The Wizard and the Prophet2 Read online

  The best way to deliver water to people’s homes efficiently, Big Water argues, is to put the process in the hands of the market. If water is scarce, then raise the price—let the law of supply and demand take over! If people want water that is not only plentiful but actually clean, then raise the price again. The market will find the balance between what consumers want and what they can afford. And if the water company does not make good on its promises, it can be ejected in favor of another firm. The threat of competition will force utilities to be accountable.

  Implicit in the free-market scenario, however, is the assumption that families can actually afford to pay for their water—and are willing to accept the price. I saw how that assumption can play out when I visited the city of Liuzhou, a small city of 1.5 million in southwestern China. In its rapid industrialization, Liuzhou has surrounded itself with more and more factories, simultaneously increasing living standards, attracting more residents, and poisoning the Liu River, formerly its water supply. The city government realized at the turn of the century that it would have to create a city water network, including sewage-treatment plants. Unable to afford the cost, Liuzhou borrowed $100 million from the World Bank in 2005. Then it signed a thirty-year contract with Veolia. The company sent out construction crews. Naturally, it needed to recoup its investment. It raised the cost of water.

  The historic center of Liuzhou occupies a promontory in a big oxbow of the Liu. Toward the northern tip of the promontory is a beat-up public square near an area that city maps label Maojin Chang—Towel Factory. The name comes from a factory that went out of business before the current wave of modernization. Most of the neighborhood’s inhabitants still lived in the shuttered factory’s dormitories, or so they told me when I came by. Many were pensioners; some were farmers who were thrown off their land to make way for the factories outside town. They were not wealthy people, and they were keenly aware of water prices. In a few hours of wandering around Towel Factory Square I found half a dozen men and women who were paying a quarter or more of their income just for water.

  Economics 101 does not readily apply to neighborhoods like these. A few blocks away from Towel Factory Square, an elderly man named Wei Wenfang waved at me. He had heard me asking about water and was eager to contribute to the discussion. (Like other residents, I suspect, he was also tickled by the opportunity to talk to Josh, my friend and translator—tall, blue-eyed Mandarin speakers were a local rarity.) Until 1975, Wei said, city water was free: you simply dipped a bucket into the Liu. You could literally see the bottom of the river back then! he said with an emphatic flourish of the hands. But now Wei paid almost $10 a month, more than a quarter of his pension, for water that was nowhere near as good. When I asked if he could save money by conserving water, he barked with laughter. Each water meter in the neighborhood, he said, covered sixty to seventy apartments, many of which are occupied by more than one family. The total bill was divided equally among the residents. “There’s no way to save,” he told me. “Your efforts are just lost in the mass. That’s the way it is all over the city.”

  The contract created a company, Liuzhou Water Services, its ownership split between Veolia (49 percent) and the city (51 percent). To judge by my conversations, people felt uncertain about the implications. Some said 51 percent ownership meant that the government was actually in control. Others fretted that the entire scheme was a way for officials to avoid responsibility—they had hired a foreign company to build a plant rather than stop the politically powerful factory owners who were polluting the river. It was a small instance of the human race’s perennial inability to govern itself. “There’s plenty of water to drink,” Wei said. “Everyone knows that is not the problem.”

  Three R’s

  The facility was big, white, and noisy. Sandwiched between an interstate highway and the Pacific Ocean, it stood in the shadow of a nearby power plant. The complex had three parts, each a bland metal-and-glass box in the style of Suburban Car Dealership. Inside the largest of the three parts was a hall the size of a football field with a thirty-foot ceiling. It was filled with the throbbing sound of large pumps. Workers wore hard hats and noise-canceling headphones. Reaching to the ceiling were endless racks of eight-foot-long gray tubes connected to fat white pipes by blue hoses. The pipes were connected to even larger pipes and then to a ten-mile-long underground conduit. The facility was located in Carlsbad, in southern California, and named after a beloved former mayor. Opened in December 2015 after seventeen years of legal and political squabbles, it provides freshwater to half a million people. It is the Western Hemisphere’s biggest water-desalination plant. Every day, it removes the salt from about 50 million gallons of water.

  Carlsbad first proposed desalination in 1998 because its officials feared that the region would run out of water as its population and economy grew. The city is at the end of the pipeline that brings water from the Colorado River to southern California. If supplies became limited, the city administration worried, those who were last in line would be stuck. The Carlsbad project would be equivalent to sticking a straw into a boundless, ever-present supply of water: the Pacific Ocean. It would be a test of the Wizard’s way out of problems: surpassing local ecological constraints, eliminating water anxieties once and for all.

  The Carlsbad desalination plant, the biggest in the Americas, opened in 2015. Credit 51

  About 3.5 percent of the weight of seawater consists of dissolved salts, most of it table salt. The most common way of removing the salt is known as “reverse osmosis.” Simple in principle but complex in practice, reverse osmosis involves forcing seawater through a membrane with extremely fine holes—so fine that they allow water molecules to pass through but block the slightly larger salt molecules. One sort of complexity stems from the need to make membranes that are both strong enough to withstand continual pressure but fine enough to allow water to pass through. Another stems from the cost of fueling the motors that pump millions of gallons through the membrane. The Carlsbad plant provides 10 percent of the region’s water, but accounts for 25 percent of its cost. The price of building it was about $1 billion.

