Trump says "we will conclude our lovely ‘stay’ in Iran by blowing up and completely obliterating all of their Electric Generating Plants, Oil Wells and Kharg Island (and possibly all desalinization plants!)"

 Trump says U.S. will destroy Iran’s oil wells, Kharg Island without deal to ‘immediately’ reopen Hormuz Strait

He thinks this is a bargaining chip instead of a requirement.

Cry me a river about Iran's water

 The destruction in the early hours of June 6 [2023] of Ukraine’s massive Nova Kakhovka dam on the Dnieper River is a dangerous escalation of the war between Ukraine and Russia. It risks massive human and ecological consequences to communities downstream being hit by vast floodwaters, and also threatens a potentially catastrophic nuclear accident. World leaders are also calling it a war crime. ...

Kakhovka Dam, one of the largest in Europe, was built in the late 1950s to provide hydroelectric power, irrigation water, and improved navigation on the Dnieper River which flows from Russia through Belarus and Ukraine before emptying into the Black Sea. When full—and it was full when it was destroyed—the reservoir contains 18 cubic kilometers (nearly 5 trillion gallons) of water. That’s around four times the volume of California’s largest reservoir, the Shasta reservoir, and about half the volume of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States. The reservoir behind the dam also supplies critical cooling water to the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, and feeds water into the North Crimea Canal, delivering nearly 80% of Crimea’s water. ...

Water and water systems have been the targets of attacks from the beginning of this war. Researchers have documented more than 50 such attacks on dams, water supply systems, city water treatment plants, pipelines, and other facilities. At the beginning of the war, the Russians destroyed a small dam blocking water flows to Crimea. And civilian water treatment and delivery systems have been widely attacked by the Russians, cutting water supplies and sanitation services for hundreds of thousands of people. Meanwhile, the Ukrainians cut levees to flood areas north of Kyiv to halt the initial Russian armored assault on the capital. But until now, there had been nothing as massive or devastating as this event. 

Attacks on dams are war crimes, as explicitly noted in Article 56 of Protocol I and Article 15 of Protocol II of the 1977 Protocols to the Geneva Conventions. These international laws prohibit attacks on infrastructure “containing dangerous forces” including explicitly “dams” and “dykes” if such attacks “may cause the release of dangerous forces and consequent severe losses among the civilian population.” Despite these prohibitions, conflicts over water and attacks on water systems are on the rise, with a dramatic increase in the past two decades.

There is precedent for Russian destruction of dams on the Dnieper River. In August 1941, during World War II, the retreating Soviet Army destroyed another dam on the Dnieper at Zaporizhzhia, the Dnieper Dam, to prevent it from falling into the hands of the advancing Nazis. At the time it was the largest dam in the world. The subsequent flooding reportedly killed tens of thousands of people downstream. ...

More.

 

 Trump threatens Iran's water supply in astonishing 'war crime' escalation as defiant Tehran tears up nuclear treaty

 

Laying waste to Iran would solve a number of problems. 

 

Trump used a phony picture of California lol

 

Incompetence from sea to shining sea: Trump releases water needed for summer agricultural irrigation in the San Joaquin Valley to fight fires but that water will simply evaporate in Tulare Lake

 

Acting on Trump’s order, federal officials opened up two California dams

... The two reservoirs are used to hold supplies for agricultural irrigation districts. Nemeth noted that winter is not the irrigation season for farms, which require more supplies to grow crops in the summer months, “so there isn’t a demand” for the water in the San Joaquin Valley at this time. ...

Peter Gleick, a water scientist and senior fellow at the Pacific Institute, said dam managers would typically only release large quantities of water in the winter when major storms create a need to make space for large inflows of runoff. But Southern California has been very dry and the snowpack in the southern Sierra remains far below average, so “there is no indication that that’s why these releases occurred.”

“In addition, when those kinds of releases do occur, they’re always done in consultation with local and state agencies,” Gleick said.

“I don’t know where this water is going, but this is the wrong time of year to be releasing water from these reservoirs. It’s vitally important that we fill our reservoirs in the rainy season so water is available for farms and cities later in the summer,” Gleick said. “I think it’s very strange and it’s disturbing that, after decades of careful local, state and federal coordination, some federal agencies are starting to unilaterally manipulate California’s water supply.”

Vink agreed, saying that given how dry it has been in the region this winter, there was no need to make such a release. In fact, he said, farmers were counting on that water to be available for summer irrigation.

“This is going to hurt farmers,” Vink said. “This takes water out of their summer irrigation portfolio.” ...

