A colleague at the Dallas Morning News used to gibe when I wrote editorials about water issues: “You turn on the tap and water comes out, right?” he would gig me in a what’s-the-big-deal? tone of voice.
Of course, he was right. For those of us in the developed world, water comes out. But the water doesn’t flow without intricate planning and delivery systems that the public rarely sees. More to the point, access to water supplies will become one of the most challenging friction points in the United States and abroad as population growth and a changing climate affect current and future supplies.
There’s a reason water is termed “the new oil.” Securing water supplies and delivering them to communities will become an increasingly crucial task. That’s particularly so when you factor in the way our food and energy needs depend upon a ready, reliable supply of water. Michael E. Webber, who teaches at the University of Texas, educates about the ways in which water, food, and energy intersect with each other. At times, the technical details can read as if Webber is writing primarily for hydrologists: Thirst for Power could have used another round of editing to keep the salient points in the lay reader’s mind. Still, this is an important book for those who simply wonder whether water will keep coming out of the tap.
Much of the answer has to do with how well communities, states, and nations manage the so-called water/food/energy nexus. That nexus is pretty simple to understand, as Webber explains: It takes water to produce energy; energy to produce water; and both water and energy to produce food.
He describes the examples that illustrate the connections: Water, and serious amounts of it, is needed to keep power plants running. Energy, and plenty of it, is needed for desalination plants that cities like San Diego, San Antonio, and El Paso are betting on to turn seawater or brackish water into everyday use. The corn we love to eat requires water to grow, sometimes putting pressure on valuable water sources like the Ogallala Aquifer, which stretches from the Texas Panhandle to South Dakota.
Finding the right policies to sustain this nexus is anything but simple. Webber begins with the battle that Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida have fought over water in the Southeast: “Drought is only one cause,” he writes in describing the dispute over water supplies. “A rapidly growing population, especially in Atlanta, as well as overdevelopment and a notorious lack of water planning, is running the region’s rivers dry. Production of thirsty energy sources just exacerbates the situation.”
So, what to do? Planning ahead is one of the most important responses, although this doesn’t mean old-time, top-down planning. Rather, smart thinking that relies heavily upon the knowledge and experience that local and state people have with nearby water sources. Texas offers a model of this type of planning. In 1997, Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock (D) got the Texas legislature to pass a water-planning bill with Gov. George W. Bush’s support. Ever since, the state has relied upon local stakeholders—from municipal leaders to agricultural representatives to environmentalists—to craft five-year water plans for their regions.
The bill divided the state into 16 regions, and their citizens are responsible for identifying and prioritizing sources for the next half-century. Texas water officials must approve the plan since some of the water belongs to the state. In some cases, they must mediate disputes. But this is a participatory process, including regular public meetings in local communities.
There is a good argument that Dallas-Fort Worth, now the nation’s fourth-largest metropolitan area, would not have grown so powerfully without local and state leaders planning and funding a series of lakes six decades ago. Let us hope that the current planning model, which includes controversial new lakes, will keep North Texas growing its economy: The last thing the region needs is to become an economic dead zone because of a lack of forethought.
The same is true in other parts of the nation where the smart use of water can help drive and sustain economic growth. “As the building blocks of industrial processes and agricultural production,” Webber writes, “energy and water both foster wealth creation and prosperity.” Fracking techniques that unlock hidden energy reserves are one of the most important economic forces in the nation. But earthquakes in unexpected places like Oklahoma have shown that energy producers need to find alternative ways to reuse wastewater from those and other wells. Researchers attribute the surprising quakes to the injection back into the earth of the waste-water. If energy producers can take care of this problem, we will continue to benefit from this intersection of water and energy.
There is an important geopolitical element to water as well. Webber does a good job explaining how the commodity can be an empowering force for women and girls in Africa and other developing parts of the world. When they and their communities have access to clean water, women don’t have to spend so much of their day finding water and lugging it back to their villages or homes, where they then must boil it with dangerous fuels. Instead, they can turn to more productive uses of their time, such as going to school.
The story once was not so different in parts of America before clean water became abundant. Webber reminds us that “the burdened, vulnerable woman in Africa today, struggling to fetch water, is not much different than the burdened, vulnerable woman in the rural United States less than a century ago. Access to water and energy turns the story around.” Water scarcities also underlie tense conflicts in places like the Middle East.
Water has the power to upend, as well as enrich, our lives. Economic growth, the empowerment of women, and political stability are three of the positives. And oh yes—so is being able to simply turn on the tap, which Thirst for Power explains is more complicated than you may think.
William McKenzie is editor of the Catalyst: A Journal of Ideas from the Bush Institute.
