11. Day Zero - Superman's Not Coming: Our National Water Emergency and What We the People Can Do About It

11. DAY ZERO

Early in 2018, Ian Neilson, the deputy mayor of Cape Town, South Africa, announced a cap on the amount of water that could be used by each person in the city. Every resident of the city, he proclaimed, was limited to thirteen gallons of water each—no one could use more than thirteen milk jugs full of water each day.

That might sound like a lot. It’s not. As one writer living in South Africa put it, “That’s enough for a 90-second shower, a half-gallon of drinking water, a sinkful to hand-wash dishes or laundry, one cooked meal, two hand washings, two teeth brushings and one toilet flush.” That writer was on the hunt for a dry-composting toilet, so that her one flush of the toilet could be saved for something else. One less toilet flush, which represented a third of the daily allotment, could mean another cooked meal, or the opportunity to wash dishes and laundry on the same day. That thirteen-gallon cap isn’t arbitrary: it’s the United Nations guideline for a human being’s minimum daily requirement. (By contrast, the federal government estimates that the average American uses up to a hundred gallons per day.)

Throughout Cape Town, citizens were having to figure out how to make the most of the little water they had left. Things looked dire—it was the sort of crisis that wasn’t supposed to happen in one of the wealthiest cities on the continent. As South African resource-management expert Anthony Turton put it, “I’m afraid we’re at the 11th hour. There is no more time for solutions. We need an act of God. We need divine intervention.”

It’s one thing when we read about parched, arid desert towns or cities in conflict zones running out of water. We might feel bad about their misfortune, but it makes sense. In places where disease is rampant, where electricity is limited, where warfare is constant, it isn’t too surprising to us that they are also running out of water. That’s what makes the story of Cape Town’s water shortage so astonishing. This isn’t some war-torn village in the middle of nowhere, nor is it a landlocked, sunbaked desert. This is a vibrant coastal city of 4 million people, a place that hosts tourists in the millions every year. It’s the home of world-class art museums and dining, a city that, less than a decade earlier, had helped to host 3 million soccer fans for a successful World Cup tournament.

And in its disastrous water shortage, Cape Town is also an early look at one of our planet’s probable futures. Cape Town’s residents gave the day that the city would run entirely out of water an appropriately ominous-sounding name: Day Zero. On Day Zero, when emergency water reserves would reach their lowest point, the city would shut off the majority of its pipes, and faucets at homes and businesses across Cape Town would run dry. To meet the bare needs of survival, citizens would line up each day to collect just 6.6 gallons each—half the UN minimum. Originally, the water was supposed to run dry at some point in 2018. But thanks to almost unheard-of efforts on the part of the city’s leadership and its residents, Cape Town was able to push Day Zero back. To do that, they had to enact water taxes, reduce water pressure, and institute the water caps described above. City officials made it illegal to use a water tap to wash your car, fill a pool, or water a garden. Shipments of bottled water sold out as soon as they hit store shelves. A black market in river water cropped up online. Thousands of Capetonians lined up in the predawn hours to fill jugs and jerry cans at natural springs. Sometimes, fights broke out in the lines, and a “water police force” was mobilized to help. The mayor even took to making unannounced public visits to households that were using too much water—an effort to shame them and everyone else into reducing their personal water usage.

Maybe you noticed a story about Cape Town’s impending water disaster sometime in 2018. And maybe, after clicking on it or scrolling past it, you never saw a follow-up. It wouldn’t be surprising, given the notoriously short attention span of the international news cycle. It would be natural to think that, somehow, Cape Town solved its problem and that the water shortage was averted or was a false alarm. Otherwise, you would’ve heard something, right?

The remarkable efforts of Cape Town’s citizens didn’t avert Day Zero. They only pushed it further out into the future. The problem hasn’t gone away. It has only been delayed. For the first time in human history, a city of millions of people came within a hairs-breadth of running out of water completely. And Day Zero is still coming.

SHRINKING WATER SUPPLIES, SHIFTING CLIMATE

What happened in Cape Town? The same thing that threatens so many cities around the world. The population of the city increased rapidly. Its government deferred building sewage-recycling plants to increase the usable water supply, and it waited too long to implement aggressive conservation policies. Above all, the environment that produces the city’s water changed entirely. Cape Town had hotter weather, less rainfall, and emptier streams—all of which led to a shortage that got worse and worse over time. Then, starting in 2014, came three years of drought, which emptied out Cape Town’s reservoirs and led to the 2018 near–Day Zero moment.

Cape Town isn’t alone. The 21 million people who live in Mexico City regularly have their domestic supplies of running water cut off. The same thing has happened in São Paulo, Brazil. In 2015, the Brazilian city’s water reserves hit terrifying lows, and some of the emergency trucks brought in to help were looted. By one estimate, São Paulo had only twenty days of water left—less than three days removed from its own Day Zero.

