Guru of Gloom fears less water

Water and drought have been in the news lately, with my county of Stafford imposing mandatory restrictions on outdoor sprinklers shortly before another nice rain fell.

A worse water warning, on a much larger scale, recently caught my eye, as I’ll get to in a minute. But first, early in my career I enjoyed editing manuscripts for a bright young man who would soon harbor greater ambitions than analyzing world agricultural conditions at the time.

Indeed he did. For in short order he began publishing tomes emphasizing the world’s looming hell-in-a-handbasket dilemma unless we reined in population growth and produced much, much more food—unlikely without destroying our very environment.

Even back then, Lester Brown knew all the right buttons to push. He soon outgrew bureaucratic confines and, exercising his growing marketing skills beyond economic analysis, launched nonprofit organizations to tap liberal foundations for support to spread his revealed word.

Over the years, with furrowed brow and doomsday seriousness, he has succeeded hugely, winning numerous accolades.(Google him; it's mind-boggling.) From the world’s earlier endangerments he had depicted—of lacking sufficient food production potential—to his present bugaboo about water shortages, Lester Brown has astutely linked research to popular concerns and marketed them to a fare-thee-well.

Good for him, except that his influence fuels the kinds of elite passions for pat solutions only bureaucrats could administer.

And ironically, his latest tome (Outgrowing the Earth: The Food security Challenge in an Age of Falling Water Tables and Rising Temperatures) first appeared this summer during record rainfall and floods in mid-America. That, plus new research claiming that rising water levels will imperial our shorelines.

“In recent months,” he writes, “rising oil prices have focused the world’s attention on the depletion of oil reserves. But the depletion of underground water resources from overpumping is a far more serious issue.” And then comes the trademark Lester R. Brown, warning: “Excessive pumping for irrigation to satisfy food needs today almost guarantees a decline in food production tomorrow.”

All rightsy. One big culprit in his view is, of course, global warming. Strange that about the same time as his book’s release, Bjorn Lomborg comes out with another one (Cool It, The Skeptical Environmentalist’s guide to Global Warming) arguing the opposite:

“[W]ith glacial melting, rivers actually increase their water contents, especially in the summer, providing more water to many of the poorest people in the world."

Lomborg asks, “Would we rather have more water available or less?” He also claims that 200,000 people in Europe die each year from excess heat, but 1.5 million die of the cold.

As Lester Brown notes, it’s true the great Oglalla aquifer beneath much of the western Corn Belt is receding as subsidized farmers pump more and more water to grow corn for ethanol to replace our plentiful oil. Each of those many strange-looking, irrigated green circles on the ground, observable in airline flights over the area, represent one or more deep-well pumps at their center. Those drawdowns, claim some unhappy Lake Superior interests who have watched their own shoreline water levels also recede, have been the culprit, since the underground aquifer itself is being recharged somehow by the lake’s water. Far-fetched? Maybe.

In any event, Brown disses competitor Borg’s work as diatribe. “His grasp of the [water] issue is shallow,” Brown sniffed in 2001. Regardless, Borg’s writing is readable and persuasive, while Brown’s is pedantic. (Maybe Les just needs another good editor.)

Nevertheless, all this is serious food for thought. Having grown up in the dry country of west Texas, where enough water is impounded in artificial lakes to take care of a still-growing population, forgive me for proposing perhaps simplistic solutions for any water deficiencies.

We should get busy and build more dams—more water, more electricity. Construction of our Rocky Pen Reservoir is getting under way here in Stafford, thank goodness. Regardless, this area should never lack water, whatever the population pressure. For we are blessed, bounded on three sides by everlasting stream and river flow. We could even draw Potomac River water if necessary, since the Supreme Court has ruled that we Virginians are entitled to it, and not just those selfish Marylanders who wanted it only for themselves.

Elsewhere, people who should worry about water, like those in Phoenix and southern California, depend all too much on snow pack in the Rocky Mountains and the flow of the Colorado River. Struggling to serve ever-increasing populations, the river someday will run dry. It already does before it ever reaches Mexico.

I intend to read Lester Brown’s new book to see if he advocates huge dams for supplying needed water, like in China. I’ll bet he hates them, since most of his environment-greeny followers and financiers do. The last time I heard him talk, he was extolling the Chinese for buying so many…bicycles.

In any event, keep it up, Les. You make for interesting rebuttals.

Some things stick in the craw

Here’s one of them: A military “expert” I’ve come to detest even more than U.S Representative John Murtha. This smart aleck nobody ever elected goes by the name of Scott Pelley. He did a TV “interview” with Marine Corps SSgt. Frank Wuterich on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago.

I don’t know how Wuterich retained his composure as Pelley verbally assailed him for being less than judicious in shooting at suspected Iraqi terrorists, a “crime” in which Wuterich is the only remaining Marine directly charged in that so-called Haditha incident, with a court marital pending. His buddies in the raid have all been cleared.

Smirky Scott Pelley deserved to have his face smashed in , and Wuterich should have done it. His late comrade in arms, Marine Corps Maj. Doug Zembiec, would have. He once told a reporter, “One of the most noble things you can do is kill the enemy.” But Pelley’s oily questioning of Wuterich was like a preacher scolding a kid over why he hadn’t been more thoughtful and considerate, since women and children were among the enemy killed in the heat of battle. Wuterich retained his composure throughout the condescending interview, despite Pelley’s baiting.

Rep. Murtha earlier had publicly called the raid “in cold blood,” and is being sued by freed Marines for slander. Good. Further, someone ought to entrap the old garbage mouth in a men’s restroom stall somewhere.

As for today’s ACLU pecksniffers, recall that Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who had been an infantryman in the Civil War, described war’s combat as an "incommunicable experience," adding that "detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."

So try to forget Pelley’s ignorant interrogation. It was only too typical of 60 Minutes in recent years, but I wouldn’t know. I seldom ever watch it anymore. Now I should simply blank it out; the Pelley segment was that repugnant, as other viewers later attested even more colorfully. I hope you didn’t see it.

On another chafing subject in the news, you couldn’t help but be reminded time and again of poor little New Orleans’ fate since Hurricane Katrina leveled the place two years ago. Despite blanket remembrances on TV, it seems that nothing much has happened since, despite the huge infusion of funds and support from taxpayers and volunteers.

As I wrote here about that misfortune for the miserable city shortly after the storm, “New Orleans is the grouchy old uncle living in the attic with his pigeons and dirty pictures. Nobody knows much what to do about him, especially since the accident.” I guess we still don’t.

Fact is, nobody in his right mind would have chosen New Orleans, even before Katrina, for a demonstration of how government or citizens could help restore it to decency.

So it’s worse now than before, with a murder rate 40 percent higher post-Katrina. The city’s more prosperous evacuees have learned to like life elsewhere, and the returnees include most of the low-lifers. The lack of progress in cleaning up the place—despite an infusion of over $100 billion of federal taxpayer money (over $400,000 per current resident)-- is understandable, in a contrarian sense.

For the skeptic who thinks the feds nowadays screw up most everything they try anyhow, New Orleans’ unrelieved agony is but another shining example:

N After all, over a year ago, Washington decreed that a long protective border fence with Mexico be built. A stretch about like one from here to Fredericksburg has been completed so far.

N State and local efforts to constrict illegal immigrant abuses meet court resistance despite the demonstrated federal incompetence in doing anything about detention and deportation.

N Ethanol gums up the gasoline distribution system, elevating prices at the pump. But never mind; our taxes subsidize it and federal law mandates it. Farmers applaud as Congress gets ready to pass another outlandish farm bill subsidizing mainly the wealthiest farmers.

By the way, there’s something about our country’s most financially handicapped folks. Officially poor, they’re about 12 percent of our population, a share inflated by aliens from Mexico. Of course, some downtrodden truly need help, and you can do so by supporting the Salvation Army. I do.

