Waterfund LLC

[Mega]

By Andrew Critchlow

5:00PM BST 20 Jul 2014

123 Comments


Britain, as the rest of the world, is facing a water crisis, leading some experts to predict that by the end of the decade H2O will be traded on financial markets like other finite commodities such as crude oil, or iron ore.


Although the Environment Agency says the past six months have been the wettest on record, summer hosepipe bans remain a possibility, partly because of historic inconsistencies in infrastructure investment. However, changing weather patterns and rising demand for water resources spell a potentially more nightmarish scenario within the next 20 years.


Britain is not alone in facing what could become a catastrophic deficit in fresh water. Unless radical steps are taken to ensure the global economy has enough water to meet all our needs then draconian measures such as rationing cannot be ruled out in the future.


Globally, the problem of water scarcity is growing at an alarming rate. By 2050, experts predict a 55pc increase in the amount of water required to meet demand from rising populations, food production and industry. To avoid serious shortfalls the world will need to invest an estimated $1.8 trillion (£1.05 trillion) over the next 20 years that could ultimately deliver $3  trillion in benefits for the global economy, according to estimates by the United Nations.


Markets can play an important role in providing future water security. The City can help to fund vital water infrastructure and the creation of a futures market to trade water would help to create a baseline pricing mechanism against which regional water tariffs could be fairly set.

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Traditionally, the main concerns surrounding water resources have focused on rapidly developing regions in Africa, Asia and the Middle East but supplies in developed nations such as the US and UK are now coming under similar stresses.

The World Economic Forum has warned: “The future security of fresh-water resources around the world is of increasing concern. Because of our interlinked global economy, water scarcity in many parts of the world could harm the global economy in ways we hadn’t thought of. Shortfalls in crop yields and more variable food prices could be an early impact.”

“Water will become something that is traded, there will be a market for it and this could happen in the next decade,” said Usha Rao-Monari, chief executive officer of Global Water Development Partners – an affiliate of New York-based investment giant Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity firm with a reported $280bn under management.

As the draw on natural water supplies from industry and agriculture intensifies then the amount of clean drinkable water that will need to be produced by sea-water desalination will increase exponentially, further pushing up the cost. In such a scenario, the creation of a futures market for water would work more effectively than government-controlled regulators such as Ofwat to protect consumers and prevent the formation of pricing cartels dominated by countries and regions that have a surplus of water resources.

The fear is that water scarcity could eventually see water-rich countries form into a group similar to the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (Opec) even though water isn’t a commodity that can be easily traded across borders at this point.

“Water will become a commodity – but a very different commodity because it is also a basic human need. If you track economic growth and you agree that water is a vital input then it will eventually become a commodity,” said Rao-Monari. Set up in March this year, Global Water Development Partners is aiming to provide investment for water projects around the world.

“Although people are realising that water is a finite resource, they are reluctant to put a price on it,” Rao-Monari observed. “We need to get real money – large money – into this sector otherwise we’re going to hit a wall.”
English farmland presents a golden investment opportunity

The value of farmland in the UK has continued to rise and now ranks alongside gold as one of the best long-term investments over the past decade.

According to Knight Frank, land values have increased by an average of 208pc over the past 10 years, compared with a return of 254pc for gold, which has been one of the hottest assets for investors over the same period.

Spurred on by growing interest from foreign investors and pension funds, farmland values in England continued to rise in the second quarter, a survey by the estate agent has revealed.

Knight Frank said average values for English farmland rose by 3pc in the second quarter to £7,515 per acre but that fewer landowners were placing estates on the market than a year earlier.
“Potentially there could be more pension fund and institutional buyers in the market,” wrote Tom Raynham, head of Knight Frank’s agricultural investment team. “There are some good deals happening off market.”