Bangalore, Beijing, Istanbul, Moscow, Cairo, Jakarta—these cities of millions of people, around the world, could be at serious risk for running out of water soon. Perhaps some part of you thinks that this sort of crisis doesn’t happen in wealthy “Western” countries. But the climate crisis is worldwide, and it makes no such distinctions. Melbourne, Australia, is a city on the edge of a desert continent, at a time when deserts are expanding around the world. The city’s authorities predict that its Day Zero may come in the next decade. California recently emerged from a record-breaking five-year drought; its major cities, Los Angeles and San Diego, were down to less than a year’s supply of water in reserve. Other American cities, like Miami and Salt Lake City, are running the same perilous risks. If and when these cities run out of water, we may be looking at an unprecedented kind of political unrest. One driven by a loss of one of the two substances, along with air, that human beings cannot live without. The struggle for water, under those conditions, would be a struggle for survival. And there is no telling what people pushed to such an extreme of desperation would do to satisfy their bodies’ thirst for another day.

I’ve spent a lot of this book talking about what happens when our water becomes contaminated—and discussing what we can do about it as individuals and communities. But there’s another threat to our water supply, one that affects not the quality of the water we rely on, but its quantity—in fact, its existence. There would be no water crisis in Cape Town—no looming Day Zeros from China to California—without global warming. There is no greater existential threat to our future on this planet. Perhaps it is cold comfort, then, that we now understand the looming threat better than ever.

Many, many volumes published by thoughtful people have covered the ways in which man-made carbon emissions are changing the environment and the planet we live on. I have no interest in reciting what is settled science. And the truth is, you don’t need to study the science to see its effects. In nearly every place I travel in the United States, people come up to me and discuss how different the weather has become, even in the last decade.

That difference in the lived experience of our climate isn’t your imagination, your nostalgia, or your faulty memory talking. It’s real, and it’s backed up by hard data. The New York Times has a nifty tool that quantifies climate changes over our lifetimes in our most familiar places: you can try it for yourself at www.nytimes.com/​interactive/​2018/​08/​30/​climate/​how-much-hotter-is-your-hometown.html. Enter your hometown and year of birth (or, if you prefer, the year you moved there), and observe how much the climate has changed from then to now. I chose Hinkley, California, the town where I first studied drinking water contamination, and 1982, the year I first moved to the state. In 1982, Hinkley experienced 129 days with temperatures above 90 degrees Fahrenheit. In 2017, it experienced 143 such days—or an extra two weeks of scorching heat. And lest you think that 2017 was an exception, you can enter the same data and look at the steadily rising trend line for yourself. In the world’s great population centers, the outlook is even worse. By the end of the century, Jakarta is expected to experience six months of 90-degree heat each year, and New Delhi is expected to suffer through eight months.

Consider the charred wreckage left behind by the 2018 California wildfire season, which burned more than 1.8 million acres and did an estimated $9 billion in damage. Consider Hurricane Maria in 2017, which killed thousands in Puerto Rico and left parts of the island in a months-long blackout. Or set aside the spectacular damage caused by an unbalanced planet and look out your back door. Were summers this hot when you were a kid? Wasn’t there less torrential rain? Don’t you remember more snow on the ground in winter? However we measure the facts, people are waking up and seeing that the climate is fundamentally different now.

We can’t escape the facts—2018 was the fourth hottest year on record and the last five years have been the hottest climate researchers have observed. The year 2018 was also the wettest year in the last thirty-five years. Scientists attribute the higher rainfall to a warmer atmosphere, which causes more evaporation, along with warming oceans, which add to the intensity of storms and hurricanes. As I mentioned in the last chapter, 2018 was also one of the most intense years for natural disasters with more than fourteen events in the U.S. alone, including two Atlantic hurricanes causing severe rains.

“Climate change” is an umbrella term for a global set of processes taking shape in innumerable, interconnected ways, ranging from the dwindling of glaciers in the Andes to the increased outbreaks of prairie fires in the American Midwest, to the increasing prevalence of disease-carrying mosquitoes. It would take a much longer book to address the ways in which averting, mitigating, and adapting to climate change is going to affect our lives in the years to come. So, rather than doing that, I’m going to focus on the impact of climate change on the thing I know best: the water we drink. I’m focusing on water because “What do I do when I turn on the faucet and nothing comes out?” is a far more compelling, visceral, and, I hope, action-motivating question than “What do I do if the average global sea level is a meter higher in 2100?”

This isn’t some distant problem that your children’s children will have to deal with. Unless you are at death’s door right now, this is something that you—the person reading this book—are going to have to deal with. Climate change is reducing the amount of drinkable water on the earth’s surface—not in some projected future, but right now—and we need to understand the scope and scale of the problem so we can take immediate action to fix it.

In October of 2018, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a report that made no bones about how bad things were. We have, they argued, a dozen years left to keep temperatures in check, or else we face drastic consequences. A team of ninety-one scientists from forty countries came together to study and review nearly every research paper written on this subject, and they all came to one incontrovertible conclusion: we need to act. Now. Climate change is happening, and it’s having a direct effect on millions of people around the world. Unchecked, it could lead to worse forest fires than we’ve seen, massive food shortages, and the death of many coral reefs around the world—among many, many other catastrophes.

