The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s newly released plan for regulating wastewater pollution, including discharges of toxic “forever chemicals,” is far too muted and sluggish, a progressive advocacy group warned Friday.
The Environmental Working Group (EWG) detailed how the EPA’s long-awaited Effluent Guidelines Program Plan 15 postpones sorely needed action to rein in widespread contamination from per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are a class of hazardous synthetic compounds widely called forever chemicals because they persist in people’s bodies and the environment for years on end.
“We are deeply concerned that the EPA is punting on restrictions for PFAS polluting industries like electronics manufacturers, leather tanners, paint formulators, and plastics molders,” said Melanie Benesh, EWG’s vice president of government affairs. “We are also alarmed that the EPA’s proposed restrictions on some of the most serious PFAS polluters—chemical manufacturers and metal finishers—are also getting delayed, with no timeline for when those limits will be final, if ever.”
According to EWG, the EPA’s new plan “falls short” of its pledge, made in the agency’s 2021 PFAS Strategic Roadmap, to “get upstream” of the forever chemicals problem.
As the watchdog summarized:
The EPA confirmed that by spring 2024—nine months later than previously scheduled—it will release a draft regulation for manufacturers of PFAS or those that create mixtures of PFAS. The agency will do the same for metal finishers and electroplaters by the end of 2024, a delay of six months. The EPA did not announce when final rules will be available for these industries.
The agency will also begin regulating PFAS releases from landfills but did not provide a timeline for a final rule.
For all other industrial categories the EPA considered for PFAS wastewater limitation guidelines, the new plan includes more studies and monitoring, likely delaying restrictions on these sources indefinitely.
“Polluters have gotten a free pass for far too long to contaminate thousands of communities. Now they need aggressive action from the EPA to stop PFAS at the source,” Benesh said. “But the EPA’s plan lacks the urgency those communities rightfully expect.”
“Although it’s a good thing the EPA is committing to address PFAS discharges from landfills—a source of pollution that disproportionately affects vulnerable communities—it’s also frustratingly unclear from EPA’s plan when, if ever, those limits will materialize,” said Benesh.
“Given the glacial pace of change in the EPA’s plan,” she added, “states should not wait for the EPA to act on PFAS.”
“Polluters have gotten a free pass for far too long to contaminate thousands of communities. Now they need aggressive action from the EPA to stop PFAS at the source.”
Scientists have linked long-term PFAS exposure to numerous adverse health outcomes, including cancer, reproductive and developmental harms, immune system damage, and other negative effects.
A peer-reviewed 2020 study estimated that more than 200 million people in the U.S. could have unsafe levels of PFAS in their drinking water. The deadly substances—used in dozens of everyday household products, including ostensibly “green” and “nontoxic” children’s items, as well as firefighting foam—have been detected in the blood of 97% of Americans and in 100% of breast milk samples. Such findings stem from independent analyses because the EPA relies on inadequate testing methods.
Researchers have identified more than 57,000 sites across the U.S. contaminated by PFAS. Solid waste landfills, wastewater treatment plants, electroplaters and metal finishers, petroleum refiners, current or former military facilities, and airports are the most common sources of forever chemical pollution. Industrial discharges of PFAS are a key reason why 83% of U.S. waterways contain forever chemicals, tainting fish nationwide.
Some congressional Democrats are “trying to force the EPA to address PFAS more quickly,” EWG noted.
The Clean Water Standards for PFAS Act, introduced in 2022 by Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), would require the EPA to establish PFAS wastewater limitation guidelines and water standards for PFAS in nine distinct industry categories by the end of 2026.
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, signed by President Biden last November, is pouring billions of dollars into an upgrade of the country’s aging water infrastructure. But a new study has found that white communities have been favored in distribution of the funds, something that’s controlled by individual states. The majority of the $55 billion allocated to water infrastructure will be distributed…
More than 300 environmental and Indigenous rights groups said Wednesday that the Biden administration must take a number of concrete actions to protect the nation’s public lands and waters from fossil fuel industry exploitation and bring U.S. policy into line with climate science—and the president’s own campaign pledges.
In a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, the climate coalition noted that President Joe Biden “made a bold promise to ban new oil and gas leasing on public lands and waters, and within days of taking office issued his Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.”
“However, since then, the Biden administration and Interior’s leadership has fallen short Interior issued new permits to drill at a rate faster than the Trump administration during Biden’s first year in office,” the letter continues. “The Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Ocean Energy Management pushed forward with new oil and gas lease sales, including a sale in the Gulf of Mexico that was vacated by a federal court for a faulty environmental review. And Interior’s final report on the leasing program failed to take into account climate impacts from extraction on public lands and waters.”
The groups also pointed to the Biden administration’s recent decision to go ahead with a major oil and gas lease sale off Alaska’s coast, ignoring warnings that the auction would imperil marine life, pollute coastal communities, and contribute to the nation’s rising carbon emissions.
“The climate science is clear: Several analyses show that climate pollution from the world’s already-producing fossil fuel fields, if fully developed, will overshoot the targets in the Paris Climate Agreement and push warming past 1.5 degrees Celsius,” the letter states. “Avoiding such warming requires ending new investment in fossil fuel projects and phasing out production to keep as much as 40% of already-developed fields in the ground.”
In a press release, the coalition outlines nine steps the Biden administration can and must take to manage “public lands and waters in a manner consistent with climate science”:
Phase out oil and gas production on public lands and waters to near zero by 2035.
Defend and strengthen the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Establish guardrails on the leasing program to protect the climate, public lands, oceans, and communities.
Issue a five-year plan with no new leases.
Stop authorizing new exploration, development, and drilling permits in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska until there is a proper analysis of climate damage.
Stop issuing new permits to drill on public lands until there is a proper analysis of climate damage and a climate screen
Manage public lands for climate solutions.
Halt climate-destroying projects in the Arctic (ex: Willow, Peregrine).
Protect climate and communities from near-term offshore lease sales (ex: Cook Inlet, Gulf of Mexico).
“As the dire impacts of climate disruption escalate, President Biden must keep his campaign promise to end oil and gas leasing on public lands,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network, a signatory of the new letter.
“Indigenous and frontline communities continue to bear the brunt of the climate crisis, and we are calling for the administration to end fossil fuel expansion and implement a just transition,” Lake continued. “There is simply no time to lose and our public lands need to be a part of the solution.”
Recent research estimates that fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters has accounted for nearly a quarter of all U.S. greenhouse gas pollution since 2005, making the end of such development critical to efforts to bring the country’s emissions into line with its domestic and international commitments.
“More drilling and more fracking is just a recipe for more climate disaster,” Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians, said in a statement Wednesday. “For our future, President Biden needs to get real, start keeping oil and gas in the ground, and truly drive meaningful action to save our climate.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Scientists are warning Utah officials that the Great Salt Lake is shrinking far faster than experts previously believed, and calling for a major reduction in water consumption across the American West in order to prevent the lake from disappearing in the next five years.
Researchers at Brigham Young University (BYU) led more than 30 scientists from 11 universities and advocacy groups in a report released this week showing that the lake is currently at 37% of its former volume, with its rapid retreat driven by the historic drought that’s continuing across the West.
Amid the climate crisis-fueled megadrought, the continued normal consumption of water in Utah and its neighboring states has led the Great Salt Lake to lose 40 billion gallons of water per year since 2020, reducing its surface level to 10 feet below what is considered the minimum safe level.
“Goodbye, Great Salt Lake,” tweeted the Environmental Defense Fund on Friday.
\u201cGoodbye, Great Salt Lake\ud83d\udc4b Megadrought and mismanagement have cost the lake 73% of its water. Now experts are warning it could dry up in the next 5 years. And \u201cIts disappearance could cause immense damage to Utah\u2019s public health, environment, and economy\u201d\nhttps://t.co/oecZ0qQ8C0\u201d
Scientists previously have warned that increased average temperatures in Utah—where it is now about 4°F warmer than it was in the early 1900s—are to blame for a 9% reduction in the amount of water flowing into the lake from streams.
The authors of the BYU study are calling on Utah officials to authorize water releases from the state’s reservoirs and cut water consumption by at least a third and as much as half to allow 2.5 million acre feet of water to reach the lake and prevent the collapse of its ecosystem as well as human exposure to dangerous sediments.
“This is a crisis,” BYU ecologist Ben Abbott, a lead author of the report, told The Washington Post. “The ecosystem is on life support, [and] we need to have this emergency intervention to make sure it doesn’t disappear.”
The shrinking of the Great Salt Lake has already begun creating a new ecosystem that is toxic for the shrimp and flies that make it their habitat, due to the lack of freshwater flowing in. That has endangered millions of birds that stop at the lake as they migrate each year.
The loss of the lake may also already be exposing about 2.5 million people to sediments containing mercury, arsenic, and other toxins.
“Nanoparticles of dust have potential to cause just as much harm if they come from dry lake bed as from a tailpipe or a smokestack,” Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, told the Post. Last month, Moench’s group applauded as Republican Gov. Spencer Cox’s administration, under pressure from residents, walked back its position supporting a plan to allow a magnesium company to pump water from the Great Salt Lake.
Abbott called the rapid shrinking of the lake “honestly jaw-dropping.”
“The lake’s ecosystem is not only on the edge of collapse. It is collapsing,” Abbott toldCNN. “The lake is mostly lakebed right now.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Clean water advocates on Friday applauded the Biden administration for
“resoundingly” rejecting the gutted regulatory framework left by former President Donald Trump as the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule restoring many water protections.
Under the new regulations, the EPA will define “waters of the United States” that are protected under the Clean Water Act as “traditional navigable waters, the territorial seas, interstate waters, as well as upstream water resources that significantly affect those waters.”
“Small streams help provide drinking water to millions of Americans. Wetlands filter out pollutants, provide vital wildlife habitat, and protect our communities from flooding in a climate-changed world.”
The rule does not go as far as former President Barack Obama’s administration went in protecting bodies of water including ephemeral streams and ponds, but they will restore protections for millions of marshes and other waterways that were stripped of safeguards by the Trump administration.
The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), which
warned in 2020 that former President Donald Trump’s rule would put “drinking water for millions of Americans at risk of contamination from unregulated pollution,” called the restored regulations “a major step forward.”
\u201cThe lakes, streams, and wetlands this rule protects ensure the health of our ecosystems and communities.\u201d
“As a result of our efforts, Lake Keowee in South Carolina, which provides drinking water for 400,000 people, will remain a pristine body of water,” said Kelly Moser, a senior attorney at SELC. “More than 200 wetland acres adjacent to the Savannah River National Wildlife Refuge in South Carolina will again have protections against development. And that’s just to name a couple of the many Southern waterways that will be cleaner thanks to the restored legal protections.”
The rule was announced two days before the new year in which the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to rule on Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, a case involving a couple in Idaho who sued the EPA after the agency ordered them to stop a construction project because the property where they were building included a federally protected wetland. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case over the summer.
Kevin S. Minoli, a former EPA counsel, toldThe New York Times that the Biden administration could have “more room to interpret” the court’s expected decision now that it has issued its own rule regarding which waters must be protected by the federal government.
“If the Supreme Court goes first, then the agency can’t finalize a rule that goes beyond it,” Minoli told the Times.
The impending decision ensured that the EPA “could not deliver fully” on the “promise” of the Clean Water Act, said John Rumpler, senior clean water campaigns director for Environment America Research and Policy Center, as “an extreme challenge to the Clean Water Act at the Supreme Court hangs like a sword of Damocles over the agency’s head.”
“The EPA’s new rule makes progress by restoring federal protections to at least some waterways,” he said. “It officially cleans up the Trump administration’s Dirty Water Rule, which wiped out federal protections for thousands of waterways and nearly half of all wetlands across the country.”
“But securing the promise of the Clean Water Act requires us to protect all our streams and remaining wetlands from polluters,” Rumpler added. “Small streams help provide drinking water to millions of Americans. Wetlands filter out pollutants, provide vital wildlife habitat, and protect our communities from flooding in a climate-changed world.”
“We will not rest,” said Rumpler, “until we counter that looming threat and all of America’s waterways get the protection they deserve.”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
Inflation dominated news headlines and American psyches in 2022. Overall, consumer prices jumped an average 7.1 percent this year, with the cost of just about everything going up, from cars to coffee and gas to groceries. The trend triggered a bitter midterm election campaign, prompted a series of aggressive interest-rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, and fears about an impending recession.
Environmental justice advocates on Friday condemned a move by a district judge in Michigan to drop two misdemeanor charges against former Republican Gov. Rick Snyder in connection with the 2014 Flint water crisis that killed dozens of residents of the predominantly Black city and poisoned thousands more. The Detroit Free Press reports Genesee County Judge F. Kay Behm signed an order remanding…
A fossil fuel company was convicted of criminal charges in Pennsylvania on Wednesday, more than a decade after an early fracking operation poisoned drinking water for residents of the small town of Dimock and sparked one of the first major controversies to arise from the oil and gas boom. After years of legal wrangling, the company formerly known as Cabot Oil & Gas agreed to plead no contest to 15…
From Martha F. Davis, Co-Editor. Today is the annual “Imagine a Day Without Water” Day of Action. To promote greater attention to water affordability and the human right to water for ALL, Northeastern Law School’s Program on Human Rights and…
For years, Americans have been served an image of an idyllic family farmer who is responsible for the food that makes its way to our homes. Unfortunately, for the majority of the food we eat, that image is not based in reality. The truth is that food production, especially industrial animal agriculture, is causing an ecological crisis in our waterways that further perpetuates the legacy of environmental racism. And it needs to stop.
The overwhelming majority of today’s U.S. food systems are dominated by a handful of international corporations. These profit-driven enterprises often employ industrialized methods, such as concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, where animals are “produced” in incredibly cramped and unsafe facilities.
CAFOs are a formidable threat to the health of our nation’s waterways, representing one of the largest unaddressed sources of nitrogen and phosphorus pollution in the United States. Their uncontrolled — and mostly unregulated — discharges into waterways lead to harmful algal blooms, which in turn impair drinking water supplies, fisheries and recreational waters across the country. Look no further than Lake Erie, the Chesapeake Bay, the Mississippi River Basin, North Carolina’s coastal estuaries, and many other inland and coastal waters that are already gravely affected. Aside from the damages done to safe drinking water and human health, it’s also really expensive. Harmful algal blooms alone can negatively impact economies by as much as $4 billion a year.
Just one of these animal factories can produce as much animal waste as a large city with millions of people. According to a 2013 study, it adds up to 1.1 billion tons of animal waste every year. At many of these facilities, the animal waste is stored in unlined lagoons that inevitably pollute groundwater. In many cases, the excess waste is applied to agricultural fields far beyond what is needed to grow food, resulting in pollution of nearby surface waters and groundwater. Some facilities even go so far as to haphazardly spray the excess waste onto fields, creating a hellish experience for the neighboring communities.
Picture homes, schools and parks covered in airborne liquified animal waste. Imagine windows shut tight in the middle of the summer because of the overwhelming odors. Consider the countless lives burdened by respiratory diseases. Think of all the rivers and streams poisoned with pathogens.
It is worth noting that CAFOs are not found everywhere. Instead, they are predominantly located in rural areas, often in communities of color. They are purposefully located here because these frontline communities often lack the political clout to stop them. The CAFOs are constructed quickly, with minimal community input and, once operational, are ostensibly shielded from any kind of transparency, oversight or consequences. For example, in North Carolina, General Statute 106-24.1 shields the state’s agriculture industry by making any information collected or published by the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services classified from the public. But it’s not just North Carolina. There are “ag-gag” laws on the books in several states.
