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« Back to Is the Oasis Vanishing? main page    Transcript for: Is the Oasis Vanishing?At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work.Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. (opening animation) BW/OC : Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Seventy percent of our planet is covered with water. But most of it is ocean water. Less than one tenth of one percent of the earth’s water is drinkable. In desert areas, scarce water sources are disappearing. Are we headed for a water crisis? Or is there a technological fix available? BW/ VO: To find out, 'Think Tank' is joined by Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security in Oakland, California, and author of The World’s Water, a biennial report on freshwater resources; and Peter Rogers, professor of city and regional planning and environmental engineering at Harvard University and author of America’s Waters. The topic before the House: Is the Oasis Vanishing? This week on Think Tank. (Opening animation) Ben Wattenberg: Water is vital to human existence. Yet in theory it costs almost nothing to produce. Some economists say that’s part of the problem. These days cool water is a hot commodity, and the politics of water is becoming increasingly complicated. In the Western U.S., the demand for water is shifting from growing crops in rural areas to providing water for bathtubs, lawns and swimming pools in urban and suburban areas. State and federal governments are cutting back water subsidies for farmers. In the Middle East, water exacerbates tensions over politics and oil. In other parts of the less developed world it’s clean water that’s the problem. International aid groups estimate that 1.3 million children die each year from contaminated drinking water. What’s the answer to the world’s water problem? If indeed there is one. More privatization? More stringent regulation? Conservation? Will new technologies come through in the clutch.? Will there be enough clean water for a thirsty world? Ben Wattenberg:: Peter and Peter, welcome to 'Think Tank.' Congratulations. This is the first show we’ve done in 10 years comprised entirely of Peters, and only of Peters, so we’re setting a record. Let me begin by raising this. When I read through the apocalyptic sort of environmental literature and you read we’re running out of oil, we’re running out of forest, we’re running out of species, we’re running out of everything, I must say-because I know a little bit about it-- I tend to dismiss that. It doesn’t add up. But when I read about the water problem, and this is probably a function of my ignorance, I’m sort of stymied because I just don’t understand what the problem is. I mean you get into a language--water table, brackish water, portable water, aquifers, watersheds--that are just alien to my experience. So why don’t we start with you, Peter Glick and then Peter Rogers come in. Let’s just get the one or two paragraph short course on what that’s all about. Peter Glick: Water is a huge issue. The hydrologic cycle is very simple. Water evaporates from the oceans and from surfaces of land, forms clouds. Eventually it rains somewhere, precipitates out. That rain collects and it either goes into our ground water, aquifers, which we use for pumping or runs off in our rivers back into the oceans. And it’s a cycle. And it goes on and on. But the same amount of water on the earth today is the same amount that there was a million years ago. The problem is the way humans want to use water. We take water out of this natural system for all of the different things we use water for. And as populations grow, demands for water in many places are growing and water quality is going down because we’re contaminating water. And all of those things are contributing in different forms to what is really turning into a global crisis over fresh water - availability and quality of fresh water. Peter Rogers: The major issues are not technical. They’re not economic. They’re political, I think. The issue of who has rights and access to water colors completely what happens so we have around the world maybe between fifty and eighty-five percent of the water is used for irrigated agriculture. And farmers the world over have sort of gotten rights or use rights of this water. And of course that was fine when the population was three billion or four billion. Now it’s six billion and growing. And so there’s more demands being placed on the system. And all of a sudden the property rights and the conflicts between users are coming to the fore and cannot be resolved by technology. Ben Wattenberg: You’ve already said the magic word twice--once each--which is population. I write about demographics and population. You know,the fertility rates are coming in so low now. I mean, even in the third world, so wouldn’t that tend to make whatever problems we’re gonna talk about today somewhat less? Peter Glick: A world with eight billion people will have somewhat fewer problems than a world with ten or twelve. What you say is good news. But we’re in a world of six point two billion people today and one point one