U.S. water usage lowest in decades
By Michael Muskal, Los Angeles Times
Americans recently passed a milestone when federal officials reported that water use across the nation had reached its lowest level in more than 45 years: good news for the environment, great news in times of drought and a major victory for conservation.
What was surprising in the U.S. Geological Survey report released last week was how little of the 13 percent decline in national water usage was due to the public cutting back.
In drought-stricken areas, such as California and other states across the West, consumers are used to frequent warnings about the need to save water. Dry public fountains, limits on lawn watering and official requests for shorter showers have all been aimed at reducing water use at a time when reservoirs are shrinking and streams are running dry.
But it turns out that the public reduced water use by only about 5 percent from 2005 to 2010, the most recent period measured by the USGS.
I hope every LTN reader checks out the whole story in the LA Times. You will read that 75% of the reduction in water use was from electricity production but no explanation of how it was accomplished. The rest of the article is just as uninformative in its lack of completeness.
This information was from the U.S. Government and Molly Maupin government hydrologists so I’m sure there was no politics involved.
Even more glaring in its dishonesty (normal for the Times) is the picture of farmland in the stories lead. The fact is, to use their terminology,
thermoelectric power production (nuclear, coal, oil, and methane) use of water went from 200 billion gallons a day to 160 billion gallons a day, a 20% reduction, while irrigation (agriculture) went from 121 billion gallons a day to only 115 billion gallons a day, a 5% reduction.
So tell me what picture should lead the article?
To continue as my computer is playing games.
The picture of farmland in the lead is extremely misleading as irrigation only accounted for a 6 billion gallon a day reduction while thermoelectric production used 40 billion gallons a day less water.
So shouldn’t a picture of a carbon fired power plant?
Is it possible that there was no water to run the turbines in the dams? And, that caused the increase in production for carbon fired power plants? Numbers can be used to “prove” many viewpoints, without necessarily being the complete picture.
So tell me what picture should lead the article?
Agriculture.
Irrigation withdrawals are far more important to *California* (mentioned early in the article to define the area of interest) than withdrawals for thermoelectric (which can also use saline water that is not a problem with drought).
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wuir.html Irrigation
http://water.usgs.gov/edu/wupt.html Thermo