The CAFO crisis is funded by huge corporations, such as Smithfield Foods, and abetted by politicians who choose to look the other way. Like so many of the catastrophes affecting frontline communities and waterways, it’s a nightmare of our government’s own making, which means we also have the power to correct it. We always have a choice, and it’s possible to make the changes we need.
The most effective way to legislatively confront the CAFO crisis would be for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to use the Clean Water Act to prevent uncontrolled discharges of untreated animal waste into our nation’s water by requiring these facilities to obtain permits that contain real limits. The Clean Water Act has had so many successes during its 50 years, just imagine what could happen if we fully implemented and enforced it. Unfortunately, the EPA has thus far failed to respond to pressure, so environmental groups are suing in order to force the regulator to take action on clean water rules governing factory farms.
We can also urge our members of Congress to go further and pass real legislation, such as the Farm System Reform Act, which would help rein in the monopolistic practices of the agriculture industry, invest billions in a more resilient food system, and finally start transitioning us away from CAFOs to more regenerative practices by truly independent farmers and ranchers.
Finally, we can and should encourage the industry to change their ways by pulling our purse strings. As the saying goes, money talks, and these companies must be forced to listen. We don’t always have to purchase food from corporations that are contributing to this CAFO crisis. For those who are able to pay a little bit more at the grocery store, just think of all you can save.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Oct. 17, 2022. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Nigerian emergency officials said Sunday that catastrophic flooding in the West African country has killed more than 600 people and displaced at least 1.3 million in recent weeks as a heavier-than-usual rain season—made more intense by the climate crisis—continues to pummel the impoverished nation.
Sadiya Umar Farouq, Nigeria’s minister of humanitarian affairs, disaster management, and social development, said in a statement that more than 2.5 million people in the country have been impacted by the historic flooding, which has destroyed 82,000 homes and damaged over 100,000 acres of farmland, endangering food supplies.
Disaster officials say the death toll has risen sharply since August amid rapidly intensifying floods, which have been deemed the worst the nation has seen in decades.
Umar Farouq stressed Sunday that “we are not completely out of the woods,” citing warnings from Nigerian meteorological that a number of states “are still at risk of experiencing floods” through the end of November.
“We are calling on the respective state governments, local government councils, and communities to prepare for more flooding by evacuating people living on flood plains to high grounds, provide tents and relief materials, fresh water, as well as medical supplies for a possible outbreak of water-borne diseases,” Umar Farouq said.
The country’s annual rain season began in June, but disaster officials say the death toll has risen sharply since August amid rapidly intensifying floods, which have been deemed the worst the nation has seen in decades. As Reutersreported, the destruction from the flooding accelerated following “water releases from the Lagdo dam in neighboring Cameroon.”
“The heavy rains and resultant flooding currently being experienced in Nigeria are evidence of the extreme climate impacts primarily driven by fossil fuels, making our homes uninhabitable, endangering lives, health, and livelihoods,” Michael Terungwa of the Coal Free Nigeria campaign said in a statement Monday.
“This is a signal that it is time for the world to move away from fossil fuels, as rapid and deep emission cuts are needed to avoid catastrophic climate impacts,” Terungwa continued. “As our country plans to implement an energy transition plan, we urge the government to prioritize clean renewable energy and not false solutions such as fossil gas that will lead us down a perilous path.”
Landry Ninteretse, regional director of 350Africa.org, noted that the Nigerian government’s updated death toll and damage estimates were released less than a month before the COP27 climate talks in Egypt.
Ninteretse said that in light of the disastrous flooding, COP27 “must define a concrete operationalization plan to implement the Global Goal on Adaptation adopted last year in order to meaningfully support countries like Nigeria in their efforts to strengthen resilience and reduce vulnerability to climate impacts.”
“We expect that developed nations will scale up funding for mitigation and adaptation as well as prioritize compensation for climate-induced loss and damage suffered by the nations most affected by the climate crisis,” Ninteretse added.
“We expect that developed nations will scale up funding for mitigation and adaptation as well as prioritize compensation for climate-induced loss and damage suffered by the nations most affected by the climate crisis,” Ninteretse added.
As emergency relief efforts ramp up in Nigeria, Central Africa has also faced devastating flooding in recent months, with the World Food Program calling the “climate-related disaster” one of “the deadliest the region has seen in years.”
“In response, WFP is on the ground providing a three-month emergency assistance package targeting 427,000 flood-hit women, men, and children in critically affected countries including the Central African Republic, Chad, the Gambia, Nigeria, Sao Tome and Principe, and Sierra Leone,” the UN organization said in a statement Monday.
East Africa, meanwhile, has been ravaged over the past few months by the opposite of heavy rainfall: prolonged, deadly drought, another form of extreme weather made worse by the climate emergency.
Last week, Oxfam International warned that “one person is likely to die of hunger every 36 seconds between now and the end of the year in drought-stricken East Africa as the worst-hit areas hurtle towards famine.”
“After four seasons of failed rains, people are losing their struggle to survive—their livestock has died, crops have failed, and food prices have been pushed ever higher by the war in Ukraine,” said Parvin Ngala, regional director of Oxfam Horn East and Central Africa. “The alarm has been sounding for months, but donors are yet to wake up to the terrible reality… Failure to act will turn a crisis into a full-scale catastrophe.”
“People are suffering because of changes to the climate that they did nothing to cause,” Ngala added. “Rich nations which have done most to contribute to the climate crisis have a moral responsibility to protect people from the damage they have caused.”
The adage that “crime is socially constructed” is often dismissed as college-dorm-room puffery, a statement that sounds provocative but is naively detached from “the reality” of crime and its impact on communities and the politicians who ostensibly serve them. The media, for its part, has a significant role to play here regarding both the social construction of crime and the manufacturing of consent around the notion that crime is not socially constructed. One recent example of how little our large media institutions covered a major story of mass violence—much less demanded “action” in response to it— is a useful object lesson in how this double standard works.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that lead levels in school drinking fountains should not exceed the threshold of 1 part per billion. “By this measure,” The Guardian reports, “71% of Chicago tests reviewed by the Guardian would not pass.”
One week ago, The Guardian published a blockbuster report, complete with new scientific analysis, showing just how widespread lead contamination is in the water system of the third-largest city in the US: Chicago. Building on years’ worth of reporting by Michael Hawthorne and Cecilia Reyes of The Chicago Tribune, Erin McCormick, Aliya Uteuova, and Taylor Moore of The Guardian carried out a new, independent analysis of Chicago’s drinking water and found that “One in 20 tap water tests performed for thousands of Chicago residents found lead, a neurotoxic metal, at or above US government limits… And one-third had more lead than is permitted in bottled water.” This means, according to the journalists, that “out of the 24,000 tests, approximately 1,000 homes had lead exceeding federal standards.” The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that lead levels in school drinking fountains should not exceed the threshold of 1 part per billion. “By this measure,” The Guardian reports, “71% of Chicago tests reviewed by the Guardian would not pass.”
The findings also confirm what community activists have been arguing for years: Lead toxins are far more common in poor communities and are disproportionately harming Black and Brown children. As the authors of The Guardian report note:
… nine of the top 10 zip codes with the largest percentages of high test results were neighborhoods with majorities of Black and Hispanic residents, and there were dozens of homes with shockingly high lead levels. One home, in the majority-Black neighborhood of South Chicago, had lead levels of 1,100 parts per billion (ppb) – 73 times the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) limit of 15ppb.
The stakes here couldn’t be higher. The negative effects of lead in water are manifest and well documented: At the levels uncovered in The Guardian report, lead in water can cause “premature birth, reduced birth weight, seizures, hearing loss, behavioral problems, brain damage, learning disabilities, and a lower IQ level in children.”
So was this report met with widespread outrage about the criminal assault on millions of Chicagoans? No. The report got one follow-up story on NPR and a couple local outlets but received no mention in any mainstream news: CNN, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, ABC News, CBS News, NBC News—none of these outlets mentioned the new report about Chicago’s clean water crisis. They ignored the story altogether.
It’s not just Chicago, and it’s not just Flint. Lead contamination is a widespread problem in dozens of cities that has been linked to increased disease, brain damage, and harmful mental effects. In other words: It’s a form of mass, routine violence leveled against the poor.
Chicago officials and Illinois state officials, to say nothing of the federal government, have known about this issue for years and have done next to nothing to fix the problem. As The Guardian reports, at the current rate the city is replacing the pipes that are poisoning its residents, Chicago is on pace to finish the task in over 1,000 years. As Heather Cherone of WTTW mentioned earlier this year, after a splashy promise by Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot to replace the 400,000 lead pipes two years ago, as of April 2022, only 74 have been replaced, or 0.0185%. (That number hasn’t improved much since the spring. As The Guardian report notes, “as of this month [September], only 180 of the city’s almost half-million lead lines have been replaced.”)
It’s not just Chicago, and it’s not just Flint. Lead contamination is a widespread problem in dozens of cities that has been linked to increased disease, brain damage, and harmful mental effects. In other words: It’s a form of mass, routine violence leveled against the poor. According to one 2019 study by The Global Alliance on Health and Pollution, the United States sees an estimated 196,930 premature pollution-related deaths annually, including 28,260 from lead-related poisoning. One 2018 Lancet study found that lead exposure may be linked to 412,000 premature US deaths yearly, 10 times greater than previous estimates. Can one honestly say they’ve seen a single story on this horrific fact in any of our local or nightly news broadcasts?
Compare this mode of violence and the media’s coverage of it (or lack thereof) to the breathless coverage a single shoplifting incident in San Francisco received last summer—an incident that was written about in over 300 separate articles in the month the video went viral. The theft of less than $1,000 worth of goods was mentioned on CNN (multipletimes!), The New York Times, NBC Nightly News, and dozens of other mainstream outlets. A few hundred dollars’ worth of goods being stolen from Walgreens—and the broader Media Concern about a shoplifting “crime wave” since 2021—has captured the public imagination for months on end, and is currently playing a significant role for more than a few candidates running for political office. We get thousands of related “news” stories, committee hearings, roundtables, and frequent congressional mentions of the issue.
Chicago officials and Illinois state officials, to say nothing of the federal government, have known about this issue for years and have done next to nothing to fix the problem. As The Guardian reports, at the current rate the city is replacing the pipes that are poisoning its residents, Chicago is on pace to finish the task in over 1,000 years.
On the other side, however, as mentioned above, there’s only been a handful of scattered reports on the poisoning of millions of Chicagoans, even though the problem has been well known to community activists, environmental activists, and residents for years. While similar instances of mass poisoning and/or governmental abandonment of people in Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi, managed to capture national headlines—albeit briefly, and only as a result of relentless online and offline social activism and the circulation of gut-wrenching images of bottles of water needing to be shipped in for years on end—those instances are the exception. Moreover, these crimes against poor and predominantly non-white populations tend to get framed merely as an unfortunate byproduct of living in poverty—an accepted injustice with no author and no party from whom to demand accountability. In the sanctioned arena of public discourse, it would seem, the mass lead poisoning of Chicago’s poor is simply seen as a Law of Nature we cannot do anything about. And then, eventually, media focus on this violence fades from our TVs, newspapers, and websites.
This is how crime is socially constructed. Despite the fact that most wealthy neighborhoods managed to swap out their lead pipes decades ago, poor neighborhoods are deliberately underserved and neglected, and the incalculable injury and death that invariably results is simply factored into the cost of maintaining the status quo. The brain damage, kidney problems, and death leveled at poor Americans who play Russian roulette every time they open their faucet is not given priority, nor is it treated as a horrible crime our leaders need to urgently address or plan for. Such a state of affairs means that Chicago Mayor Lightfoot could just ignore media inquiries about the new report’s findings and quickly pivot to hosting business forums—and the world keeps turning. Everyone forgets and moves on. Because our media––and thus, the public—don’t have the tools to understand that preventable mass injury, death, and environmental harm is not a Fact of Life, something we cannot do anything about. It is a political choice, and it’s one our leaders make every day because those it’s slowly killing have little to no political voice.
Imagine, if you will, that the Chicago City Council passed a law stipulating there could be no new casinos or sportsbooks in Chicago until all the lead pipes were replaced. It would get done in 18 months. The massive developer and gambling lobbies would personally start digging the holes. There is, as of now, no lobby for the poor, no political incentive to frame lead poisoning as a crime, and no media grammar to frame it in this way. So there’s just nightly stories on purse snatchings and shootings—which are, of course, news—but, in and of themselves, provide a wildly incomplete portrait of how violence is visited upon people.
The water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, is the latest in an arc of environmental catastrophes affecting predominantly Black communities from Flint, Michigan, to New Orleans. Often, these disasters are preceded by decades if not centuries of segregation and government neglect. Once a water crisis begins, it rapidly spirals into a comprehensive disaster with ripple effects on a community’s economy, education, and more. As of Sept. 15, Gov. Tate Reeves of Mississippi has declared Jackson’s water safe to drink, but a long battle to properly resource the city’s recovery remains ahead. Vangela Wade of Mississippi Center for Justice joins The Marc Steiner Show to discuss the struggle on the ground, and Jackson’s place in a larger pattern of environmental catastrophes linked to systemic racism.
Vangela Wade is the president and CEO of Mississippi Center for Justice, a public interest law firm advancing racial and economic justice through an approach that combines legal services with policy advocacy, community education and media outreach.
Studio/Post-Production: Dwayne Gladden
Transcript
Marc Steiner: Hello, I’m Marc Steiner. Welcome to The Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. Good to have you all with us. I never really thought about the arc of racism and water until covering this disaster in Jackson, Mississippi. This devastating arc between the water infrastructure disaster in Jackson, Mississippi, water poisoning in Flint, Michigan, and the avoidable disaster in the wake of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, and how deeply connected they are. The waters that sickened, drowned, and left communities devastated, but let loose by the racist neglect that permeates political power in this country.
So once again, we return to Jackson, Mississippi. We’re joined by Vangela M. Wade, who’s president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, a nonprofit public interest law firm committed to advancing racial and economic justice, a group that’s taking on the struggle legally to the powers that be, which are in many ways living legacy of the embodiment of segregation that preceded it, and working with communities to fight racism and for an equitable society. In one of the most, I hate to say, backwards states in the country, Mississippi. And it’s interesting that this is about the same time that Katrina exploded, that we saw what happened in Jackson. And Vangela M. Wade, welcome. Good to have you with us.
Vangela Wade: Thank you, Marc. And I will say, certainly Mississippi has its many…
Marc Steiner: It does.
Vangela Wade: …Shortcomings. We’re at the bottom of the worst list of social indicators and at the top of the worst list of social indicators, such as health education, economics, criminal justice. But there are people here who are fighting the fight, people here who have made strides and significant changes. So we are fighting to move past some of the stigma that Mississippi has perpetuated for years. So we have some backwards leadership in certain areas, but we certainly have very progressive… We have communities that are very progressive, and we have people who are leading organizations similar to Mississippi Center for Justice that are just as progressive and who are making sustainable change in the city.
Marc Steiner: Very well said. And I agree. I suppose sometimes, it gets, as it must to you and many others, it just gets to you sometimes about how crazy it is, I mean, when you have this governor who’s saying, well, it’s Jackson’s fault. They didn’t put the money into this place. And then you have, as you wrote about, people who are taking the money that was meant to help people being stolen by the wealthy and squandered. I mean, those situations are just maddening. They’re insane.
Vangela Wade: You’re exactly right. What we try to do is try to keep our eye, we try to keep our eyes in the focus forward, because we do realize that, for instance, with regards to the resources that are allocated from state leadership, in many instances, when it comes to not only Jackson, but other majority Black municipalities, that those municipalities, those communities, aren’t always getting their equitable share of the resources. Particularly the resources that are even given, whether it’s through tenant funds, or whether it’s through the recent various relief funds. And so those are particular areas that we are going to continue to keep our eyes on in the event that we may need to determine if there’s some action that should be taken, as we did with Katrina.
We had to go to bat for Black people on the Mississippi Gulf Coast who were not given their equitable share or, heck, [crosstalk] share, following Katrina, to make repairs to their homes, as compared to those homes that were on the beach. They were owned by majority white citizens. The Black citizens were left out, not only left out of their homes by Katrina and that devastation, but also by the state government, until the Mississippi Center for Justice went in to fight that battle. So we are here for the people of this state, for our stakeholders. And when we see an injustice, we will do our best to make a change.
Marc Steiner: And it does seem… Just for a moment, as you were speaking, I was thinking about how, while this was going on, we were recording on our side here in Baltimore, Maryland. And just two weeks ago, we had the same scare on the West side of town, the majority Black community, where there was E. coli in the water. Or what’s happening in Newark, or Flint, or across the country. I think people need to be able to connect these dots and say… Understand what is really happening here, to the poorest and Blackest communities in America when it comes to our water infrastructure and poisoning of our children and families. It’s a very serious problem.
Vangela Wade: You’re exactly right. It’s a rippling effect. It’s not just an infrastructure issue. It becomes a healthcare issue. And ultimately it becomes an education issue. It’s an economic issue. So what may start out as the municipalities or the local communities not receiving their equitable share of resources from the state, it ends up impacting the citizens in a way that will take decades to overcome. And when you’re looking at situations such as the city of Jackson’s current water crisis that is not that current, it’s something that’s been ongoing for more than 50 years now. And it’s just come to, as we say in the South, it’s just come to a head at this point. And of course, all eyes are focused on Jackson. But as you mentioned, there was Flint, Baltimore. There are other areas that have similar infrastructure issues, similar issues where the citizens in those municipalities are being poisoned by water.
We’re certainly concerned about the amount of lead that’s in the water here in Jackson, but that could be said for small towns in the Mississippi Delta as well. Again, those areas being primarily African American. And so while we don’t want to say that everything is related to race and discrimination, sometimes it’s just there. It’s there, and it’s the obvious connection. But what we are looking at now is… I guess the immediate issue, of course, is the water crisis in Jackson. What we should all start to focus on is what will it take to correct this situation, or to make this situation better for the people, the people who are depending on not only the local leadership, but the state leadership to actually lead. And we are finding that that’s not happening.
So we also then have to start and we have to look at the long-term impact and long-term solutions. Quite frankly, we don’t have a lot of hope at this point in the same people doing the same thing and seemingly as though they’re expecting a different outcome. So with everybody, with all the media’s eyes and attention and the cameras and the microphones in Jackson at this point, we are hoping that the attention will be a lasting attention so that the people who are most responsible for leading will do just that and will bring some change to the citizens of Jackson.
Marc Steiner: I’m going to come back to the political issues that you face in Mississippi in this struggle here around water and more in this particular moment. But I’m just curious, at this moment of our taping, what I’ve read is that the water pressure is back on, but the water is still not fit to drink. Am I right?
Vangela Wade: That’s what I am understanding as well. And certainly we have received substantial outpouring of help all around the city from people coming near and far and bringing water. Certainly, that’s wonderful, and we’re so humbled by that. But we’ve got to look forward and know that, eventually – Well, hope that eventually the leadership will do what it takes to make the repairs, to bring the water quality to where it is something that’s not basically the same as a third-world country. We have to worry about our children and the water that they’re drinking and how that’s going to impact their health, as well as our elderly citizens who are impacted by this water crisis as well. So there is a rippling effect, and we are hoping that change will come very soon.
Marc Steiner: So I was thinking about what the governor, Governor Reeves said, he said he told city leaders that they needed to do a better job collecting their water bill payments before they start going and asking everyone else to pony up more money. And at the same time, it’s the same governor who vetoed what was a bi-partisan legislation that would’ve provided relief to poor residents, saying he doesn’t agree with the idea of it, calling it free money. So when you’re up against that kind of political mindset, that kind of human mindset, societal mindset, what do you do? How are you confronting that? How are you addressing that? How are you dealing with that? I mean, that’s got to be difficult, to say the least.
Vangela Wade: Yeah. You’re exactly right. It’s not something that’s new for us, that type of rhetoric. It’s unfortunate. And I think it’s more of a political approach to real problems, and it’s a way to deflect the state’s lack of oversight or lack of engagement in the capital city. So when comments such as those are made, you can’t do anything about what a person will say. But then what we are hoping is that people will exercise their right to vote, privilege to vote, and make a change at the ballot box, to change the people who are in charge of making the decisions about allocating resources and who receives those resources and how those resources are allocated.
That’s where we need to spend our time, where our focus is not worrying about the political rhetoric, but focusing on voting. And if people would go out to… If they would vote, regardless of who they’re voting for – I’ve recently been reminded that we must always be nonpartisan – But regardless of who they’re voting for, they need to exercise that vote, looking at the resources that are coming in and out of their communities and if they’re receiving their equitable share of those resources. Whether it’s the governor or whomever it may be, if they want to spend their time and focus on ridiculous statements and comments such as that, then so be it. But the people should be heard, and they should be heard at the ballots.
Marc Steiner: So a couple questions here. One, I’m curious more about the Mississippi Center for Justice. You seem like you’re like a number of legal agencies I’ve been associated with a bit in the past all rolled into one, in terms of the work that you do. Talk about what you are doing as an organization to address what’s happening at this moment.
Vangela Wade: Well, as you mentioned early on, the Mississippi Center for Justice is a nonprofit, public-interest law firm. We’re the only nonprofit public-interest law firm homegrown in the state. And our focus is not only on advocacy, but also direct services, impact litigation, as well as policy. And this particular, what we call a… I guess this is a quasi-man-made, natural disaster. Certainly the floods was the impetus to this current focus on the water crisis, but governments, the state, the city’s failure to collaborate, failure to allocate resources, was what I would say was the man-made disaster.
So at this point, we are doing what other organizations are doing. We’re focusing on immediate need, providing in coalition resources for the community. We are also looking at some mid-level or mid-term type of solutions. And also, without saying a lot or giving away strategy or plans, we are also looking at some of the long-term issues to determine if there’s additional actions that we need to take. So it’s all on the table.
Marc Steiner: All on the table. I was thinking about what [inaudible] was saying. Would take billions to fix the immediate problem, even more to fix the long-term issues. They’ve just passed this $1.2 trillion bill in Congress around infrastructure. The question is how that helps Jackson. I mean, if the money’s going through this state of Mississippi, there’s no telling what Jackson will get or not get, how little it might get. And why can’t Jackson get the money directly from the federal government? What kind of efforts are being made to control the funding coming in so you can actually put people to work, change the infrastructure and get that done? Because if you listen to the governor of that state, the money coming in, as we used to say, I bet you a dollar to a donut, that money is not going to Jackson. So tell me about that, what’s happening with that, and whatever role you’re playing in that?
Vangela Wade: Well, I will just say with regards to that, certainly we’re not around those tables. That’s way above my pay grade with regards to how the system of allocation from the federal government through the state and down to the city of Jackson. But what I will say is that to me, in my opinion, rolling the money, the funds out directly through the state and hoping that a state such as Mississippi, with the systemic issues and history of discrimination in play, seems a little ridiculous. And it’s similar to when you have Block money that comes through the federal government to states through basically Block Grants, which is what happened with the tenant funds. And then the state and the governor are able to decide how that money is to be distributed, and whether or not it actually gets to those that it was intended for is a different issue.
So at this point, again, we are focusing on the immediate assistance that we can provide, and then looking at the issues and the impact on the community to determine if there are other actions that we need to be focused on. Similar to what we focused on during Katrina, when we did realize that funds were not being distributed as they should, for the folks who needed it most, and eventually that resulted in litigation. So not saying that that is what we are specifically doing right now. I am saying that it is all on the table as it becomes appropriate.
Marc Steiner: But you are a legal organization. So if litigation’s necessary, you’re there.
Vangela Wade: We could be there.
Marc Steiner: I was thinking about what you just said as well. And if you could give people a sense of what it is like for the people in Jackson at this moment, just in terms of surviving around water and water issues. And we know that there’s this whole arc in America where communities of color are always in the most dangerous disastrous position when it comes to situations like this. So talk about what it is like day-to-day for you, for other people in Jackson at this moment?
Vangela Wade: Well, with regards to many people in Jackson who are experiencing this current and trying to live through this current crisis with not having water running through their faucets for cooking, or to drink a glass of water with medicine, or to take a bath or shower without worrying about dangerous bacteria or whatever else is in the water, it’s not easy, as you pointed out. It’s not easy, sometimes, being at the bottom of the barrel with regards to resources. So the citizens in Jackson are doing what I’ve seen them do best over the last 20 years that I’ve lived in this area. They’re fighting through. They’re fighting through the issues, they’re fighting through the challenges, because they’ve got to go to work, they’ve got to raise their children, they’ve got to take care of the elderly. We’ve got to educate. Life continues, notwithstanding the challenge of the current water crisis.
So I’d say that, and then I, really with realizing the fight that the people in Jackson are pushing through, I say that, and I am imploring those in leadership, from the governor, lieutenant governor, speaker, those in the legislature, be they Black or white, and the local, the mayor, the city council, whomever it is that these people who were voted in, who were given the responsibility to lead, I am asking that they do just that. That they lead and make those decisions in the best interest of the people, not in the best interest of a political party, and not in the best interest of continuing systemic discrimination or injustice to hold up an ideology.
The people in Jackson are pushing forward. They’re receiving all of the wonderful help with regards to the water and other resources that are allowing them to go through their daily lives. And we are hoping that the water system will be repaired over time, and the water will become drinkable, and they will be able to push at least that challenge behind them and move forward with their lives.
Marc Steiner: I mean, yeah, because for those of us who just turn on the faucet and drink the water, to think about what it would be like to have to boil your water, find water, get bottled water, take care of your children, make sure they don’t get sick. It’s like we’re creating the worst conditions you would imagine in a developing nation as opposed to being in the United States of America.
Vangela Wade: Exactly. And when you think about that, and you think about that in terms of, certainly, people who are elderly or people who are living with illnesses or disabilities, and they’re not able to get out and about to go stand in the long lines to get a case of water to take home to use for bathing, for eating, for drinking, that makes it even just more ridiculous that we are in this country in 2022, and this is the issue that is taking the headlines.
Marc Steiner: What would it take to get President Biden and the federal government to give the money directly to Jackson, Mississippi, to redevelop this infrastructure, put people to work and change… Because the infrastructure is crumbling across the entire nation. Lead pipes… It’s crumbling, and Jackson, I’ve talked to folks there, and they say literally the pipes are crumbling in people’s hands, literally crumbling. So what would it take to get the money directly into the hands of Jackson, Mississippi, to do the work themselves without having to go through the capital down the street?
Vangela Wade: Yeah, well, again, that one is above my pay grade, and I’m sure that the mayor of Jackson, and the city council, they’re probably wondering, trying to answer that same question. Why can’t the monies be sent directly to the place, to those who need it, those who are going to be responsible for implementing? That’s the system as it is. We just hope that once the money is sent through the state that there is an equitable distribution from the state through to the city to make these repairs. Now that there’s money coming in from not only… Certainly not from FEMA, but the federal government. Of course there was the infrastructure monies that were already being delivered, and we are hopeful that money will be used in a way that will address the city’s problem.
When we look at this issue, we need to make sure that we are seeing the people that are being impacted. It’s not a city, but it’s the community. It’s the community that’s suffering as a result of the failures, the failure from the state level, and possibly the failures at the city level, because this goes back years. The people who are harmed the most are those that have entrusted, regardless of whether the money’s coming from the federal straight to the city or through the state, the people who are being harmed the most are people who put their trust in the leader, the current leadership at all these various levels.
Marc Steiner: So I’m curious as we conclude, so in your center, you were in the middle of a lot of the work to make sure things were right in rehabilitating things after Katrina. So what is your role now? What are you doing in Jackson? What steps are you all taking to address and deal with this? Whether it’s on an organizing level in the community or legally in terms of fighting it in the courts?
Vangela Wade: Right. We are working in collaboration, in coalition with other social justice organizations and community organizations to help provide resources, and we are also working with groups to look at more intermediate and long-term solutions. So that’s where we are now. And these things, what I’ve seen over the last few weeks, this is what I call a… It’s evergreen. Things are changing on the ground, it’s changing within the community, the resources that are coming in are changing each day. But one thing is for sure: The water crisis is real, the water is undrinkable, and we’ve got to continue to keep the people in mind, to keep them as our focus, to look at what we need to do as a community, as social justice organizations, as governmental agencies, to rectify this situation for the citizens of Jackson. And so as this continues to unfold, Mississippi Center for Justice will continue to engage with the community, and we will continue to have discussions from within as to how we should address these issues moving forward.
Marc Steiner: Well, I really do appreciate you taking the time, and I also appreciate the work that you’re doing at the Mississippi Center for Justice and the fight you’re making for a more equitable society. And I will stay in touch because you’re in the midst of a real battle for people’s lives. Not just for a better society, for, actually, people’s lives. And so I want to thank you so much, Vangela Wade, for joining us today. It’s been a pleasure to talk with you, and good luck.
Vangela Wade: Thank you, Marc, for having me.
Marc Steiner: We’ll stay in touch.
Vangela Wade: Thank you.
Marc Steiner: And I hope all of you out there have enjoyed this conversation. And once again I want to thank you all for joining us. And please let me know what you’ve thought about what you heard today and what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at mss@therealnews.com. I’ll get right back to you. And if you have an extra minute, stay there. Go to therealnews.com/support, become a monthly donor and become part of the future with us. So for Stephen Frank, Dwayne Gladden, and Kayla Rivara, and the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved, keep listening, and take care.
Jackson, Mississippi, remains gripped in an ongoing water crisis. The task of distributing water to local residents has been largely taken up by community organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Operation Good. Organizer, writer, and educator Kali Akuno joins The Marc Steiner Show to explain how the current crisis is a reflection of capitalism’s failures and decades of institutional racism. Though Jackson today is more than 80% Black, this is a recent demographic development created by white flight and capital flight from the city. The state’s prolonged neglect of Jackson’s infrastructure is a consequence of an entrenched far-right politics in Mississippi’s public institutions. And what’s happening currently in Jackson is a sign of things to come around the country. To fight back, Akuno emphasizes the need to build mass movements and grassroots networks capable of exercising real political power.
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Sept. 13, 2022. It is shared here under a Creative Commons license.
Indigenous water defenders and their allies on Tuesday celebrated a Minnesota court ruling protecting a Line 3 protest camp from illegal government repression.
“This is a piece in the long game and we aren’t afraid.”
Tara Houska, Indigenous activist and Giniw Collective founder
Hubbard County District Judge Jana Austad issued a ruling shielding the Indigenous-led Giniw Collective’s Camp Namewag—where opponents organize resistance to Enbridge’s Line 3 tar sands pipeline—from local law enforcement’s unlawful blockades and harassment.
The ruling follows months of litigation on behalf of Indigenous water protectors, whose legal team last year secured a temporary restraining order issued by Austad against Hubbard County, Sheriff Cory Aukes, and the local land commissioner for illegally blocking access to Camp Namewag.