Before I get into the substance of the report, let me tell you a bit about its authors. The IPCC is chaired by Hoesung Lee, a South Korean scholar who is an international expert on the economics of climate change and the world’s most trusted authority on the state of the climate. Rather than conducting its own research, the organization assembles and digests the most up-to-date research in the fields of climate science and meteorology into reports that the world’s governments can use to inform their actions. Thousands of scientists have contributed to this process. The IPCC has been at it for three decades, and by 2007, its global reputation was such that it won that year’s Nobel Peace Prize, along with Al Gore. If there’s a knock on the IPCC, it’s that, given the organization’s consensus-oriented process, it produces findings that understate the threat of climate change. If you read the IPCC’s reports, you’ll notice that nearly every sentence they write and every conclusion they reach comes with a confidence assessment—low, medium, high. They are their own harshest critics.

As climate journalist David Wallace-Wells explains, “Almost since the panel was convened, in 1988, it has been criticized for being too cautious in its assessment of the problem—a large body of temperamentally cautious scientists zeroing on those predictions they can all agree on (and which, they may have hoped, policymakers might find workable). The panel’s Wikipedia page has separate subsections for ‘Outdatedness of reports’ and ‘Conservative nature of IPCC reports.’ ” So take what you’re about to read with a grain of salt: not because it exaggerates the threat but because it quite possibly downplays it.

The report’s full name is “Global Warming of 1.5°C, an IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.” But the full title gives the reader important context. The IPCC focused on outlining, in a painstaking, numbers-based, hundreds-of-pages-of-thinking level of detail, what happens if we keep the warming of the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Planet-wide, we’re already 1 degree above pre-industrial levels, and what this report makes clear is that controlling climate change to limit warming to only 1.5 degrees is both hugely difficult—and important. If half a degree of difference doesn’t seem like much, think again. When these scientists are speaking about degree-level differences, they aren’t talking about this or that unseasonably warm or cold day. They are talking about the planetary temperature on average. In this context, a difference of a half degree Celsius reflects a fundamental change to the planet’s climate, a delicate system on which human civilization, and our way of life, depend.

As Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II, put it, “Every extra bit of warming matters, especially since warming of 1.5°C or higher increases the risk associated with long-lasting or irreversible changes, such as the loss of some ecosystems.” Temperature differences that look small on the printed page translate, in fact, to questions of life or death for millions.

Some of these changes are already taking place. The report’s authors found that climate change of 1°C above pre-industrial levels has already taken place. “One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes,” said Panmao Zhai, a climatologist who co-chaired one of the report’s working groups. Among other things, the report’s authors found that climate change has led to both “an increase in the frequency and duration of marine heatwaves” and more heat waves on land. It’s also led to an increase in the incidents and the intensity of heavy rainfall—and at the same time, increased the risk of droughts in the Mediterranean region.

But the primary work of the report wasn’t to tell us what we already know—that there have been changes to our environment that are a direct cause of things we’ve done—but to look ahead, to point us to what might happen if we aren’t more careful stewards of the planet.

If we pass 1.5 degrees Celsius, we can expect more extreme weather: “The strongest warming of hot extremes is projected to occur in central and eastern North America, central and southern Europe, the Mediterranean region (including southern Europe, North Africa and the Near East), western and central Asia, and southern Africa (medium confidence). The number of exceptionally hot days are expected to increase the most in the tropics, where interannual temperature variability is lowest; extreme heatwaves are thus projected to emerge earliest in these regions, and they are expected to already become widespread there at 1.5°C global warming.”

The report also explores what happens if we exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius and hit 2 degrees of increase above pre-industrial temperatures. And again, while half a degree of difference can seem minuscule to us, the report reminds us just how much is at stake. At 2 degrees, warming and related ocean acidification will destroy most of the world’s coral reefs. Flooding could endanger coastal cities around the world, such as Guangzhou, China; Mumbai, India; Osaka, Japan; New Orleans; and New York City. The property damage, displacement of millions of people, and costs required to protect low-lying areas from increased flooding would help cut global GDP per capita by more than a tenth. And even the most monumental efforts to protect urban centers from flooding will, by necessity, remain incomplete. As Wallace-Wells points out, Manhattan is wealthy enough that policymakers will almost certainly consider it worth protecting from rising waters with a massive seawall; in fact, such efforts started soon after Superstorm Sandy in 2012. But such an undertaking costs hundreds of billions of dollars, is likely to take more than thirty years to complete, and still leaves neighboring Long Island exposed. How would local and state governments deal with the millions of internal climate refugees who would have to abandon their homes under that scenario?

Already, we’re learning that the U.S. isn’t exempt from the displacement of populations caused by climate change. A “climate refugee” isn’t a distant, foreign figure on the evening news. It’s a family driven out of their home by the Camp Fire in California or Hurricane Florence in the Carolinas. “The survivors of the disasters,” writes environmental reporter Alleen Brown, “have resorted to camping in tents in retail parking lots, sleeping on friends’ couches, parking trailers on the lawns of their destroyed homes, or renting overpriced apartments in communities where housing has become increasingly scarce. Safety nets like flood and fire insurance or the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) routinely fall far short of providing the support needed to keep survivors housed, fed, and on their feet.”

Even more seriously, how would governments across the world deal with influxes of climate refugees at their borders or within their borders? That is not a hypothetical question, either. Keep in mind that many of the refugees arriving at America’s southern border have been displaced by drought in Central America. One of them is Davíd, a farmer who joined the migrant caravan from Honduras to the U.S. border. Asked by Brown why he had made an almost unthinkably dangerous trek across much of Central America and Mexico on foot, he responded, “I’m here because of the drought.”

