2 hours ago
15
This summer could be the hottest, driest and deadliest in English history. Successive heatwaves have so far claimed almost 3,000 lives. Nearly three-quarters of England and all of Wales is in drought, while key reservoirs are parched. Across this brown and stickily unpleasant land, from Grimsby down to St Ives, hosepipe bans are in force, while music festivals are staged not on green fields but in giant dust bowls.
Just how bad is it? I asked a leading climate scientist.
“This is as good as it’s going to get,” said Hayley Fowler, a professor at Newcastle University. “It will only get hotter.”
A little while back, the Met Office filmed a mock weather forecast for 2050, with an authoritative yet smiley man wielding a clicker in front of a map. So far, so soothingly familiar – only the UK had gone from its usual green and jaunty yellow to a deep, bloody red. Cambridge was stamped with 40C, while Somerset and Dorset were up at 45C. This is the near-future that awaits you and me, our children and grandchildren. Just two decades away, the weather forecaster urged us to block out the sun and stay indoors. “Drink plenty of fluids,” he added.
Except there will not be as much fluid to drink. Britain is world-renowned for its soft steady drizzle, but over the next couple of decades, our summers will turn arid while winters are more likely to bring a regular deluge of rain, breaking our riverbanks and flooding our homes. Indeed, El Niño means this winter is likely to be especially bad – up there with Storm Desmond, believed Prof Fowler, the cyclone that in December 2015 shut down railway lines and plunged more than 60,000 homes in the north of England into darkness with no power.
“Climate whiplash”, scientists call this: lurching from bone-dry to soaked to the bone. Pleading for water half the year, then terrified of its power the other half. This is not “climate change” as it used to be shown on official graphs, running on smooth lines pointing upwards; this is breakdown.
Not that you’d know it from our politicians. This week, Nigel Farage’s useful idiot, Richard Tice, urged us to stop moaning and down some English sparkling. Our new prime minister, Andy Burnham, is strikingly eloquent on many subjects, but keeps stumm on the climate crisis, apart from his promises to be “pragmatic” on fossil fuels. Elsewhere, the columnists dust off their standby paragraphs fulminating about the Englishman’s right to wash his own SUV, and the public information ads chide us to turn off taps, as if more mindful toothbrushing is a climate-adaptation strategy. All is business as usual – even while the business model is broken.
“We are used to taking water for granted, thinking of it as infinitely available,” Dr Jonathan Paul, an earth scientist at Royal Holloway University of London, told me. “Very soon, we will be treating it as a precious resource.” He can foresee battles for who gets water between farmers and datacentres.
At the start of this year, I wrote about the temporary drought faced by households in Kent and Sussex, thousands of whom faced no running water for days on end. In Tunbridge Wells, people told me how quickly social norms broke down. Washing from buckets, they spent their days feeling grubby and smelly. Supermarkets were stripped bare of water.
Readers wrote to me about how those everyday scenes struck them as frightening, but they are what lies ahead for many more of us, if we leave a looming water crisis to be solved by our busted water system. Britain’s water supply is entrusted to a string of local private monopolies, overseen by underfunded, demoralised and largely toothless watchdogs. Since Margaret Thatcher sold off our water, this essential infrastructure has fallen into the hands of a transnational network of spivs and cowboys who have stripped it of almost every penny. For the sake of elite enrichment and lower household bills, the water system has relied on the public investment made by postwar social-democratic governments.
Within living memory, says Paul, Britain was a world leader at the design and building of reservoirs. Its water engineering and research was studied from Iran to Israel to the US. That expertise has vanished and the last big reservoir in England was built in 1992, planned and designed before privatisation.
after newsletter promotion
These financiers and their husk companies cannot cope with the scenarios laid out by scientists. This summer the water companies have urged us to take shorter showers while lobbying ministers to allow surge pricing – which means charging you and me more for our water when we most need it. Never let a good crisis go to waste, after all. Late in the day, the government has demanded the industry plan for climate breakdown, but its plans are little more than patching up leaks and cutting down on waste. As is argued in a recent book on the industry, Murky Water: Challenging an Unsustainable System, by the Foundational Economy collective, this is a “fantasy plan”, in which Thames Water and the rest suddenly fix more burst pipes than they have ever managed before.
This crisis has been in part imposed on us from above – by successive bungling governments and rapacious companies. It will not be fixed from above, by either a Labour government paralysed with fear of the electorate or financiers out to make one last buck. Even if the water industry is taken back into public hands, we will need to find a way of investing vastly more into the system. As is argued in Murky Water, the fairest way of doing that is by changing our billing system so that we pay according to our means.
But for now consider today’s Britain. A country famous for its rain struggling with a dwindling water supply. A country in the North Sea now importing its energy. A democracy that just 10 years ago voted to take back control is now on the verge of losing control over its water and energy. What a state of affairs.
-
Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist
