Full Transcript

Jay Famiglietti:
Hi, I’m Jay Famiglietti, the host of Let’s Talk About Water Podcast. This is a podcast about the future of our planet’s water and why you should care. We’re coming to you from the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon.

As an American ex-pat, I’ve been following the 2020 presidential election while buried deep, deep in snow here in Saskatoon. Which is great, of course, for recharging soil, moisture and groundwater and feeding the South Saskatchewan River comes spring. However, in contrast to the bucolic snow covered plains here in Saskatchewan, in many ways, including environmentally, the run-up to the US election was a tumultuous one. The campaign was interrupted by weeks of roaring wildfires in the West and multiple hurricanes that battered the Gulf and East coasts. And all of this was against the cultural backdrop in which many Americans developed a new awareness of the need to end systemic racism, including environmental racism, and a majority of Americans rank climate change as a key issue for policy makers to address, and all the while the Trump administration continued, with great success, to roll back well over 100 environmental policies and regulations that have protected water, air, soils, forests, oceans, and well, us for years.

I’m relieved that vice-president Joe Biden won and is now president-elect. Biden has made his climate agenda clear. It is a top priority for his administration and he wants to weave it into the fabric of all aspects of government, domestic, economic, foreign policy, and more. Clearly, President-Elect Biden already has his hands full with the urgent need to better protect Americans from the raging coronavirus, but he’s already taken clear steps towards implementing his environmental agenda, and today we’d like to discuss how he might move forward on water.

To reflect on perhaps the most consequential US election results in modern times and what it means for water, my friend and colleague, Dr. Peter Gleick joins us from his home in California. Peter is the co-founder and president emeritus of the Pacific Institute in California, and his work there focuses on regional and global fresh water issues, including climate change, water and conflict, the human right to water, and a number of important water policy issues. He and the Pacific Institute have recently released a brief called Water Recommendations to The Next President, and together we’re going to discuss what President-Elect Biden means for water security and climate change strategies across the United States.

Welcome to the show, Peter.

Peter Gleick:
Thanks very much, Jay. It’s great to see and hear you again.

Jay Famiglietti:
So I’m curious, Peter, what was going through your mind when the election results started coming in on November 3rd?

Peter Gleick:
Perhaps as a scientist, it’s no surprise, I favor politicians who understand and pay attention to science and who use science and policy recommendations and actions. I have to say when the election results started coming in on the night of the 3rd, I turned off everything. I turned off my TV, I turned off my phone, I stopped paying attention to Twitter, which I paid too much attention to anyway, because the results made me nervous and I waited and I tried to go to sleep and I sort of slept the night of the 3rd and the morning of the 4th, and I got up in the morning and things looked a lot better.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, I agree. So just to share with you, my wife and I were in the same boat, and just because we live in Canada now, we’re still American citizens and we follow the news closely and it was extremely stressful. Yes, I did vote by mail and we were able to follow up and find out that they were counted. But yeah, it was really, really nerve wracking, even though we’re all prepared. We’re all prepared in advance to know that the day of election was going to favor President Trump and that the mail-in votes would favorite Biden, but it was so difficult to watch and scary because a lot of us who focus on climate and environment know that if President Trump was elected to a second term, it could have disastrous implications for climate and environment.

So what do you think a Biden win then means for water security and for climate change?

Peter Gleick:
Well, of course that’s a gigantic question. The simplest answer is it means a return to the use and value of science in making policy. If there’s anything that, from my perspective, has been egregious about the last four years, it’s the attempts to censor and discount and eliminate the use of science or even twist the use of science in policymaking. So that alone is worth everything to someone like me. It means more scientific representation on federal advisory committees, scientists have been kicked out of many of those committees. Hopefully it will mean a very prompt roll back of some of the efforts to eliminate regulations around water and climate and other environmental issues.

You mentioned that in the introduction, hundreds of regulations have been eliminated or delayed or rolled back under the Trump administration. And there’s an opportunity to put some of those back in place, to accelerate new regulations on contaminants that have been delayed for now four years or longer, to pay more attention to the fact that there’s still very large communities in the United States that don’t have access to safe water and sanitation, something that’s been ignored again for way too long, to restore protections for the waters of the United States.

Jay Famiglietti:
And so that’s really encouraging to hear. And of course, we’ve already seen to your point about opportunities for scientists to get back on important advisory panels. We’re already seeing that with President-Elect Biden’s coronavirus task force already communicating directly in the news about the severity of the situation, the realities about when a vaccine might be available, what that means for 2021. So that’s really, really encouraging. So, you mentioned the rollbacks and I mentioned the rollbacks and let’s just set the stage a little bit for our audience, which is not strictly American. The Trump administration has rolled back so many policies and regulations. Rather quietly, I think. Can you talk about a few of those that you know about?