 

Anarcho-tyranny in Pacific Palisades Fire: No water in some fire hydrants

 

 From the Los Angeles Times here:

“There’s no water in the fire hydrants,” Caruso said. “The firefighters are there [in the neighborhood], and there’s nothing they can do — we’ve got neighborhoods burning, homes burning, and businesses burning. ... It should never happen.”

A spokesman for the Department of Water and Power acknowledged reports of diminished water flow from hydrants but did not have details on the number of hydrants without water or the scale of the issue.

In a statement, the DWP said water crews were working in the neighborhood “to ensure the availability of water supplies.”

“This area is served by water tanks and close coordination is underway to continue supplying the area,” the DWP said in its statement.

 

Providing basic fire fighting resources is a bare minimum function of local government, at which this very wealthy community is obviously failing, mirroring California government's overall statewide failure to reduce wildfires.

State Farm stopped insuring roughly 30,000 homes in California in the summer of 2024, in part due to the danger to its business there from catastrophic fires in communities where multi-million dollar homes are common, and too commonly go up in smoke.

You'd cut your losses, too, if you suspected the locals had become as hopelessly bad as the one party state under Gavin Newsom.

Just found out my neighbors raise funds to provide clean water in drought stricken Zimbabwe

You know the place, where Robert Mugabe spent 37 years turning it into a Maoist hell after white Rhodesians had turned it into a prosperous exporting nation.

We have terrible water problems right here in Michigan, like in Flint but also in many other places affected by PFOS, but my lunatic Christian home-schooling neighbors decided to help the lunatic fringe communists a continent away instead. They're even going there to run a marathon (!) in celebration of the project.

We are doomed.

Clean water flows only from white privilege (and places it subdued in 1945, 1953 and 1973)

Michigan's own Steve Gruber has an important story about contaminated water in the US

New Drinking Water Crisis Dwarfs Flint Tragedy:

[T]he catastrophe brewing across the state and in waterways throughout the country will make the tragedy that took place in Flint seem minor.

Don't blame the Flint River for Flint's water problems

So says the Flint River Watershed Coalition, here:

"It was improper treatment of the water, rather than the health of the river itself, that sparked the suite of issues with Flint’s drinking water."

For more photos see "The Flint River isn't what you think it is, and here's why you should check it out".

clear waters

diverse habitat

thriving wildlife

Water Is Nineteen Times Rarer Than Gold

"Bodies are much more rare and porous than is commonly believed: water is nineteen times lighter, and by consequence nineteen times rarer than gold . . .."

-- Sir Isaac Newton

Stealing Food From the Future Depends on Stealing its Water

After reading this important story from Charles Laurence for the UK Telegraph, you will understand the necessity of industrial scale farming and genetically modified seeds, except that even after all that, the water beneath the High Plains isn't coming back, 20 percent of the world's food supply will disappear, the Colorado River will be the West's last lifeline, and T. Boone Pickens aims to make a mint in the process.

Here's an excerpt:

[I]t was only in the 1940s, after the Dust Bowl (the result of a severe drought and excessive farming in the early 1930s), that the US Geological Survey worked out that the watering holes were clues to the Ogallala [Aquifer], now believed to be the world's largest body of fresh water. They were about to repeat the dreams of man from the days of Ancient Egypt and Judea to turn the desert green, only without the Nile or Jordan. With new technology the wells could reach the deepest water, and from the early 1950s the boom was on. Some of the descendants of Dust Bowl survivors became millionaire landowners.

'Since then,' says David Brauer of the US Agriculture Department agency, the Ogallala Research Service, 'we have drained enough water to half-fill Lake Erie of the Great Lakes.' Billions upon billions of gallons – or, as they prefer to measure it, acre-feet of water, each one equivalent to a football field flooded a foot deep – have been pumped. 'The problem,' he goes on, 'is that in a brief half-century we have drawn the Ogallala level down from an average of 240ft to about 80.'

Brauer's agency was set up in direct response to the Dust Bowl, with the brief of finding ways to make sure that the devastation never happens again. If it does, the impact on the world's food supply will be far greater. The irrigated Plains grow 20 per cent of American grain and corn (maize), and America's 'industrial' agriculture dominates international markets. A collapse of those markets would lead to starvation in Africa and anywhere else where a meal depends on cheap American exports. 'The Ogallala supply is going to run out and the Plains will become uneconomical to farm,' Brauer says. 'That is beyond reasonable argument. Our goal now is to engineer a soft landing. That's all we can do.'