Daniel Salzler No. 1163 EnviroInsight.org Four Items August 19, 2022
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1. Cybersecurity in Water Management Facilities.Cyberattacks are a growing threat to water utilities. Recent incidents have garnered media attention as potential threats to water systems endanger public health and the environment. Water systems epitomize volatile
critical infrastructure and are designated in the National Security Memorandum on Improving Cybersecurity for Critical Infrastructure Control Systems. This requires baseline and sector specific goals to detect and prevent cyber threats. In addition, America’s Water Infrastructure Act includes mandates to improve the cybersecurity of water systems. Fortinet surveyed water utility leaders during the fourth quarter of 2021 to understand utilities’ status and future needs for improved water system cybersecurity.
To download the white paper, go to https://www.waterworld.com/white-papers/whitepaper/14234206/fortinet-cybersecurity-in-water-management-facilities
2. The Big New Climate Bill’s Most Important Provisions. The U.S. House and Senate passed a monster climate and tax bill.
here’s a summary of what’s included in the bill?
Prescription drug pricing: The legislation would allow for Medicare to negotiate drug prices starting in 2023. Medicare patients would have their out-of-pocket costs capped at $2,000 annually and would have the option to break that down into monthly payments. Vaccines would also become free for senior citizens, who are the only population for whom vaccines were not already free. In the one-page summary, Democrats said they expect that the prescription drug part of the legislation would raise $288 billion.
Increased IRS enforcement:Another important stream of revenue for the legislation comes from a pledge to increase money to allow the Internal Revenue Service to improve taxpayer compliance. Roughly $3.1 billion will be spent on taxpayer services; $45 billion will be spent on enforcement; $25 billion on operations support; and $4,75 billion on modernisation. A one-page summary said that “no use of the funds is intended to increase taxes on any taxpayer with taxable income below $400,000.”
Corporate minimum tax: Senators Ron Wyden (D), the chairman of the Finance Committee, and Elizabeth Warren have previously floated the idea of a corporate minimum tax to ensure that corporations don’t use loopholes to get away with paying below 15 per cent. The legislation from Mr Manchin(D) and Mr Schumer (D) would impose a 15 per cent minimum tax on corporations with a profit of at least $1billion. Democrats estimate the tax would raise $313 billion in a decade. The tax was slightly weakened during the vote-a-rama after Senate Minority Whip John Thune (R) proposed an amendment that would have exempted subsidiaries of private equity that Senator Kyrsten Sinema(D) supported and would have been paid for by extending a cap on state and local tax deductions that passed under the Trump tax cuts of 2017. That would have killed the bill in the House as many Democrats from New York and New Jersey oppose the cap. But Senator Mark Warner (D) included an amendment that removed the SALT cap language while still keeping the private equity carve-out.
Continued subsidies for Obamacare: When Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan Act last year, they included subsidies that would help people buy their own health insurance through the marketplaces enacted through the Affordable Care Act. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the subsidies increased the amount of financial aid for people who were already eligible to receive subsidies and increased who else was eligible to include many middle class families during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the subisidies were only available for two more years and they were set to expire. The Inflation Reduction Act would extend them for three more years.
Climate change provisions: Democratic senators faced perhaps no greater obstacle with Mr Manchin(D), who hails from coal-heavy West Virginia, than dealing with climate change. A one-page summary from Mr Schumer estimated the legislation would reduce emissions by roughly 40 per cent in ten years and would spend $369 billion in climate change mitigation and energy security in the same amount of time. At the same time, the legislation would reinstate lease sales for drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and in Alaska. At the same time, it would provide a $4,000 tax credit for low-income families to buy used clean-energy vehicles; 10 years of tax credits to make homes run on clean energy; a $1 billion grant program to make affordable housing more energy efficient; and $9 billion to help low-income people to electrify home appliances and retrofit for energy efficiency.
What was taken out of the bill
Closing the carried interest loophole:Currently, partners at private investment funds are allowed to have their income taxed as capital gains, which has a rate lower than general income tax. This includes partners at hedge funds, private equity and venture capital firms. Mr Manchin said in his statement that the US tax code “should focus more on closing unfair loopholes like carried interest”. Democrats estimated the amount will raise about $14 billion in a decade. But Senator Kyrsten Sinema(D), who has opposed tax increases, opposed closing the carried interest loophole and Democrats crapped it from their final package to get her on board.
A cap on insulin for private insurance patients: Democrats had hoped to cap the price of insulin in the Inflation Reduction Act for both Medicare patients and people on private insurance. But Senates Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough (unelected, nonpartisan interpreter of chamber rule) found that the cap on insulin for private insurance did not pass the “Byrd Rule”, which the parliamentarian uses to determine if legislation is related to the budget and therefore if it could be passed through budget reconciliation. Democrats kept it in the legislation but during the Senate’s “vote-a-rama,” Republicans raised a point of order, which meant the cap would have needed 60 votes to stay in the bill. Seven Republicans voted to keep the cap in–ranging from moderates like Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski (R) to conservatives like Josh Hawley (R)–but that was three votes shy of the 60 votes needed. However, the cap on insulin prices for Medicare recipients remained in the bill.
Drug rebate; Under the original proposed legislation, pharmaceutical companies would have been required to reimburse Medicare if they raised the price of drugs higher than the rate of inflation. But Ms MacDonough issued guidance saying that did not pass Byrd Rule (The Byrd rule governs the process of budget reconciliation) muster.
