Brilliant! Drought-Stricken Florida Gives Nestle Unlimited Water for $230

Ah, Florida. With a reputation already sullied by dirty election politics and bonehead decision making, this latest news is funny, sad and totally unsurprising all at once.

Boing Boing has it:

The State of Florida has given a Nestle bottling plant the right to pump as much water as it can get out Madison Blue Springs State Park, which is presently in drought conditions. The right lasts until 2018, and cost Nestle $230 in permit fees. Florida is presently in bitter dispute with its neighboring states over a region-wide water-shortage.

$230. Total. No taxes, no fees - plus the state gave Nestle an outrageously large tax refund for this bottling operation. With some predicting that water shortages will place this precious commodity’s value above oil in the not-so-distant future, Florida has proven that politics trump the needs of its citizens any day of the week.

One wonders whether the clowns in office just run around in circles playing human whack-a-mole on each other all day. Maybe that would explain the astounding dearth of brain cells in lawmakers’ skulls.

Link [Boing Boing]

Photo: Flickr user rexboggs5

Las Vegas Has Even Odds on Going Dry Within 13 Years

Las Vegas is a city of odds. You get that the moment you step off the airplane and see the slot machines waiting just a few steps out of the tunnel. You can find odds on just about anything in Sin City- dice, cards, spinning wheels, fast dogs, and boxers.

And now water.

Environmental Graffiti reports that there’s a 50/50 chance that Las Vegas’s main source of drinking water, Lake Mead, will be dry by 2021. One of this country’s fastest growing metropolitan areas could be out of water in 13 years, rendering the whole place, for the most part, unlivable. Las Vegas doesn’t exist without easy cheap water. It’s a frickin’ desert for FSM’s sake. The city could possibly build a bigass pipeline to pull in water from far away, but would be hard pressed to do it without actually invading another state- water supplies is tight all over the country (see the fight between Florida, Georgia, and Alabama) and no one is giving it up easy.

Do you think mainstream America will wake up to the fact that clean drinking water is the most precious resource we have if Vegas went dry?
Make sure to get to Las Vegas in the next decade or so. It might not be around for much longer.

Link [Environmental Graffiti]

The Downside of Water Conservation: More Expensive H2O, Slashed Revenues

We all know we need to conserve water. The Southern and Southwestern parts of the United States are in the midst of a pretty good drought and Australia is coming around to the fact that the rains aren’t coming back anytime soon. Himalayan glaciers are melting, threatening the water sources for a good chunk of the world’s population and it’s not a stretch to say that the next big wars will be fought over H2O.

So it may come as a bit of a shock that some small municipalities are freaking out over how much less water their customers are using.

The problem for them is that the reduced consumption means reduced incoming revenue. Or as one water works czar Cliff Curtis says:

“Conservation is killing us.”

The city of Toronto, Canada has almost a billion dollars in repair work now the books but only saw revenue of $604M last year. Other Canadian regions are seeing the same problems as more citizens use less water and install water saving devices like low flow toilets.

To combat the budget shortfalls water czars and boards are being forced to raise water prices.

No one said it’s going to be easy to ease ourselves into a greener tomorrow and there will most certainly be hiccups and bumps along the way. Paying more for our water even as we use less seems to be one thing that we’re all going to have to deal with at some time. It’s certainly better than using up all the world’s clean freshwater in a frenzy of consumption.

Link [TheStar]