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The Current Transcript for January 23, 2018

Host: Anna Maria Tremonti

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Listen to the full episode

Prologue

[Music: Theme]

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Chinese language, dips into translation]

VOICE 1: We can see Sanchi tanker has completely sunk. Nothing but debris and oil are still burning. A ten square kilometres oil belt has been formed. It is a very serious situation.

ANNA MARIA TREMONTI: Translation from a reporter from the CCTV China news service, hovering above the East China sea, where an Iranian oil tanker went up in flames two weeks ago and then sank to the bottom a week later—in waters that have long been in dispute between China and Japan and also rich with seafood. The ship the Sanchi was carrying petroleum condensate: toxic, colourless, soluble, and now considered one of the more problematic and environmentally threatening spills on record. And while marine biologists and environmental experts worry, China is searching for the ship and Japan is noticeably silent. In a moment, the curious and catasophrics case of the sinking of the Sanchi. Also today, as U.S. President Donald Trump begins his second year in the White House, you have likely lost track of all the controversies he's waded into or created.

SOUNDCLIP

DAVID FRUM: The controversies will divert you from the scandals. This president—every day—does something that would be the single biggest scandal of the whole administration if it had happened under a different president.

AMT: Author David Frum looks at a presidency that he says has the potential to erode America's prized democracy. He explains Trumpocracy in half an hour. And they are one day closer to “Day Zero” in Cape Town, South Africa.

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: I think “Day Zero's” going to happen whether the government wants to do it or not. I think the water is going to run out and it's very scary to think of it, but I think it's a reality.

AMT: It may be the first major city in the world to run out of water. It will not be the last. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

Why more people aren't talking about the Asian oil spill as big as Paris

Guests: Richard Steiner, Miguel Quintana

SOUNDCLIP

VOICE 1: An Iranian oil tanker that had collided with a Chinese vessel in the East China Sea has sunk. That's according to Chinese state television. The Iranian ship had been ablaze for a week. CCTV says large amounts of oil are now burning in the surrounding waters. Efforts are underway to assess the spread and drift of the oil.

AMT: Well that happened earlier this month. And if you missed the story, you are not alone. It's taken a while for the world's attention to catch up with the vast scale of the disaster: the largest tanker spill in decades. Thirty-two crew members are presumed dead after an Iranian tanker, the Sanchi collided with another ship on January 6th and burst into flames, later sinking. It was carrying about 136,000 tonnes—or one million barrels of condensate, an especially flammable type of light oil. Experts who study oil spills say this puts us in uncharted waters. Jon Watts is the global environmental editor for The Guardian in the U.K. He says there are many unanswered questions about all of that condensate.

SOUNDCLIP

JONATHAN WATTS: Has it gone up in smoke literally? Has some of it evaporated or has some of it gone in the sea and is polluting fish? The complication is, that unlike a crude oil slick, which you can see because it's thick and black, and this is the very familiar type of oil slick we've seen on television countless times. This is different—it's very hard to see, it doesn't appear on the surface very clearly. It's more soluble. So the good thing is that you don't have this ugly black mark on the top of the sea. The bad thing is you don't know where it is or exactly what its doing unless you monitor things very, very carefully—which wasn't done initially. So there's a big mystery, a big fear, about where this toxic oil has gone.

AMT: We'll hear more about the environmental consequences in a moment. But, this is what Jon Watt says he'll be watching for as the story continues to unfold.

SOUNDCLIP

JONATHAN WATTS: The ship has now sunk and there are questions about how much is still inside the ship and might now be seeping out. Another thing would be is there any monitoring of fish in that area, in the East China Sea, and the level to which this fish might be contaminated because this is a very important fisheries area for Japan, China, and for South Korea and potentially millions of fish are affected—and we don't know where they're going. It's quite possible a lot of them will end up in supermarket shelves particularly in those three countries.