Peter Gleick:
Sure. So again, there are lots of them, but let me mention two on the water side that are really critically important. Again for your audience, the United States has two major federal pieces of legislation around water. One is called the Clean Water Act and that addresses industrial pollution and the protection of natural waters in the US, and one is called the Safe Drinking Water Act that protects the quality of drinking water. For the Clean Water Act, the major rollback has been an elimination of an effort, starting in 2015 by the Obama administration, to protect a whole series of watersheds and rivers and streams and ephemeral streams and wetlands that were not previously protected. It was a massive effort to really extend protections to waters in the United States that had not previously had legal protection. And the Trump administration rolled that back. It was probably the biggest water disaster in policy that we saw.

On the Safe Drinking Water side, for our tap water systems, probably the critical issue is the effort by the Environmental Protection Agency, which is responsible for our Safe Drinking Water Act regulations, to cancel or slow down regulating certain toxic chemicals that are not currently regulated, what we call forever chemicals. The PFAS’s, perchlorate, a terrible water contaminant was scheduled to be added to the protection list, and that was delayed or eliminated, and efforts to eliminate lead pipes still remaining in many communities in the United States have been slowed down as well. So those are two examples of really egregious water regulations that the Trump administration eliminated or rolled back that are protective of public health.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, it’s really amazing that he was able to do that. I want to share a little anecdote with the OSF, the water technology conference in Israel about a year ago and the EPA administrator, Andrew Wheeler, was there. And so Wheeler gets up there and he starts talking about how clean the air and the water are. And of course, this has been happening for a few decades, things have really been getting cleaned up, and he segues very quickly into all the deregulation that they’re doing, making the implication that it’s the deregulation that’s resulting in the clean air and the clean water. And I think every American in the room, myself included, that live in the United States, that care about the environment, got up and left. So it was my first sort of in person brush with the disinformation, with the alternate reality that is the Trump world.

Peter Gleick:
Yeah. So it’s not a surprise because of who Trump has put into those positions. These are all anti-government, deregulation advocates, industry lobbyists and advocates. The environmental regulations are anathema to them. The idea that deregulation helps the environment or that the environment is already so cleaned up that we don’t need these regulations anymore is just belied by the facts. But facts have never been a key element under the Trump administration.

Jay Famiglietti:
I know, and this is the problem, and it’s people like you and like me that have to go out there and tell the truth. So again, I’m really glad you’re on the program. You and your colleagues Heather Cooley and Jason Morrison at the Pacific Institute, recently released a document called Water Recommendations to The Next President. What made you want to do that?

Peter Gleick:
The truth is we do this every four years. The Institute is an independent non-partisan research institute. We were founded 33 years ago to look at a wide range of environmental, economic development, and political science issues focused entirely on water and basic human needs. And every four years, independent of whoever the president is or whoever the new incoming administration is, we try to offer some policy recommendations, based on science, for what the new administration might do on the water side. That was no different this year. And we made these recommendations not knowing who the next administration would be led by. We could’ve come up with a huge list, but we put them into four categories.

The first category was the fact that there are still tens of millions of Americans that don’t have access to safe, affordable drinking water and sanitation. The second is the issue of climate change and the role that climate change is in effecting water resources and will continue to play in affecting water resources. The third is the risk that water problems worldwide pose for US national security and international security, associated with the work we’ve done for a long time on conflicts, growing conflicts, associated with water. And then the fourth is a recommendation that the US redo something we haven’t done for decades. And that is create a national water plan, put together a national water commission, create a national water plan that addresses broadly all of the challenges around water and strategies for moving forward on them.

Jay Famiglietti:
So this access to water thing, I find it really, really troubling. You mentioned that tens of millions of Americans are without access to safe, clean drinking water. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Peter Gleick:
There are 800 million people around the world that don’t have access to what we describe as safe drinking water. There are over 2 billion people worldwide that don’t have access to fundamental sanitation services. Which again, you and I, and probably all of your listeners, completely take for granted because we’re fortunate enough to live in the wealthier parts of the world. And yet even here, even in the United States, there are millions of people who turns out don’t have access to safe water and sanitation. Either their water is contaminated with chemicals, it’s at a price they can’t afford, they live in farm worker communities in the Central Valley of California that have water that’s contaminated with nitrates or pesticides or other agricultural chemicals. They live on Native American communities that have never had adequate access to safe water and sanitation. And it turns out there are millions of them. There are millions of people in the United States that don’t have access to what we consider safe water and sanitation, and that’s frankly, inexcusable in the 21st century. But it’s also something that most people don’t know about in the United States.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, I agree. I think most people are surprised and you’ve sort of indicated in your remarks just now that it’s the marginalized communities, it’s the poor, it’s the communities of color that bear the brunt of this. And do you have any recommendations for the incoming administration on how to deal with this particular aspect?

