Holy Toledo: Water Wars Coming

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

05 August 14

owhere has the abandonment of reason and of science on the part of half of the American political system had such serious consequences as it has had on our attempts to craft national responses to our cascade of interconnected environmental problems, most of which have some basis in the Great Climate Change Hoax, which half of our political system believe is a scam to suck up that sweet grant money or, as Paul Ryan so brilliantly put it last week, to raise taxes. I don't know but, maybe, if a half-million people still don't have potable drinking water in a couple of weeks, we might take the whole thing a little more seriously than we have, and we might conclude that the planet's getting genuinely pissed at us all.

Algae blooms in Lake Erie typically arrive in the summer and are fed by excess nutrients added to the lake - especially phosphorus. That phosphorus can come from fertilizer runoff from farms and lawns as well as from livestock pens or malfunctioning septic systems. A bout of strong sunshine this summer also appears to have helped the algae bloom grow.

We stopped this kind of thing back in the 1970's, because that's when we passed the Clean Water Act, and had Earth Day, and we and our Canadian friends were willing to spend $8 billion to save Lake Erie. However, that was before Ronald Reagan was elected to save us all from the dead hand in the jackboot of over-regulation, and to demonstrate to us all that unleashing the power of American corporations was the fast lane to glory. Under Bill Clinton, deregulation became "regulatory reform," which meant finding ways to do the damage more slowly. That was before science became a political drawback. Does the GCCH figure into this? Of course, it does.

As the scientists told Ecowatch in a 2013 report, the microcystis bacteria thrive in warm, nutrient-rich waters. The microcystis-laden algae also survive better in those warmer conditions than other, non-toxic algae does. They're the "cockroaches of the aquatic world," according to the report. It's not just higher temperatures that will increase the bacteria's presence, either. Ecowatch notes that as climate change fuels more heavy rainfall events, sewer systems are likely to be more quickly overwhelmed, leading to the release of bacteria- and pathogen-rich sewage into the lake.

I guarantee you that anyone who makes that argument -- that climate change is involved because it results in heavier rainfall and, therefore, more sewer systems flooding into the lake, carrying Christ alone knows what-all -- will find someone standing up and telling them, "You're blaming climate change for everything," as though there were nothing connected in the ecology of the planet at all. And that is not even to mention the role played by the invasive zebra mussels, that kill the animals that eat the algae. Every way you can screw a planet, we have.

Anyway, this is the second time in a year in which environmental damage has deprived an American city of its drinking water for a substantial period of time; we recall that Huntington, West Virginia was boiling and bottling thanks to the efforts of Freedom Industries. We have had wars for gold. We have had wars for oil. We next will have wars for water, provided, of course, that there's any left that's fit to drink.