billion people don’t have access to clean drinking water, something you and I take completely for granted. Two point four billion people, forty percent of the world’s population, don’t have access to sanitation services. And so millions of people are dying every year from preventable water related diseases that we know how to cure, we know how to prevent. Ben Wattenberg: How do you prevent them? Peter Glick: Well, there’s no one answer to that. In the U.S. we’ve spent billions of dollars building a wonderful infrastructure of dams and aqueducts and water treatment plants and wastewater plants. That’s a very expensive way to solve this problem. I mean we couldn’t afford to do that exactly in the rest of the world. But we can drill wells. We can have point of use systems that clean up water. We can have small community scale water systems. One of the things we’re learning is that there’re a lot of solutions in the developing world where this is really a problem. Ben Wattenberg: Now, the other thing is, because you just touched on it, it’s not that we’re running out of water. It’s that we’re running out of inexpensive water because there are many solutions including desalination and very specifically something that interests me is nuclear desalination of water, which it may be more expensive now. It may stay more expensive forever. But I mean if you’re willing to pay for it, the water’s there. Peter Rogers: Well, that’s right. But how much can you put forward to pay. For instance I think we need to make a distinction between the issues that Peter was just talking about water and sanitation for populations. We have the technology right now to produce water that’s a reasonable cost for those uses. Fifty cents a cubic meter or something like that. But we cannot afford to produce water for irrigation with that. Peter Glick: We desalinate water now extensively around the world where water is really, really scarce and where energy is cheap - the Persian Gulf, Caribbean Islands where they just have no other choice. But it’s really expensive. And so before you would ever do that for most of our water uses and before you would ever do desalination for agriculture, you would do other things first that are cheaper. In particular you’d figure out how to use the water that we’re already using more effectively, more efficiently. And there are plenty of ways to do what we want to do while using less water. Ben Wattenberg: What are some of them? Peter Glick: Well in the agricultural area, for example, there are a whole series of sprinkler systems and drip irrigation systems that provide precisely the amount of water you want, where you want it, and when you want it rather than the old method of flood irrigation. That was very inefficient. A lot of that water never went to productive use. It was evaporated off. It dripped into ground water... Ben Wattenberg: When you fly over the west and you see these big circles, that’s good. Peter Glick: Those are sprinkler systems. Although there are now new, much more efficient sprinkler systems that are more precise. You measure the soil moisture so you’re not sprinkling when the soils don’t need it. There is existing technology at reasonable prices that could allow us to produce more food with the existing amount of water we’re already using or, frankly, more food with less water. And that’s much cheaper than desalination.. The disadvantage of nuc-you can desalinate with solar or fossil fuels or nuclear, any...any energy source. Because all you’re doing is stripping salt out of water. But the disadvantage of nuclear desalination is nuclear energy is more expensive than alternatives. And so you would use something else. Peter Rogers: But, you know, the question and I think Peter sort of skirted it was we have all of these technologies available for improved agricultural performance. You know there are lots of things you could do to save water. But there’s no incentive to save water. Why would you try and save water if you’re paying three dollars an acre-foot or something ridiculously low for... Ben Wattenberg: The measurement is an acre-foot? Covering an acre to one foot of depth? Peter Rogers: Yeah. But, cities in the same regions are willing to pay three hundred and fifty dollars per acre-foot for the same water. So there’s no incentive for farmers to economize because, essentially, water is a free good as far as they’re concerned. Ben: Because? We city folks subsidize it. Rogers: Pretty much, yeah. Ben Wattenberg One of the things that comes up again and again and is still I mean in motion now is the idea of dams. For a while dams were really a hot ticket. I mean everybody was building dams. This was a great way to hold water, create sack water pools, recreation, do all the nice things. And India and China particularly in more recent years have bit into some huge dam building projects that were going to save the world or save their countries. And now somehow the shine is off the rose. What happened to dams? Peter Rogers:. People thought they were good things to do and it wasn’t until we started to notice the impact on the ecosystem and the external effects of dams. The damming