Peter Gleick:
Yes. So again, the water recommendations, there’s been a lot of talk about investment in infrastructure and the need in the United States to put money into infrastructure. Well, part of that need is water-related infrastructure. It’s low-income housing assistance funding. It’s rural water improvement funding. It’s investment in, frankly, a program to remove every single lead pipe that still remains in our streets, in our old urban centers, that contributes to lead contamination in our drinking water. It’s new standards for contaminants that have not been adequately regulated. As we talked about a little bit earlier, the PFAS’s, the perchlorates, the whole suite of chemical contaminants that ought to be regulated under our Safe Drinking Water Act and ought to be removed from our tap water. We’ve not addressed that adequately.

It’s water efficiency programs, both in cities and on farms, that frees up water, that permits more water to be made available to these disadvantaged communities, and at the same time saves the environment and saves money. Now those are some of the priorities that we describe as terms of solutions for addressing this failure to meet basic needs for water and sanitation.

Jay Famiglietti:
Those are really solid recommendations. Some of the more concise recommendations that I’ve heard on the topic. So thank you for sharing those with us.

It really does look like President-Elect Biden wants climate change to really be a cross-cutting theme in his administration. So given that he’s already going to do some of the things that you recommend, like staying involved in the National Climate Assessment and rejoining the Paris agreement, are there other things that you would like to see done?

Peter Gleick:
Yeah. Well, first of all, let me say that at last. I’m a climate scientist by training and a hydrologist, I’ve been working in this field for a long, long time. It’s long overdue that we’ve had a national leading political figure talk about the efforts that his administration and his team will take on climate. It’s not enough to acknowledge that climate change is real, that ship sailed long ago in the scientific community. It’s not enough to say that we ought to be doing something. We have to take action. To his credit, the Biden team, long ago in the campaign, acknowledged the critical need to address climate change. It’s been a sea change. It’s a sign for optimism decades too late, but I’m more optimistic now that we have a chance, which we would not have had if there had been a reelection of Donald Trump, a chance to stop this, or at least even slow down the speeding train that’s coming at us.

The Biden administration has already said they’re going to put climate not just the science department, not just the Environmental Protection Agency, not just the Department of the Interior, but the Department of Agriculture, for example, the Department of Commerce, the State Department, and policy. And one key example of what we need to do that was eliminated by Donald Trump is we need to re-up the Clean Power Plan in the United States, which acknowledges that climate change is real and that pushes aggressively forward at de-carbonizing our energy system, getting carbon out of our energy production system. We already know that coal is dying. There was nothing that Donald Trump could do to stop that, but frankly, we need to kill it faster than it’s dying. We need to eliminate oil, we need to eliminate natural gas, and we need to accelerate the replacement of those with renewable non-carbon sources, and Biden has committed to doing that.

Jay Famiglietti:
I guess it’s clear to say that you’re optimistic about the future under President Biden.

Peter Gleick:
Well, so I’ve been accused of being too optimistic in general, and I am an optimist, which some people might think of as just a poorly informed pessimism. I’m certainly more optimistic with the Biden administration, because none of this would have been done under the Trump administration. We don’t have any more time to lose addressing climate issues. Not just because of impacts on water, but because of coastal impacts, and impacts on agriculture, and impacts on health, all of these things. So I’m more optimistic now than I would have been. I’m pessimistic in the sense that we have to acknowledge that climate change at the moment is out of control. That there are now unavoidable impacts of climate change that we’re going to have to deal with. We have to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases and slow down that speeding train, but we’re also, unfortunately, in a position now we have no choice but to also look at the unavoidable impacts of climate change on our environment, on our water systems, on our agriculture, on our coasts. The failure to act decades ago means those impacts are here.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, so since we’re taking a dark turn, what I saw as a darker side of the report, which is the Assessment and Preparation for National Security threats to Water, can you talk about those a little bit and what that entails?