In fact, none of the potential consequences of unchecked warming hit as close to home as the prospect of massive droughts. The number and scale of droughts will be “substantially larger at 2°C than at 1.5°C in the Mediterranean region (including southern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East) and southern Africa.” Like flooding, water scarcity is expected to be worse at 2 degrees than at 1.5 degrees—with socioeconomic differences also affecting which populations are made worse off by the effects. Unsurprisingly, the most impoverished will suffer the worst effects. But none of us will be exempt: at 2 degrees of warming, up to 400 million people will suffer from water shortages like, or worse than, the one just experienced in Cape Town.

Keep in mind, though, that even 2 degrees of warming is an “optimistic” target, because without dramatic reductions in emissions, we are projected to blow right through it by the end of the century. Without a change to the emissions status quo, 3 or 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century are in fact more likely. Three degrees could mean multi-year droughts in southern Europe and Africa. Four degrees could cut worldwide grain production by half, meaning regular economic crises and famines around the globe. Read enough of the report and a mere 1.5 degrees of warming, even taking into account the devastation that it would bring, starts to sound like some sort of happy ending.

ACCESS TO CLEAN WATER

I read this report with great interest, and even greater trepidation, because climate change around the world is tied to what I have made my life’s work here in the United States: making sure people have access to clean water. But just weeks after this UN report landed, another report dropped that hit much closer to home. In late November 2018, thirteen federal agencies got together and released their own report showing that if America did nothing about climate change, we risk losing 10 percent of our economy. You read that right: climate change poses a direct and active threat to one-tenth of the entire GDP of our country. As The New York Times reported, that kind of loss would represent “more than double the losses of the Great Recession a decade ago.” Just like the IPCC report, the domestic version pointed out that the crises we can already see playing out around us—devastating annual wildfires in the West, crops failing in the Midwest, and record-breaking hurricane seasons on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts—can be traced to the single source of climate change.

The 1,656-page report isn’t remarkable just for its findings but for the fact that it was published at all. In fact, thirteen federal agencies (including NASA and the EPA) banded together to release a report that directly contradicted the views of President Trump, who has, among his other remarks, celebrated “beautiful, clean coal” and dismissed climate change as a “Chinese hoax.” It’s the most comprehensive data published to date in our country determining that “there is no convincing alternative explanation” for global warming other than human causes. Needless to say, Trump didn’t agree with the report’s conclusions, and he’s directed the EPA to take actions that will make things substantially worse for the climate, the environment, and, by extension, our water supply by—to take one example—rolling back vehicle emissions standards. His administration also directed scientists to finalize their research and release the report two weeks early on “Black Friday,” a day when most Americans are distracted with holiday shopping and not checking the headlines. When asked about it the following Monday, Trump told reporters, “Yeah, I don’t believe it.”

“There is a bizarre contrast between this report, which is being released by this administration, and this administration’s own policies,” Philip B. Duffy, president of the nonprofit climate change research organization Woods Hole Research Center, told The New York Times. But here at least I want to dwell on the positive. Even as the climate change denier-in-chief dominates the headlines, we should never forget that scientists and policy professionals continue to work behind the scenes to alert us to the reality of climate change, and to help us meet its challenge before it’s too late. When exactly is too late? Keep in mind that the IPCC tells us that 1.5 degrees of warming will likely be locked in by 2040.

What’s to be done about a problem that’s as big as climate change? I’ll end this chapter with some practical suggestions, but before we get there, I think that there’s one suggestion that takes precedence. Meeting the challenge of climate change begins with looking the facts squarely in the face. That’s why I’m glad that the federal report pulled no punches in its conclusions: “More frequent and intense extreme weather and climate-related events, as well as changes in average climate conditions, are expected to continue to damage infrastructure, ecosystems, and social systems that provide essential benefits to communities. Future climate change is expected to disrupt many areas of life, exacerbating existing challenges to prosperity posed by aging and deteriorating infrastructure, stressed ecosystems, and economic inequality.”

And when it comes to water, the report is downright bracing: “Rising air and water temperatures and changes in precipitation are intensifying droughts, increasing heavy downpours, reducing snowpack, and causing declines in surface water quality.”

It’s worth diving into the details. Part of what climate change does is change weather patterns—more intense snow, not enough rainfall, areas that become warm when they should be cold. When that happens, it leads to unpredictability in how much water is available relative to what communities have needed in the past. Climate change also leads to sea levels rising, and when salty ocean water rises and gets mixed in with a drinkable water supply, that further reduces how much water is available for people to drink. It doesn’t help, of course, that U.S. water infrastructure is in about as bad a shape as the rest of our infrastructure, and that many of the water and waste-treatment plants we rely on were built for different weather conditions than we are experiencing today. Estimates show that updating our water infrastructure alone—dams, levees, wastewater systems, and so on—will cost some $1 trillion in the next twenty-five years.