AMT: Jon Watts, global environmental editor for The Guardian newspaper. This major tanker spill may not be generating a great deal of media attention around the world. My next guest is keeping a very close eye on it. Richard Steiner is a marine scientist and an oil spill consultant. He's based in Alaska. We've reached him in Anchorage. Hello.

RICHARD STEINER: Good morning.

AMT: So how big is this oil spill?

RICHARD STEINER: Well actually it's very large. It's a very serious issue. And it had—as you mentioned—a million barrels of natural gas condensate on board, which is very light, very volatile, and acutely toxic down to very low concentrations. If all of that was released, which seems a virtual certainty now given the Ministry of Transport's underwater survey of the sunken ship, this is by far the largest environmental release of petroleum condensate in history. So this is a very big deal.

AMT: I'm trying to think of other spills. There's something like the Deepwater Horizon, which gushed for so long. How does it compare to something like that or the Exxon Valdez that hit the coast of Alaska?

RICHARD STEINER: Yeah, I worked on both of those. The Deepwater Horizon was by far the largest accidental oil spill in human history. It's about four to five million barrels. Sanchi again is about a million barrels of condensate. Exxon Valdez was between one quarter to one half million barrels. So Sanchi falls in the middle there between those two. But the damage caused by Exxon Valdez because it was a toxic crude oil in a inshore productive pristine marine environment was off the charts. It was certainly the most ecologically damming spill we know of.

AMT: So this is not that heavy crude that we can see in clumps and glumps. This is different. What are the dangers of this one?

RICHARD STEINER: Well you're right. There's a lot we don't know about a major condensate spill because we've never seen one. This the first. But what we do know is that it behaves very differently than crude oil. It does not form a surface slick. Containment and recovery with traditional booms and skimmers, is not possible. It either burns, evaporates, or dissolves. We do not know the percentage of each of those from the Sanchi, which is one of the reasons I pushed the Chinese government on day two to get a comprehensive monitoring program offshore and then we could have understood where this stuff went. It's not as persistent as crude oil. But there is this conventional human bias for what we can see if oil comes to shore lines or if you can see it on the sea surface, then we get it. But this is very different. The dissolved fraction is in the water under the sea surface. You don't see it. The smoke and evaporates are already gone. And even though water pollution has already dispersed from the site with water current, you don't see it in traditional sense. But it still has impacted the East China Sea offshore pelagic ecosystem quite severely. And we expect that—yet the governments have not fielded a comprehensive environmental monitoring program. So if you don't look, you won't find. And that's what unfortunately where we are these days I think.

AMT: And if I can just clarify. So the slick that would have been on the surface, is that from the actual fuel tanks as opposed to the cargo of fuel?

RICHARD STEINER: That's correct. Yeah. The cargo capacity on this size of tankers up to 4,000 tonnes. She was near the end of her trip. So it's our understanding that she had maybe a thousand tonnes of heavy bunker fuel oil on board. That's what's forming the surface slicks in the area. But you will notice two days ago the State Oceanic Administration from China mentioned that there were 330 square kilometres of surface slicks. Then yesterday, they said there were none, because there had been a storm and they all had dissipated or emulsified in the upper sea surface with wave turbulence and such. There was a very poor effort to actually contain and recover those surface slicks. That is a minimum they need to do, is actually get that stuff recovered. But they didn't even do that. And again that is only the tip of the iceberg regarding the pollution from this event. If a 1,000 tonnes of fuel oil comes out versus a 136,000 tonnes of this toxic condensate, obviously the biggest problem is the condensate—where it went and what damage was caused?

AMT: So what could the environmental impact of the condensate be?

