Bloomberg reported on Sunday that California water futures
are now officially on the Wall Street markets, with the United
States–based CME Group heading up the 2021 contracts connected to the
state’s billion-dollar water market. The “commodity” was most recently
going for $496 per acre-foot with the main purchasers of the
futures—which were first announced by CME in September—expected to be
large-scale water consumers, chiefly utility companies and the states’
Big Ag corporations. (California is home to the largest agriculture
market in the nation.) “Climate change, droughts, population growth, and
pollution are likely to make water scarcity issues and pricing a hot
topic for years to come,” RBC Capital Markets managing director and
analyst Deane Dray told Bloomberg. “We are definitely going to watch how
this new water futures contract develops.” We’ve officially reached a new
phase of the Mad Maxification of America.
“Mni wiconi”—Lakota for “Water is life”—is not just a
snappy slogan popularized by the Standing Rock movement. It’s a fact of
human existence. The move to sell water futures in California stands as a
foreboding indicator of the transformation of water from basic right into
a luxury good. It’s a frightening expansion of a reality that already exists
for poor, Black, Latinx, and Native communities across the country,
from Flint,
Michigan, to Navajo Nation. Welcome to the future.
Back in 2012, MIT News profiled the head of the company Sourcewater,
which at the time had introduced the idea of creating an online exchange
for gas and oil companies to quickly and easily source and purchase the
water necessary to keep up with the rampant domestic fracking boom. These
companies needed water but didn’t want to pay a ton for its
transportation; Sourcewater helped them accomplish that. And because
American businesspeople have been conditioned to bow down to middlemen
who help drive down costs, Sourcewater was viewed as a success story.
Read through the MIT News piece and you’ll
find all the circus-like twists necessary to justify the company’s
purported innovation. “Reducing the amount of truck travel via the new
online marketplace also brings environmental benefits,” the outlet wrote
of a company created to help facilitate fracking.
One year after Sourcewater’s big breakthrough, in
2013, the federal government supposedly finished its part of a pipeline
called the Mni Wiconi, designed to pump water from the Missouri River to
tribal citizens and rural communities in western South Dakota. Up to that
point, due to both the theft of Lakota lands and four subsequent damming
infrastructure projects in the mid-twentieth century, many on the Oglala
Lakota reservation, as well as those living on the Rosebud and Lower
Brule reservations, had been forced to rely on fresh water deliveries by
truck.
Yet, even after the pipeline system was in place, it
remained ineffective in spreading water to the tribal citizens in need,
according to a 2019 reportfrom High Country News:
“In reservation towns and villages, the new pipeline water is fed into
old community water systems—some of which date to the 1960s, with pipes
made of potentially hazardous asbestos-cement. The Mni Wiconi’s builders
pledged but failed to replace those antiquated systems.” But for the 15
majority-white communities in the areas, as well as local white
ranchers—whose county carried an annual per-capita income three times
that of the Oglala community—the water pipeline worked just fine: “All
the water flowing through Mni Wiconi pipes to those users is from the
Missouri River, and their pipeline connections are funded by fees they
pay to a not-for-profit, the West River/Lyman-Jones Rural Water System.”
The same year that High Country News published
its feature, Sourcewater hauled in a tidy $7.2 million Series A
investment and joined the space race of companies looking to
provide satellite images of potential water sources to their extractive
industry clientele.
These stories are the same kind of nightmare fuel as
the new water futures market; it’s just they’re rarely paired together in
mainstream coverage. The growth of companies like Sourcewater and CME,
which exist to make a quick buck on the world’s emergencies and ill-fated
economic pursuits, or austerity regimes like those that oversaw the
crisis in Flint, are different faces of the same disaster: A future in
which a select few hoard a necessary resource and relative like water is
actually already here. That might be the scariest part about any of it.
[Nick
Martin@nicka_martin is a staff writer at The New
Republic.]
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