Like many other big deals in Sacramento in recent years, this one, too, was composed in large part of black boxes, deferrals, fudges and borrowing — $11.1 billion in general obligation bonds in this case– for large water projects, some as yet unspecified, plus a fair amount of pork having little to do with water.

From 30,000 feet, the agreement, in the form of five bills, touches nearly all the major issues in California’s complex water picture: flood control, protecting the fragile Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta ecosystem, securing more water for the big San Joaquin Valley growers, many of them suffering the effects of a severe drought, reducing water consumption, monitoring and replenishing the state’s overdrawn ground water and addressing the increasingly severe effects of global warming.

We don’t yet know whether the deal will lead to the construction of a peripheral canal to take Sacramento River water around the ecologically overstressed Delta, for delivery to those growers and to Southern California cities. Nor do we know how much of the new storage capacity will be the costly surface dams the growers love and how much will go into the Valley’s depleted underground aquifers.

What we do know is that the deal did little to guarantee effective ground water monitoring by the state or to require more efficient use of water by agriculture, which still consumes roughly 80 percent of the state’s water. It aims to reduce urban water use by 20 percent but requires no similar effort by growers. And it’s still the taxpayers who’ll have to pay off the bonds – with interest a total of as much as $22 billion — not the farmers, developers and flood plain property owners who will be the major beneficiaries.

Water is a fixed – and probably declining – resource. The only way it can be stretched is by conservation, recycling of waste water and by more efficient use. This deal takes the first baby steps in that direction, but only by promising more goodies to agriculture and by taking most of the money to pay for it not from the beneficiaries but from schools, universities, the old and the sick, and from the taxpayers, present and future. Next November, when they get to vote on the bonds, they’ll have the last word on that.

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Source: California Progress Report

The grants, in conjunction with $120 million in low-interest loans provided by the state, will pay for more than 50 wastewater- and drinking-water system improvements statewide, including projects in and around Kansas City.

Kansas City will receive $23.9 million — including $3 million in grants — for eight projects, according to the state Department of Natural Resources. Blue Springs, which already won approval for about $33 million in low-interest loans for a wastewater-treatment expansion project, will receive $3 million.

Other area cities receiving grants or loans include Harrisonville, $7.3 million; Liberty, $1.9 million; Parkville, $612,048; Platte City, $1.2 million; and Weston, $3.6 million.

Source: KansasCity.com

Starting last week, the soft gurgling of the estimated 561 million bottles of water sold every year in Connecticut was supposed to translate into the sweet clink of millions upon millions of nickels rolling into the threadbare pockets of state government.

Oct. 1 was the trigger date for expanding Connecticut’s long-standing system of requiring 5-cent deposits on beer and soda bottles and cans to include all those plastic water bottles.

Theoretically, the bottle-and-can deposit system ensures beverage containers are recycled, thus keeping them out of landfills and incinerators and off the streets, because consumers return them all to supermarkets or redemption centers to get all their deposits back. But lots of people don’t bother to redeem their containers and just throw them away.

A day after the new deposits hit, prices for a 24-pack of Poland Spring ranged from $3.99 at the Wethersfield Price Rite, to $5.49 at the Big Y in Ellington, to $6.99 at the Rocky Hill Stop & Shop. Sorkin said those pricing decisions are made by individual stores for reasons that could include a local sale, efforts to use up water that was delivered before wholesale prices rose, and possibly an effort to temporarily ease sticker shock for consumers.

The battle over who gets to keep the unclaimed deposits has been raging for years. Beverage distributors hired high-powered lobbyists like Pat Sullivan and Jay Malcynsky to convince lawmakers to let the industry keep the estimated $24 million in annual unclaimed deposits. They insisted they needed the money to cover beer and soda container handling and recycling costs, and their arguments and influence worked for a long time.

The turning point came late in 2008, when the recession’s brutal impact on state revenues started to become painfully clear. Lawmakers desperate for money to cover gaping holes in the budget saw those unclaimed deposits as “low-hanging fruit,” a revenue source that was a lot less painful than things like tax increases. So the General Assembly agreed to rip the unclaimed deposits away from distributors and stick them in the state’s treasury.

Environmentalists had warned for years that the mountains of plastic water bottles being thrown away were choking our landfills and polluting our air through incineration, littering our streets, and increasing our dependence on foreign oil. (The plastics used in most water bottles are petroleum-based.)

Susan Collins, executive director of the California-based Container Recycling Institute, says putting deposits on bottles and cans is “by far the way that has been most effective” in getting containers out of the waste stream and into recycling.

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Source: Fairfield Weekly

Water scarcity resulting from climate change is the number one issue the world will have to grapple with in the future, according to chief climate scientist and Nobel Peace Prize-winner Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri.

On the one hand, we will have more water around us with sea level rising. Drought caused by climate change, on the other hand, will leave billions of people without clean water.

Speaking yesterday at the 2009 Nobel Conference at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, MN, Pachauri said: “At one level the world’s water is like the world’s wealth. Globally, there is more than enough to go round. The problem is that some countries get a lot more than others.”

Pachauri went on to describe the global imbalances in short detail. “With 31 percent of global freshwater resources, Latin America has 12 times more water per person than South Asia. Some places, such as Brazil and Canada, get far more water than they can use; others, such as countries in the Middle East, get much less than they need.”

Countries around the world share water resources. As these resources disappear, huge peace and security problems could arise. Pachauri said: “Over 260 river basins are shared by two or more countries. As the resource is becoming scarce, tensions among different users may intensify, both at the national and international level. In the absence of strong institutions and agreements, changes within a basin can lead to trans-boundary tensions.”

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Source: ecoworldly.com

After an extended grassroots campaign, Nestlé is finally removing 23 bottled water test wells from a wildlife management area in Shapleigh and Newfield, ME.

Shelly Gobielle and her neighbors first discovered the wells a year and a half ago, three years after Nestlé’s under-the-radar installation. Upon realizing that Shapleigh was likely one of the next site for Nestlé’s water extraction for its Poland Spring brand bottled water, residents approached town officials with their concerns about what bottling would do to the local ecosystem. Their words fell on deaf ears, as Nestlé had already lobbied for and secured the support of the Shapleigh town officials.

The only option was for residents to take matters into their own hands, forming the group Protect Our Water and Wildlife Resources (POWWR). Members hit the streets and went door to door educating the public and signing enough petitions to call a town meeting, held four months ago.

Residents in both Shapleigh and the neighboring town of Newfield passed ordinances that asserted the right of townspeople to control their own water and to prohibit commercial water extraction, a reality that can at last be assured.

This is a watershed moment, so to speak, in the effort to restore local control over water. Earlier this month another community group, the Michigan Citizens for Water Conservation, secured a major court victory against Nestlé after nine years of legal battles and Nestlé appeals. The settlement requires Nestlé to dramatically reduce pumping during summer months at a critical well site in Northern Michigan, and prohibits the corporation from increasing pumping levels in the future.

Source: AlterNet Mobile

The knives came during California’s budget battle — literally. But there’s still at least one big tussle in the Golden State left this year: solving the state’s water crisis.

As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, Gov. Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders are planning a big push to address water shortages in the state, which has suffered a three-year drought. Everything from new reservoirs to urban conservation efforts is being considered.

But a big lever, according to a new study out of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute, is getting farmers to use H2O more efficiently.

The finding is no great surprise. The Institute’s co-founder Dr. Peter Gleick has long advocated a “soft path” for water (freeing up new supply by curbing waste). And he’s been a critic of what he calls misinformation about the plight of Central Valley farmers. He says that they’re getting more water than they claim, and that the causes for astronomical unemployment rates in some farm communities owes more to the recession and poverty than the drought.