of the rivers, fish production dropping off, sediment being removed from the dams. Peter Glick: The Twentieth Century was a century of building big dams. And those dams brought us enormous benefits: hydropower, irrigation, recreation. But they also brought terrible costs, which as Peter suggests we’re now beginning to understand. Environmental costs, economic costs, the truth is they’re increasingly expensive and social costs, people are dislocated when we build dams. There have to be moved. So we’re entering I think a new era in which we’re thinking about using the dams we already have but we’re not gonna build many more. Ben Wattenberg: What’s the argument for privatization of water? I mean I’ve been reading up a little bit about it and my understanding had been and I mean I know many, many cities in America have private water, are fed by private water companies Peter Rogers: Well it’s always been presented as an efficiency argument that it would be more efficient, that government cannot provide the services as efficiently as the private sector. And you know there’re lots of things... Ben: Wattenberg Because they don’t have competition to... Peter Rogers: Well, the company of yours is going to be a monopoly too. So... Ben Wattenberg Well unless you establish the rules that say we can take up to four private companies and then let’s see who delivers the water cheapest. Peter Rogers: But the arguments are not that clear right now. And you know the most efficient water system in the world bar none is in Singapore. And it’s a government-run agency. I mean the governments can be very efficient. It’s much more efficient than the French-run ones and the German, the British ones. So you know it doesn’t have to be... Ben Wattenberg Singapore has a certain advantage by, in something like this, of not having a democratic government. I mean you have a government that says-wham--you’re going to do this or fifty lashes. And you know it cuts off a lot of expenses and folderol. I mean it’s got a few downsides that I would not particularly like to live with. Peter Glick: That’s true. But there are very efficient well run public water systems in the United States as well. And in fact eighty-five percent of the U.S. population gets its water from public water systems. We’re mostly a public water system country. And in fact that evolved because private water companies in the Eighteen Hundreds weren’t doing the job and municipalities took them over. Ben Wattenberg: I see. Peter Glick: The arguments for privatization are supposedly perhaps more efficiency. Cities have trouble running efficient water systems some people argue. B ut I think the evidence doesn’t support that. Ben Wattenberg: What’s the converse argument for more regulation? Peter Glick: Well in any case, public or private, you have to have government oversight. Ben Wattenberg: Right. Peter Glick: What is a public good? There’s competition in these bids for water systems. But once a water system contract is signed, it’s a monopoly contract, often a twenty-year monopoly contract. And all of the American private water companies, almost all of them, have now been bought up by foreign companies. There’re really only three big ones. Two French companies, Vivendi and Suez, and RW, which bought up American Waterworks. But you do need government oversight to monitor water quality, to protect the public interest. Peter Rogers: You know the English-the British system was the first big one to go. When Maggie Thatcher sold the whole thing lock, stock, and barrel mostly to the French, but they the system is working reasonably well. And the reason is that they have this very strong regulatory agency. And I found out just recently the operating budget of that agency, this is just in the... Ben Wattenberg: In the UK? Peter Roger: ...in the UK. To regulate the water-it’s all privatized--is a billion U.S. So you know they really go after this thing in a big way. They’re spending real resources into the regulation of the private sector and it shows. Peter Glick: The biggest private municipal water system was Atlanta. In Nineteen Ninety-nine the city of Atlanta privatized its water. They signed a deal, twenty-year contract, with a company called United Water which was bought out by the French. That contract was cancelled just a couple of weeks ago. Ben Wattenberg: Was that a monopoly deal that it was just, they’d be the sole provider? Peter Glick: Yes. There’s competition in the bidding for who gets control of this but once they signed the contract, United Water had a twenty year monopoly contract to provide water services and operate the system and so on. They don’t own the system. But a few weeks ago Atlanta and United Water went their separate ways. They cancelled the contract, because it wasn’t working out. They weren’t saving the money they were expected to save. The city wasn’t getting the services they expected to get. It was, I think, a setback, really a wakeup call for cities to watch out for the dangers of this. Ben Wattenberg : Didn’t get that fine kind of Tiffany service that you get from your favorite local government on an all sorts of services? (Rogers