The agent said that the acreage which has been advertised this year for sale publicly has fallen 17pc but anticipates that values will increase by a further 6pc over the next 12 months.
Despite concerns over the outcome of the Scottish referendum, land values also grew by 2pc in the first half north of the border.
Coal

The latest cost for British investors from green taxes kicked in last week when the profitability of coal-fired power stations fell below natural gas burning plants. A near doubling of Britain’s carbon price floor in April and a 25pc drop in the wholesale price of gas since the first quarter has hit coal-fired generators.

The UK depends on coal-fired plants, which are approximately 2.3 times more carbon intensive than natural gas for generation. Broker Macquarie says: “If this trend continues, UK baseload coal-fired generation could fall significantly later this quarter and in turn have a negative impact on thermal coal demand in Europe’s second-largest thermal coal importer

[Mega]

Re: Waterfund LLC

Jim Rickards keeps talking up "Waterfund LCC" on his twitter a/c.............what does Itulip crew think?

[shiny!]

Re: Waterfund LLC

I don't know anything about the Waterfund, but former Texas Agriculture Commissioner Jim Hightower (one of the few politicians I respect) has written about the perils of privatizing water rights for many years. It first came to my attention in his wonderful book, If the Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates published in 2000.

This is an excerpt:

Should we invade Canada with armed forces? Sure, they’re nice people, and ever so peaceable. (It’s going to be hard to work up much xenophobic hatred toward a country that thinks “jeepers” is an expletive, and that has “Be Polite” in its constitution.) But Canadians have something we need, and I don’t mean hockey players. “Blue gold,” it’s been dubbed by a Canadian newspaper, but it’s far more valuable than that implies, because the world can do without gold.

Water. That’s what Canada has that parts of our country and much of the world might literally kill for.

Hell, you say, water’s everywhere. Yes, but as Canada’s Maude Barlow points out, less than half of 1 percent of all the water on the globe is drinkable. An author and agitator for common sense, Barlow heads the Council of Canadians and is founding chair of Action Canada Network, two grassroots groups working for progressive policies. “Worldwide, the consumption of water is doubling every 20 years,” she writes in a stunning report called “Blue Gold: The Global Water Crisis.” In a very short while, most of the world’s people will face shortages or absolute scarcity. This is not a matter of seeing more stories of wretched African children dying in horrible droughts, but of imminent water crises in America (the Southwest, Florida, and California especially), Southern Europe, India, England, China, and other nations not usually thought of as facing massive water shortages.

Canada, on the other hand, has a blessing of agua fresca. Some 20 percent of the world’s entire supply of freshwater is in its winding rivers and countless lakes. This reality has not dawned on Canadians alone; others are casting their eyes northward. But it’s not countries making invasion plans—it’s corporations.

To get their hands on the gold, the corporate grubbers first have to change how drinking water is managed. Instead of letting countries treat it as a commonly held resource allocated for the general good, they want it considered as a commodity traded by private investors for profit. Like oil or pork bellies . . . only this is your drinking water they want to privatize. Will it surprise you to learn that those bratty globalization twins, NAFTA and the World Trade Organization, contain provisions that advance the commodity concept? Both baldly assert that “water, including ordinary natural water of all kinds,” is merely one form of “goods,” subject to the new rules of global trade.

We’re talking about bulk sales here: not Evian, but whole lakes and aquifers bought and mined, rivers siphoned off, the Great Lakes themselves on the market. Barlow and others report that multinationals are ready to use supertankers, pipelines, canals, river rerouting, and other mammoth schemes to shift the product from the water-rich to those willing to pay top dollar:

Nordic Water Company totes H2O from Norway to thirsty Europe across the sea in giant, floating plastic bags.
Global Water Corporation, a Canadian firm, has cut a deal with Sitka, Alaska, to haul 18 billion gallons of water per year from nearby Blue Lake to China—“Water has moved from being an endless commodity that may be taken for granted to a rationed necessity that may be taken by force,” says GWC’s chilling statement.

The Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal involves building a dike across James Bay to capture water from 20 rivers that feed it, converting the bay into a giant reservoir, then building a network of canals, dams, and locks to move the water 400 miles south to Georgian Bay, where it would be “flushed through” the Great Lakes into pipelines that would take it to America’s Sun Belt for lawn watering, golf course sprinkling, and other essentials.

The McCurdy Group of Newfoundland hopes to “harvest” some 13 billion gallons of water a year from one of that province’s lakes, pipe it to the coast, pump it into old oil tankers, and ship it to the Middle East for a hefty profit.

One Monsanto executive, seeing a multibillion-dollar business opportunity, says bluntly: “Since water is as central to food production as seed is, and without water life is not possible, Monsanto is now trying to establish its control over water. . . . Monsanto [has launched] a new water business, starting with India and Mexico, since both these countries face water shortages.”

“Canada,” barked editor Terence Corcoran of the Financial Post in a 1999 editorial, “is a future OPEC of water”; he urged that the country begin trading this commodity. But thanks to citizen groups like Maude Barlow’s, the Great Canadian Water Sale-a-Thon has yet to begin; their vigilance has produced a temporary moratorium on bulk sales. This might be a good place to add that Maude, and Canadians generally, are not saying, “It’s our water and the rest of the world can go suck eggs.” To the contrary, they are pushing for a public policy of sharing their bounty to meet the global water crisis, allocating water particularly to help those in need.

But the pressure is intense to simply let “the market” decide who needs it. And the big stick of “free trade” is being wielded to turn the water loose. Sun Belt Water Inc., based in Santa Barbara, California, has filed the first NAFTA water case. It had an agreement with a British Columbia company to ship water in tankers from B.C. to Southern California. But such an outcry ensued when the scheme became public that the provincial government enacted a moratorium on all water exports. The corporation sued Canada in 1998, claiming that its future profits were “expropriated” by British Columbia’s export moratorium and that, under NAFTA’s Chapter 11, the nice people of Canada owed it $468 million.

Money isn’t enough, though. Sun Belt CEO Jack Lindsey is also outraged at what he perceives as Canadian stinginess: “California has 33 million people—more than the entire population of Canada. This is expected to double in the next 20 years, and they have been living in a permanent drought condition. In 20 years, the shortfall in California will be 4 million acre-feet of water [per year]—1 percent of what spills into the Pacific Ocean from British Columbia—and they’re saying ‘Sorry, you can’t have it?’” Such a humanitarian. Jack just wants a few drops for California’s poor parched people.

What a crock. Bulk water deals have nothing to do with global need and everything to do with global greed. Privateers will deliver the water to whoever will pay the most—like Silicon Valley’s water-gobbling high-tech companies and agribusiness corporations that suck up aquifers like insatiable sponges. Then there is Lindsay’s snide comment about water that just “spills into the Pacific Ocean,” a common refrain, as if water that isn’t being used commercially is being “wasted.” Never mind that water running to the sea is essential to the ecological cycle, delivering nutrients, sustaining fishing economies, replenishing wetlands, and doing much more useful chores than fattening the wallets of would-be water barons.

Jim Hightower is a best-selling author, radio commentator, public speaker, and all-around political sparkplug. From If the Gods Had Meant Us to Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates (HarperCollins, 2000).

Hightower also wrote this:

"Loyalty to country, always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it." -- Mark Twain

June's Lowdown
June 2002, Volume 4, Number 6

Taking our common wealth and selling it
Stop the corporate takeover of our water

The greater villains are loose in our world today, literally thirsting to take things that are yours and mine—and this time they might make off with the greatest plunder of all: our water.

Yes, the ideologues and greedheads who brought us the fairy tale of energy deregulation and the Ponzi scheme of Enron are aggressively pushing for deregulation and privatization of the world’s water supplies and systems. They are determined to turn this essential public resource into another commodity for traders and speculators—a private plaything for personal profiteering.