“Today David beat Goliath in a legal victory for people protecting the climate from rapacious corporate destruction,” Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, director of the Center for Protest Law & Litigation at the Partnership for Civil Justice Fund, said in a statement.
“The outrageous blockade and repression of an Indigenous-led water protector camp were fueled by massive sums of money flowing from the Enbridge corporation to the sheriff’s department as it acted against water protectors challenging Enbridge’s destruction of Native lands,” she added.
Indigenous activist and Giniw Collective founder Tara Houska, who is a plaintiff in the case, said that “15 months ago, I was woken up at 6:00 am and walked down my driveway to a grinning sheriff holding a notice to vacate my yearslong home.”
“That day turned into 50 squad cars on a dirt road and a riot line blocking my driveway,” she recalled. “Twelve people—guests from all over who came to protect the rivers and wild rice from Line 3 tar sands—were arrested and thrown into the dirt.”
Remember when Hubbard County blocked our camp’s driveway and started ticketing people while relentlessly surveilling and harassing us? The court ruled what they did was illegal.
Today’s ruling is a testament to the lengths Hubbard County was willing to go to criminalize and harass Native women, land defenders, and anyone associated with us—spending unknown amounts of taxpayer dollars and countless hours trying to convince the court that the driveway to Namewag camp wasn’t a driveway. It’s also a testament to steadfast commitment to resisting oppression. This is a piece in the long game and we aren’t afraid. We haven’t forgotten the harms to us and the harms to the Earth. Onward.
Winona LaDuke, co-founder and executive director of Honor the Earth and a former Green Party vice presidential candidate, stated that “we are grateful to Judge Austad for recognizing how Hubbard County exceeded its authority and violated our rights.”
“Today’s ruling shows that Hubbard County cannot repress Native people for the benefit of Enbridge by circumventing the law,” she added. “This is also an important victory for all people of the North reinforcing that a repressive police force should not be able to stop you from accessing your land upon which you hunt or live.”
BREAKING: LINE 3 CASE WIN. In a major victory, a Minnesota judge ruled that police violated rights of water protectors when they blocked the driveway to a resistance camp last year. https://t.co/dyPcOWcJUe@ProtestLaw@zhaabowekwe@WinonaLaduke
EarthRights general counsel Marco Simons asserted that “the court’s ruling is a major rebuke to police efforts to unlawfully target water protectors and to interfere with their activities protesting the Line 3 pipeline.”
“Blocking access to the Namewag camp exemplifies a pattern of unlawful and discriminatory police conduct incentivized by an Enbridge-funded account from which the police can seek reimbursement for Line 3-related activities,” he continued.
“Police forces should protect the public interest, not private companies,” Simons added. “Cases like this highlight the dangers of allowing the police to act as a private security arm for pipeline companies.”
Jackson, Mississippi, remains gripped in an ongoing water crisis. The task of distributing water to local residents has been largely taken up by community organizations like Cooperation Jackson and Operation Good. Organizer, writer, and educator Kali Akuno joins The Marc Steiner Show to explain how the current crisis is a reflection of capitalism’s failures and decades of institutional racism. Though Jackson today is more than 80% Black, this is a recent demographic development created by white flight and capital flight from the city. The state’s prolonged neglect of Jackson’s infrastructure is a consequence of an entrenched far-right politics in Mississippi’s public institutions. And what’s happening currently in Jackson is a sign of things to come around the country. To fight back, Akuno emphasizes the need to build mass movements and grassroots networks capable of exercising real political power.
Residents of Jackson, Mississippi, are in the throes of a seemingly unending water crisis and a near collapse of the city’s public water system.
Jackson’s current crisis came to a head after the city experienced heavy rains in late August, increasing the raw water entering the OB Curtis Water Treatment plant, the city’s primary water treatment plant. This, in turn, slowed the treatment supply and caused a drop in water pressure, leaving over 150,000 residents without access to water. (When water pressure drops, there’s a high probability that untreated groundwater can enter the water system through damaged or cracked pipes, thus forcing residents to have to boil water to kill potentially harmful bacteria.)
The crisis that we have going on in Jackson—this has been happening since I was a little kid… Every year the water be messed up and the potholes be messed up. You all have all this money, what you all spending it on?
Derrell Johnson, Operation Good member
As of Monday, city officials said the OB Curtis Water Treatment plant had restored water pressure to 87 PSI. However, a boil-water notice remains in effect—a frequent occurrence in the city of Jackson, where boil-water notices can last for a few days, while others can last for weeks.
The problems plaguing the city of Jackson today are grave and systemic: old and leaky pipes, malfunctions at treatment plants, all connected to a shrinking tax base (and shrinking funds for public infrastructure) resulting from white flight, which began after schools were integrated in the 1970s, and economic disinvestment. The state’s Republican legislature has also failed to provide the majority-Democrat city with adequate funding for repairs. Without a complete overhaul of the water system, residents will be living in a perpetual water crisis.
Jackson, Mississippi, is a majority-Black city (82%) where residents have either been without water or have been under a boil-water advisory since July 30, after the Mississippi State Department of Health detected levels of turbidity or cloudiness in the water that violated state health regulations. Even before the pressure dropped at the OB Curtis Water Treatment Plant, Jackson’s system—and its citizenry—was already under distress. In February, 2020, a winter storm ravaged the city’s already-failing infrastructure and burst pipes bursts left many residents without water for a month.
Investigative sampling, which helps determine the quality of water, began on Tuesday. The city will take 120 water samples from across Jackson to determine if the boil-water notice can be lifted. It will take two consecutive days of clear samples before the state Department of Health lifts the boil-water notice.
This is, indeed, a crisis, and the lives of Jackson’s residents have been upended. Residents in South Jackson are still waiting in lines in the sweltering heat for bottled water they can use to drink, cook, and brush their teeth.
Residents in South Jackson, a majority-Black and working-class neighborhood, have been lining up at 2827 Oak Forest Drive, a tennis park where staff members of the violence prevention organization Operation Good have organized drives to donate water since the crisis started. They have also been dropping off supplies to elderly people in the community who don’t possess the resources to purchase bottled water. Both Operation Good on the South side, and Cooperation Jackson on the West side have been working overtime to meet the needs of their beleaguered neighbors.
Operation Good is a local community organization dedicated to lending a hand in anyway they can. they’ve already started collecting and distributing water cases to households in the area but they’ll need help to continue. to donate, their cash app is $operationgoodms pic.twitter.com/hoIViPBsb4
On Labor Day, I visited Jackson with water contributions from my community in New Orleans to deliver to Operation Good. While loading cases of water, I spoke to Operation Good members and a resident from South Jackson about the ongoing neglect that led to this travesty today, and about the fact that, until it receives billions of dollars’ worth of infrastructure repairs and system upgrades, a majority-Black American capital city will be continually left without water.
I asked residents and volunteers, “If you had an opportunity to speak to Gov. Reeves about the water crisis, what would you say? And what can ordinary people do to help?” Here’s what they said.
Portrait of Derrell Johnson, Operation Good member. Photo taken by Jason Kerzinski on September 5, 2022
Derrell Johnson
The crisis that we have going on in Jackson—this has been happening since I was a little kid… Every year the water be messed up and the potholes be messed up. You all have all this money, what you all spending it on? This is Jackson. This is the capital of Mississippi. Why won’t you all take the time out and fix the city? We have people that want to travel, visit different states, and come to Mississippi. Why won’t you all just make the city look good? Man, people probably won’t come…
Portrait of Jason White, Operation Good member. Photo taken by Jason Kerzinski on September 5, 2022.
Jason White
What would I say to our governor? He’s y’all governor, not my governor.
This water crisis should have been fixed. The situation with this water has been going on for years and years. You have been funded many a time by the federal government to fix the water situation. Instead of y’all fixing it, you want to patch the water situation and pocket the rest of the money—or whatever you want to do with it. You’re not taking care of the good citizens of Jackson.
That’s why I’ve been here working with Operation Good; we’ve been providing for our citizens. On the South, North, West, East—every side of Jackson—Operation Good are there helping communities. We do community cleanups, we pass out water, we have extravagant events to feed whole communities. Everything.
Our government—they don’t care about us, not the lower class. You have to be up there with them people in that rich class in order for them to take care of you.
Jason White, Operation Good member
Our government—they don’t care about us, not the lower class. You have to be up there with them people in that rich class in order for them to take care of you. Where do you see this water problem happening? In Jackson. Meanwhile, in Brandon—that’s one of the surrounding cities—now they saying they have water problems because their water system is connected to ours. But actually they been on the news saying their water system is not connected to ours. So why y’all trying to fund them? Why y’all sending water over to Brandon and these different areas when the people right here in Jackson need it? You tell me, Governor.
Portrait of KK Finch, Operation Good member. Portrait taken by Jason Prather on September 5, 2022
KK Finch
If I could speak with Governor Reeves in reference to the water crisis, I would actually tell him to come reside in one of the South Jackson locations, put his family in one of these neighborhoods, in one of these homes, let them have to live in this situation to see how it actually feels. It’s no fun, and you don’t really feel it until your family has to deal with it firsthand. We can get on TV and talk about the problem, we can get in front of the cameras and talk about what we’re going to do, but unless you’re out here living in it you don’t fully understand.
It’s frustrating for the citizens of Jackson—South Jackson, North Jackson, East Jackson, West Jackson—to have to do this. We have elderly people who can’t afford to buy water. You can’t boil water to take baths; it’s a high risk. I have a six-year-old grandson who received third-degree burns three years ago during a boil water alert. His mom was boiling water to try to bathe and cook, he bumped into her in the kitchen while she was transferring the boiled water from the stove to the sink, and he received burns. It’s not safe. Kids don’t understand what’s going on when they see their parents coming through with big pots of water that they’ve boiled just to wash a dish, or big pots of water just so they can take a bath adequately.
If I could speak with Governor Reeves in reference to the water crisis, I would actually tell him to come reside in one of the South Jackson locations, put his family in one of these neighborhoods, in one of these homes, let them have to live in this situation to see how it actually feels. It’s no fun, and you don’t really feel it until your family has to deal with it firsthand.
KK Finch, Operation Good member
When it comes to us out here passing out the water, I’m doing it because it’s the right thing to do. My community needs it. If I could give everybody what they need I promise I would, but I don’t have the finances. But just being able to see the looks and smiles on these people’s faces when you hand them these cases of water that they need—they’re very appreciative, and it makes me feel good as a person. It makes our organization feel good. It makes the youth in our organization feel good to give back to their community.
At one point in time, I was a problem in this community. I was a young kid. I was a hard-head little girl, running fast, but now I want to be part of the solution in the community. First step: trying to help with the water crisis. We help with the youth, we help with trying to clean up South Jackson. Whatever our community needs, Operation Good is trying to meet them there.
Patsy Marie Nard, South Jackson resident. Portrait taken by Jason Kerzinski on September 5, 2022
Patsy Marie Nard
They say that you should go to the store and buy water. But majority of the time most of the stores are out of water, and the stores that do have water—they’ve jacked their prices up three times.
Patsy Marie Nard, South Jackson resident
You can’t cook ‘cause you don’t have any water. You can’t utilize the water ‘cause there’s toxins in it. They say that you should go to the store and buy water. But majority of the time most of the stores are out of water, and the stores that do have water—they’ve jacked their prices up three times. I mean, I’m on a set income. I get a social security check every month—that’s once a month. I can’t afford to buy water and pay bills. I didn’t expect for this to happen. I know God… He’s the head of everything, and everything happens for a reason. But Governor Reeves… they say they gave him everything they can give him, but he hasn’t got up and done anything.
If Governor Reeves could just get up and start serving us in Jackson, Mississippi… How would he feel if he didn’t have water? He can probably afford it, but a lot of people like myself cannot afford water. I mean, that’s something that you need in order to survive. I need water. I’m disabled and I have a whole lot of illnesses. I am so sick. I have to take a whole lot of medicines, I have to go see a doctor, I have to do everything. But if Governor Reeves, making all that money, could please just get up off his tail and try to put some of that money toward other people. A lot of people need that money. I’m not “out” no money because I don’t get none. And when I get it I don’t mind sharing and giving to others. Because you never know when you might be in distress, like right now.
What if it was one of Governor Reeves’s siblings, or his parents or something, in the same predicament as we are? He wouldn’t want to feel like that, to wake up the next day and one of his parents or siblings or closest friend is deceased because they were dehydrated, because their sodium level is low and they had some seizure or heart attack or brain tumor due to lack of water. You have to have water to live.
I got other people in the household. I got my son, my granddaughter, me, my boyfriend. My daughter comes over ‘cause she doesn’t have any water. Then you turn the water on and it’s just drip, drip, drip. How you going to take a bath with some little drip of water?
Patsy Marie Nard, South Jackson resident
I got other people in the household. I got my son, my granddaughter, me, my boyfriend. My daughter comes over ‘cause she doesn’t have any water. Then you turn the water on and it’s just drip, drip, drip. How you going to take a bath with some little drip of water? And you can’t use your bottled water cause you have to have something to drink. So then you have to go places with a smell… I don’t like to get out the car, to be honest with you, because I haven’t been able to really take care of my hygiene like I would normally do. I just was thinking, “Maybe it’s the last days or something.” I don’t really know what’s ahead for me.
And so, I just thank God every day that I’m living and there are people in this world that do care, just like you. You care. This lady and her husband over there—look how much they care. A lot of people just don’t care. A lot of people just be asleep. Open your eyes up and wake up! Because, instead of giving people some water, people out here making money jacking the prices up. I go to the store and the man charged me $2.19 for a bottle of water—and then, with tax, it was $2.39. I said, “Man, you crazy.” I know I needed it. I said, “That’s wrong, though. How you going to charge somebody for the water?” Money is the root of all evil. Money going to be here when you ain’t… I just hope people open their eyes up and think. God gave you a brain; use it.
Tim Finch, Operation Good member. Portrait taken by Jason Kerzinski on September 5, 2022.
Tim Finch
If I had the chance to speak to Governor Reeves, I would ask him what’s been the delay since he’s been in office? He’s been made aware of these problems. We try not to do the blame game because this affects the whole city of Jackson, but we would ask him, “Hey, what’s the hold up? Forget the mayor. Forget the city council. Forget the people you have problems with. Some of these citizens are the ones that voted for you. Whatever little beef or misunderstandings you have with other politicians—put that on the back burner, man. Take care of your constituents first. These people voted for you, man.” A lot of people think, like, “Oh, didn’t none of the Black people vote for Tate Reeves.” But a lot of people in our community voted for him over the other choice… He had a lot of support from Jackson, Mississippi, whether he believes it or not. I was out here at the polls taking elders to vote. So, we supported Tate Reeves, but it’s like he forgot.
Governor Reeves wants to build a golf course over here. What about water? We got this and that, we allocate money for everything, but it’s hard for these kids to get water. These people need water. We have a lot of elders and we have a lot of babies, man. If you don’t have elders to teach and babies to follow those teachings, it’s the end of society. We got to take care of them babies and our elders.
A lot of people think, like, “Oh, didn’t none of the Black people vote for Tate Reeves.” But a lot of people in our community voted for him over the other choice… He had a lot of support from Jackson, Mississippi, whether he believes it or not. I was out here at the polls taking elders to vote. So, we supported Tate Reeves, but it’s like he forgot.