And it isn’t just potable water that’s at risk either. It’s the water that’s integral to all aspects of our lives and economies. Water cools power plants, for instance, and the report notes that we may face energy issues if our power plants can’t cool themselves. Some energy is derived from water directly, in the form of hydroelectric plants. When the total volume of available water decreases because of fluctuations in the environment, that energy source is also put at risk, potentially driving consumers to fossil fuels and their emissions. It’s a vicious circle. Our farm animals need water to drink, and thus agriculture is hit by the changes in water that stem from the changes in our environment. And, of course, the crops we depend on for food depend, in turn, on water. A 2012 drought brought the Mississippi River to record low levels, holding up shipping and leading to harvest failures in the Midwest. The extreme floods and droughts that we’ve become accustomed to seeing on the nightly weather reports often mask deeper, systemic changes and shocks—the implications of which can last for decades.

The report makes an additional point about water that I want to emphasize: “Water systems face considerable risk even without anticipated future climate changes.” Even if climate change were magically resolved tomorrow, dams and levees aren’t as well maintained as they ought to be, and as a result, “several recent heavy rainfall events have led to dam, levee, or critical infrastructure failures.”

One of the most notorious of these failures was the breach of the levees protecting New Orleans during 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which led to disastrous flooding. But similar water infrastructure failures have become the background noise of American life. For instance, in 2015 and 2016, a total of seventy-five dams failed in South Carolina under the pressure of unusually high rainfall. And in 2017, the emergency spillway of the Oroville dam in Northern California collapsed, leading to the evacuation of some 180,000 residents. These are just the acute failures. The infrastructure that makes your tap work and releases clean water is sorely in need of an upgrade. “Across the Nation,” the report finds, “much of the critical water infrastructure is aging and, in some cases, deteriorating or nearing the end of its design life, presenting an increased risk of failure. Estimated reconstruction and maintenance costs aggregated across dams, levees, aqueducts, sewers, and water and wastewater treatment systems total in the trillions of dollars based on a variety of different sources.” Here’s a truly frightening conclusion for many people in the United States who live close to a dam: “More than fifteen thousand dams in the United States are listed as high risk due to the potential losses that may result if they failed.”

But what has climate change, you might be asking, done specifically to drinking water? Here’s what has happened: as temperatures rise in different parts of the country, the total amount of snowfall is reduced. (As the report notes, this has been especially true in the western United States.) Melting snow eventually populates the freshwater bodies we rely on for drinking water. Less snow means less melt, which means lower water levels. Won’t that be offset, though, by increased rainfall? Not enough to solve the problem. First, the rainfall isn’t expected to be concentrated in the parts of the country that most need water. As the federal report points out, for instance, “the 2011–2016 California drought was characterized by low precipitation combined with record high temperatures.” Second, where heavy rainfall does occur, it often “mobilize[s] pollutants,” washing them into the water supplies we depend on. You may remember the viral photos of hog manure spilling out of storage lagoons in North Carolina during Hurricane Florence in 2018. Add to these facts that the timing of the melting is happening earlier, and the fact that melting glaciers change aquatic ecosystems, and you have what the report calls “a risk of decreased and highly variable water supplies for human use and ecosystem maintenance.”

Climate change affects the demand for water, as well as the supply. In many ways, the impact of climate change on water can be a vicious circle: not only does a warming climate deplete our usable water supplies, but the hotter it gets, the more water humans need to use. There is, of course, the obvious way in which that works: when it’s hotter, we consume more water. But there’s also the fact that water used to irrigate crops evaporates faster, prompting farmers to use more water to make up for the loss and, therefore, to deplete precious supplies like underground aquifers at even higher rates. In other words, as temperatures rise, farms have to consume more water just to maintain their operations.

The quality as well as the quantity of water is affected when the climate changes. When there are massive floods or other events that shift how water flows in our country, it means that new substances, pathogens, microbes, sediment, and saltwater, can infiltrate our drinking water supplies. Rising sea levels and deteriorating infrastructure means that “saltwater intrusion” is a serious threat to drinking water on islands from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and even in Miami.

Miami already faces “chronic flooding,” even on days when the sun is out. But its water problems are likely to prove even more immediate than sea level rise. As the seas rise, saltwater seeps into the supplies of groundwater that Miami relies on for drinking water. At the same time, increased rain and flooding connected to climate change threaten to pollute drinkable groundwater with toxic waste from local Superfund sites and with human feces from septic tanks. Currently, Miami draws its water from an easy-to-tap aquifer. But, reports Bloomberg Businessweek, “without this abundant source of freshwater, made cheap by its proximity to the surface, this hot, remote city could become uninhabitable.” If anything, the headline on the story is even more harrowing: “Miami will be underwater soon. Its drinking water could go first.”

Another major degradation of drinking water took place in Toledo, Ohio, in August 2014. A toxic algae bloom developed in Lake Erie, as the microorganisms turned much of the water that Toledo residents rely on into a viscous green soup. The algae didn’t just discolor the water; they released toxins that can cause vomiting in humans and death in domestic animals and livestock, and local water treatment plants were unable to keep up. Half a million residents were left without drinking water. As the recent federal report recognizes, this was no one-off incident but another impact of climate change: “Warmer temperatures and heavy precipitation associated with climate change contribute to the development of HABs [harmful algal blooms].” In fact, such blooms have been trending upwards in Lake Erie for the past decade. It’s not just a problem for Ohio. In the summer of 2018, another toxic bloom, the worst in more than a decade, was responsible for the deaths of thousands of marine animals in Florida.

