers a vital topic very ably. I was tempted to drop to a four for two reasons: this book desperately lacks visualization, something publishers are going to have to learn to integrate if they want to survive (see the TED Briefing "Data is the New Dirt" by David McCandless); and because this book is part of a twelve-book read and review series started for UNESCO, I don't see all the solutions well represented at the end--the book ends weakly. Still, it is a vitally serious, desperately serious book, a sequel to the author's Water Follies: Groundwater Pumping And The Fate Of America's Fresh Waters, and should be read with When the Rivers Run Dry: Water--The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century and The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink.
At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog you can do what Amazon does not provide for: see all of my reviews on all books on water with one click, and explore my integrative summative reviews of non-fiction books and DVDs in 97 other categories.
Published in 2009, this is a current book that should be completely redone with proper visualizations including state by state visualizations and accompanying data sets, and then issued in paperback along with lists of "who to call" state by state.
The author impresses me greatly with his mix of detailed facts and face to face interviews woven into a story, but it is not an easy story to follow and time, space, water reality just does not come across in plain text.
Notes that stayed with me:
+ Las Vegas is the icon of irresponsible behavior and ran out of water in 2001
+ Hoover Dam made Las Vegas possible, built by the Mob after gambling legalized for the dam workers
+ Today Las Vegas spends million per hotel room in total construction and service costs to create
+ billion pipeline is planned from the Mississippi, this is an example of money over thinking
+ Hotels use only 3% of the Las Vegas water--this was an eye opener for me. The hotels and casinos have been totally responsible, have understood the crisis, thrown money at it, and represent state of the art water recycling and gray water utilization as well as water conservation.
Observation: If Las Vegas truly runs out of water one day and the USG Government chooses to bail it out at our expense, it will be ten to a hundred times more costly than the Wall Street bailout. It's time we reestablished public control over the public purse.
QUOTE (17): Water lubricates the American economy just as oil does. It is intimately linked to energy because it takes water to make energy and it takes energy to divert, pump, move, and cleanse water. Water plays a critical role in virtually every segment of the economy, from heavy industry to food production, from making semiconductors to providing Internet service. A prosperous future depends on a secure and reliable [and clean] water supply. And we don't have it. To be sure, water still flows from taps, but we're draining our reserves like gamblers at a crap table.
+ Droughts are a threat to URBAN areas, I really appreciated the insights in this section
+ Private wells are not understood or monitored, they are consuming a lot and also have chloride & other concentrations
Much of the book covers ground I have walked in other books. For the US audience, I would certainly recommend this book and the others above. For the international audience, I recommend instead, in this order:
The Atlas of Water, Second Edition: Mapping the World's Most Critical Resource
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World's Water
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit
As a general observation, although the author scared me at first with his advocate of placing an economic value on water, in the end he proves to be an advocate of a REGULATED marketplace, not a "free" market where costs can be externalized to the public. Of course this requires public intelligence in the public interest, something that does not exist today in structured reliable form.
+ People simply do not know where their water is coming from
+ Rivers have massive amounts of sewage effluent, mercury from power plants, and concentrated contamination on the river bed from past era
+ Mixing storm and sewage in one infrastructure was a HUGE mistake that needs to be rectified
+ Pesticides and nitrogen fertilizers are into the water so fast, the public has no clue, government is not serious
Despite my four pages of notes I found the Solutions portion of the book disappointing but still valuable.
+ Business as usual is still in vogue
+ No one has inventoried dried up rivers and springs--simply not documented
+ Dams don't add water, they just redirect it
+ Federal government is out of money, municipal bonds are a hard sell
+ Shocking number of dams still being proposed today
+ Dam removal is WORKING, restoring ecology and especially fish
+ Legal rules have not kept pace with technology
+ One quarter of US water supply comes from pumping groundwater
+ Rights of USE IN COMMON versus rights of EXCLUSIVE OWNERSHIP are two different things
+ Everyone talking about "moving" large amounts of water artificially is generally ignorant or unethical
+ Cloud seeding does not work
+ On desalination does not fully address the toxic outputs
+ Water requires complex engineering, we are not there [I am reminded of my friend Chuck Spinney's comment on how national "defense" has spawned an entire generation of engineers who know only "government spec, cost plus" engineereing, which is to say, very bad engineering. His book, Defense Facts of Life: The Plans/Reality Mismatch applies to every aspect of our national domestic and global policies--Washington is out of touch with realities, the Governors are in denial.
+ Drugs in water are miniscule but mixed--the science is not there
GIVING AWAY CONSERVATION TOILETS IS BOTH THE CHEAPEST AND THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY OF CONSERVING WATER.
Intel is a case study in understanding and addressing the problem, the author partially addresses my concerns over computer toxicity (see for example, High Tech Trash: Digital Devices, Hidden Toxics, and Human Health.
Water rights and water pricing are an emerging area of study and not yet in the policy and legal arena in proper form. I am impressed by the author's depiction of how developers WILL pay for water rights as part of the deal, it just has to be decumented and presented.