Tim Finch, Operation Good member
We know it’s not 100% Governor Reeves’s fault, but he’s in that seat now, so, hey, we all got to bear the burden of our forefathers, right? He got to bear what they left there on his plate. They left that there for him. It wasn’t something he started. It’s been going on since the ’80s, since Mayor Kane Ditto—first mayor to publicly say, “Hey, we got a problem with our water system in Jackson.” How many governors and mayors we’ve had since then?
We all can blame who we want to blame, but it’s a Mississippi failure. It’s not a Jackson failure, it’s not a mayor failure, it’s not a governor failure. It’s a Mississippi failure as a whole. This is our state capital. If I was governor, I’d be embarrassed. I’m the governor and I’m sitting here at the capitol building and these people around me ain’t got no water? All these other cities and states got to donate? Mississippi and Jackson are doing things, but they ain’t moving like the people out of town. Ain’t no excuses. I ain’t heard nobody out of town say, “Ain’t no water” yet. But the state and all of them are saying, “Ain’t no water. It’s hard to find.” How is it hard to find when we got people from New York, everywhere, sending truckloads of water?
If the water is a crisis, a whole bunch of stuff falls under that water crisis. Because they tell you, “Don’t open your mouth and don’t open your eyes if you take a shower in the water.” As an adult, I’m like, “Eh, maybe I shouldn’t even take a shower if I got to do all this,” because you may take a shower every day in the water no problem, but everybody’s body is different. What if I take a shower and I wake up the next morning and my throat is swollen up? We never know what the poisons in the water going to do to everybody individually.
As far as what everyday people can do to help, the first thing I would ask everybody to do is say a prayer for each of us. Say a prayer for your neighbor, because that’s what it’s going to take. It don’t matter how much money the government allocates and dumps. If God ain’t overseeing that money, it still ain’t going to do what it need to do. I ask everybody to just say a prayer and do what you can do. Don’t be a part of the problem. Let’s forget whose fault it is. Let’s forget. Let’s be the ones that fix it. White, Black, Mexican, Asian, Puerto Rican—it doesn’t matter. Let’s fix the problem for the citizens of Jackson. Anything you could do—if you go in the store and buy a bottle of water for your neighbor, one bottle of water, case of water, it doesn’t matter. Anything you could do to help, to be a part of the solution instead of the problem, that’s what we ask from the citizens.
And for the citizens of Jackson, stay calm. We know it’s frustrating. We live here. I’ve stayed in this same South Jackson neighborhood, one of the poorest neighborhoods (if not the poorest part) of Jackson. And me and our team, Operation Good and our youth participants—we were out here seven days last week, Monday through Sunday. Not one time did we say to the citizens that come through that there wasn’t no water. We have people just going in their personal pickups to buy pallets of water from Target or Home Depot.
I ask everybody to just say a prayer and do what you can do. Don’t be a part of the problem. Let’s forget whose fault it is. Let’s forget. Let’s be the ones that fix it. White, Black, Mexican, Asian, Puerto Rican—it doesn’t matter. Let’s fix the problem for the citizens of Jackson.
Tim Finch, Operation Good member
If people could do this out their own pockets, how the government officials going to say, “Oh, it is hard to find water right now because so many people buying it”? I ain’t buying that. With politicians, man, no matter what color they are, it’s all a game. At the end of the day, they lie to us to get in there, and then when they get in there they might pass one little bill and say, “Okay, we gonna do a one cent tax cut for the citizens, but that’s it.” What about all the other stuff to save the city?
Let me ask you this: How many state capitals in America you know don’t have a shopping mall or a movie theater? Jackson, Mississippi, the only one in these United States. We are the largest city in the state of Mississippi, the state seat, and we don’t have none of these things. You’ve seen it. The roads look a mess. It’s like we on a backwoods road in the country where they drive tractors all the time.
Once again, I would reiterate to all citizens—whether you’re in Jackson, New Orleans, Chicago, wherever—let’s not say, “It’s his fault, or his fault.” Let’s say, “Hey, what happened? What can we do to fix it? To help?” Let that be our motto during this water crisis in Jackson. “What can we as individuals do to help?” Because we have to understand what we do as individuals reflects upon all of us. Let us have self discipline amongst ourselves and help the community; don’t worry about whose fault it is. If we do what we got to do in God’s name, we ain’t got to worry about whose fault it is, because he’s going to fix it. He knows what needs to be done, who needs to be moved. He is going to take care of that part. We just do the good part and let God do the rest.
Trevion Russell, Operation Good member. Photo taken by Jason Kerzinski on September 5, 2022
Trevion Russell
Us passing out water to the community is helping them while their water pressure is low, because a lot of people ain’t able to move around to get their water or able to do what they need to do because they’re elderly. Us passing out water to the community is good because they ain’t going to have no water to cook if we weren’t out here seven days a week, passing out water to the community so they can eat what they want to eat by using bottles of water. They can’t use no water from the sink because there’s no pressure in the faucet.
I think that’s a good deed for us to do what we doing instead of us just being at home. We could have just been sitting at home chilling, but we took out time, out of our kind hearts, to come out here, pass out water seven days a week, every day, nonstop.
What ordinary people can do to help is donate, come out here, help us pass it out. Or spread the word around the community and say, “We have water up here if you need any water for your shower.” Stuff like that.
Geno Wolmac (Not Pictured)
It don’t matter what political party a city is or what color or race people are in the city; it’s still a part of the state. I think it takes everybody working together to make sure people won’t have to go through a water crisis like we going through. If we all in this together, then we should all work together.
Geno Wolmac
This problem been going on, so I can’t just say it end with Governor Reeves or start with him. As far as all who play a role in a state government and our city government, this is something that everybody been knowing was an issue. I don’t think that the adequate infrastructure money is allocated to the city of Jackson because of how it is here: It is a predominantly Black city. All of the tax base has been eroded. The investment in Jackson hasn’t been there. Encouragement of investment in Jackson hasn’t even been taking place on the state level or on the city level. Therefore, when you erode the tax base, you are going to erode the infrastructure here.
In the future, we should invest in our capital city the same way other states invest in the metro area. It don’t matter what political party a city is or what color or race people are in the city; it’s still a part of the state. I think it takes everybody working together to make sure people won’t have to go through a water crisis like we going through. If we all in this together, then we should all work together.
There are work-arounds the U.S. can use to fund affordable housing, drought responses, and other urgently-needed infrastructure that was left out of the two recent spending bills.
Congress has passed two major infrastructure bills in the last year, but imminent needs remain. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law chiefly focused on conventional highway programs, and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 (IRA) mainly centered on energy security and combating climate change. According to the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), over $2 trillion in much-needed infrastructure is still unfunded, including projects to address drought, affordable housing, high-speed rail, and power transmission lines. By 2039, per the ASCE, continued underinvestment at current rates will cost $10 trillion in cumulative lost GDP, more than 3 million jobs in that year, and $2.24 trillion in exports over the next 20 years.
Particularly urgent today is infrastructure to counteract the record-breaking drought in the U.S. Southwest, where 50% of the nation’s food supply is grown. Subsidies for such things as the purchase of electric vehicles, featured in the IRA, will pad the coffers of the industries lobbying for them but will not get water to our parched farmlands any time soon. More direct action is needed. But as noted by Todd Tucker in a Roosevelt Institute article, “Today, a gridlocked and austerity-minded Congress balks at appropriating sufficient money to ensure emergency readiness. … [T]he US system of government’s numerous veto points make emergency response harder than under parliamentary or authoritarian systems.”
There are, however, other ways to finance these essential projects. “A work-around,” says Tucker, “is so-called off-balance sheet money creation.” That was the approach taken in the 1930s, when commercial banks were bankrupt and the country faced its worst-ever economic depression; yet the government succeeded in building infrastructure as never before.
Off-budget Funding: The Model of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation
For funding its national infrastructure campaign in the Great Depression, Congress called on the publicly-owned Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC). It was not actually a bank; it got its liquidity by issuing bonds. Notes Tucker, “The RFC was allowed to borrow money from the Treasury and the capital markets, and then invest in relief and mobilization efforts that would eventually generate a return for taxpayers, all while skating past austerity hawks determined to cut or freeze government spending.”
The RFC was an executive agency with the ability to obtain funding through the Treasury outside of the normal legislative process. Thus, the RFC could be used to finance a variety of favored projects and programs without obtaining legislative approval. RFC lending did not count toward budgetary expenditures, so the expansion of the role and influence of the government through the RFC was not reflected in the federal budget.
The RFC lent to federal government agencies including the Commodity Credit Corporation (which lent to farmers), the Electric Home and Farm Authority, the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie Mae), the Public Works Administration, and the Works Progress Administration (WPA). It also made direct loans to local governments and businesses and funded eight RFC wartime subsidiaries in the 1940s that were essential to the war effort.
The infrastructure projects of one agency alone, the Works Progress Administration, included 1,000 miles of new and rebuilt airport runways, 651,000 miles of highway, 124,000 bridges, 8,000 parks, and 18,000 playgrounds and athletic fields; and some 84,000 miles of drainage pipes, 69,000 highway light standards, and 125,000 public buildings (built, rebuilt, or expanded), including 41,300 schools. For local governments that had hit their borrowing limits on their taxpayer-funded general obligation bonds, a workaround was devised: they could borrow by issuing “revenue bonds,” which were backed not by taxes but by the revenue that would be generated by the infrastructure funded by the loans.
A bill currently before Congress, HR 3339, proposes to duplicate the feats of the RFC without increasing the federal budget deficit or taxes, by forming a National Infrastructure Bank (NIB).
China’s State “Policy Banks”
China is dealing with the global economic downturn by embarking on a stimulus program involving large national infrastructure projects, including massive water infrastructure. For funding, the government is drawing on three state-owned “policy banks” structured like the RFC.
The Chinese government is one of those systems referred to by Todd Tucker as not being hampered by “a gridlocked and austerity-minded Congress.” It can just issue a five-year plan and hit the ground running. In May 2022, it began construction on 3,876 large projects with a total investment of nearly 2.4 trillion yuan (about $350 billion).
Funding is coming chiefly from China’s “policy banks” set up in 1994 to provide targeted loans in areas where profit-driven banks might be reluctant to lend. They are the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China and the Agricultural Development Bank of China. As noted in a June 30 article in the Washington Post, China could also draw on its “Big Four” banks – Industrial & Commercial Bank of China Ltd., China Construction Bank Corp., Agricultural Bank of China Ltd., and Bank of China Ltd. – but “they are essentially profit-driven commercial banks that can be quite picky when it comes to selecting borrowers and projects. The policy lenders, however, operate on a non-profit basis and are often recruited to pour cheap funds into projects that are less attractive financially but matter to the longer-term development of the economy.”
Like the RFC, the policy banks mainly get their funds by issuing bonds. They can also get “Pledged Supplementary Lending” directly from the Chinese central bank, which presumably creates the money on its books, as all central banks are empowered to do.
Dealing with China’s Water Crisis
According to the Xinhua News Agency, on July 7 construction began on a project linking China’s two mega water infrastructures – the Three Gorges Project and the South-to-North Water Diversion Project – transferring water from the water-abundant south to the arid northern region of the country. The goal is a national water grid, increasing the quantity of water available for use nationally by about 20% and increasing China’s irrigated area by about 10%.
The South-to-North Water Diversion Project is already well underway. The middle route, the most prominent one due to its role in feeding water to the nation’s capital, begins at the Danjiangkou Reservoir in the Hanjiang River in central China’s Hubei and runs northeastward to Beijing and Tianjin. It was completed and began supplying water in December 2014. The eastern route began supplying water in November 2013, transferring water from Jiangsu to areas including East China’s Shandong Province. The new project will channel water from the Three Gorges Reservoir area to the Hanjiang River, a tributary of the Yangtze River. It is scheduled to be completed in nine years.
Solving Our Water Crisis
The total estimated investment for China’s national water grid is about 2.99 trillion yuan (U.S. $470 billion). This is comparable to the $400 billion the National Infrastructure Bank Coalition proposes to allocate through HR 3339 to address the serious drought in the U.S. Southwest.
As in China, one alternative being considered by the NIB team is to divert water from areas that have it in excess. One proposal is a pipeline to ship Mississippi River floodwaters to the parched Colorado River via a Wyoming tributary. Another option is to pump water from the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest to California via a subterranean pipeline on the floor of the Pacific Ocean – not upstream water used by Washington and Oregon residents, but water from the ocean outflow where the river feeds into the Pacific and its freshwater becomes unusable saltwater.
Those are doable alternatives, but political and regulatory obstacles remain. Ideally, sources of water would be found that are new not just to the Southwest but to the surface of the planet. This is another proposal being explored by the NIB team – to tap “deep seated water” or “primary water,” the plentiful water supplies below normal groundwater tables.
Studies have found evidence of several oceans’ worth of water locked up in rock as far down as 1,000 kilometers below the Earth’s surface. (See The Smithsonian Magazine, “How the Earth’s Mantle Sends Water Up Toward the Surface,” June 2022.) This water is not part of the hydrologic cycle (clouds to rain to ground to clouds again), as shown on testing by its lack of environmental contaminants. From the time when atomic testing began in the Pacific, hydrologic water has contained traces of tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen used as a fuel in thermonuclear bombs. Primary water shoots up tritium-free —clean, fresh and usually drinkable without filtration.
There are many verified cases of mountaintop wells that have gushed water for decades in arid lands. This water is now being located and tapped by enterprising hydrogeologists using technological innovations like those used in other extractive industries, but without their destructive impact on the environment. For more on primary water and the promising vistas it opens up, see my earlier articles here and here.
Funding Through the National Infrastructure Bank
Critically needed water and other infrastructure projects can be funded without tapping the federal budget, with funds generated through a national infrastructure bank. Unlike the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, the publicly-owned bank proposed in HR 3339 is designed to be a true depository bank, which can leverage its funds as all depository banks are allowed to do: with a 10% capital requirement, it can leverage $1 in capital into $10 in loans.
For capitalization, the NIB will follow the model of Alexander Hamilton’s First U.S. Bank: shares in the bank will be swapped for existing U.S. bonds. The shares will earn a 2% dividend and are non-voting. Control of the bank and its operations will remain with the public, an independent board of directors, and a panel of carefully selected non-partisan experts, precluding manipulation for political ends.
The NIB is projected to lend $5 trillion over 10 years, or roughly $500 billion per year. That means each year the NIB will have to add $50 billion in new capitalization in the form of debt for equity swaps. The incentive for investors is the extra 2% yield the NIB provides on its preferred stock, plus a government guarantee. The U.S. Postal Service, the fourth largest holder of U.S. Treasuries globally, is one possible investor. Others are pension funds and builder associations with investment portfolios, all of which need a certain number of triple-A-rated investments. NIB bonds will have a better rate of return than Treasuries, while achieving the laudable purpose of filling the critical infrastructure gap.
To clear checks from the newly-created loan deposits, the NIB will bring in cash from incoming customer deposits, loan repayments, NIB-issued bonds, and/or borrowing from the Federal Reserve. How much cash it will need and its timing depends on how many infrastructure companies maintain their deposit accounts with the NIB.
The $5 trillion the NIB lends over 10 years will add $5 trillion to the total money supply; but the “productive” loans it will be making are the sort that do not add to price inflation. In fact, they can reduce it – by raising GDP growth, increasing the supply side of the supply-versus-demand inflation equation.
America achieved its greatest-ever infrastructure campaign in the midst of the Great Depression. We can do that again today, and we can do it with the same machinery: off-budget financing through a government-owned national financial institution.
