Last month, a YouTube video by Popular Science was making the rounds. Called “Where to Live in America, 2100 A.D.,” the video displays a map of the U.S. as it is likely to be affected by climate change in the next 80 years. Almost the entire continental U.S. will be at risk of rising sea levels, rising temperatures, increased hurricane and tornado activity, and/or intensified drought and risk of wildfires with one notable exception: Michigan!
I will admit to feeling a little bit of relief, particularly since I’m not likely to relocate out of state (then again, I won’t be alive in 2100 either). Michigan gets so much bad press lately, and sadly much of it is deserved. For once, it would be nice not to be frustrated and disappointed by my home state.
And yet, even I, a total science tyro, recognize the foolishness of this fantasy of a safe haven. The reality is this: There’s nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. There is no escape from climate change. Indeed, the climatological and political effects are upon us already.
I’ve lived in this state for almost sixty years now (something that surprises me no end) which is plenty long enough to testify to my personal experiences of seasonal change, even without the data to back me up. As we have recently seen here, however, the hallmark of anthropogenic global warming isn’t necessarily uniform *warming* but increased weather *weirding.* Thus the winter of 2014-15, the coldest of my lifetime with the most snowfall ever measured in several SE Michigan cities, is not evidence to support global warming denial, but a painful demonstration of its comprehensive effects. That winter, we had a displaced polar vortex for weeks on end, so that the bitter cold that normally would be experienced near the North Pole dipped far, far to the south instead.
This year, we had a much milder, much wetter winter than usual. And when we have had rain, instead of snow, we’ve had cloudbursts on a regular basis. We didn’t usually have that here, where the skies open and the rain just tumbles down. Now we do.
As we’ve seen in connection with the killer heat waves in northern Europe and in the American Midwest and Southwest these past few years, the impact of extreme heat is pretty obvious. It’s harder to tease out the immediate public health effects of unexpectedly cold weather. It is possible that more people than usual died of the cold due to acute exposure; accident; illness. It’s even more difficult to detect what increased instability of our climate does to our collective and individual emotional and mental state. But just think about how hard it is to cope with the chaos unleashed via the current illegitimate occupant of the White House. Similarly, it’s hard to deal with the deep uncertainty that weather-weirding and climate change induce even in comparatively “safe” regions. Through all of this upheaval, it is a comforting delusion for some of us in Michigan to hold that our abundant fresh water will prove to be a buffer against the worst impacts of climate change. But let’s take a look at how a few of the interconnected effects, all related to water and its control, are already complicating — worsening — our lives.
Before the days of “Pure Michigan” as a campaign slogan (now a bitterly ironic label to associate with a state that took steps to poison an entire city), we used to claim the title of “Water Wonderland.” Of course, that too would be ironic in the present circumstances. But what it also reveals is a deeply-ingrained tendency to take our abundant water resources for granted. (At least until a profit can be made of it; more on that below.) The state of Michigan isn’t only defined by being bounded by 4 of the 5 Great Lakes; we also have several thousand little inland lakes, dozens of navigable rivers and streams, thousands of acres of wetlands. We might not have mountains, but we do have fresh water.
Let’s consult another precious resource, the Environmental Protection Agency, for some basic facts about this region.
The Great Lakes are the largest surface freshwater system on the Earth. Only the polar ice caps contain more fresh water.
- 84% of North America's surface fresh water
- about 21% of the world's supply of surface fresh water
These data alone are impressive. The dependence of the human beings living in this area on this resource is also difficult to overstate. The Great Lakes Basin provides water for personal, agricultural, industrial, and recreational use to over 30 million people (not limited to Michigan residents) — over 30% the entire population of Canada, and over 10% of the U.S. population. The Great Lakes moderate our temperature extremes in the winter and summer. The presence of the lakes has fostered in Michigan a fruit belt that produces U.S.-top-ten quantities of stone fruits such as cherries, peaches, and plums, to say nothing of the other agricultural crops they sustain.
Yet as thoroughly dependent as we are on our water supply, we have no real safeguards in place here on behalf of the water, nor well-crafted policies to regulate water use, nor priorities to guarantee access of our citizens to fresh and safe water before all other potential users.
Consider this illuminating example. Everyone’s favorite corporate villain, Nestlé, has been seeking a permit for the past several months to expand its ability to draw from ground water in Mecosta and Osceola Counties, a relatively rural section of the state whose largest town is Big Rapids. They initiated this request only about seven years after they had lost a suit to increase their desired pumping rate from just over 200 gallons to 400 gallons per minute on average. (I am eliding some details in well locations and pumping rates, not pertinent to the point here.) Just last week, part of their petition was denied by the Osceola Township Planning Commission. This may be only a temporary setback, admittedly, given the predilections of the totally industry-captured MI Department of Environmental Quality.