RICHARD STEINER: Well, I'm sure the toxic plume that dissolved in the water column has already spread over hundreds of square miles of the East China Sea. And with turbulent mixing even contacted the seabed. So even though it's 150 miles offshore and the pollution subsurfaced, there has been serious ecological injury. Whenever you spill, tens of thousands of tonnes of toxic petroleum chemical into a marine ecosystem, you expect impacts to be severe. And the East China Sea is a rich productive offshore ecosystem. There's hundreds of species of fish that are commercially harvested there. There's many seabirds and marine mammals: humpback whales, fin whales, minke whales, killer whales, and a rare bryde's whale. And all of those can be acutely impacted. They can have lethal impacts where they die if they're exposed to high concentrations of this stuff. And they can have sub-lethal impacts like reproductive impairment, morphological changes, physiological damage, tissue damage, organ damage, and it can have multi-generational effects like carcinogensis, that some of this stuff is benzene.

AMT: And some of this is seafood. Like some of this stuff is fish. It's a real rich fishing area, is it not?

RICHARD STEINER: That's correct. Yeah.

AMT: So what does it mean to people eating?

RICHARD STEINER: Well, my recommendation—I've recommended this to the governments of China and Japan over a week ago—is that they close the fisheries in the region that could potentially be impacted by this pollution event until they can confirm to the consumers onshore that the region and the fish products that are in market are safe and not contaminated. I have not gotten a response on that, but I do think they're weighing that as a possibility. That's sort of standard procedure here in the U.S. and in Canada with how to proceed with protecting consumers with seafood contamination during an oil spill. In this one, one of the big human health issues is benzene, which is a single ring aromatic hydrocarbon. It's highly carcinogenic. And I believe the WHO standard is down to 10 parts per billion. So the standard is very, very, very dilute benzene concentrations are bad. And we know a lot of benzene went into the water there. So they need to do a fishery sampling program and close the fisheries until they can confirm that it's safe.

AMT: Do you know where it might be drifting? The slick is kind of going toward Japan. What about the other stuff? Do we have any idea?

RICHARD STEINER: Well that's—absolutely not. We have a suspicion that it's flowing towards Japan, that I think the tanker actually sank within the Japanese EEZ—exclusive economic zone. But that's why the government needed to immediately do a current trajectory modelling—both surface and subsurface sea currents—and then model where this subsurface toxic hydrocarbon plume would travel. I know it's covered hundreds of square miles of the East China Sea already. But it's all gone downstream. The tanker itself drifted maybe a hundred miles from when the first collision occurred and then it drifted almost south to where it sank.

AMT: Right.

RICHARD STEINER: The other real issue was whether there was still intact cargo holds on the tanker—on the sea floor. And they did get an ROV down there and surveyed over the past couple of days, and the result is as we suspected, that most of it is pretty trash and there's probably little if any condensate still left on board.

AMT: Okay. Well, Richard Steiner please hold on for a minute. I want to talk to another guest and have you listen in. Miguel Quintana is a freelance journalist based in Japan. He's been watching this story unfold there—or trying to anyway. We have reached him in Tokyo. Hi.

MIGUEL QUINTANA: Hello.

AMT: And I say you're trying to because I understand there's not much coverage in Japan.

MIGUEL QUINTANA: Well yes. I need to be a little bit specific about this idea of coverage. I was here as everyone else saw the pictures of this tanker going down in flames after exploding—Chinese images from China's CCTV. What has been puzzling in the beginning and then became very worrying, then turned to appalling and even disbelief for me is the absence of follow ups on—precisely what your previous guest and yourself were talking about—all the open questions. And the question being what exactly is going on?

AMT: And this appears to have gone down in the exclusive economic zone of Japan. Are they talking about this at all?

MIGUEL QUINTANA: Well that's one very interesting point, which is that very few little coverage there was in the beginning mentioned that this ship went down in Japan's exclusive economic zone. What does that mean? We know it's three hundred sixteen kilometres west—it's an island called Amami Oshima. And if you do look at the map you realize that it is in an area where you appear you to have those two exclusive economic zones—China and Japan's—overlapping. Now the question is, why once you've said that wouldn't you be concerned? Why wouldn't you mention that this is perhaps the largest tanker accident of the last 25 years on a global scale that there are concerns for the environment? Why are people not hearing about this? And it brings back very bad memories about what happened after the nuclear accident at Fukushima Daiichi. But even then it was not some kind of media blackout. There was debate over the words that should be used and how to interpret the data here. Here, if you read the newspaper, you just don't read about it.