laughs) Peter Glick: Well, Tiffany service is not the way to describe it. Ben Wattenberg: You’re telling me. Peter Glick: They weren’t getting the basic services that they really deserve. Peter Rogers: But of course they privatized in the first place because everybody was unhappy with the public supply, that it was not working very well. It was very expensive. It was low quality. It was being in serious trouble with EPA. They were being fined massively for the water quality. So they thought this is a way out is to get somebody in to run it. Ben Wattenberg Speaking of EPA, we do have in the United States much, much cleaner water than we used to. Is that correct? Peter Glick: Our water system’s great. We have basically potable water from our taps. That’s something people in developing countries would love. Ben Wattenberg: Potable, getting back to terminology, just means drinkable. Peter Glick: You can drink it with no ill health effects. That’s great water. Ben Wattenberg: And that’s something obviously, again getting back to what we’re talking about if you could get that kind of clean tap water in the less developed countries in the world, you’d save a million peoples’ lives. Peter Glick: You would save millions of peoples’ lives every year. Peter Rogers: But you have to think about how expensive it is to treat every molecule of water the way we treat it. It may be better to have a dual system. It may be better to have a local recycling system. There’re whole ranges of technologies. Ben Wattenberg: What does that mean? A dual system? Peter Rogers: Well you could have something used for flushing toilet, you can retreat at the plant. In Namibia, in Vinhockin, the capital city in Namibia, forty percent of their water supply comes directly from their sewage treatment plants. They don’t take more than forty percent because they’re worried about the salt build up, the salts in water. But you can do those things and they’re a little bit more expensive. Some of them require some perceptual changes. People don’t like to think that they’re drinking rehabilitated wastewater. But, in fact, that’s what they do... Ben Wattenberg: Why are some developing countries, India and Bangladesh come to mind, both of which used to be net grain importers and are now net grain exporters and have sort of solved in some large measure, at least their water problems. Why do some do so well while others, Ethiopia I guess is one that would come in mind, are chronically behind the eight ball? What’s the difference? Glick: Well India and Bangladesh haven’t... Peter Glick: India and Bangladesh haven’t solved their water problems. Ben Wattenberg: Have not? Peter Glick: No. They’ve partly solved their food problems. You’re absolutely right. They’ve done tremendous things in increasing their ability to feed their very large and growing populations. But in fact some of that has come at the cost of their water system. India, in many parts of India, is over pumping their ground water. That means they’re taking ground water out faster than it’s naturally recharged. Ben Wattenberg : What is ground water? Peter Glick: Ground water is water in aquifers. It rains and it seeps into the ground. And when you dig a well... Ben Wattenberg: See there. Now we got ground water, we got aquifers... Glick: Aquifers and ground water are the same thing.. And in India, they’re pumping it out faster than it’s naturally recharged by rainfall in order to grow food. And when that happens, the ground water level drops. You have to pump it further and further, and that gets more and more expensive. And ultimately it’s unsustainable. You can’t keep doing that. And so to a large degree some of the food that the world produces and India and China produce is dependent on what we call non-renewable ground water. It’s not sustainable. And they’re going to run into trouble. Ben Wattenberg: I mean it’s renewable if you don’t use too much of it, or if you use less of it? Peter Glick: It’s renewable, it’s renewable if... Ben:Wattenberg But not at that level. Peter Glick: ...if it’s recharged at the rate you pump it if you let it come into balance. The other problem in Bangladesh is that in fact it turns out they made tremendous progress in the Sixties and Seventies drilling ground water wells for water supply. And they saved millions of lives because they stopped drinking surface water that was contaminated. And they reduced diarrheal diseases and cholera and dysentery. The problem is it turns out they have a very serious water quality problem in their ground water, arsenic in particular. And tens of millions of Bangladeshis are drinking arsenic contaminated ground water. And they now have a new water crisis that they didn’t know they had until we started testing the quality. Ben Wattenberg: Let’s move a few miles to the west. What is the situation in the Middle East? People say that the Arab Israeli thing in particular is at its root is a water fight. I mean I’m not sure that’s really true. There are a lot of roots to it. But what’s going on there? Peter Glick: Well the problems in the Middle East are complicated, of course. They’re political. Ben Wattenberg: Good, Peter. Peter