What’s interesting about the analysis is just how much the authors think a combination of irrigation technologies and management practices can save: 5.6 million acre-feet in an average year. That’s 17% of all water used by California farmers, and more than twice the total the state’s millions of city-dwellers could save if they wised up about their water use. It’s also a whole lot more than the enormous desalination plant in Carlsbad, Calif. will produce when it comes online.

The report reiterates what demand-siders in both the water and energy debates have been saying for a long time: Spending money on capital-intensive projects (like desalination plants and huge solar arrays) makes little sense when there are cheaper and bigger opportunities in improving efficiency.

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Source: Wall Street Journal

BUNDANOON, AUSTRALIA — When the residents of Bundanoon voted last week to stop selling bottled water in town, they never expected to be thrust into the global spotlight.

With a nearly unanimous show of hands at a community meeting on July 8, locals in this tourist town touched off a worldwide debate about the social and environmental effects of bottled water that has put the beverage industry on the defensive.

State and local officials across the United States have been phasing out the use of bottled water at government workplaces in recent years, citing a range of concerns including the energy used to make and transport the bottles and an erosion of public trust in municipal water supplies. But as far as campaigners are aware, Bundanoon is the first town in the world to stop all sales of bottled water.

Set in the cool highlands southwest of Sydney, Bundanoon is a sleepy village of tidy gardens and quaint cottages surrounded by the weekend estates of wealthy urbanites. It is the sort of place where strangers strike up conversations on park benches along the picturesque main street and townsfolk leave fresh flowers on the local war memorial.

According to Huw Kingston, the owner of Ye Olde Bicycle Shoppe and a leader of the “Bundy on Tap” campaign, the ban did not begin as an environmental crusade. It started when a Sydney-based bottling company sought permission to extract millions of liters from the local aquifer.

At first, residents were upset at the prospect of tanker trucks rumbling through their quiet streets. But as opposition grew, Mr. Kingston said many began to question the “bizarre” notion of trucking water some 160 kilometers, or 100 miles, north to a plant in Sydney, only to transport it somewhere else — possibly even back to Bundanoon — for sale.

“We became aware, as a community, of what the bottled water industry was all about,” said Mr. Kingston. “So the idea was floated that if we don’t want an extraction plant in our town, maybe we shouldn’t be selling the end product at all.”

A dozen or so activists got together and called a community meeting. Of the 356 locals who turned out to vote by a show of hands, only one objected.

The ban is entirely voluntary. But with the support of the public, the town’s six food retailers have agreed to pull bottled water from their shelves starting in September. They plan to recoup their losses by selling inexpensive, reusable bottles that can be filled at drinking fountains and filtered water dispensers to be placed around town.

Some of the town’s 2,500 residents say they support the plan because they worry about the effects of chemicals in plastic bottles; some view it as a positive demonstration against the water plant. Others, however, are skeptical that the cash-strapped local council will be able to maintain the new drinking fountains. And others worry about the health implications of leaving only sweetened alternatives on refrigerator shelves.

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Source: New York Times

DALLAS — A reputation as a wasteful “water hog” is complicating Dallas’s efforts to siphon water from nearby communities.

Local officials, who say they need to nearly double their water supply in coming decades to keep up with a fast-growing population, want to build new reservoirs and buy water from nearby Oklahoma. But these efforts are entangled in federal lawsuits as Dallas’s neighbors see the city’s love for emerald-green lawns and lush golf courses as rampant waste.

“It’s not that they need the water to survive,” said Michael Banks, an East Texas dentist who lives near a river Dallas wants to dam. “What they want is to destroy our wildlife so they’ll have enough water for their grass.”

City officials recognize they have an image problem. “We’ve been called water hogs,” said Ramon Miguez, Dallas assistant city manager. But he said the city has made significant efforts to conserve water in recent years, including educating residents not to drench their lawns.