  The reverse-osmosis machinery in Carlsbad was designed by IDE Technologies. IDE was founded by the Israeli government in 1960 under the name Israel Desalination Engineering. A special project by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, it was created in the hope of eliminating the nation’s dependence on the Jordan River, contested by Jordan and Syria. After their initial hope of freezing freshwater out of seawater proved unworkably expensive, the IDE engineers tried out one scheme for desalination after another. They achieved enough success that they were contracted to build several desalination plants in areas that could not readily be provided with water in any other way—the Canary Islands, for instance, and several remote air bases in Iran. But practical desalination remained a distant prospect.

  In 1966 Israel invited a California scientist, Sidney Loeb, to spend a year at Ben-Gurion University in Beer-Sheva (the new Hebrew name for Beersheba). Loeb had worked for industry after taking an undergraduate degree in engineering in 1941. Feeling restless, he quit his job at the age of forty and went to graduate school at the University of California at Los Angeles. Like the researchers in Israel, scientists at UCLA had been seeking practical desalination methods. Loeb joined the quest with another student, a Canadian named Srinivasa Sourirajan. They developed the first successful reverse-osmosis process in 1960—“successful” in the sense that it worked in a laboratory, not that it could be deployed in the real world. Sourirajan soon ran into visa problems and Loeb continued alone, constantly tweaking the all-important membrane. By 1965 the technology had advanced enough that Loeb was able to build a commercial reverse-osmosis plant—the first in the Americas—in Coalinga, a town of about six thousand in the San Joaquin Valley. So thick with salts was its groundwater that residents had always brought in potable water by tanker cars. The apparatus, small enough to fit into the village firehouse, provided about a third of th
e town’s drinking water. It was operated by Coalinga’s lone fireman.

  Loeb gained little from his success—Coalinga’s water was costly, and most of the rest of North America had had cheaper sources. But the Coalinga plant resonated in Israel, where he was asked to teach a course on reverse osmosis and set up a reverse-osmosis plant at a kibbutz at the southern edge of the Negev. Afraid that the water was full of chemicals, kibbutz residents initially refused to drink the water. The university sent a doctor to explain that the kibbutz had already pumped out so much groundwater that the minerals in the remainder were building up to toxic levels. The kibbutzniks reconsidered and dipped in their cups. The modern desalination industry was born. Today more than eighteen thousand desalination plants are operating around the world. The field is growing—but it is also contentious. Some of the biggest disputes are in California.

  California has always experienced droughts, but they have been more frequent in the twenty-first century. Every year but one between 2007 and 2017 was a drought year; the years between 2011 and 2014 were the driest period in California for more than a millennium. Wizards and Prophets agree that something must be done to waterproof the state, but they disagree on everything else.

  Credit 52

  The former point fingers at the state’s dam reservoirs, which are surprisingly small; unable to store California’s occasional heavy rains, they have often been forced to dump water in dry periods. Expanding the dams is a Wizardly option; so is digging a reservoir almost twenty miles long to store water from the Sacramento River. Long in the making is a multibillion-dollar plan to build two thirty-five-mile-long underground tunnels to funnel water from the same river to the Central Valley Project and the State Water Project. Perhaps most important, California localities have proposed more than twenty major desalination plants (not all are actively being pursued). The desalination plants must be built now, Wizards argue, so people can develop the technology for later, when it will become critical; costs will come down with experience, as has been the case with, for example, solar power.

  Finding more water is especially important for agriculture, Wizards say. If the world needs to produce a lot more food—maybe twice as much—California, with its good soil and warm climate, is one of the places where it will happen. If that food is provided by C4 rice or some other super-productive grain, California will need water to grow it. Already farms use four-fifths of the state’s water. Greatly increasing agricultural productivity means increasing the supply, which in the long run means desalination. Ultimately, Wizards argue, it is the only way for people to surpass local limits.

  Prophets resist these claims. Desalination plants kill marine life, they argue, pollute the seas with their discharges, and increase utility rates—all because big businesses feel crimped by the soft path. Prophets instead point to water recycling, stormwater capture, lawn and garden watering rules, leak tracking, graywater reuse, appliance- and fixture-efficiency standards, well controls (drilling is almost unregulated, leading to groundwater depletion)—an array of small-scale changes that mostly involve nudging people and businesses to change their habits and become more efficient. Encapsulating this approach is the mantra of the Three R’s: reduce, reuse, and recycle.

