Queensland Premier Peter Beattie recently was quoted talking up Brisbane's water shortage. He said computer modelling has shown that without rain and without water restrictions, Brisbane would be without water by December 2006.
I read on and discovered that with water restrictions we would run out just two months later in February 2007. Are the restrictions really worth all the trouble, I pondered, if we are going to run out of water anyway? That night it rained.
On the weekend I read The Courier-Mail and Australian Water Association report on the future of southeast Queensland's water. The Courier-Mail should be congratulated for commissioning a report that pulls together a lot of basic information.
The report, available from The Courier-Mail's website, indicates that most of the southeast including Brisbane, Gatton, Ipswich, Caboolture, Redcliffe and Logan has enough water until 2025. According to the report, the "safe yields" will not be exceeded until then.
In contrast Toowoomba, Crows Nest and Jondaryan already have exceeded their "safe yield". Indeed it is reasonable to conclude from the report that Toowoomba does have a water crisis.
But even this can be averted through a commitment to water recycling and perhaps a cap on Toowoomba's populations.
By 2025 the greater Brisbane region is expected to be home to another one million people and the existing dams will be inadequate. Rather than build new dams, the new reports suggests governments support a combination of water recycling and also build a few desalination plants.
Brisbane, like other state capitals, is situated beside the ocean and is thus well positioned to use desalination technologies.
As Professor Bjorn Lomborg, Danish statistician and author of Cambridge University publication, The Sceptical Environmentalist, has said: "Desalination puts an upper boundary on the degree of water problems in the world. In principle we could produce the Earth's entire present water consumption with a single desalination facility in the Sahara, powered by solar cells. The total area needed for the solar cells would take up less than 0.3 per cent of the Sahara".
The Courier-Mail and Australian Water Association report indicates that desalinated water would cost $1 to $1.40 per thousand litres to produce.
I am now paying about $0.90 a thousand litres for the water delivered to my home by Toowoomba City Council.
But I am being told I really shouldn't use it to water my garden -- or at least not my lawn.
I would be happy to pay a bit more for my water and use recycled water, including for drinking, if I didn't have to worry so much about running out of water.
KPMG's Bernard Salt, arguing in favour of a new dam for Sydney, recently commented that "without the dam, four, and eventually five, million residents of Sydney must daily adjust their lives to accommodate water shortages so as to preserve the bushland and the downstream environment outside the city.
"With the dam and no water restrictions this generation of Sydney residents and the next are freed from the daily grind of preserving every single guilty drop of water".
Interestingly, surveys in Sydney and Melbourne have found high levels of public support for water restrictions. Certainly a community continually told it is about to run out of water is going to support restrictions and rally against people like me who like to water their lawn.
The advantage with desalination and recycling, as proposed in The Courier-Mail and Australian Water Association report, is that it doesn't really matter whether it rains.
In 1983, I won the Grade 6 Form Prize.
I was given a book titled SOS Save the Earth. The book focused entirely on reducing pollution. Indeed, in the 1980s environmentalism was about pollution -- chimney stacks, leaded petrol and cleaning up smelly rivers.
Twenty years later many of these issues successfully have been addressed and the environmental focus has moved on to saving water and saving energy. Indeed, now the Victorian Government's eco-perfect family includes a young girl called Hydra Sustainable who says we should only wash our hair once a week -- to save water.
I've been there and done that, and I suggest we endorse the new The Courier-Mail and Australian Water Association report and get cracking on the water recycling and desalination initiatives so my children and grandchildren can wash their hair and water their gardens every other day -- should they so please.
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