In just the past few years, trans-national conglomerates already have privatized all or parts of the water systems of Atlanta, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Bolivia, Casablanca, Charleston, Chattanooga, Ghana, Houston, Jacksonville, Jersey City, Lexington, New Orleans, Peoria, Ontario, San Francisco, and many other places. ...more

and this:

A SIMMERING WATER WAR
Thursday, November 11, 2010 | Posted by Jim Hightower
Listen to this Commentary

Here in my home state of Texas, we're suffering from withdrawal pains.

This is not caused by our addiction to alcohol or drugs – but to plain water. And to make our pain worse, it's not the people of Texas who are hooked on a destructive water habit – it's the boneheaded executives and greedheaded investors in coal-fired and nuclear-powered plants that generate electricity.

And don't laugh at Texas, for the same corporate addiction might be draining the fresh water supplies where you live. Question: which uses more water – your washing machine chugging out one load of laundry, or the power plant that provides the few kilowatts of electricity to heat the water for that one load? No contest. The power plant uses as much as 10 times more water to make the electricity than you use to fill your machine.

It doesn't have to be this way. Solar and wind alternatives use almost no water to produce electricity – an advantage that today's "clean-coal" hucksters and nuclear speculators don't want you or your congress critters to realize. Indeed, their lobbyists are pushing hard at both national and state levels to get regulatory breaks and taxpayer subsidies to let these voracious giants keep mainlining our nation's water.

Private interests now want to build four new, water-sucking power plants in our state – even though Texas already produces far more electricity than it needs. Where would they get the billions of gallons of water they'd use each year? From the Colorado River, draining it and the region's Highland Lakes of the essential and scarce H2O that supplies millions of people in the Austin area and downstream.

Wherever you live, it's time for a citizen's intervention to break this costly habit. For information and action tips, contact Public Citizen Texas at www.texasvox.org.

[Mega]

Re: Waterfund LLC

Wonder info A!
Much good work done there.............i wonder if anyone from "Itlip high command" would like say something..........
Mike

[Slimprofits]

Re: Waterfund LLC

Does Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe believe that water is a human right?


http://www.nestle.com/aboutus/ask-nestle/answers/nestle-chairman-peter-brabeck-letmathe-believes-water-is-a-human-right

[Thailandnotes]

Re: Waterfund LLC

Just another tentacle of fire. Coastal aquifers, often complicated, have recently been deregulated. Small water companies have been snapped up like banks were a decade ago. Prices have soared. Meters installed, less testing of water quality, communities barred from buying private water companies, and on and on. We got rid of our landline phone because it was costing us on average seven dollars per call to keep it. By the time we got rid of the house it was about 2.00 to flush the toilet.

[dcarrigg]

Re: Waterfund LLC

Does Nestlé Chairman Peter Brabeck-Letmathe believe that water is a human right?


http://www.nestle.com/aboutus/ask-nestle/answers/nestle-chairman-peter-brabeck-letmathe-believes-water-is-a-human-right

I thought that was interesting, so I looked for the original video. Here it is with English subtitles.

All-in-all I'd say there are a few things that are happening here.

The move to privatize the sun, moon, stars, air we breathe, oceans, drinking water, etc. is on. It probably has been for a while. But it's stronger now. There's less traditional temperance. People will come right out and say that greed, one of the seven cardinal sins, is "good."

But I have to say that looking around, I don't see how privatizing things is supposed to make them last longer, and I think it's strange this argument has gained traction over the last decade or two.

Oil is privatized. It doesn't stay cheap and plentiful forever. Why would privatizing water make it stay cheap and plentiful forever?

You see the point, don't you? There's a certain amount each culture uses. Round these parts it's probably 4 or 5 flushes, a shower, a couple quarts for cooking and cleaning, 2 glasses for drinking, and a quart for grooming at the sink per person per day.