One enterprising reporter with the Detroit Free Press, Keith Metheny, investigated the question a little more thoroughly than most, however, to produce this fascinating and unsettling assessment:
Utilities, industries and farmers use trillions of gallons of Michigan ground and surface water each year, essentially for free….
That’s trillions with a T. Annually. Much of this is indeed consumptive use, meaning that the water leaves the Great Lakes watershed as a consequence, never to be regained. Only some of the consumptive use is regulated, to some modest extent. (Metheny explains that the industries using large amounts of water for which they received approval prior to 2009 will not, under current law, ever be vulnerable to a roll-back of their quotas, no matter how much our water situation changes.)
Metheny continues:
It's become a sore point for many people that Nestlé, a subsidiary of Nestlé S.A., headquartered in Switzerland, may soon be given state permission to increase its groundwater pumping at an Osceola County well to up to as much as 210 million gallons per year, for the price of a $200 DEQ permit fee, as nearly 18,000 Detroit residents face potential water shutoffs for delinquent bills.
Why yes, yes it has. The contrast is especially acute in light of these details, as described in an MLive article by Garret Ellison last December:
Nestlé Waters North America, the world's largest bottled water company, shipped the first bottle from its Ice Mountain plant in Stanwood in May 2002. Since then, the company has extracted billions of gallons of groundwater from underneath Michigan and has paid next to nothing for it.
Michigan ... charges high-volume, self-supplied water bottlers like Nestlé and Absopure only $200 per year in paperwork fees to operate. There's no state tax, license fee or royalty associated with the company's extraction of a precious natural resource. (emphasis added)
Typically, a household in Flint or Detroit can expect to pay at least — at least — $100/month for water & sewer services. Per the EPA, an average household uses about 300 gallons per day, which thus means about 10,000 gallons per month per household. Nestlé pumps that amount in less than one hour, and pays virtually nothing for it.
What’s worse is that Nestlé is NOT the biggest corporate consumer of groundwater in the state. That dubious distinction (again, from Metheny) goes to the pharmaceutical giant, Pfizer:
The state's largest groundwater extractor — by far — is Pfizer's pharmaceutical manufacturing operation near Kalamazoo, at more than 6.9 billion gallons in 2015, according to DEQ data. That annual groundwater withdrawal exceeds the total water volume of Orchard Lake in Oakland County, or Wayne County's Belleville Lake.
And in the decades ahead, when we find ourselves surrounded by water that a thirsty, hot, overextended nation wants, what will we be able to do about it? Remember, Nestle’s deal was made back in 2002, and is thus currently not subject to review. Not so much for the citizens of Detroit, Highland Park, and Flint, of course, who already pay some of the highest rates in the nation for water. (Fun fact: I’m back within the service area of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department now in Ypsilanti, after several years living in Ann Arbor, which is outside the DWSD. My water bill jumped by 50% — and even so it’s still far below the rate that Flint residents are expected to pay for water that they cannot use.)
One more data point to mention here: the permission recently granted to Waukesha, Wisconsin, to draw water from Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes watershed is surprisingly limited in comparison to the surface area of the lakes themselves, and in consideration of that reality the eight states bordering the lakes created a Compact in 2008, with related federal legislation signed by G. W. Bush, to attempt to restrict any diversions of water outside the watershed. (No, I’m not knowledgeable enough about water policy to explain why complete water *extraction*, e.g. for bottled water sales, doesn’t count.) Waukesha applied for an exemption to this policy, because 1) their own water supply was contaminated by radium and would be costly to treat and 2) the guidelines had been drawn in such a way to create a loophole for nearby towns (namely, being a town in a county falling partially within the watershed) to be able to obtain a waiver. All eight governors voted to grant the exemption last summer, with the caveat that all water was to be treated and returned to Lake Michigan, rather than become “consumptive” use. A challenge to this deal is still pending, though a decision is expected soon, probably upholding the original decision.
(Funny/not funny that Waukesha, a wealthy, predominantly white community, was able to secure good, clean water so much more easily than Flint, which of course is much less white and much less affluent.)