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3. The Southwest Is Running Out Of Fresh Water. Could The Ocean Provide A Cure? Water managers are feeling the crunch of a supply-demand imbalance along the Colorado River. Fresh water reserves are shrinking as climate change squeezes the river that supplies 40 million people and fields of crops across seven states. Some have proposed desalination technology as a way to augment that supply, easing the strain on a river that supplies a growing population from Wyoming to Mexico. Experts say it could be part of the solution, but likely won’t make much of a dent in the region’s water crisis.
At the Carlsbad desalination plant, former seawater poured into a cup from a freshwater spigot. Michelle Peters, technical and compliance manager for plant operator Poseidon Water, held it and took a drink.
“At 10 a.m, the morning surfers were swimming in it off the coast in the ocean here,” she said. “Now it’s high-quality drinking water, ready for consumption.”
On an early-afternoon tour of the facility, Peters walked through neat rows of white pipes on the way to the “reverse osmosis gallery.” In here, towering stacks of pipes and blue tubing fill a warehouse-like room, and water roared through them at a din.
Michelle Peters fills a glass with freshly desalinated ocean water at Poseidon Water’s Carlsbad plant. Using reverse osmosis, the facility creates about 10% of San Diego County’s freshwater supply.”This is where the magic happens,” Peters said. “This is really what makes desalination. It’s the heart of the site.”
Water laden with salt, bacteria, and other impurities enters these vessels. It’s forced through membranes about the width of a human hair, passing through tens of thousands of times before it emerges on the other side just about ready to drink.
Desalinated ocean water already enters the basin through a handful of plants in California, and some have proposed increasing the scale of desalination around the region.
Perhaps the most prominent of those is Arizona Governor Doug Ducey’s ambitious proposal to strike a deal with
Mexico in which the state would fund an ocean desalination plant on the Gulf of California, allowing Mexico to use the newly-desalted water in exchange for some of Mexico’s share from the Colorado River.
The plan is expensive and largely unprecedented but has added a degree of legitimacy to the idea that ocean desalination could help parts of the Colorado River basin that are far from the coast. Policy analysts say it’s not the best way to add to Arizona’s supply, but merits further research.
“People should understand that it’s probably the most expensive water supply that would be available as one of the many solutions to Colorado River shortage issues,” said Sarah Porter, director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University.
Porter said desalinated water is likely too expensive for the agriculture sector, the river’s largest water user. “It probably is — and will be someday — a solution for municipal water users,” she said.
“And that’s when it becomes a solution — when the less expensive water supplies and less expensive opportunities to stretch current supplies have already been taken advantage of,” Porter said.
Arizona’s project would carry a hefty price tag. A 2020 binational study of potential desalination deals between Arizona and Mexico showed construction costs in the billions and annual operating costs in the tens of millions.
A big chunk of operating costs would come from the steep expense of moving water over a long distance. Arizona’s proposed project would pump water nearly 300 miles north to the Morelos Dam near the U.S. border, driving up total costs for the project that would ultimately make the fresh water itself more expensive for users.
That study said desalinated water could cost around $2,000 per acre-foot, roughly ten times more expensive than the current cost of Colorado River water delivered by the Central Arizona Project — a canal that carries water across more than 300 miles of desert. An acre-foot is the amount of water needed to fill one acre of land to a height of one foot. One acre-foot generally provides enough water for one to two households for a year.
Because of the high costs associated with water transport, most experts say adding desalinated water to the drinking supply really only makes sense when it’s implemented near the coastline.
Experts overwhelmingly agree that most water-starved cities in the Southwest should try to find fresh water elsewhere before turning to desalination, and list a myriad of cheaper and less complicated ways to augment the drinking supply.
That practice, often called “buy and dry,” is already employed in some parts of the basin, but Lund sees room for expansion. Agriculture uses about 70-80% of the water in the Colorado River basin. For a long time, policymakers have resisted cutting into that number.
But the severity of the drought and the need for additional supply to keep taps flowing in cities has forced hard conversations that suggest municipal users are increasingly likely to invest in the temporary or permanent purchase of agricultural water. Farm groups worry that water leaving the land will harm rural economies and ecosystems.
But the severity of the drought and the need for additional supply to keep taps flowing in cities has forced hard conversations that suggest municipal users are increasingly likely to invest in the temporary or permanent purchase of agricultural water. Farm groups worry that water leaving the land will harm rural economies and ecosystems.
Agriculture accounts for about 70-80% of water use in the Colorado River Basin. Buying water from farmers and ranchers has been suggested as a way for cities to supplement their freshwater supplies.
Lund listed other alternatives to desalination that could be employed before cities turn to pulling water from the sea — xeriscaping or fallowing lawns, more stormwater capture and more wastewater reuse.
Cutting back on lawn watering has already helped many cities, which have conserved effectively enough to stretch a finite supply of water over decades of population growth. Wastewater recycling programs, which essentially purify sewage back into clean drinking water, are gaining steam in some parts of the basin, heralded as expensive but necessary means of keeping fresh water from leaving the system in the first place.
Warming temperatures accelerated by climate change, mean dry soils and early snowmelt that will keep the Colorado River basin dry in the future.
Wetter weather patterns may not be the reason that desalination plants would be constructed but unused, but Lund says they may not be needed if large amounts of water are reallocated from agriculture, which was not an option in Australia.
Despite the costs and challenges of expanding desalination in the U.S., experts say the technology is at least worth a closer look.
“Yes, desalinated seawater is expensive,” said Sharon Megdal. “But we have to recognize that water is a scarce commodity. Water is a valuable commodity. And seawater desalination tends to be a drought-proof technology.”.”
4. CAP Water Report
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