Glick: They’re ideological. They’re religious. They’re over land. And they’re also over water. Water is a scarce resource in the Middle East. Every major river in the Middle East is shared by two or more nations. The Nile is shared by ten nations. Egypt’s at the end of it but there’re ten nations that share the Nile. The Jordan River is shared by Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinians in the West Bank, Israel, Jordan and even part of the watershed is in the Sinai in Egypt has it. And it’s not a very big river. Ben Wattenberg : It’s not. It’s a ditch in some places. Peter Glick: It’s not a big river and it’s over allocated. And so there’s competition and there’s conflict and there has been for thousands of years over water in the region. Ben Wattenberg: Now do I understand that even with all the turbulence that’s been going on in the Middle East the negotiations about water between the Palestinians and the Israelis are still going on? I mean they haven’t pushed that aside? Peter Glick: Yes. The good news is that despite the horrible things that are going on in the Middle East, there is competition and discussion about water. There’s a peace treaty between Israel and Jordan that has an explicit section devoted to water that says Israel will provide Jordan with some water here and Jordan will provide Israel with water here and we’ll form a joint committee to manage the disputes. And even with the current problems, that agreement and a comparable agreement with the Palestinians and the Israelis have reduced the risks of conflicts there. It’s the way to go. Peter Rogers: No, but I think you have to step back and look at the resources in the Middle East, and particularly between Israel and Palestine. You know the part of the problem with the settlement issue is to guarantee access to the water in the aquifers. So thirty percent of Israel’s water comes from the West Bank. So it’s not at all an accident that there’s a tremendous desire to keep settlements in the West Bank so you can control. The issues are very muddy to say the least. And but certainly the... Ben Wattenberg: Keep the metaphors moist. Peter Rogers: So even though these are in hundred percent Palestinian controlled areas, the Israeli government still controls the drilling of wells and the pumping of water. Ben Wattenberg: If you could tell us just in a sentence or two, Peter and Peter, what’s the solution? What should we do working on, are we working on? Peter Glick: There are new ways of thinking coming down that let us look at how we use water and figure out how to use it more efficiently. We can do what we want to do, we can meet our needs and our desires for water with much less water than we’re currently using. Ben Wattenberg: That would include growing crops that are fed by rainwater rather than by irrigation for one example. Peter Glick: Or growing crops with efficient irrigation technologies rather than inefficient irrigation technologies. I mean to be somewhat mundane there are new toilets and new washing machines that use much less water. Industry is cutting their water use tremendously. The United States uses less water today for everything than we used twenty years ago. We are breaking the cycle. It’s no longer necessary to assume there’s going to be exponential increase in demand for water. We can become much more efficient and I think we are becoming more efficient, and that’s going to be a key to this problem. Ben Wattenberg: Okay. Peter, want to close it out? Peter Rogers: Well I don’t see it as a technical problem at all. I see it very much as a social and a political problem. And until we are able to raise the level of education about water use and its role in society and role in nature, I don’t think we’re ever going to get anywhere. We have a very open society, very open way of doing things. And there’s lots and lots of argumentation. There’s no clear policy directives from the government. We don’t seem to be able to get people to say well it’s probably not a smart idea to do this, to straighten this river, or do this, because there’re a group of consumers in that area who want to be satisfied and they want to let the barge people or the other people. Ben Wattenberg: So you’re saying, surprise, it gets back to politics, which is a shocking thought in this community. Peter Rogers, Peter Glick, thank you so much for being with us on Think Tank And thank you. Please remember to send us your comments via e-mail. They help us make 'Think Tank' a better program. For 'Think Tank,' I’m Ben Wattenberg. (credits) We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better. Please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Avenue, NW, Washington, DC 20036. Or e-mail us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Tank, visit PBS on line at www.pbs.org, and please, let us know where you watch Think Tank. At Pfizer we’re spending nearly five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have twelve thousand scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer. Life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. This is PBS. 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