Could somebody please get an extension ladder to help Senator Schumer down from the ceiling? He’s stuck in the rafters in a high-pitched note of self-congratulation whilst spraining his elbow as he awkwardly and repeatedly tries to pat his own back, screaming over and over again “the greatest climate legislation of all time!”
Compared to what?
Still, one signal that something really good must be in the nonsensically titled Inflation Reduction Act is the fact that no Republican senators voted for it. Nowadays, the extreme right has the entire Republican edifice on its hands and knees, almost in a fetal position in a deadly chokehold, and they’re not about to risk voting for anything that smacks of help for ordinary Americans. Plus, as for climate-type legislation, they detest mention of global warming. It gives ‘em the willies.
Nevertheless, in spite of 100% Republican opposition, the bill is likely to pass and become law. It does a lot of really good things to help climate change/global warming. There is no doubt about this.
The real question is whether it’s enough soon enough. And, similar to all commitments by nations of the world to mitigate climate change, will it really happen? Climate change mitigation plans have a very spotty, almost zero, record of achievement.
The bill directs about $370 billion (that’s a lot) over 10 years toward promoting clean energy and climate resilience, with about two-thirds of the money coming in the form of tax credits for producing electricity from clean energy sources, investing in renewable energy technologies and addressing climate change through carbon sequestration, renewable fuel production, and clean energy manufacturing.
According to Evergreen Action, a left-of-center advocacy founded by former staffers to Gov. Jay Inslee’s presidential campaign, which advocated zero emissions by 2035 when some other candidates didn’t even know what zero emissions really meant:
The bill is an opportunity for a major breakthrough in America’s fight against climate change. This bill has the potential to be the single largest investment in clean energy in American history. Making major investments in clean energy is one of the best ways Congress can lower inflation and shield Americans from the volatility of fossil fuel markets. 1
The bill includes $60 billion to boost domestic clean energy manufacturing, including $30 billion in production tax credits for solar panels, wind turbines, batteries and critical mineral processing. It also offers lower- and middle-income motorists a $7,500 tax credit for clean vehicles, while states and electric utilities would see $30 billion in grants and loans to expand clean energy. The bill also includes $60 billion for environmental justice communities and a fee on methane emissions that will rise to $1,500 a ton by 2026.
The Nature Conservancy released the following statement on August 7th:
The Senate’s approval of the Inflation Reduction Act gives us hope, and more optimism than we’ve had in years, that the U.S. Congress recognizes the urgency of the global climate crisis and is prepared to lead a meaningful response.
Almost all environmental advocacy groups favor the legislation. Indeed, it would be ridiculous to naysay the only true broad-reaching climate legislation in American history.
But, is it enough soon enough? Which may have been on the minds of legislators in Washington, D.C., assuming the nation’s intelligence agencies sent them classified notes about the most frightening climate behavior in human history; i.e., the world is drying up!
And, maybe they read the recent NASA/National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration report that the planet is trapping heat at a rate that’s twice as fast as only 15 years ago.
Carbon emissions have turned the planet into a heat machine. Compelling evidence of this tragedy is found throughout the world, as follows. It demands a much bigger Inflation Reduction Act but on a worldwide coordinated basis:
According to SPEI Global Drought Monitor, severe drought is now found throughout the planet.
A recent University of Cambridge study claims that since 2015 European drought has accelerated and intensified. In fact, the continent is experiencing the most intense drought in 250 years.
Italy’s Po River Valley, as of July 2022, has cut water for 125 towns. Drinking water is delivered via trucks to Piedmont and Lombardy, as local reservoirs no longer exist. They’re gone! Italy’s drought alert is now spreading to the central part of the country to the rivers Arno, Aniene, and Tiber where water levels are “drastically down.”
The Rhine River, Europe’s most important waterway for commerce and industry and tourism, is close to shutting down. Key shipping lanes are down to 19 inches water depth. This is happening two months before the normal seasonal lows. Transports already reduced from 6000-ton loads to 800 tons but may be forced to halt completely, depending, and making coal shipment to Germany and inclusive of all commercial goods, a horrendous challenge for upcoming winter months.
In France more than 100 towns are without drinking water and now receive water deliveries by truck. The government has established a water crisis team. Trees and bushes are prematurely shedding leaves. France’s nuclear power plants, at a time when half of its 56 reactors are offline due to maintenance and serious corrosion issues, are now threatened due to river water temperatures used to cool the reactors. Restrictions kick in 26°C. Some plants are experiencing 28°C and 30°C river water temps.
In Spain, water restrictions have been imposed on Barcelona, Malaga, Huelva, and Pontevedra. Catalonia has severe restrictions on individual liters per day. The price of olive oil is likely to spike by at least 25% as heat hits crops.
In Portugal, 99% of the country is experiencing severe drought. It’s the driest in 1,200 years. Lawn watering prohibited.
According to NASA, the worst drought in 900 years is hitting the entire Middle East. A Carnegie Endowment study as of 2022 claims water scarcity is threatening violent conflicts throughout MENA, the acronym for the Middle East and North Africa. 80-90 million people in the region will experience water insecurity within three years. The European Commission Joint Research Center, in a recent study, claims there’s a 75%-90% chance of water wars.
Santiago’s population of 6.5 M is on a severe water-rationing program with rotating 24-hour cutoffs for homes in the city. On the suburban outskirts of Santiago, water is delivered by truck to 400,000 families or 1.5M people. They are allotted 50 liters (13.2 gallons) water per day per person. Additionally, in the northern regions of Chile, precipitation is down 90%.
In Argentina, the drought is so bad that the famous Iberia wetland is at its worst levels in 80 years as fires raged earlier this year in one of the world’s largest wetlands.
In SE Asia, the Mekong River, the principal river for the entire region, is in 4-year drought, the worst in 60 years. Cambodian water for crop irrigation is down to 20% of normal.
China has informed Guangzhou (pop 15M) and Shenzhen (pop 12.5M), the country’s tech hub, to cut per capita water use from January to October of 2022. The Pearl River Basin, which serves as the water source for China’s most populous urban centers, as mentioned, has been hit with severe drought, plus the looming drinking water crisis is compounded by drought-induced saltwater intrusion.
In Japan, Matsuyama (pop 515K) and Shikokuchuo (Pop 84K) are rationing water to citizens. Some areas of the country are experiencing crippling water shortages. The country is also experiencing power shortages and intends to go to more coal.
In Africa, Ethiopia and Kenya are faced with brutal drought. Three million livestock have died under the fierce influence of heat. In the Horn of Africa, 20M people are at risk of starvation and failure of water supplies.
America’s two largest water reservoirs, Lake Mead and Lake Powell are within a few tens of feet of dead pool status defined as water no longer running downstream beyond Hoover dam and Glen Canyon dam respectively. Lake Mead dead pool is 895 feet elevation; it’s currently 1,041 feet. Lake Powell’s dead pool is 3,370 feet elevation. It is current 3,536 feet. The US Bureau of Reclamation recently informed the seven Colorado River Basin states to cut water usage on an emergency basis.
Is the Senate’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 big enough, soon enough? Probably not.
Congress really needs to go back to Biden’s initial $3.5T Build Back Better Plan. In that regard, The Economist, July 21, 2022 ran this article: “American Climate Policy is in Tatters—Manchin Single-handedly scuttled Biden’s BBB Plans for $3.5 trillion”.
The entire planet is reeling from global warming. America’s modest couple hundred billion climate plan is a drop in the world’s bucket. The whole world needs to mimic Biden’s original BBB plan, or it’s lights out. The evidence of that is compelling, unless, of course, facts don’t count any longer.
“How the Senate Climate Bill Could Slash Emissions by 40 Percent”, Scientific American, July 28, 2022.
May 15 this year came as a timely warning that India is in the center of the global warming crisis. On this day the maximum temperature crossed the 47 degrees Celsius limit in about 20 cities, mostly in northwest and central parts of the country. These cities also figured in the table of the hottest cities at world level on this day.
Most of these cities and the surrounding countryside have been figuring prominently also in the longer heat waves which have been experienced since early April.
Six of these cities are located in the Thar desert or the area close to it. These include Jaisalmer, Phalodi, Pilani, Churu, Bikaner and Ganganagar.
Four other cities are concentrated in a region of 13 districts known as Bundelkhand in Central India which saw temperature reaching 49 degrees C in Banda.
As climate-fueled floods and droughts wreak havoc around the world, a hard truth is emerging: sooner or later, water always wins. But these devastating water extremes are not just due to climate change. They are made much worse by our poor development choices aimed at controlling water. The following excerpt is from the book >Water Always Wins, in which Hakai contributor Erica Gies follows innovators in what she calls the Slow Water movement who are instead asking a revolutionary question: what does water want?
What water wants is to reclaim its slow phases—wetlands, floodplains, mangrove forests—that we’ve erased with development. The Slow Water movement has parallels to Slow Food, drawing attention to water’s relationships with rocks, microbes, beavers, humans, and how our actions affect them. Projects work with local geology, life, climate, and cultures rather than trying to control them.
People’s Alliance party leader Sitiveni Rabuka says the FijiFirst government is not fit to run the country because it cannot efficiently provide two basic necessities — electricity and water.
In a statement issued yesterday, he said the continuing crises of dry taps and regular power cuts was “good reason for voting the FijiFirst government out of office”.
“The inability of the Minister of the Economy Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum, and the Prime Minister Voreqe Bainimarama to keep the lights on and the water flowing through the taps is an indictment of their leadership,” Rabuka said.
“In addition to their other failures, they clearly cannot efficiently provide these two basic necessities for living. They are therefore not fit to remain in office.”
The former prime minister also claimed electricity supply disruptions, leaking mains, dirty water and empty taps were part of the daily routine for hundreds of thousands of citizens.
“Disruptions occur in many areas causing turmoil and stress in homes, workplaces and public facilities such as hospitals,” he said.
“On more than one occasion in recent times, all of Viti Levu has lost its electricity — some places have suffered up to four power cuts in one day.
“The CWM Hospital, the country’s largest, has previously been left without water. You can imagine what a nightmare that was for hundreds of patients, visitors and staff.
“There has never been an apology from Mr Bainimarama or Mr Sayed-Khaiyum for not getting their water and power act together.”
Felix Chaudharyis a Fiji Times reporter. Republished with permission.
The climate crisis is making droughts more frequent and longer-lasting, a new UN report has announced.
The report, Drought in Numbers, 2022, was released Wednesday in honor of Drought Day at the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD)’s 15th Conference of Parties (COP15) taking place in Abijan, Côte d’Ivoire from May 9 to 20.
“The facts and figures of this publication all point in the same direction: an upward trajectory in the duration of droughts and the severity of impacts, not only affecting human societies but also the ecological systems upon which the survival of all life depends, including that of our own species.” UNCCD Executive Secretary Ibrahim Thiaw said in a press release.
The planet is wheezing, coughing and sputtering because of vicious attacks by worldwide droughts aided and abetted by global warming at only 1.2C above baseline. Some major metropolises are rationing water.
What’ll happen at 1.5C?
It’s not as if droughts are not a normal feature of the climate system. They are, but the problem nowadays is highlighted by reports from NASA and NOAA stating that earth is trapping nearly twice as much heat is it did in 2005 described as an “unprecedented increase amid the climate crisis.” This trend is described as “quite alarming.”
The planet trapping heat at double the rate of only 17 years ago is off-the-charts bad news and reason enough for the world’s leaders to go all-in on global warming preventive measures, and then hope and pray that it’s not too late.
Throughout Earth’s history drought has been a normal feature of climate change, but that’s the past. Droughts are no longer normal features. They are much, much more severe and longer lasting, for example, America’s drought in the West is ongoing for 20 years, the worst in 1,200 years, and it’s taken Lake Mead water levels down to 1937 when it first started filling up.
On a worldwide basis, drought’s impact on water reservoirs on every continent is chilling. Agricultural yields are suffering.
Undoubtedly, the utter failure by the world’s political leaders to respect 30-50 years of public warnings by scientists to “get off fossil fuels ASAP” is coming home to roost. When will the general public fight back and throw out climate change denial politicians along with their motley shrilly charlatans?
Along those lines, in an historic judgment, a Belgian court ruled that Belgium’s climate failures violate human rights, stating that public authorities broke promises to tackle the climate issue. 58,000 citizens served as co-plaintiffs in the case. To wit: “By not taking all ‘necessary measures’ to prevent the ‘detrimental’ effects of climate change, the court said, Belgian authorities had breached the right to life (Article 2) and the right to respect for private and family life (Article 8).”1
A major study of soil moisture drought in Europe during the period from 1766 to 2020 led to the conclusion that recent drought events brought the “most intense drought conditions for Europe in 250 years: “We conclude that Europe should prepare adaptation and mitigation plans for future events whose intensity may be comparable to the previous event, but whose duration (and partly their spatial extent) will be much greater than any event observed in the last 250 years.” 2
An international team, led by the University of Cambridge… found that after a long-term drying trend, European drought conditions since 2015 suddenly intensified, beyond anything in the past two thousand (2,000) years.
Eastern Europe is feeling the impact of serious drought. A report from the Atlantic Council in 2021 “emphasized the impacts of drought on Ukraine’s grain exports, noting that they had ‘fallen sharply year-on-year during the current season due to smaller harvests caused by severe drought conditions.’ When an agricultural power as important as Ukraine suddenly starts producing and exporting much less food, it is a recipe for social dislocation, human suffering, and political unrest, both inside the country and beyond.” 3
According to the European Commission: “A severe drought has been affecting northern Italy and the Po River basin in particular.” 4 In Northern Italy, most of the reservoirs are below the minimum historical values… stored energy as of March 2022 is 27.5% less than the 8-year minimum. Both agricultural yield and costs for power are negatively impacted. That -27.5% is 27.5% below the 8-yr minimum!
In the US, according to the Palmer Drought index, severe-to-extreme drought is affecting 38% of the contiguous US as of March 2022. That’s almost as bad as it ever gets. More than 50% of the country registers as moderate-to-extreme. As a result, the US Bureau of Reclamation is scrambling to retain/add/cheat/steal enough water for America’s two largest reservoirs Lake Powell and Lake Mead to keep hydropower supplying electrical power to 5M and water to 40M. Rationing to some of seven SW states has already started. Is that the eye-opener of all eye-openers? Answer: Yes.
Historic drought has literally changed the landscape in parts of South America: “Until 2020, there was plenty of water, swamps, stagnant lakes and lagoons in Argentina’s Ibera Wetlands, one of the largest such ecosystems in the world. But an historic drought of the Parana River dried much of it out; its waters are in the lowest level since 1944. Since January it has been the stage of raging fires.” 5
Chile is experiencing such a horrendous record-breaking drought (13 years) that the capital city Santiago, population 6M, is rationing water. The city will experience rotating water cut-offs of up to 24 hours at a time in a four-tier alert system with public service announcements so residents can prepare for no water. “This is the first time in history that Santiago has a water rationing plan due to the severity of climate change, It’s important for citizens to understand that climate change is here to stay. It’s not just global, it’s local,” according to Claudio Orrego, governor of the Santiago metropolitan region.6
In SE Asia the Mekong River serves as the waterway for the livelihood of 65M people. This is the fourth year of drought. According to the Ministry of Water Resources river conditions are the worst in 60 years. For example, in Cambodia water capacity for crop irrigation is at only 20%. Upstream dams in China and Laos also negatively add to the impact of severe drought conditions.