But thanks to charity, government largess and the nation’s prosperity, our poor fare well compared with just about anywhere else, and better even than the average European. For instance, according to a new study by the Heritage Foundation:

"[T]he typical American defined as poor by the government has a car (31 percent of poor households own two cars), air conditioning, a refrigerator, a stove, a clothes washer and dryer, and a microwave. He has two color televisions, cable or satellite TV reception, a VCR, or DVD player, and astereo. He is able to obtain medical care. His home is in good repair…his family is not hungry…If poor mothers married the fathers of their children, nearly three-quarters of the nation's impoverished youthwould immediately be lifted out of poverty...”

No wonder foreigners clamor to get here by hook or crook.

Woes over stocks and mortgages

I have lost some weight in the past year, physically, thank goodness, and in the past month, quite a bit fiscally, alas. The latter dip is painfully mindful of some five years ago when I shed a great deal of the fiscal kind of weight because of the infamous tech and dot-com crash of the stock market back then.

True, like most dieters, I had since managed to gain most of the monetary value back, but now this. Which reminds me, I have little sympathy for the various political efforts to bail out folks who got home mortgages too large for their pocketbooks and now face tough times or foreclosures.

Has anyone stepped in to bail me out of my investments that have gone south? Yeah, right. But I really deserve consideration, being a senior citizen and all. After all, I’m entitled to a special parking space, reduced state income taxes, and cheaper McDonald’s coffee.

Even so, it’s a truism that when things start to pinch, people whine. Thus, since the real estate bubble has burst and has now been blamed for stock market tribulations, I suppose my pain is tiny compared with home owners who have been foreclosed or can't sell. The stock market may again perk up shortly—I keep telling myself--but not the real estate market around here, I would guess.

The continuing travails of real estate mortgages and their financing have become a major drag that has ultimately rubbed off even on innocent souls like me, via that cussed stock market.

I’m happy not to have needed to sell my home, for I would estimate that its sales value has shrunk a lot since its outlandish reappraisal by the county two short years ago. That’s not so bad, unless my heirs try to unload it anytime soon—not that I want that to happen anytime soon, for obvious reasons. True, if I had to sell, any replacement I’d like should also be cheaper than before. And that situation may prevail for some time. Read this gloomy assessment in a late-August Wall Street Journal story:

“While new-home construction tumbled in July to the lowest pace in a decade, supplies remain high and demand keeps dropping—giving the market more room to fall…[The credit situation] also may halt some mortgage lending and keep more buyers on the sidelines, pushing the housing market down further.”

Existing home sales nationally continue downward, and are now nearly a tenth below year-ago levels.

As for Stafford home sales data, comparing July this year with July 2006, total sold dollar volume was down 15 percent, average sales price was $376,000, down 2 percent, and days on market averaged 107 versus 69 last year. Even so, we can take solace in the fact that our homes here are huge bargains compared with what house hunters must endure nearer Washington, D.C. Even with the slack sales, a Wall Street Journal piece featured a picture the other day of an ordinary split-level tract home, circa-1960, with a one-car garage in Bethesda, Md.. The asking price: $825,000.

Gosh. That kind of money would buy you either of the NVR or Augustine model mansions now on display in the new Hills at Aquia development next door to Aquia Harbour.

Regardless, until the home market stabilizes, here’s the best advice: Don’t sell and don’t buy, yet. And don’t weep too much for folks who have had to sell, especially if they’ve lived here for a while. In just the first seven years of the 21st century, Stafford home values more than doubled, from an average of $164,000 in 2000 to $395,000 in 2006.

So we retirees sitting here are doubly blessed. If we don’t like the dip in dollar appreciation currently, we can pick up and move to Florida and net lots of money in the pocket, that is, if you like hurricanes and big snakes. I would lean towards my old home town in Texas. What bargains. In a newer suburb of Abilene, a truly upscale new home lists for about Stafford’s average in July, at $375,000: All brick, Four bedrooms, 4,000 square feet, on a corner lot.

Also, remember that all this short-term weeping over the Stafford real estate market is water off a duck’s back if you are like me and other homeowners, over half of whom nationally are said to own their homes free and clear.

In contrast, it’s a worrisome time for the investing Americans, over half of whom are dependent to one degree or another on the stock market, with its continued sagging, churning, and zooming (hopefully in that order before winter).

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