QUOTE (251): For privatization to be successful, governments must regulate water as a social good, ensuring access to all. PUCs must carefully monitor the financial returns to the private company and link any rate increases to agreed-upon improvements in service, conservation programs, or environmental stewardship. ... In any event, government should retain ownership of the water resources.
I buy in to the author's views that only by charging for water can we press forward in modernizing archaic infrastructure including farming infrastructure where cheap water has incentivized the life extention of very leaky inadequate water routing systems. Farmers still use 70-80% of the water in any given state, but at the same time, their share of the food dollar has dropped from 40 cents to 20 cents. My own observation: we clearly need to do holistic analysis to optimize food growing (not meat growing) in relation to where the water is and how best to keep the water clean--at the same time, and the author documents this brilliantly, we need to understand the "return on investment" that water yields, for example, under 0 for an alfalfa unit and over one million dollars for a computer chip using the same amount of water.
The section on conservation movements and land trusts is impressive and carried the book to a five. I am expecially impressed by the combination of
HYBRID consortiums and
SHARED INFORMATION
J. F. Rischard understood this and articulated it in his book, High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them. We have antiquated governments, corporations, non-governmental organizations, and universities, all nearly brain-dead for having been in the "rote" by regulation mode for so long. INFORMATION IS THE FACILITATOR, HYBRID COALITIONS ARE THE ACTORS.
The author speaks of "an unlikely coalition of farmers, environmentalists, and business interests...." and on closer examination this boils down to persistent informed personalities showing each group, from that group's point of view, the economic, social, and ecologicial advantages in their own terms. PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE LEADS TO SELF-REGULATION THAT IS EFFECTIVE.
QUOTE (303-304): We must break the relentless cycle of overuse by restricting new access to the public resource, by protecting existing users with quantified water rights, by making these water rights transferable, and bvy insisting that new users purchase and retire existing water rights in exchange for permission to place a new demand on the resource.
A truly deep book rich in detail, lacking in visualization. My bottom line is that we have not done our homework. WE have not inventoried the history of water zip code by zip code, we have not quantified and evaluated the return on investment for water use at every location and in relation to every product, and therefore we have no basis for intelligent policy making from the zip code level to the national, regional, and global levels. There is a lot of common sense and professional research in this book--to me as a professional intelligence officer it shouts out: COLLECT, PROCESS, ANALYZE, SHARE. Public intelligence in the public interest--that's the missing link in Water, and in relation to the other eleven core policies itemized by Earth Intelligence Network (Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society). See the strategic analytic model--and the impact of CORRUPTION on all matters, at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
A solid five, needs more work, and a follow on book that visualizes and quantifies and compares, state by state, district by district.
Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It Feature
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Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It Overview
In the middle of the Mojave Desert, Las Vegas casinos use billions of gallons of water for fountains, pirate lagoons, wave machines, and indoor canals. Meanwhile, the town of Orme, Tennessee, must truck in water from Alabama because it has literally run out. Robert Glennon captures the irony and tragedy of America s water crisis in a book that is both frightening and wickedly comical. From manufactured snow for tourists in Atlanta to trillions of gallons of water flushed down the toilet each year, Unquenchable reveals the heady extravagances and everyday inefficiencies that are sucking the nation dry. The looming catastrophe remains hidden as government diverts supplies from one area to another to keep water flowing from the tap. But sooner rather than later, the shell game has to end. And when it does, shortages will threaten not only the environment, but every aspect of American life: we face shuttered power plants and jobless workers, decimated fi sheries and contaminated drinking water. We can t engineer our way out of the problem, either with traditional fixes or zany schemes to tow icebergs from Alaska. In fact, new demands for water, particularly the enormous supply needed for ethanol and energy production, will only worsen the crisis. America must make hard choices and Glennon s answers are fittingly provocative. He proposes market-based solutions that value water as both a commodity and a fundamental human right. One truth runs throughout Unquenchable: only when we recognize water s worth will we begin to conserve it.
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Customer Reviews
Municipal bonds backed by water revenue - Hildy Richelson - Blue Bell, PA United States
When a bond buyer thinks about purchasing a safe revenue bond, they think about bonds backed by water. They don't think about water bottling companies taping acquifers and shipping the water elsewhere. Nor do investors think about where the water will come from to support the water demands of the growing populations in arid states. He makes it clear that water is not an unlimited resource that we can take for granted.Bonds: The Unbeaten Path to Secure Investment Growth (Bloomberg)
Good book and yet one more resource at risk - Reviewer - Near Columbus, OH United States
I saw Robert Glennon speak at a conference recently, which motivated me to go buy his book and read it. This is a hefty book filled with example after example of water issues. Glennon describes the whole spectrum, from what you do in your bathroom to how it affects energy and agriculture. Glennon is a Tuscon native so his familiarity with water issues is personal and professional. It is a US-centric book so it does not offer much descriptions of other water issues. For example, much of the African continent and parts of southern China will be subject to major water challenges, but there isn't much info on them in the book.
