Thirsty Cities
April 7th 2007 23:04
Moving to this?
The great cities of Australia are dying of thirst. Brisbane, the capital of Queensland is already on level five restrictions. The governments, local and state, have not really made their minds up about what this means, what restrictions to impose, the penalties for over use. What is clear is that we have never seen anything like this before and we have been warned about this for a long time. There is no excuse for having done nothing. Nothing was done. Sydney is also in the grip of a wet drought; rain on the city, empty dams. Jemma who has recently been returned as Premier in New South Wales through masochism by the voters of New South Wales, proposes to meet the serious problem by building a desalination plant. Desalination plants have serious pollution problems. The sludge they produce is likely to devastate Sydney Harbour. They require huge amounts of energy and yet the power stations which are to supply this energy will also require large amounts of water producing a cycle of waste of water and energy that hardly seems to be a solution at all. Victorians whose capital Melbourne is also in the grip of drought have decided to use the ostrich approach. The Government there has failed to apply the heavy restrictions they should have begun even before Brisbane imposed theirs. Such foolishness will lead to the imposition of restrictions so sudden and so severe that Melbourne will face economic ruin or even civil disorder.
It may be that Australia through El Nino, sunspots and other cyclical phenomena was due for a once in a thousand years drought even without the additional effects of global warming. However global warming has arrived in the joint consciousness at a time when fears of cities without water is realized by drought. The true state of affairs, cyclical drought or global warming cannot be known at this stage. As the major cities of Australia lose their supplies of water, social and economic disaster loom. We had forgotten until now that much of what we doing in business as well as in our houses relies on a steady supply of potable water. The power industry is the primary example of this. As the power plants lose their water, power outages will lead to the crippling of manufacture. Agriculture, the growing of the vegetables and meat that supply the cities depends on water.
What can be done? The simple answer to this is nothing. It is too late. Crazy schemes of diverting the northern rivers in land or piping water from the North have been talked about by politicians because this is the time of desperate-speak. In fact whether it be diversion, desalination or pipelines, the solutions involve engineering on a massive even unrealistic scale evolving many years into the future. The Australian Federal Government threw a sum of 10 billion dollars into the mix with little thought about where this money should be spent and without even involving the Federal Treasury in the costing.
What can be done? Pray for rain.
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