In China the port city of Guangzhou (pop 15M) and Shenzhen (pop 12.5M), which links HK to mainland China, have put residents on notice to cut (reduce) water consumption between January and October of 2022, as the main water source, the East River (down 50%) experiences the most severe drought in decades.7
In Africa, a brutal drought in Ethiopia and Kenya has caused three million livestock dead and 30% of household herds have died in Somalia. According to the UN, the worsening drought in the Horn of Africa puts 20M people at risk. Rampant migration follows in the footsteps of severe drought, e.g., Central America’s Dry Corridor.
As nation/states fail to adequately address the global warming issue with Plan A, which is attacking the source, or cutting fossil fuel emissions, it becomes increasingly urgent to go to Plan B, which is adapting to the unforgiving climate system exhaust (cough-cough) of a failed Plan A.
In 2021, the Netherlands hosted the first-ever Climate Adaptation Summit (CAS 2021), highlighting adaptation measures as crucial for minimizing extreme weather events and improving water security.
The facts surrounding the current status of CO2 emissions (at all-time highs over the past millennium) and plans for expansion by the fossil fuel industry over the course of this decade; i.e., China and India building new coal plants like crazy and oil companies planning to spend billions for new oil and gas expansion, dictate that adaptation to an unpredictably challenging destructive climate system is an absolute necessity because global warming ain’t gonna get fixed.
It is noteworthy that Dr. James Hansen’s (Columbia University) most recent monthly temperature update states:
Note monthly temperature anomalies on land now commonly exceed +2°C (+3.6°F), with the Arctic anomaly often exceeding +5°C (+9°F).
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change forewarned that +2°C is the upper limit where the climate system starts to get real crazy; however, at today’s overall planet temperature of +1.2°C above baseline trouble is already evident, e.g., the worst droughts in centuries found on every continent with some major cities either rationing water or suggesting voluntary cutbacks. And, oh yeah, food prices are just starting to skyrocket.
Frankly, human ingenuity must take over on local and regional bases to work towards “adaptation to a rambunctiously changing climate,” and, of course, lots of luck. Interestingly, some of America’s biggest western cities have learned to adapt to severe drought, as discussed in some detail in the article: 8
“Drought: The New Global Calamity?” The Kashmir Monitor, June 30, 2021.
“The 2018-2020 Multi-Year Drought Sets a New Benchmark in Europe”, American Geophysical Union, 15 March 2022.
“Extreme Drought Is Crashing Food Production Whether Russia Invades or Not”, The Nation, February. 17, 2022.
“Drought in Northern Italy”, March 2022: GDO Analytical Report, European Commission.
“Climate Change Brings Extreme, Early Impact to South America”, phys.org, March 1, 2022.
“Chile Announces Unprecedented Plan to Ration Water As Drought Enters 13th Year”, The Guardian, April 11, 2022.
“China’s Southern Megacities Warn of Water Shortages During East River Drought”, Reuters, December 8, 2021.
America’s western metropolises are thriving in the midst of the fiercest drought in over 1,000 years.
Not all climate change/global warming news is negative. Positive pushback to global warming is real and happening right under our collective noses.
Still, climate scientists wring their hands in despair over the failure of the corporate-controlled world to come to grips with climate change’s biggest bugaboo, which is too much fossil fuel emitting too much CO2 creating too much warmth that eventually brings on excessive heat. Ergo! Ecosystems fail! Droughts accelerate!
For decades now, scientists have been warning about the danger of too much fossil fuel causing climate system failure, like wet-bulb temperature-related deaths within 6 hrs. @ 95°F/90%H (India?), crop failures, rising sea levels, and scorching droughts. The broken promises of nation/states to “fix it” almost always turn to dust or result in too little, too late.
Yet, Hooray! Human ingenuity is alive and well. Adapting to record-setting drought in the United States is happening, especially in desert cities in America’s arid West, living proof that adaptation to a broken climate system is possible and likely for decades to come. The level of success is reason enough for some amount of cheer and good feelings. America’s western cities are taking on the worst drought in centuries and winning!
But, before looking behind the scenes of heroic efforts by some of America’s biggest cities, it is crucial to look at an all-points bulletin issued by the Bureau of Reclamation about critically low water levels at Lake Powell and at Lake Mead, which are responsible for hydroelectric power for millions and drinking water for 40M people in the West. Water levels at these two crucial reservoirs are dangerously low, calling for extreme measures years earlier than planned.
The Bureau had to pull off some gimmickry (hydrological accounting) for Lake Powell to continue providing hydroelectric power to millions of homes. Otherwise, the power was destined to end as water levels fall below intakes. Water levels at Lake Powell are at all-time lows. The Bureau of Reclamation, in order to keep both hydropower and drinking water for millions, had to employ gimmickry whilst “holding the hands” of seven (7) states that receive their water downstream from the Colorado River to Lake Powell and onto Lake Mead, which is also at all-time record lows going back to 1937 when Lake Mead first started filling up. This is heartbreaking evidence of the devastating drought throughout the West, which refuses to let up.
The Bureau’s gimmickry includes plans for Lake Mead to give up some water intake from Lake Powell to keep the hydropower on for millions of homes. The Bureau, in turn, is robbing water (162B gallons) from a recreational reservoir, Flaming Gorge Reservoir (Wyoming and Utah), to be sent to Lake Powell. This somewhat complicated transaction keeps the lights on for millions, although, Lake Mead loses 480,000 acre-feet of water that Lake Powell normally sends its way. In the end, it’s hoped that spring snow runoff will compensate for the loss to Lake Mead.
The maneuvers by the Bureau include contingency plans that trigger mandatory water reductions for western states such as Arizona (-30%). As a result, farmers in the Phoenix area will have to fallow cotton and alfalfa fields. Most importantly, the accounting gimmick will allow the Bureau to avoid declaring a Tier 2b shortage as it artificially assumes (cooking the books) that Lake Mead did receive water from Lake Powell that it did not receive. As it happens, the Western states are already at Tier 1 shortages whereas a Tier 2b shortage would involve draconian cuts.
The short take on this convoluted affair is that America’s West is running out of adequate water supply in large measure because of an unrelenting drought that has all of the characteristics of a mega-drought. A megadrought is defined as a period of extreme dryness that lasts for decades. During a megadrought wet years do appear but quickly return to severe dryness. The current drought in America’s West has lasted for 20 years.
Along the way the big metropolitan regions have learned how to capitalize on those intermittent wet years in addition to smart measures to conserve and create more potable water. In remarkable fashion, they have learned to cope and are fighting back against the worst drought in recorded history, building adequate supplies of water, and in some cases, more than enough water, as the world surrounding these megalopolises containing millions of people turns brutally dangerously hot and dry. This exemplifies human initiative and ingenuity at work, and it promises to extend quality life in the desert West beyond the challenges of the worst drought in 1,200 years. It is something to behold.
San Diego, Phoenix, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Albuquerque in the face of the worst drought since William the Conquer (1028-1087) hit the shores of England are already working around the issue of federal cuts in Colorado River water, the first cuts in history.
The San Diego Water Authority recently did a water supply stress test that showed it is “water good” until 2045, and probably beyond. Similar results are happening in Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Albuquerque, all nestled within a drought apocalypse, but managing to create adequate supply of water to continue growing into the surrounding desert countryside. It’s a miracle of ingenuity, foresight, and dedication. It’s all about sourcing and conserving water.
YaleEnvironment360, an indispensible source for best coverage of the environment, recently published an article by Jim Robbins: “A Quiet Revolution: Southwest Cities Learn to Thrive Amid Drought”, YaleEnvironment360, April 24, 2022, stating: “From replacing water-guzzling lawns with native vegetation, to low-flow plumbing fixtures, to water recycling and desalination, to the shift of agricultural water to cities, governments in arid western regions are pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy.”
The upshot is that water conservation is one of the keys to successfully encountering droughts. For example, San Diego water usage dropped from 81.5 billion gallons in 2007 to 57 billion gallons in 2020 because of conservation measures.
Moreover, nine (9) desert cities in the Colorado River Basin complex lowered water demand by 19% to 48% from years 2000 to 2015. These are testimonials to the value of conservation measures.
According to YaleEnvironment360:
San Diego has pursued a multi-pronged approach. The city now requires an array of water-saving technology in new homes, such as low-flow toilets and showerheads. Perhaps the single biggest piece of the conservation solution is paying homeowners to tear out yards full of Kentucky bluegrass and replace them with far more water-efficient landscaping. The city-run program pays up to $4 a square foot for as much as 5,000 square feet, and so far has replaced 42 million square feet of water-thirsty lawns.
Per capital water usage for the San Diego County Water Authority has dropped from 235 gallons per day per capita in 1990 to 135 gallons per day now. That is an impressive change. Furthermore, the city captures 90% of rainwater runoff for additional supply to 24 reservoirs where it is treated to drinking water standards.
Oceanside, California, near San Diego, just opened a “toilet to tap” recycling facility that creates 3 million gallons per day or 20% of the city needs. Similarly, San Diego is working on a project for 40% of city water needs by recycling “toilet to tap.” San Diego is also home to North America’s largest desalination plant.
The metropolis of Phoenix took the number of single-family homes with lush landscaping from 80% in the 1970s down to 10% in 2022 as desert heat-tolerant plants replaced water-guzzling grass.
Los Angeles is beating the drought challenge with heavy investments in water storage, rainwater capture and reclamation with a goal of self-sufficiency of 70% of city water needs from local sources by 2035. LA mayor Eric Garcetti claims: “We’re going to have plenty of water.” 1 According to Felicia Marcus, former chair of the California State Water Resources Control Board, who is now a visiting fellow at Stanford University: “The LA area is going to be the epicenter of climate adaptation in urban water in the world. ”2
Work is already underway in LA with massive upgrades to wastewater treatment plants for potable water, spending $4.3B for the city’s Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant. LA will source 35% of the city’s water from recycling versus 2% today. Additionally, some of the world’s largest groundwater treatment facilities are under construction in the San Fernando Valley.
LA is currently expanding catch basins and inlets that recharge aquifers, and it is planning to double rainwater capture capacity over the next 15 years. That’s water that previously flowed directly into the ocean.
Conservation measures for LA started in the 1970s. Today, LA uses less water per capita than it did 50 years ago despite a population increase of one million. Water usage per capita has declined by more than 40%.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California has a record 3.2 million acre feet of water in reservoirs, thanks to the foresight to overbuild storage reservoirs combined with conservation measures, all the while working against the impact of the worst drought in over 1,000 years.
The state of California is moving to small-scale recycling. For example, in San Francisco, every commercial building over 100,000 sq. ft. has to use on-site recycling systems. Additionally, home water recycling units are coming soon, prompting some water aficionados to speculate that water utilities could end up with stranded assets or extra capacity.
Optimism about future stable growth in America’s West is directly tied to adapting to the rigors of a megadrought: “We know it’s a desert and we plan accordingly,’ said Arizona’s Kathryn Sorenson (Kyl Center for Water Policy). ‘Phoenix can survive dead pool’ — the term for a nearly empty Lake Mead — for generations. We have groundwater; we have done a good job of conservation and diversifying our portfolios. Desert cities are the oldest cities, and we will withstand the test of time.” 3
Eckhouse and Bliss, “Los Angeles Is Building a Future Where Water Won’t Run Out”, Bloomberg, January 31, 2022.
A friend, a young journalist in Gaza, Mohammed Rafik Mhawesh, told me that food prices in the besieged Strip have skyrocketed in recent weeks and that many already impoverished families are struggling to put food on the table.
“Food prices are dramatically surging,” he said, “particularly since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war.” Essential food prices, like wheat and meat, have nearly doubled. The price of a chicken, for example, which was only accessible to a small segment of Gaza’s population, has increased from 20 shekels (approx. $6) to 45 (approx. $14).
These price hikes may seem manageable in some parts of the world but in an already impoverished place, which has been under a hermetic Israeli military siege for 15 years, a humanitarian crisis of great proportions is certainly forthcoming.
In fact, this was also the warning of the international charity group Oxfam, which on April 11 reported that food prices throughout Palestine jumped by 25% but, more alarmingly, wheat flour reserves in the Occupied Territories could be “exhausted within three weeks”.
The impact of the Russia-Ukraine war has been felt in every part of the world, some places more than others. African and Middle Eastern countries, which have been battling pre-existing problems of poverty, hunger and unemployment, are most affected. However, Palestine is a whole different story. It is an occupied country that is almost entirely reliant on the action of an occupying power, Israel, which refuses to adhere to international and humanitarian laws.
For Palestinians the issue is complex, yet almost every aspect of it is somehow linked to Israel.
Gaza has been under an Israeli economic blockade for many years, and food that Israel allows to the Strip is rationed and manipulated by Israel as an act of collective punishment. In its report on Israeli apartheid published last February, Amnesty International detailed Israeli restrictions on Palestinian food and gas supplies. According to the rights group, Israel uses “mathematical formulas to determine how much food to allow into Gaza”, limiting supplies to what Tel Aviv deems “essential for the survival of the civilian population”.
Aside from many infrastructure issues resulting from the siege – lack of clean water, electricity, farming equipment, etc. – Gaza has also lost much of its arable land to the Israeli military zone established across border areas throughout the Strip.
The West Bank is not much better off. Most Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are feeling the growing burden – the Israeli occupation, compounded with the devastating impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and structural weaknesses within the Palestinian Authority, rife with corruption and mismanagement.
The PA imports 95% of its wheat, Oxfam says, and owns no storage facilities whatsoever. All of such imports are transported via Israel, which controls all of Palestine’s access to the outside world. Since Israel itself imports nearly half of its grains and cereals from Ukraine, Palestinians are, therefore, hostage to this very mechanism.
Israel, however, has been amassing food and is largely energy independent, while Palestinians are struggling at all levels. While the PA should shoulder part of the blame for investing in its ‘security’ apparatus at the expense of food security, Israel holds most of the keys to Palestinian survival.
With hundreds of Israeli military checkpoints dotting the occupied West Bank, cutting off communities from one another and farmers from agricultural land, sustainable agriculture in Palestine is nearly impossible.
Two major issues complicate an already difficult picture: one, the hundreds of kilometers long so-called ‘Separation Wall’, which actually does not ‘separate’ between Israelis and Palestinians but, instead, unlawfully deprives Palestinians from large tracts of their land, mostly farming areas; and two, the outright robbery of Palestinian water from the West Bank’s acquifers. While many Palestinian communities struggle to find drinking water in the summer, Israel never experiences any water shortage throughout the year.
So-called Area C, which constitutes nearly 60% of the total size of the West Bank, is under complete Israeli military control. Though sparsely populated in comparison, it contains most of the region’s agricultural land, especially areas located in the very fertile Jordan Valley. Though Israel has postponed, under international pressure, its official annexation of Area C, the area is practically annexed, and Palestinians are slowly being driven out and replaced by a growing population of illegal Israeli Jewish settlers.
The rapidly rising food prices are hurting the very farmers and herders who are responsible for filling the massive gaps caused by the global food insecurity as a result of war. According to Oxfam, the cost of animal feed is up by 60% in the West Bank, which adds to the “existing burden” faced by herders, including “worsening violent attacks by Israeli settlers” and “forced displacement”, as in ethnic cleansing resulting from Israeli annexation policies.
Though it may bring partial relief, even a halt to the Russia-Ukraine war will not end Palestine’s food insecurity, as this issue is instigated and prolonged by specific Israeli policies. In the case of Gaza, the crisis is, in fact, fully manufactured by Israel with specific political designs in mind. The infamous comments by former Israeli government advisor, Dov Weisglass in 2006, explaining Israel’s motives behind the siege on Gaza, remain the guiding principle of Israel’s attitude towards the Strip. “The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet, but not to make them die of hunger,” he said.