Glennon's solution is that water should be more expensive. This isn't quite a price-fixing or cap and trade solution. Water is a little different than gasoline or CO2 emissions. In some areas, he shows how development contracts depend on the acquisiton of water rights from either retired or unused water rights in the area, which prevents over development without regard to water planning. This method seems to be effective, and it indirectly attaches a price to water. Since a developer must acquire water rights from someone else in order to build, some developers are willing to negotiate substantial prices with water sellers. This is kind of like a liquor license model, where the # of licenses are limited to an area.
While it is evident that we pay way too little for water in this nation, and that there is often little correlation between energy or civil infrastructure and water infrastructure during the planning phase, Glennon's solution will have opponents. But he's right - we pay too little and something needs to be done about it. While I don't like the idea of someone deciding how much to gouge me, I do like the idea of intelligent water management based on the estimated supply for a region. I took a shower this morning and thought about all that water running down the drain while I waited for it to warm up. My house (like most houses) doesn't have a gray water capture system. How many gallons could I save? My water bill is cheap enough that I don't think much about it. But as I watched those gallons swirl down the drain as I often do, I imagined that each of them cost . If that were the case, I probably would have wasted . I would be sure to implement water saving measures if the price on water was higher.
Before I read Glennon's book I had been entertaining the idea of rain barrels. After I finished the book, I was determined to get them. We just tilled the garden, and the idea of irrigating that garden with harvested rain water now seems like a very logical and practical thing to do, rather than sitting there spraying treated, drinkable water through a hose while I sip a beer made from treated municipal water. As Glennon aptly describes, we can make some changes.
The failure of the political allocation of water in the United States - Excerpt from - Oakland, CA
Glennon carefully documents the many elements of the nation's inefficient water system that are setting the stage for a potential future calamity. . . .
In the book's most interesting chapters, the author describes the many interrelated uses of water, illustrating a complexity that exceeds the capacity for planning. For example, many readers may know that household use of water, even for lawn watering, represents a relatively small component of overall water use, especially as compared with agricultural use. But water is also an important input in a number of other industries. Energy producers use large quantities of water, both for hydroelectric production and to cool conventional and nuclear power plants. Electricity production uses 140,000 billion gallons of water a day, and although much of this use is non-consumptive, this large amount of water must be available for production to proceed (p. 60). Approval to build two new nuclear power plants in the Southeast was recently denied owing to insufficient stream flows in the Savannah River (p. 32). Ethanol production also requires vast quantities of water, both to grow corn and in refining. California hopes to produce 1.0 billion gallons of ethanol per year, but this production will require 2.5 trillion gallons of water annually for irrigation, the equivalent of all of the water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers that goes to cities in Southern California and farmers in the Central Valley (p. 55). Minnesota hopes to become a center of ethanol refining, but the Land of 10,000 Lakes lacks sufficient water to operate more than a handful of refineries (p. 54). Internet servers and computers use surprisingly large amounts of water for cooling. For example, Google spends one dollar on air conditioning for every dollar spent on electricity to power server farms; one server farm in Virginia uses 13.5 million gallons of water per day (p. 58).
Glennon provides numerous examples of profligate water use that reflects a lack of incentive to conserve because the price does not reflect true marginal cost. However, he also provides numerous examples of innovative ways people conserve water when necessary. . . .
So far so good. However, the book contains several troubling inconsistencies, which foreshadow subsequent weaknesses. . . .
Perhaps the book's fundamental weakness is Glennon's unwillingness to draw what seems to be the logical conclusion from his analysis: that efficiency in water allocation requires the United States to adopt a true market system for water. Economists such as Terry Anderson and Vernon Smith have laid out the dimensions of such a market system (Terry L. Anderson and Donald R. Leal, Free Market Environmentalism. [New York: Palgrave, 200l]; Terry L. Anderson and Pamela S. Snyder, Water Markets: Priming the Invisible Pump [Washington, D.C.: Cato Institute, 1997]). This system would involve full, tradable rights to surface water, "ownership" of groundwater, an end to federally subsidized water projects, and full-cost pricing of water delivered to users. Glennon certainly accepts that the country needs some of the features of a market, and his proposed reforms include pricing and metering use and negotiated water transfers, but he envisions these measures as appendages to a public system. He seems to have an unshakable faith in politicized resource allocation. In chapter 13, he describes the failure of public water systems to invest in maintenance and improvements over the years, resulting in water-main breaks, aging treatment plants, and the continued joining of storm and sanitary sewers. The pattern is not surprising: "No politician wants to stand for reelection on the slogan `I overhauled the sewer system!'" (p. 213), a conclusion that certainly accords with public-choice analysis. Yet, for Glennon, the solution nevertheless lies in political action: "Only the federal government can lead such an initiative. . . . We need to devote substantial resources to finding sustainable solutions to the problem of human waste disposal" (p. 218). He fails to recognize that politicized resource allocation has brought about the present unsustainable society.
Despite the book's weaknesses, however, it contains a wealth of interesting information on a policy issue of continuing importance. The details of Glennon's diagnosis, including the systemic lack of incentives and the absence of a profit motive in resource allocation, are on the mark. The proposed solution of infusing the politicized system with more marketlike features may not solve the nation's water problems, but it represents a step in the right direction.
From a review by Daniel Sutter, The Independent Review, Spring 2010
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