For all of these reasons, the warming of the planet can degrade the quality of our water both directly and indirectly. Keep in mind that all of these stresses on our water systems are interconnected. In that way, they’re not unlike the interconnected changes in our planet’s climate—for instance, the way that rising temperatures threaten to melt Arctic permafrost, releasing methane emissions that raise the temperature even more, or the ways that carbon emissions filter into and acidify the oceans. The built water systems we rely on can be almost as complex, and almost as prone to unexpected shocks.

Consider the case of Toledo again. The temporary loss of the city’s drinking water was an inconvenience rather than a tragedy because residents could rely on bottled water for as long as the algal bloom lasted. But bottled water doesn’t magically appear on shelves—collecting it just depletes water supplies somewhere else. Not only does the process of bottling and shipping it contribute to the emissions that make events like Toledo’s loss of drinking water more likely; more to the point, a bottled water solution is only practicable to the extent that drinking water problems are localized and temporary. When a water shortage lasts too long or affects too many people, then we’re no longer in Toledo, we’re in Cape Town, where bottled water couldn’t stay on the shelves long enough to meet demand.

Or consider the 2012 Midwest crop failures. Centuries ago, crop failures like that would have starved entire regions, bringing mass death in their wake. We’re fortunate that such famines are far rarer today, because the global food system is generally flexible and resilient enough to make up for local shortages. You might have experienced the 2012 crop failures yourself in higher prices at the grocery store, but not in the agonizing realization that you can’t feed your family. But the very reason the 2012 crop failures had a limited impact is the same reason that the increased severity of droughts is so worrisome: the interconnectedness of global food and water systems. Those systems are resilient enough to adapt to localized crop failures. But as the pace of droughts picks up and the likelihood of crop failures increases, those shocks can reverberate through the global system. Remember, a consequence of 4 degrees of warming could mean that worldwide grain outputs are cut in half. A drought in Ukraine or Zimbabwe could mean empty shelves at the grocery store in Rhode Island.

In a way, all of these interlocking facets of our lives that might suddenly go wrong point to one of the biggest tragedies of climate change. It helps us see the interdependence and the beautiful complexity of the natural and human systems we have unthinkingly relied on, at the moment those systems are threatening to fall apart.

And yet, all of this can still feel a bit abstract. When I turn on the tap in my kitchen, I don’t think about global water systems, at least not very often. I think about water, about the life-giving substance that pours out of the faucet with a flick of my wrist. If I’m in a grateful mood, I think of how fortunate I am to live in a place where clean, drinkable water is a utility, not a luxury; how much I depend on the infrastructure that channels water from melting snow, through reservoirs and filtration systems and into my tap, and on the people who work every day to maintain it; how my cup of water depends on a set of precarious environmental conditions that are eroding every day. I hope you’ll think about those things too from time to time. But it might help, instead, to think once again about what will happen on the day when you turn on the faucet and nothing comes out.

Lori Paup doesn’t have to imagine that. Soon after she and her family moved to a new home in southeastern Arizona in 2014, she found brown water running out of her kitchen tap. When she ran her hand under it, she felt grains of sand. Soon the dishwasher and laundry machine stopped working, and a local water driller confirmed her fears: “You’re running out of water.” Her house relied on a well dug three hundred feet deep to tap into an underground aquifer but suddenly it went dry. So did her neighbors’ wells. About a hundred families in the Sulphur Springs Valley where Paup lived experienced similar water shortages.

The immediate culprit was large-scale industrial farming in the valley. Backed by overseas investors, massive agricultural operations had sprung up over the previous decade, digging up to two thousand feet deep in search of the water needed to grow pecans and pistachios. Groundwater extraction in Arizona was, and still largely is, unregulated, so if agribusiness siphoned off the water that families like the Paups and their neighbors relied on, there was no recourse. But the larger problem is that the industrial farms are extracting more and more of a dwindling resource. As The New York Times Magazine reports, “Aquifers across the globe are beginning to quietly dry up under the compound strain of increased food production and a two-decade stretch that now includes the ten warmest years in recorded history.”

Aquifers take thousands of years to accumulate, as precipitation gradually seeps into the earth, but humans can deplete them in a fraction of that time. In the past decades, residents and farms in the Sulphur Springs Valley were extracting more than ten times the amount of water from the local aquifer than percolated in each year; in other words, they were withdrawing from a generational savings account at a rate that would soon leave them bankrupt. Around the world, the same pattern is repeating itself, as climate change and more intensive agriculture deplete water supplies on both the input and output ends.

“Of the planet’s thirty-seven major aquifer systems,” NASA scientists found, “twenty-one were on the verge of collapse. In the Great Plains, farmers had exhausted a third of [the Ogallala aquifer’s] potable water in just thirty years. In California, the Central Valley aquifer was showing signs that it could drop beyond human reach by the middle of this century. But the worst declines were in Asia and the Middle East, where some of the planet’s oldest aquifers were already running out of water.”