Spats between communities that sip and those that gulp are becoming increasingly common in the South and the West. Sprawling cities packed with houses featuring big lawns and many bathrooms typically don’t use water very efficiently, experts and environmentalists say.

So when city officials scout for more water beyond their boundaries, they don’t get much sympathy from their neighbors.

“It’s an environmental equity issue,” said David Feldman, chairman of the Department of Planning, Policy and Design at University of California, Irvine. “Before they give up their water, they want to make sure that the city isn’t being wasteful.”

In recent years, cities such as Los Angeles and Las Vegas have been forced to conserve water aggressively to meet their needs and persuade other communities to let them tap their supplies.

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Source: The Wall Street Journal

1. Only order water in restaurants if you really want it. According to the San Diego Water Department, every glass of water served at a restaurant requires another two glasses to wash and rinse it. “Since nearly 70 million meals are served each day in US restaurants, we’d save more than 26 million gallons of water if only one person in four declined the complimentary glassful.”

2. Color your toilet water. Add a few drops of food coloring into your toilet tank. If it seeps into the toilet before you’ve flushed, you have a leak. Fixing the leak can save countless gallons per month.

3. Put a plastic bottle in your toilet tank. First, add about an inch of sand to the bottle, then fill it with water and screw on the cap. Put the bottle into your tank (away from any important plumbing items): The amount of space taken up by the bottle equals the amount of water saved in each flush.

4. Water your lawn with more water…but less often. Sprinkling your lawn too lightly can actually prevent the water from getting deep enough into the soil, which causes the grass to develop shallower roots and the grass becomes less resistant to a drought. Instead, deep soak your grass and use the San Diego Water Department’s landscape watering calculator to know how often for your lawn: http://apps.sandiego.gov/landcalc/start.do.

5. Cover your pool. An averaged-sized pool loses 1,000 gallons of water per month. You can reduce it by 90% by using a pool cover.

6. Add a patio. A nice patio will not only add value to your property, but it also takes the place of grass or other plants that need to be watered.

7. Water your lawn on non-windy days. The wind can blow the water off your grass or plants. What a waste!

8. Don’t use your toilet or sink as a garbage can. Flushing tissues or cigarettes down your toilet wastes a flush every time. And scraping your dishes into your garbage disposal rather than a trash can (or compost bin!) causes extra running water.

9. Water plants in creative ways. Use leftover water to water your plants: melted ice from a cup, water from cooking noodles or vegetables, or the water from your hot water faucet while waiting for it to warm up.

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Source: Examiner.com

For more ways to save water at home, view Nuprana’s Water Conservation Products.

DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.

Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.

Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.

“I was so willing to go to jail for catching water on my roof and watering my garden,” said Tom Bartels, a video producer here in southwestern Colorado, who has been illegally watering his vegetables and fruit trees from tanks attached to his gutters. “But now I’m not a criminal.”

Who owns the sky, anyway? In most of the country, that is a question for philosophy class or bad poetry. In the West, lawyers parse it with straight faces and serious intent. The result, especially stark here in the Four Corners area of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, is a crazy quilt of rules and regulations — and an entire subculture of people like Mr. Bartels who have been using the rain nature provided but laws forbade.

The two Colorado laws allow perhaps a quarter-million residents with private wells to begin rainwater harvesting, as well as the setting up of a pilot program for larger scale rain-catching.

Just 75 miles west of here, in Utah, collecting rainwater from the roof is still illegal unless the roof owner also owns water rights on the ground; the same rigid rules, with a few local exceptions, also apply in Washington State. Meanwhile, 20 miles south of here, in New Mexico, rainwater catchment, as the collecting is called, is mandatory for new dwellings in some places like Santa Fe.

And in Arizona, cities like Tucson are pioneering the practices of big-city rain capture. “All you need for a water harvesting system is rain, and a place to put it,” Tucson Water says on its Web site.

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Source: The New York Times