You could charge $400 per month for that "privilege" and people are not going to change their habits unless they absolutely have to. Same with their driving habits. Besides, we already pay a bill in most of the 1st world. It's just often not to a for-profit rent vampire.

But this argument that by privatizing things and giving them market values will significantly slow residential water use is absurd - especially the water system which is a natural monopoly and left unregulated would just lead to price gouging and zero competition like every other natural monopoly.

Privatizing electricity and the electricity grid in the late 1800s didn't lead to people using less of it. In countries where it is public, people use the same goddamn amount of electricity as in culturally identical places where it is private.

Privatizing fisheries has had the same effect. Either you can have transferable, atomizable, tradeable, quotas or you can have regular quotas or you can have no quotas. People eat fish every summer and fisheries are depleted nearly regardless. Having one sort of a quota system either public or private may slow it down more than having none - but the fishermen don't think so, and either way, letting banks in as the middle-men for fisheries doesn't seem to slow it down any better than just keeping the rent vampires out.

Think of every rare earth element. We're using all of them up. At breakneck speed. They are all private.

Think of every private commodity. Do we really eat less wheat or corn or whatever than in the past?

So why, if we give our water to Nestle or Goldman Sachs or Bechtel or anyone else would we expect the water to last a lot longer than it does now?

The only way it makes any sense at all is if you picture people just wantonly wasting water everywhere. I live in a coastal community where lawn watering is banned - we solved that one without privatizing everything. But otherwise, people generally seem pretty good about not wasting a ton of water. Like I said, they already have a bill and a meter. The only way privatization shifts incentives is if that bill goes way, way higher to the point where most people can't afford it and half the population starts showering once a month or something.

And I know the way we treat water around here is far looser than desert countries where a daily shower is out of the question.

But giving up our aquifers and lakes and reservoirs for free or dirt cheap to some company whose express goal is to rake me over the coals and shake my wallet out to get me to use less water "for my own good" is just hogwash.

Yet that's exactly the Nestle argument he makes in 2005. And I hear it all the time. "Just privatize it and the market will solve all your problems." Problem is, I don't pray to Mammon, nor do I trust him to solve problems for me. In fact, I don't trust anyone ever who says "Give me your keys and your bank account numbers, I'll take care of it for you, don't worry about a thing." After all, what is a market but a bunch of people making transactions? Why would I put any more faith in that process than I do in people generally? Markets with good competition can be very good at establishing efficient prices. Probably they're better than any mechanism we've come up with yet. But they're not perfect and infallible. And they certainly don't solve the problem of scarcity.

So why is it now and for the last few years that a lot of the big corporate guns are trying to sell markets as a panacea?

I get it where it could make them money. Nestle would buy up Lake Constance in a heartbeat and charge a premium for it. It's beautiful down there. Hell, maybe they could even charge for looking at it if they privatize the roads in and out of the valley.

But why come out and tell us that only by giving all of our fresh water away to big, far-off corporate players can we avoid the catastrophe of a water shortage? Why will privatization solve this when people are using water every day either way?

Since when did people start making the argument that markets solve the problem of scarcity?

Because everything I learned all those years ago in economics class had scarcity as an assumption built right into the first micro class. It was all about allocating scarce resources.

And I don't remember the part where the scarcity went away. Nor do I remember the part where unregulated, private, for-profit natural monopolies efficiently allocated scarce resources.

Markets have become a faith. It's like they believe Adam Smith's Invisible Hand is actually the Hand of God. And instead of looking at how they work, when they work best, and when they might not - "Privatize everything, for it will be better" has simply become a prayer of the new faith. Maybe this could be another one:

Blessed Market who art perfection
Hallowed be thy price
Thy Kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as well as in the heavens

And give us some bread, if we've got the cash
But forgive all our trespasses, if we grease the skids
And always rule us strict by temptation
For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory
So long as they can't vote on it,

Amen.

After all, we can't get back to feudalism without saying a few new prayers for our new lords...