Occupy.com / News Analysis
Published: Friday 1 August 2014
The world water shortage looks unsolvable and corporations aren’t helping the problem.
Corporations will continue to abuse their constitutional
protections as legal “persons” until fresh water has become fully
privatized, or until corporate constitutional rights are eliminated with
a constitutional amendment.
Depleting a Precious Resource
The Colorado River Basin is
an especially critical water resource, responsible for supplying
municipal water to 40 million Americans and irrigating 5.5 million acres
of land. As the US Bureau of Reclamation has documented,
22 federally-recognized tribes, seven national wildlife refuges, four
national recreation areas, and 11 national parks depend on the basin. In
a new report by NASA and the University of California at Irvine,
researchers discovered that between December of 2004 and November of
2013, the basin lost 53 million acre-feet of
water. 41 million acre-feet, or 75 percent of that loss, came from
groundwater sources, like those pumped by Nestlé. That’s more than twice
the amount of water contained in Lake Mead, America’s largest
freshwater reservoir. In the meantime, Nestlé, with 29 water bottling
facilities across North America, pocketed $4 billion in revenue from bottled water sales in 2012 alone.
But Nestlé isn’t alone in abusing the main water source of
the Western United States. Expansive golf courses in desert areas, like
those in Arizona and Southern California, require hundreds of thousands
of gallons of water per day to maintain. According to the United States
Golf Association (USGA), 2 million acres of American golf courses are
irrigated, or 80 percent of the country's total golf course acreage.Between 2003 and 2005,
the USGA estimated that 2,312,701 acre-feet of water was used to
maintain golf courses, amounting to over 2 billion gallons of water per
day. An NPR report from 2008 put that in perspective, comparing the
average daily water usage of one golf course to the amount of water used
by one American family over the course of 4 years.
An “Insurmountable” Water Crisis by 2040
Egregious abuses of limited freshwater supplies have led
to panic from some and greed from others. If current drought conditions
and water usage patterns persist, it’s estimated that the world will
face an “insurmountable” water crisis by 2040. Aarhaus University of
Denmark, the Vermont Law School and the nonprofit CNA Corporation recently released a study showing
that a global population increase compounded by an exponential increase
in water consumption will inevitably lead to drastic drought conditions
unless immediate action is taken. The study projected a 40 percent gap
between water supply and demand by 2030 under current conditions.
According to the study, 41 percent of American freshwater
consumption came from energy production alone. Energy sources like
nuclear and coal power were responsible for the bulk of water
consumption, though the process of hydraulic fracturing – better known
as fracking, where jets of water mixed with chemicals are blasted
underground to break up shale formations that produce natural gas – was
also high on the list. A prime example is Texas, where the population is
expected to skyrocket from 25 million to 55 million in the next 35 years.
Texas currently draws 91 percent of its electricity from natural gas,
nuclear and coal power. And in the summer of 2011, Texas experienced its
worst drought in history.
Outdoing Texas, California is now facing its worst drought
in 1,200 years. Latest numbers from the National Drought Mitigation
Center show that 80 percent of California is in “extreme drought.” A
full 31 percent of California is experiencing “exceptional drought”
conditions, including population centers like Los Angeles, Oakland, and
San Francisco. Food prices have gone up by an average of 2.5 percent
since last year, and are expected to increase by another 3.5 percent
before year's end. No less than 85 percent of the lettuce Americans eat comes from drought-ravaged California. Fresh fruits and vegetable prices are projected to increase by 6 percent in the coming months as a result of the drought.
Constitutionally-Protected Corporate Greed
The research community isn’t the only group of people
paying attention to the writing on the wall. Corporate executives are
quickly making moves to privatize water resources, declaring the resource to be the next oil. Peter Brabeck, chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, has openly said that "access to water is not a public right." This is in spite of UN Resolution 64/292,
which declares that water and sanitation are both basic human rights.
The World Health Organization has said that one person needs 20 liters of water for “survival” levels of use,
including bathing and laundry. As I wrote previously for Occupy.com,
the France-based Suez company is using a New Jersey-based subsidiary to
prepare a buyout of Detroit’s water infrastructure, with a potential end
goal of privatizing the Detroit River and the Great Lakes.
Researchers argue for greater regulation of water usage to
prevent future global drought, though that becomes complicated when
looking into how such regulations would be implemented and enforced. The
US Bureau of Reclamation monitors surface water, but groundwater
regulation is up to individual states. And in the Colorado River Basin,
for example, California has no regulations on groundwater usagedespite
the Bay Area implementing strict new penalties for excessive use of
water. Even if federal or state agencies wanted to intervene to stop
corporate entities like golf courses, power companies or Nestlé from
using up precious groundwater resources, corporations and their profits
are protected under the constitution, giving them the same rights as
actual human beings.
Ever since the Supreme Court established that corporations are legally people in the Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroadruling
of 1886, corporations have successfully overridden a slew of
regulations citing the equal protection clause under the 14th Amendment.
By proving that a certain regulation would unduly infringe on a
corporation’s ability to make a profit, well-heeled corporate entities
have lawyered up to defy regulatory agencies for over a century. The Buckley v. Valeo ruling in 1976 further ensconced corporate personhood, and the Citizens United v. FEC ruling
in January of 2010 established the precedent that because corporations
have the same legal rights as a person, their money is considered free
speech. So not only can corporations defy any new regulation on their
future usage of precious water resources, but they can spend unlimited
amounts of money in election cycles to elect politicians who will
prioritize their right to make a profit over a citizen’s right to have
access to water.
As long as corporations are given the same constitutional
protections as people, they’ll always escape regulation and
accountability for their actions. Simply "getting money out of politics"
is not enough – only a constitutional amendment that explicitly
abolishes the concept of corporate personhood and separates money from
free speech will guarantee that necessary actions can be taken to
prevent a disastrous water shortage.
ABOUT Carl Gibson
Carl Gibson,
25, is co-founder of US Uncut, a nationwide creative direct-action
movement that mobilized tens of thousands of activists against corporate
tax avoidance and budget cuts in the months leading up to the Occupy
Wall Street movement. Carl and
other US Uncut activists are featured in the documentary "We're Not
Broke," which premiered at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. He currently
lives in Manchester, New Hampshire. You can contact Carl at usuncut@gmail.com, and listen to his online radio talk show, Swag The Dog, at blogtalkradio.com/swag-the-dog.
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