For people like Lori Paup, running out of water isn’t an abstraction they read about in the news, or in climate projections, or in international reports. It’s a reality that’s already here. Her family has been unable to sell their home, but they were lucky enough to move to a nearby ranch as caretakers; for now, they can draw from a well with sufficient water. But for Lori, the act of opening a faucet will never be the instinctual, indifferent act it is for so many of us: “You’re wondering what might happen when you turn on the sink. What it could mean.”

None of this is a secret. It’s public knowledge that the aquifers are drying up. It’s common sense that you can’t practice water-intensive farming in a desert and expect the water to last forever. It makes headlines when a dam fails in California, or freshwater turns slimy green in Ohio, or the Mississippi River gets so low that boats have to stop sailing it. You can read the IPCC report, or our federal government’s report online, for free. We can’t say we haven’t been warned.

I started this chapter describing the harrowing story of Cape Town’s Day Zero, and its temporary delay. But I didn’t mention the part of the story that strikes me as the saddest. It’s a headline from April 26, 1990, in the Cape Times newspaper: “City will run out of water ‘in seventeen years.’ ” The prediction was a bit premature, but in essence, it was right on. Cape Town was warned. Cape Town knew what was coming. And despite some truly impressive efforts, it couldn’t take the warning seriously enough because if you really believe a warning that you’re going to run out of water, the source of life, you’d do anything, pay any cost, and implement any policy to avert it. Cape Town didn’t, and the prediction came true.

We are getting all of the same warnings today, except on a far larger, more dramatic, more unignorable scale. The lights are flashing red. Are we going to heed the warnings? Climate change can be our problem—ours to face and ours to solve. Just as I don’t want to understate the scale of the crisis, I don’t want to understate what facing it will require of us. As one of the scientists involved in the drafting of the UN report put it, “Limiting warming to 1.5°C is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but doing so would require unprecedented changes.” We’d need those changes to achieve the required 45 percent reduction in carbon emissions from 2010 levels by 2030—and we’d still have to remove some CO₂ from the air manually.

Yet the mere fact that the UN report offers the possibility of fixing this problem should be reason enough to try: we’re not too far gone yet to do something about the dramatic effects of climate change generally, and the effects it has on our water supply specifically. As you know, I’m not a believer in standing on the sidelines. The thousands of people I meet with and talk to every year come to me because they want to do something. They want to take action. They want to make their voices heard. And perhaps most important, they want to make sure that their kids, families, and neighbors are able to drink safe, clean water—for a long time.

So how can we make that happen? How can we take real, concrete action for the sake of our planet and our water? Here are some suggestions:

VOTING COUNTS

In addition to turning the EPA over to polluting industries and gutting fuel efficiency standards, one of the things that the Trump administration did that has had profound consequences for the future of the environment was pulling America out of the Paris Agreement. That was a set of agreements that the U.S. helped to negotiate back in 2016, intended to help the entire world band together and figure this problem out. Taking us out of the agreement told the world that we’re not serious about fighting climate change, even as the report released by Trump’s own administration points out that a changing climate will hit our economy twice as hard as the Great Recession. Along with China, the U.S. leads the world in carbon emissions—and it’s impossible to imagine a solution to the problem of climate change that doesn’t include American action.

So, what to do with a problem that seems as difficult and big as global warming? Start with your vote. Make sure that the next time an election comes around, the candidates know that you, their constituents, are paying attention to their votes and messages on global warming. If you don’t like what your representatives have to say, tell them so. Write in. Call in. Demand answers. The next time there’s an election, see where your local and national candidates stand on the Paris Agreement and then vote. Tell your friends to vote too.

Let me say again: this isn’t about taking political sides or choosing a political party. I’ve been disappointed by both Democrats’ and Republicans’ approach to these issues. And in truth, they aren’t political issues, or they shouldn’t be. These are reality issues, scientific issues, and as the IPCC report illustrates, there’s a well-established, well-researched, agreed-upon set of conclusions—and we need to begin taking them seriously. I am encouraged by recent elections: in 2018, a new crop of men and women were elected to Congress who are sounding the right notes on these subjects. They are introducing solution-oriented legislation like the Green New Deal, which would work to reduce U.S. carbon emissions and create new jobs to boost the economy. At a minimum, they are making issues like climate change a central subject of discussion, and that itself is important.

Probably the most important element of the IPCC’s report is the one that the media underplayed: that there is still time to do something about the problem of global warming. In other words, things look bad, but there’s hope. We nurture that hope when we turn it into action, when we stand up and say, “Enough is enough. This is a global problem, and the United States of America needs to lead on this.” I’ve ended every chapter of this book by telling you things you can do, and this chapter is no different. You need to pay attention to problems that seem remote and unsolvable like global warming, because they affect the water you drink and the water your children will drink. In fact, if we don’t take action, our taps will run dry sooner than we may think.

WATCH BUSINESS LEADERS

There are leaders in the private sector in the United States who have been vocal and outspoken on the issue of climate change. While Elon Musk is a controversial figure, I applaud what he did as soon as President Trump pulled out of the Paris Agreement: Musk stepped down from the White House advisory councils he was a part of. As he tweeted, “Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.”

