Don't Steal Our Water!

We've known for more than 30 years that climate change is a serious problem. Places like California, Nevada, Colorado and Arizona are suffering from decades of worsening drought and wildfires.

After a horrendous fire season last year, California is being torched again this year. The main problem is that people keep building houses in the hills and forests, and when those forests burn, their houses do too.

In Phoenix temperatures this past August were over 100 degrees every day, and hit 110 or more twelve days (twenty years ago, there were only three 110+ days). It's unsafe just to go outside in heat like that, and you certainly can't exercise or work. Even planes can't take off when it starts getting that hot.

We live in Minnesota, where a lot of people complain about the winters (which aren't anywhere near as cold or snowy as they used to be). The thing about winter is that you can still go outside and do things if you dress properly.

But when it starts getting to 118, 120 degrees, you can't put on clothes to get cooler. You'd have to wear a liquid cooling system like a spacesuit to keep your body temperature down.

Yet people continue to move to these areas. We're in a bike club and have acquaintances who just bought a house in Phoenix. But they have to come back to Minnesota in the summer to ride their bikes because you can't exercise outside in Arizona in the summer. It's just too damn hot.

And because of the heat island effect, the more buildings and houses they put up in Phoenix, and the more plants and natural soil they displace, the hotter it will get.

This is the core of the problem. There are far too many people living in areas that have too few resources. Water, in particular, is in very short supply.

Which brings us to the issue that brought on this rant: a railroad company is proposing to steal water from an aquifer in Minnesota and ship it to the southwest. They want to ship half a million gallons a year by rail.

The company doesn't think there's anything wrong with this:

Dakota County officials said Progressive Rail would work with Oregon-based Water Train, which provides water to government agencies in Colorado, Utah and Arizona. Water Train’s website says the company is “nothing more than delivered bottled water, except our bottles (railroad tank cars) hold more than 26,000 gallons each.”

Oh, it's just bottled water, only our bottles are 26,000 gallons. Right. This is a terrible analogy, because bottled water is a terrible scourge.

Worse, shipping water by rail, which burns diesel fuel to power the engines, will only exacerbate the problem that's causing the water shortage in the first place: global warming.

A few years ago the water level in White Bear Lake, a large lake northeast of St. Paul, dropped precipitously because of aquifer depletion. It takes tens of thousands of years to replenish aquifers. It's ridiculous to drain our resources so that geezers can flee south for the winter.

Clearly, the answer is not to send water to the Southwest. People should start moving out of those areas to return the population to levels that local resources can sustain.

And, of course, we should stop burning so much oil flying and driving around the country to escape the global warming that we're causing by burning so much oil and coal and gas.