Will this waiver prove to be the proverbial camel’s nose in the tent? What about the next request for a waiver, or the one after that? Will the controversial idea spoken aloud earlier this month by Jay Famiglietti, the senior hydrologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, eventually become feasible? In an April 4, 2017, interview with ideastream.org aired by Cleveland public radio stations and quoted in a Detroit Free Press article, Famiglietti said,
[You] might imagine that there's a giant bull's-eye that can be seen from space that's sitting above the Great Lakes — meaning it's a target area, in a sense, for the rest of the country….
Because there's so much fresh water, you can imagine that 50 years from now ... there might actually be a pipeline that brings water from the Great Lakes to Phoenix. I think that that's part of our future.
The article notes that Famiglietti qualified that statement, observing that the logistics and cost now make it prohibitive. And yet, he reiterated something we all need to admit: “The global water crisis is ‘far worse than most people imagine’.”
So where will it stop, this effort to privatize the commons, to extract public goods for private gain? Who will benefit and who will suffer? In a hotter, drier, more crowded, less predictable, more chaotic environment, who will have sufficient power to make these policy decisions on behalf of the people, not the profiteers? We already know the answers to these questions.
For several years now, the water protectors in Michigan such as Maureen Taylor, Monica Lewis-Patrick, and Melissa Mays, have been speaking very clearly and forcefully. In their assessment, the water wars are already happening, and they’re having the biggest impact on those who can least afford any extra challenges for survival. The cautionary tales of Detroit, Highland Park, and Flint support this conclusion recently written by Dennis L. Green, former Systems Engineer for Facilities Design for the DWSD and published on Eclectablog on the third anniversary of the switch to the Flint River as Flint’s water source:
As long as decisions regarding the health and safety of the people are made by politicians not accountable to the affected parties, more sewage spills, sinkholes and poisoned water is inevitable.
Poor people, predominantly people of color, are on the front lines of this version of the environmental justice struggle. Even here in a water-rich region, where the abundance of this natural resource makes it that much easier to take it for granted, fresh water is given away to those who would profit from it. People are dying here, now, in Michigan, for lack of pure, safe water. The powers that be are already saying, “Water for me, but not for thee.”
No, there’s no safe place; there’s no place outside of the ripple effects that climate change has already set in motion. So, since we can’t escape, and since people are already being harmed, then we must put our best efforts into mitigation now. And that’s why I’m marching this Saturday.
[Daily Kos activists heading to D.C.: Feel free to join me and several others! Meetup plan here.]
Michigan Climate Activists
There will be People’s Climate Marches in Detroit, Ferndale, Grand Rapids, Kalamazoo, Marquette, Newaygo, and Traverse City. Click here to see the interactive map of sister marches — which applies outside of Michigan, too.
Daily Kos Climate Marchers!
If you’d like to march with other readers of Daily Kos, visit Connect! Unite! Act! (7:30 AM Pacific) for march locations. Send navajo a Kos mail or leave a message in the comments.
SCICLI Blogathon
Support the Daily Kos SciCli blogathon during the April 22-28 week of action promoting the April 29 People’s Climate March with stories on how science and climate change are affecting our lives and our planet.
For background on the SciCli Blogathon and the Week of action visit boatsie’s diary from 4/17, Besame’s from 4/20, and onomastic’s from 4/21.
SCICLI Blogathon Schedule (all times are PDT)
2:30 pm: Cracks in Greenland ice-sheet may link up and break off DarkSyde
5:00 pm: Peoples Climate March just one piece of the resistance against lethal eco-policies. Meteor Blades
9:00 am: People's Climate March next Saturday. Run on Sunday. RLMiller
2:30 pm: SciCli Blogathon: "I can't believe we're marching for facts" Edition (#ScienceMarchSF Photo Essay) citisven
5:00 pm: Climate change: Be Positive. It’s Important. John Crapper
2:30 pm: I Resist in Miami Because We Provide the 1st Glimpse Into Future Climate Mayhem Pakalolo
5:00 pm: Resist,Rebel, and Revolt for Earth, Wind, Water: Climate March on Sat., 4/29 2thanks
10:45 am: Toosdai Critters Speak Out Samanthab
5:00 pm: Had We But World Enough And Time . . . Besame
2:30 pm: Climate Change is Making the World Friendlier for Mosquitoes, Diseases, and Death Dartagnan
5:00 pm: peregrine kate
2:30 pm: Bill McKibben
5:00 pm: WarrenS (Man With Sign — 85 Weeks on the Edge)
2:30 pm: Tamar
5:00 pm: annieli
3:00 pm: Meteor Blades
Climate Hawks Vote is hosting a training for leaders of the climate movement who are considering running for office on April 30, the day after the People’s Climate March. Read more about the training at People's Climate March next Saturday. Run on Sunday.