If you can imagine a situation designed for flak, this was it: politics, climate change, and Elon Musk, all in one very public moment. But Musk knows what he’s talking about. He’s not a tree-hugger or an environmental activist; he’s the head of a car and rocket company, and he’s also scientifically literate enough to understand that climate change isn’t just a spooky-sounding phrase.

Why does his story matter? Because when a CEO of a company has the courage of their convictions, when they endure the flak they’re bound to receive for making a statement like that, we ought to applaud them and support them. Bob Iger, the CEO of Disney, announced that he too was leaving a White House advisory council after the Paris decision. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has announced plans to fight climate change; Apple CEO Tim Cook has been a trailblazer for sustainable business practices and has called other leaders to action.

We need to make sure that the leaders of companies that make the products and services we use every day know that we’re watching their moves on these subjects. It’s one thing for a random person to tweet their disapproval about the Paris decision; it’s another when a Musk or a Cook goes out on a limb and tells the White House that they’ve done something wrong.

TAKING DIRECT ACTION

But what can you do, personally? If someone like Musk or Cook can’t force the White House to accept the reality of climate change, what can you hope to accomplish?

Quite a lot, actually, but only if you join forces with others around the country and around the world who share your convictions. The good news is that, thanks to the internet and social media, it’s easier to find people who share your convictions than it ever has been. Throughout our history, tools like boycotts and civil disobedience have succeeded in bringing much-needed change to pass. Consider the Standing Rock protests in 2016 and 2017, in which thousands came together to resist a pipeline in North Dakota that threatened Native Americans’ land and drinking water. In the short run, the protesters were unable to block the pipeline, but their stand inspired and mobilized ordinary people across America, a few of whom ran for and won public office in the 2018 midterm elections.

Stopping the worst of climate change will take many more brave stands like that, from many more ordinary people who have decided to make their voices heard. Connecting with climate activists near you only takes a few clicks, but it can make a world of difference.

REDUCE YOUR FOOTPRINT

Climate change is the result of millions of small decisions we make every day, whether to eat meat for lunch, book a trans-Atlantic flight, or bike to work instead of drive. My choices and yours are part of climate change. I point that out to make you feel empowered. Climate change isn’t happening to us, it’s something that we are all participating in, and it’s something that we can choose to change, if we act in time. The scary thing about climate change is that our small and seemingly inconsequential choices turn out, over time, to add up to effects of such magnitude that they can radically disrupt our way of life. But that’s the fortunate thing about climate change too: the solution isn’t, at base, any more complicated than those small choices. The solution starts right now, right where you are at this moment.

In 2017, a team of researchers reviewed the results of thirty-nine studies to identify the most effective steps individuals can take to lower their share of carbon emissions.

Here are the top twelve actions:

1. Have one fewer child
2. Live car-free
3. Avoid one round-trip trans-Atlantic flight
4. Buy green energy
5. Buy a more efficient car
6. Switch from an electric car to car-free
7. Eat a plant-based diet
8. Replace a gasoline car with a hybrid car
9. Wash clothes in cold water
10. Recycle
11. Hang-dry clothes
12. Upgrade lightbulbs

Of course, even if you take every step on that list—even if you’re a childless, car-free vegan without a dryer—you will only make an infinitesimal dent in the total amount of carbon pumped into our atmosphere every minute. So why bother?

First, because it’s the right thing to do. I don’t want to be part of a problem on the scale of climate change, period—sometimes, we’re called to do the right thing whether or not we can be sure of the results. But in this case, doing the right thing shows us that, together, we don’t have to be powerless in the face of climate change. We don’t have to sit passively as water dries up and is poisoned all around us. We can start by taking action in our own lives, and then reaching out to others who share our commitments and building movements that can reach those in power before it’s too late. Just as learning about water helps us appreciate it more, I hope that addressing climate change and its impact on our lives can help drive your future choices.

If you need any more motivation to act now: While this book was going through edits, another climate change headline caught my eye about the Colorado River. A study published in February 2020 confirmed the dire water situation in the West. It’s not news that for years drought and warming temperatures have taken a toll on the river’s flow. But computer simulations and historical data helped piece together that about 1.5 billion tons of water from the river has been lost, thanks to an ever-shrinking snowpack, according to researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey. That amount of water is equivalent to the annual water consumption of about 10 million Americans. The Colorado River is the largest and most vital one in the Southwest, supplying drinking water to 40 million people, supporting $1 trillion in economic activity each year, and irrigating millions of acres of farmland.

Here’s the thing. While these numbers sound alarming, evaporation is not new. Scientists have been monitoring and warning us about these problems for years. In 2015, researchers called evaporation “a large and continuing problem in the Colorado River basin, including Lake Mead and Lake Powell, where about 500 billion gallons of water evaporate annually.” These are the two largest man-made water reservoirs in the country. Once this water is gone, it’s gone. I even have a study looking at water loss in Lake Powell from 1986. The time to find new water management strategies is here. The time to act on climate change is now.

Global warming, like many of the issues we’ve highlighted in the book, can seem distant, theoretical, and impossible to solve. But as you’ve seen with water pollution and the threat posed by toxins to our communities, there’s always something that can be done. I am, and have always been, a big believer in the idea that no problem caused by people can’t be fixed by people. Global warming is no different. If I’ve learned one thing in my career, it’s that each of us can change the world.