
Food & Water Watch
By Elizabeth Schuster
Monday, I participated in a meeting hosted by the White House Council on Environmental Quality and the Environmental Protection Agency on financing water infrastructure.
Although I applaud the administration’s efforts to convene a discussion about the enormous need to invest in our nation’s aging infrastructure, I was discouraged that much of the meeting focused on promoting public-private partnerships and attracting more private financing for public water systems.
Throughout the meeting, a misleading notion was continually raised that using private capital to fund water systems somehow constitutes an innovative approach to financing. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Time and again, municipalities and consumers have suffered under privatized water systems.
As if attempting to package and sell privatization as a new trendy approach isn’t alarming enough, the chief financial officer of American Water, the nation’s largest water company, added insult to injury when she asked about the status of the company’s proposal that the Internal Revenue Service modify its rules to allow companies that take over privatized municipal water systems to retain public tax benefits on the system’s existing debt.
Why not just give private companies like American Water the same tax-exempt status on bonds as public utilities? That’s actually another proposal out there these days. Apparently, this so-called “innovative” private financing requires government tax breaks and special treatment to compete with traditional public financing.
This is not the first time American Water has floated this proposal to the federal government. In response to a Freedom Of Information Act request filed by Food & Water Watch in November 2012, we learned that American Water’s proposal had made it to the Treasury Department in September. Then in March of this year, the company included its proposal in testimony submitted to the House Appropriations subcommittee. Talk about persistence.
Modifying the tax code to allow private companies like American Water to receive the same tax benefits on its financing as our public, local governments would not level the playing field. It would give companies an unfair and unjustified advantage. Worse, unlike with local governments, there is no guarantee that lowering the borrowing costs for private companies will result in greater investments in our water systems or lower water rates for consumers. The companies could just pocket most of the savings, using the lower debt costs to rationalize higher returns. That means we would sacrifice tax revenue to pad the profits of the water privatization industry.
We have to keep tabs on their next moves and continue to protect our water systems. At the end of the day, privatizing our public water systems is not an innovative approach to delivering clean, safe, affordable water to U.S. communities. Instead, we should stick to a tried and true method—keeping water in public hands. If we want to talk actual innovation, why not establish a steady source of federal funding for community water systems so no municipality ever has to entertain the notion of privatizing its water.
Visit EcoWatch’s WATER page for more related news on this topic.
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A Game of Jenga
<p>Think of it as a game of Jenga and the planet's climate system as the tower. For generations, we have been slowly removing blocks. But at some point, we will remove a pivotal block, such as the collapse of one of the major global ocean circulation systems, for example the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), that will cause all or part of the global climate system to fall into a planetary emergency.</p><p>But worse still, it could cause runaway damage: Where the tipping points form a domino-like cascade, where breaching one triggers breaches of others, creating an unstoppable shift to a radically and swiftly changing climate.</p><p>One of the most concerning tipping points is mass methane release. Methane can be found in deep freeze storage within permafrost and at the bottom of the deepest oceans in the form of methane hydrates. But rising sea and air temperatures are beginning to thaw these stores of methane.</p><p>This would release a powerful greenhouse gas into the atmosphere, 30-times more potent than carbon dioxide as a global warming agent. This would drastically increase temperatures and rush us towards the breach of other tipping points.</p><p>This could include the acceleration of ice thaw on all three of the globe's large, land-based ice sheets – Greenland, West Antarctica and the Wilkes Basin in East Antarctica. The potential collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet is seen as a key tipping point, as its loss could eventually <a href="https://science.sciencemag.org/content/324/5929/901" target="_blank">raise global sea levels by 3.3 meters</a> with important regional variations.</p><p>More than that, we would be on the irreversible path to full land-ice melt, causing sea levels to rise by up to 30 meters, roughly at the rate of two meters per century, or maybe faster. Just look at the raised beaches around the world, at the last high stand of global sea level, at the end of the Pleistocene period around 120,0000 years ago, to see the evidence of such a warm world, which was just 2°C warmer than the present day.</p>Cutting Off Circulation
<p>As well as devastating low-lying and coastal areas around the world, melting polar ice could set off another tipping point: a disablement to the AMOC.</p><p>This circulation system drives a northward flow of warm, salty water on the upper layers of the ocean from the tropics to the northeast Atlantic region, and a southward flow of cold water deep in the ocean.</p><p>The ocean conveyor belt has a major effect on the climate, seasonal cycles and temperature in western and northern Europe. It means the region is warmer than other areas of similar latitude.</p><p>But melting ice from the Greenland ice sheet could threaten the AMOC system. It would dilute the salty sea water in the north Atlantic, making the water lighter and less able or unable to sink. This would slow the engine that drives this ocean circulation.</p><p><a href="https://www.carbonbrief.org/atlantic-conveyor-belt-has-slowed-15-per-cent-since-mid-twentieth-century" target="_blank">Recent research</a> suggests the AMOC has already weakened by around 15% since the middle of the 20th century. If this continues, it could have a major impact on the climate of the northern hemisphere, but particularly Europe. It may even lead to the <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/handle/10871/39731?show=full" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">cessation of arable farming</a> in the UK, for instance.</p><p>It may also reduce rainfall over the Amazon basin, impact the monsoon systems in Asia and, by bringing warm waters into the Southern Ocean, further destabilize ice in Antarctica and accelerate global sea level rise.</p>The Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation has a major effect on the climate. Praetorius (2018)
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