Peter Gleick:
You’re absolutely right. In the last few years, not just in the United States, but around the world, there have been what we call cyber attacks, cyber terrorism on water systems. Water systems are increasingly computer connected. We control our dams, we control our water treatment plants through computer systems. And when those computer systems can be hacked, then they can be taken over. And the risk is that there’s a risk of water quality challenges, water contamination, release of water from dams. We’ll never go back to an analog water system, where some guy goes and turns a valve and opens a spigot and physically adds chemicals to a water treatment plant. There are serious advantages to computer control, but there are liabilities and disadvantages too, and one of those is the risk of cyber terrorism. Now I believe, first of all, that our water systems are relatively low on the cyber terrorism target list, but they’re not zero. And the good news is that there are ways to protect these systems, we just need to be more aware of both the risks and the solutions to that.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, I’ll tell you what was a real eye-opener for me. So I worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for a few years before I moved to Canada and we were having a conversation one day with the cyber security section. And I was unaware that JPL suffers attacks at the rate of something like thousands per second, from around the world. I was completely unaware. It’s a national lab, there are many secure projects that are going on. So the purpose of the talk was to raise that level of awareness amongst the scientists, amongst the employees, and it really worked.

Peter Gleick:
I don’t think anybody in the general public is completely aware of the scope of these kinds of attacks. I certainly wasn’t. I work at a relatively small, independent, nonprofit research institute. We don’t do any secret work, any confidential work. We don’t work for industry. We do science and research, and yet even our small institute, my single IT guy tells me, is constantly being probed by outside computer networks. And we have firewalls in place and there’s nothing secret about what we do, the risk is that we would lose our research and have it be destroyed somehow. But, my guess is these attacks are everywhere and we need to be aware of them.

Jay Famiglietti:
Yeah, I think they are. And so I want to finish up with kind of a question about the reality of the Biden agenda. He’s going to have so much on his plate with the virus, with healthcare, with race relations. We know climate is important. I’m concerned about, say some of the water quality issues. I think the climate related water issues we’ll probably get swept into and maybe well addressed by the climate agenda. I’m concerned about the water quality issues that we’ve discussed. And the other thing I’m concerned about is what happens if the Democrats don’t win those two Senate seats that will be run off in January, which would effectively yield a tie in Congress in the Senate. And one in which Vice-President-Elect Harris, who is a Democrat and of course supports the climate agenda, would preside over. So what are your thoughts on those things?

Peter Gleick:
Well, you laid it out pretty clearly. If the Democrats don’t win those two Senate seats that are still up, then control of the Senate will remain in Republican hands. And that will hugely hinder the Biden administration’s ability to get legislation through. Now, it’s entirely possible that there are enough moderate Republicans in the Senate that Biden will still be able to pursue some sort of a legislative agenda, especially on the environmental front, which has much broader support. But even without the Senate, just getting qualified people back into the departments, the Department of the Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, the science agencies, that alone will be an enormous positive impact that doesn’t require the Senate, doesn’t require Republican cooperation.

There are other things that the president can do, as an executive, in terms of rolling back some of the worst negative changes of the Trump administration. So I’m cautiously optimistic that we’ll be better off. I’m enormously optimistic that we’ll be much better off than if we had had another four years of Trump. But it will remain to be seen how much can actually be done. Again, just on the positive side, every opinion poll in the United States shows that the public really cares about water, that the public is increasingly really aware of the climate challenge. And as with politics, first you need to bring the public along and then sometimes the policymakers follow.

Jay Famiglietti:
Peter, I think that’s a very optimistic note on which we can wrap it up. Peter Gleick is the co-founder and president emeritus of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research institute in California that focuses on regional and global freshwater issues, including climate change, water in conflict, water policy, the human right to water, and much more. Peter is a MacArthur Fellow, a member of the US National Academy of Sciences, and a winner of the 2018 Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization. And he’s the author of many scientific papers and a dozen books, including The World’s Water, Bottled and Sold, and A 21st Century US Water Policy. He’s also the lead author of the Pacific Institute’s recent policy brief Water Recommendations to The Next President. You can find the brief and learn more about Peter and the work of the Pacific Institute at PACINST.org. That’s P-A-C-I-N-S-T.org. Thanks very much, Peter.

Peter Gleick:
Great to talk to you, Jay. Thank you.

Jay Famiglietti:
Well, that’s it for another episode of Let’s Talk About Water, produced by the Global Institute for Water Security at the University of Saskatchewan and the Walrus Lab. I’m your host Jay Famiglietti.

Thanks to the Let’s Talk About Water team who help with the show together, including Mark Ferguson, Laura McFarlan, Amy Hergott, Jesse Witow, Shawn Ahmed, Stacey Dumanski, and our producer, Sean Prpick. And as always, special thanks to Linda Lilienfeld.

Check out our next show on December 2nd on which we’ll take a fresh look at indigenous water rights. But instead of checking the calendar, make it easy for yourself and set an alert so you’ll know the moment a new episode drops. We’re also really easy to find because we’re on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitchr, and many other quality podcasting platforms. You can also stream us on Facebook at Let’s Talk About Water Podcast or follow us on Twitter @LTAWpodcast. See you next time.

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