NASA Points out There Might be a Teensy Problem with Water – Fox News America Responds

Water running out in America’s major agricultural region, and the globe’s political flashpoints.

Washington Post:

The world’s largest underground aquifers – a source of fresh water for hundreds of millions of people — are being depleted at alarming rates, according to new NASA satellite data that provides the most detailed picture yet of vital water reserves hidden under the Earth’s surface.

Twenty-one of the world’s 37 largest aquifers — in locations from India and China to the United States and France — have passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more water was removed than replaced during the decade-long study period, researchers announced Tuesday. Thirteen aquifers declined at rates that put them into the most troubled category. The researchers said this indicated a long-term problem that’s likely to worsen as reliance on aquifers grows.

Two of the most stressed aquifers on the planet are the Arabian Aquifer, and another major one stretching between India and Pakistan.
Given the role of drought and heat in the current Syria/ISIS crisis, does one still have to ask what could go wrong if the water supplies for a critical global oil supplier, and one stretched between two not-very-friendly nuclear nations, suddenly slow to a trickle.

Meanwhile, in America’s most drought stricken area, wealthy conservatives show typical can-do American community spirit in responding.

Washington Post:

Drought or no drought, Steve Yuhas resents the idea that it is somehow shameful to be a water hog. If you can pay for it, he argues, you should get your water.

People “should not be forced to live on property with brown lawns, golf on brown courses or apologize for wanting their gardens to be beautiful,” Yuhas fumed recently on social media. “We pay significant property taxes based on where we live,” he added in an interview. “And, no, we’re not all equal when it comes to water.”

Yuhas lives in the ultra-wealthy enclave of Rancho Santa Fe, a bucolic Southern California hamlet of ranches, gated communities and country clubs that guzzles five times more water per capita than the statewide average. In April, after Gov. Jerry Brown (D) called for a 25 percent reduction in water use, consumption in Rancho Santa Fe went up by 9 percent.
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“I call it the war on suburbia,” said Brett Barbre, who lives in the Orange County community of Yorba City, another exceptionally wealthy Zip code.

Barbre sits on the 37-member board of directors of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a huge water wholesaler serving 17 million customers. He is fond of referring to his watering hose with Charlton Heston’s famous quote about guns: “They’ll have to pry it from my cold, dead hands.”

Here a YouTuber warns that water rationing is just the tip of a conspiracy iceberg that will eventually result in a “Jade Helm” military coup of some kind.

Inhabitat.com:

While farmers and other businesses are forced to cut back on water use in a desperate attempt to slow California’s steady sinking, the oil industry has been allowed to maintain their water usage. And that usage is significant. Oil refiners are estimated to be the second largest water user of non-agriculture businesses in California (golf is the first). For each gallon of oil refined, between 1 and 2.5 gallons of water is used, most of which ends up being dumped into the ocean or evaporated as steam. The water, once in the ocean, can’t be used unless it’s desalinated.

California is the third largest refiner of oil in the nation, after Texas and North Dakota, and the state doesn’t keep stats on how much water the refineries use. Mother Jones investigated, asking the six companies that make up 90 percent of the state’s refining capacity, to share their figures. Although three declined to comment, the data released by the other three provided enough of a baseline to extrapolate that, at full capacity, oil refineries use 94 million gallons of water per day in California. As Mother Jones reports, that’s more than twice as much as the daily water use of San Francisco homes. Just let that sink in for a while.

Inhabitat also reports that new limitations on water have so far forced the abandonment of 620,000 acres of California farmland.