Presidential candidates talk about all sorts of issues on the hustings: immigration, health care, gun control, taxes, climate change and foreign affairs, among the biggies.
They talk about water, too, though often in the context of other concerns.
Climate change, for example. Climate change is about many things, including the furious rainstorms that are increasingly pounding parts of the country and that lead to damaging floods and polluted waters. Each of the Democratic candidates, and all but one of the Republican aspirants for the presidency (that would be President Trump) believe that climate instability is a problem and deserves attention.
A common proposal among many Democrats is the Green New Deal, a massive jobs-energy-spending initiative that in varying degrees concerns the safety of water supplies. Axios recently summarized the Democratic candidates’ positions.
Take note: The Green New Deal is generally silent on fracking – a petroleum mining practice that contaminates a lot of water -- but some of the candidates have expressed individual views on that.
Water also comes up in reference to economic justice. Among the candidates, California Senator Kamala Harris has been among the more outspoken about how it’s the poor who get hurt the most when public water gets fouled. Here she is talking about a Water Justice Act that she introduced in September.
Exhibit #1 on the water justice agenda is Flint, Michigan – particularly during a candidate debate in nearby Detroit that ABC summed up quite well.
In Detroit most candidates insisted that water infrastructure needs attention. (Left unacknowledged in those prescriptions, however, is the fact that infrastructure spending isn’t a sure-fire winner in all cases; the 2014 lead-contamination crisis in Flint originated in an infrastructure project that switched the supply of water from one source to another.)
For his part, President Trump has indicated that spending on pipes and treatment plants is needed; but a plan issued by the White House in early 2018 was panned by critics for being short on federal dollars and excessively reliant on local governments and private businesses to get the job done. Here’s the Natural Resources Defense Council on that.
Finally, befitting our wide-ranging relationship to inland waters, the candidates’ discussions about water aren’t all about drinking water. For example, if a Democrat were to win the presidency a year from now, expect the winner to reinstate the Waters of the United States Rule – a step by President Obama in 2016 that extended to small streams the same environmental protections that the Clean Water Act granted to large bodies of water; the Trump administration suspended that rule this fall.
And, if Andrew Yang were to win the presidency, expect some innovative engineering initiatives that grant water in its frozen state a special role in addressing climate change, including a plan to shore up glaciers to help limit global warming.