  Many of these measures apply to cities, but Prophets believe the soft path also could apply to agriculture. More than half of California farms use flood irrigation—covering their fields a few inches deep in water—as did the farmers of the ancient Fertile Crescent. Converting these to sprinklers would save huge amounts of water; more still could be conserved by simply not using irrigation when the soil is already moist. (Incredibly, irrigation still continues even when it is raining.) Further savings could be made by adjusting what farmers grow, as Israel has done with cotton. Most of the almonds in the United States, for example, are grown by about four hundred large operations in the San Joaquin Valley, which use about 10 percent of the state’s water supply. And the state remains the nation’s biggest producer of alfalfa, used for cattle feed. Most of that feed is sent to cattle in other states that could grow their own; some is exported across the Pacific. Meanwhile, more water is used to grow alfalfa than is consumed by all the households in California. And so on.

  The dispute in California will be echoed in different ways across the globe. The hard path creates universal Wizardly solutions that do not depend on local conditions or knowledge. It leads quite naturally to broad fields of waving grain—visions of concentrated productivity. Societies that adopt the soft path will lead toward networks of smaller farms with drip irrigation and multiple crops—the inhabited, networked spaces preferred by Prophets. One values a kind of liberty; the other, a kind of community. One sees nature instrumentally, as a set of raw materials freely available for use; the other believes each ecosystem has an inner integrity and meaning that should be preserved, even if it constrains human actions. The choices lead to radically different pictures of how to live. What looks like a dispute over practical matters is an argument of the heart.

  * * *

  *1 Terminology in this region is contested. I use “Palestine” to refer to historic Palestine—the area under British rule from 1922 to 1948—and “Palestinian territories” for the non-Jewish areas established in 1948 by U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181. That resolution split Palestine into two separate entities, Israel and the Palestinian territories, neither of which accepted its proposed borders.

  *2 Brooks borrowed the term “soft path” from the energy advocate Amory Lovins, whom I discuss in Chapter 6.

  [ SIX ]

  Fire: Energy

  Pithole

  First the derricks, then the bars and brothels. After that, the wasteland.

  In 1859 the first successful oil well in the United States was drilled in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Six years later, in January 1865, more oil—a lot more oil—was found where I was standing, eight miles away in the almost uninhabited slopes near Pithole Creek. Within weeks new wells were being dug by the score and spewing petroleum across the snowy slopes that rose from the river. Wagons carrying tons of oil in improvised barrels jolted one after another on the muddy tracks out of town. When one wagon got trapped in the mire, those behind it could be stuck for days. Some outfits turned to ferrying the oil down shallow, rocky Pithole Creek. They dammed the stream, piled barrels onto rafts, and then broke the dam, letting the rafts surf downstream on the wave. Vessels capsized so often that people made a profitable business of skimming crude from the riverbank.

  In every direction the landscape was stripped of trees to build oil silos, oil barrels, oil roads—and a new oil city, population fifteen thousand. Conjured out of nothing, it was the world’s first petroleum boomtown. It had no legal existence or official name or town charter or anything but petroleum, so much petroleum that it seeped to the surface and covered every horizontal surface in a foot-thick impasto of oily mud mixed with snow and excrement (the city had no sewers). Most people called the new settlement Pithole. Newspapers called it Oil-Dorado or Petrolia. Whatever the name, it was a frenzy of extraction. Entire buildings were thrown up in a few days, then caught fire and were rebuilt. Oil seeped into ordinary water wells, a fact discovered when firefighters who had been dumping water onto one of Pithole’s many fires realized that they were instead feeding the conflagration. Seizing the opportunity, an inventor developed a wheeled firefighting dredge that scooped up mud, hundreds of pounds at a time, and catapulted it into the flames. While demonstrating his invention at a fire, its creator fell into the machine and was thrown into the blaze.

  Pithole’s main street was a muddy wreck during the town’s brief heyday. Credit 53

  By August 1865, seven months after the first Pithole strike, more than three hundred derricks were operating and hundreds of other wells were under way. People bought and sold drilling land in a fever, waving bricks of cash. The atmosphere was filled with smoke and ash and the baying of human beings in chase of money. So many sex workers flooded into the town that they marched d
own First Street in a daily parade. Hooker and john alike were sure they were at the beginning of something that would last forever and change the world.

  Today (in a photograph taken from the same location) almost nothing remains of the world’s first oil boomtown. Credit 54

  That same month a big well stopped flowing. Others followed—the oil was running out. Brothel owners, sensitive to customers’ moods, quickly vacated their establishments; other, less perceptive businesspeople followed later. By the spring of 1866 scores of buildings stood empty. Pithole was barely a year old but already in breakdown. In 1870 only 281 people lived there. Eight years later somebody bought the entire town for $4.37.

  Today not one of Pithole’s original structures remains. During my visit I strolled down paths that had once been streets past vacant land that had once been real estate. Not another soul was in sight. Somebody had planted trees along the paths. Hand-stenciled signs identified the locations of vanished buildings: hotels, law offices, banks. A small museum with irregular hours stood atop a hill. The age of petroleum seemed to have alighted there and left.

  A brief, tawdry flowering, followed by collapse—surely Pithole’s inhabitants had not imagined this as their future (most of them, anyway). Walking through the city’s ruins, I found it hard not to wonder whether our industrial era was not simply Pithole writ large: an evanescent surge of wealth, much of it squandered, doomed to end when the world’s fuel supply was consumed.