Palestine needs immediate attention to stave off a major food crisis. Gaza’s pre-existing extreme poverty and high unemployment leaves it with no margins whatsoever to accommodate any more calamities. However, anything done now can only be a short-term fix. A serious conversation involving Palestinians, Arab countries, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and other parties must take place to discuss and resolve Palestine’s food insecurity. For Palestinians, this is the real existential threat.
Mexico is heading into the worst months of its dry season. Fifteen of 32 states are experiencing extremely high stress on water resources, as use surpasses the amount available.
Water rights activists use the term “Day Zero” for the date when a region will lack sufficient water to meet basic needs. Much of Mexico is close to this point, with Monterrey and Nuevo Leon only having two months of water reserves, and Mexico City two years. For comparison’s sake, England has been described as being in the “jaws of death” because its Day Zero is 25 years away.
Activists with the Indigenous Caravan for Water and Life argue that it is multinational corporations, often with governmental support, that are responsible for causing climate change, environmental damage and water shortages — rather than the regular dry season.
“It’s not a drought, it’s looting” has been one of the main chants of the month-long caravan which kicked off in Puebla on March 22, and will run until April 24.
The caravan, one of the biggest demonstrations in recent years of Indigenous people’s defense of the environment, will cover nine states and visit Indigenous communities across Mexico each day for 34 days. These communities are standing up for their environmental rights and autonomy. Most are confronting megaprojects, where manufacturing, mining, extractive and commercial companies — often from the U.S. or Europe – have built massive amounts of infrastructure, such as hydroelectric plants and gas pipelines, to plunder the communities of their water and energy resources.
In Puebla state alone, hundreds of corporations have licenses to build or maintain such infrastructure, which many local residents refer to as “death projects” because they threaten the existence of nearby communities. The hydroelectric plants that are built to provide mines with energy deprive nearby farmers of water. There are fracking zones and gas pipelines, and most supportive infrastructure is also privately owned, with corporate interests at heart and no community consultation. Areas with the highest concentration of such projects, such as Serdán and northern Puebla state, also have the highest levels of organized crime.
Mexico has the highest amount of carbon emissions from electricity of any country in Latin America. In Cuautlancingo, Puebla, for example, where Volkswagen and the industrial park, Finsa, is located, at least 80 percent of electricity use is industrial. Companies like Volkswagen, Ternium, Heineken and Dr. Pepper are also among the main users of water in Puebla state.
Indigenous people are participating in a month-long caravan, traveling around the country and marching and meeting in multiple towns and cities a day, in order to denounce environmental destruction by transnationals.Tamara PearsonRepresentative of the National Indigenous Council, Marichuy.Tamara PearsonA meeting of local communities and the caravan in Ahuacatlán on March 26.Tamara Pearson
These mega projects disproportionately affect Indigenous people, said María de Jesús Patricio, widely known as Marichuy, who is a spokesperson for the National Indigenous Council (CNI) and the first female Indigenous presidential hopeful in the country.
From the way Indigenous people farm, to the deterioration of their lands, to the stealing and contamination of their water, the mega projects affect “what they eat, and therefore their health. They are modifying the environment, polluting the … rivers, and modifying farming cycles. And they cause internal divisions in the communities, by winning over some members with donations and telling them that the mega projects will bring employment,” Marichuy told Truthout from a bus during the caravan.
Mega projects also often involve displacing entire Indigenous communities, and the loss of important natural, cultural or religious sites. Across Mexico, some 4,200 dam construction projects have forced 185,000 people, mostly poor or original peoples, to leave their homes.
The violence against the land is reflected in the violence against people defending it. Last year, 25 such activists were murdered, with 238 total violent attacks recorded — making it the most violent year since 2014, when the Mexican Center for Environmental Rights (CEMDA) began keeping a tally.
Uniting Isolated Struggles
The caravan around Mexico is showing people that “our problems are similar … communities are seeking ways to walk together and denounce all the different types of plundering,” Marichuy said.
For the launch, the caravan held a press conference and marched outside Bonafont, a water bottling plant that is owned by Danone. Local Nahua peoples had taken over the plant last year, but were evicted by the military in February.
The bottling plant is now guarded by security forces in full battle gear, with a wall of 20-liter water bottles and two steel fences to prevent Indigenous locals from returning. The group’s march past the plant was brief. Otomis, who had joined the caravan from Mexico City, shouted, “Water is not for sale. No more armed forces in our towns.”
The next day, the caravan traveled to San Miguel Xoxtla, a nearby region that European steel company Ternium is turning to dust.
“The small farmers in the area denounced the pollution of air, land and water by the company. Its toxic waste and ashes are spewed out over the land. The wind hits you in the face and it smells very bad. The company consumes millions of liters of water — we don’t know how much exactly because there’s no transparency,” Armando Gomez, an Otomi member of the caravan, told Truthout. He said they also visited other towns and struggles nearby, and described how his clothing and shoes were full of dust because the area, which was previously fertile land, is so dry now.
Ternium’s excessive use of water is leaving locals without, and the runoff from its manufacturing processes is polluting a canal and one of the three main wells in Xoxtla that supplies water to people’s homes. The canal also passes through locals’ corn, bean and zucchini farms, contaminating their crops. Residents have denounced an increase in cancer cases and deaths since Ternium (then Hylsa) began operating. Last year, for the first time during the rainy season, the nearby Prieto River was completely dry, thanks to water use by Ternium.
After a march in Puebla city to protest outside the state parliament, as well as visits to other communities in the state, such as San Isidro Huilotepec, where locals are trying to stop a gas pipeline, the caravan headed to Ahuacatlan in the Sierra Norte mountains on March 27.
There, Totonaco and Nahua people, along with other Mexicans, celebrated what they called “partial victories.” They have managed to stop a mega project which involved building a hydroelectric dam for a Walmart, Suburbia, and other shops that would have left them without water for their crops. Communities in the region have also been organizing for years to shut down open-pit gold mines owned by Canadian company, Almaden Minerals, and another which is part of the Espejeras project. The mines have destroyed thousands of hectares of forest and contaminated domestic water with cyanide used to separate gold from other minerals. Fifty towns also face water shortages due to hydroelectric dams redirecting water to the gold mines.
At the event, activists read out a statement, affirming, “In February and March, after seven years (of resistance), the courts canceled five mining concessions in Ixtacamaxtitlán, Cuetzalan, Tlatlauquitepec and Yaonáhuac.”
A few days later, while in Chilapa, Guerrero, the caravan denounced the organized criminal group, Los Ardillos, for deploying 50 vans and 20 motorcycles in the path of the Indigenous activists. Media and human rights groups were on high alert, and the caravan was on guard all night. Community police accompanied the caravan until it arrived in Mexico City to continue its journey.
Activities as part of the caravan’s visit to Ahuacatlán on March 26.Tamara PearsonThe Indigenous-occupied, former INPI building.Tamara PearsonSecurity forces guard the entrance to the plant that had been run by Indigenous people, as they march past on March 22.Tamara Pearson
There, the caravan held a public meeting in the House of the People and Indigenous Communities — a five-story building formally used by the National Institute of Indigenous Peoples (INPI), a federal agency. On October 12, 2020, Otomí people in Mexico City took over the building, and have been running it ever since. They argued that the INPI betrays Indigenous people, and that the institute is indifferent to their needs. For instance, over 100 Otomis have spent years trying to meet the bureaucratic requirements of the INPI and other government agencies in order to claim some abandoned buildings to live in. In the meantime, they had been living in the street. When the pandemic began, the INPI threw out three years of permits and requests, forcing the Otomis to start again. They say the INPI uses their symbols and art, such as the Otomi dolls, while refusing to defend their rights.
In Mexico City, mining, food, entertainment, and other companies consume 850 times more water than households on average, and are a major contributor to water shortages. On April 7, the caravan visited Xochimilco, in the south of the city, where Indigenous people used to farm using a chinampa system, which consists of built-up islands among the huge lakes and canals. For the last century, that water has been sent to Mexico City, leaving local farmers and residents without.
“The canals are drying up; natural water has been replaced with low-quality treated water; the fish we used to eat are gone. We haven’t benefited in any way from supplying the city with water, and we’ve never been consulted. As original peoples, we have to defend our land, our resources, and our self-determination,” Silvia Cabello Molina, a local autonomous council representative, told Truthout.
Xochimilco was an abundant region of lakes and flower and vegetable growing.Tamara PearsonSilvia Cabello Molina, a local autonomous council representative, speaking at a meeting in Xochimilco, as part of the caravan.Tamara Pearson
From Coca-Cola’s illegal water extraction in Apizaco, to privatized water in Puerto de Veracruz, the map of struggles that the caravan has visited and will visit is a detailed one.
The caravan “is a message that (original) peoples are bringing to other peoples and communities, suburbs, organizations. As they go, they bring the message that it is important to struggle, to organize in order to defend water, and life … and that together, it’s possible to stop all this,” Marichuy said. “If communities can’t strengthen their self-determination and autonomy, they leave a space for the mega projects to continue their destruction.”
When Governor Whitmer signed the bipartisan Building Michigan Together Plan, she chose to allow a $50 million subsidy to Michigan Potash Company to remain in the bill. MCWC and other concerned groups and citizens learned about this gift to a poorly conceived start-up project only days before the bill came out of the legislature for signature. We have been investigating and opposing this unnecessary and potentially destructive scheme for the last 6 years. Clearly neither the legislature nor the Governor took the time to investigate this venture before slipping it into the otherwise decent infrastructure bill.
“The water is back,” one family member would announce in a mix of excitement and panic, often very late at night. The moment such an announcement was made, my whole family would start running in all directions to fill every tank, container or bottle that could possibly be filled. Quite often, the water would last for a few minutes, leaving us with a collective sense of defeat, worrying about the very possibility of surviving.
This was our life under Israeli military occupation in Gaza. The tactic of holding Palestinians hostage to Israel’s water charity was so widespread during the First Palestinian Intifada, or upirising, to the extent that denying water supplies to targeted refugee camps, villages, towns or whole regions was the first measure taken to subdue the rebellious population. This was often followed by military raids, mass arrests and deadly violence; but it almost always began with cutting Palestinians off from their water supplies.
Israel’s water war on the Palestinians has changed since those early days, especially as the Climate Change crisis has accelerated Israel’s need to prepare for grim future possibilities. Of course, this largely happens at the expense of the occupied Palestinians. In the West Bank, the Israeli government continues to usurp Palestinian water resources from the region’s main aquifers – the Mountain Aquifer and the Coastal Aquifer. Frustratingly, Israel’s main water company, Mekorot, sells stolen Palestinian water to Palestinian villages and towns, especially in the northern West Bank region, at exhorbitant prices.
Aside from the ongoing profiteering from water theft, Israel continues to use water as a form of collective punishment in the West Bank, while quite often denying Palestinians, especially in Area C, the right to dig new wells to circumvent Israel’s water monopoly.
According to Amnesty International, Palestinians in the occupied West Bank consume, on average, 73 liters of water a day, per person. Compare this to an Israeli citizen, who consumes approximately 240 liters of water a day, and, even worse, to an illegal Israeli Jewish settler, who consumes over 300 liters per day. The Palestinian share of water is not only far below the average consumed by Israelis, but is even below the recommended daily minimum of 100 liters per capita as designated by the World Health Organization (WHO).
As difficult as the situation for West Bank Palestinians is, in Gaza the humanitarian catastrophe is already in effect. On the occasion of the World Water Day on March 22, Gaza’s Water and Environmental Quality Authority warned of a ‘massive crisis’ should Gaza’s water supplies continue to deplete at the current dangerous rate. The Authority’s spokesman, Mazen al-Banna, told reporters that 98 percent of Gaza’s water supplies are not fit for human consumption.
The consequences of this terrifying statistic are well known to Palestinians and, in fact, to the international community as well. Last October, Muhammed Shehada of the Euro-Med Monitor, told the 48th UN Human Rights Council session that about one-quarter of all diseases in Gaza are caused by water pollution, and that an estimated twelve percent of deaths among Gaza’s children are “linked to intestinal infections related to contaminated water.”
But how did Gaza get to this point?
On May 25, four days after the end of the latest Israeli war on Gaza, the charity Oxfam announced that 400,000 people in besieged Gaza have had no access to regular water supplies. The reason is that Israeli military campaigns always begin with the targeting of Palestinian electric grids, water services and other vital public facilities. According to Oxfam, “11 days of bombardment … severely impacted the three main desalination plants in Gaza city.”
It is important to keep in mind that the water crisis in Gaza has been ongoing for years, and every aspect of this protracted crisis is linked to Israel. With damaged or ailing infrastructure, much of Gaza’s water contains dangerously high salinity levels, or is extremely polluted by sewage and other reasons.
Even before Israel redeployed its forces out of Gaza in 2005 to impose a siege on the Strip’s population from land, sea and air, Gaza had a water crisis. Gaza’s coastal aquifer was entirely controlled by the Israeli military administration, which diverted quality water to the few thousand Jewish settlers, while occasionally allocating high saline water to the then 1.5 million Palestinian people, granted that Palestinians did not protest or resist the Israeli occupation in any way.
Nearly 17 years later, Gaza’s population has grown to 2.1 millions, and Gaza’s already struggling aquifer is in a far worse shape. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) reported that water from Gaza’s aquifer is depleting due to “over-extraction (because) people have no other choice”.
“Worse, pollution and an influx of seawater mean that only four percent of the aquifer water is fit to drink. The rest must be purified and desalinated to make it drinkable,” UNICEF added. In other words, Gaza’s problem is not the lack of access to existing freshwater reserves as the latter simply do not exist or are rapidly depleting, but the lack of technology and fuel that would give Palestinians in Gaza the ability to make their water nominally drinkable. Even that is not a long term solution.
Israel is doing its utmost to destroy any Palestinian chances at recovery from this ongoing crisis. More, it seems that Tel Aviv is only invested in making the situation worse to jeopardize Palestinian chances of survival. For example, last year, Palestinians accused Israel of deliberately flooding thousands of Palestinian dunums in Gaza when it vented its southern dams, which Israel uses to collect rain water. The almost yearly ritual by Israel continues to devastate Gaza’s ever shrinking farming areas, the backbone of Palestinian survival under Israel’s hermetic siege.
The international community often pays attention to Gaza during times of Israeli wars; and even then, the attention is mostly negative, where Palestinians are usually accused of provoking Israel’s supposed defensive wars. The truth is that even when Israel’s military campaigns end, Tel Aviv continues to wage war on the Strip’s inhabitants.
Though militarily powerful, Israel claims that it is facing an ‘existential threat’ in the Middle East. In actuality, it is the Palestinian existence that is in real jeopardy. When almost all of Gaza’s water is not fit for human consumption because of a deliberate Israeli strategy, one can understand why Palestinians continue to fight back as if their lives are dependent on it; because they are.
Total Congressional funding for all aspects of the Navy’s Red Hill water contamination debacle is now over $1.1 billion according to Hawai’i Congressional representative Ed Case and billions more are needed to complete clean-up, defueling and closing of the massive leaking Red Hill jet fuel storage facility.
In a news release on March 9, 2022, Rep. Case said, “These funds ($700 million) are in addition to the $403 million in emergency funding we obtained in another bill we passed just weeks ago, bringing Congress’ total funding for all aspects of Red Hill in the current fiscal year alone to over $1.1 billion. But billions more will be required to complete all aspects of the cleanup, stabilization, defueling and closing of Red Hill and the relocation of its fuel and build fuel storage capacity elsewhere.”
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