AMT: So what are you suggesting?

MIGUEL QUINTANA: Keeping me busy for the past week.

AMT: What are you suggesting when it comes to environmental issues? That reporters, journalists, and news organizations don't dig?

MIGUEL QUINTANA: Well to me that is among the open questions. All I'm trying to do right now and what I've been trying to do over the past week—day by day I got more and more surprised and more concerned—is that in the same way as environmentalist or experts will treat a spill on this scale, journalists will treat this kind of information with a list of protocols. Where did it happen? Who was involved? What are we looking at? What are the risks? And then you can talk to experts and bring them in and just inform the public and let them know whether they should or not to be worried about it. And this does not seem to be happening—again I need to be specific on that—since we learned that this ship went down. If I may just give you one specific example it's the Asahi Shimbun. This raises the question of how do you point out the absence of something especially in media coverage when we're all over exposed to all kinds of things that are more or less relevant to our lives. I looked specifically into one newspaper called the Asahi Shimbun. It's one of the most famous and biggest newspapers in Japan. And I just took a week's worth of newspapers from the day of the accident to one week later. I went to page after page after page; scanned absolutely everything. And can you guess how many instances I found the articles even mentioning this? And I would give it to you right now. Zero. And that to me is shocking and raises very important questions about not just the role of the media but how they function. And I'm not trying to point fingers. But what I would like to do ideally is get people in this country to think about it and what it means for them, for their democracy, and for whatever else may be coming down the road.

AMT: Okay. Well, Miguel Quintana interesting to get that perspective from you. Thank you very much. That is Miguel Quintana, a freelance journalist based in Tokyo. Richard Steiner you're listening to that. I'm going to bring you back into this conversation. What do you make of that? This is sort of —China Japan—you're trying to tell them both to do stuff. You surprised that it's not getting a lot of attention with the Japanese public

RICHARD STEINER: Well I am surprised and I am also very frustrated and disappointed. This is 150 miles offshore. There are no independent observers out there. There is very minimal monitoring. And so we really don't know what to believe with all this information is tightly controlled by a traditionally nontransparent government that of China and Japan—as we've just heard from Miguel is saying nothing. And that really is stunning. And again, if we don't transparently communicate with citizens, that's a basic fundamental tentative democracy. My counsel to the governments of China and Japan is that all that is to be open and honest about these things than to attempt to cover them up and conceal the truth. That what they need to start doing immediately.

AMT: And we are talking about petroleum condensate. As you point out we've not seen something like this. Is there a lesson here? Canada has got a lot of ports. Is this something Canada should be learning from this as well?

RICHARD STEINER: That's a great question and the answer to that is absolutely. The Sanchi should be a wakeup call for Canada, in particular B.C. and Alberta. Condensate is coming into Canada now by pipeline and tanker. About 180,000 barrels a day are coming through the southern pipeline—the Enbridge pipeline from Illinois up to Alberta. If Northern Gateway gets built over to Kitimat, that would be about the same amount of condensate coming in. But even now there is condensate and methanol coming into Kitimat by tanker and shipped by rail to Alberta. This is all used to dilute bitumen to make it easier to transport the pipelines. So a Sanchi disaster is a real and growing risk for Canada. And particularly if built the Gateway Pipeline. So when you see images of the Sanchi exploded and on fire and sinking and dead crew and the pollution event, just imagine Kitimat and Douglas Channel, Haida Gwaii, and Prince Rupert, Hartley Bay, and you get the picture pretty quickly the risk we're taking.

AMT: Richard Steiner, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your time and your insights.

RICHARD STEINER: Sure. My pleasure. Good luck.

AMT: Richard Steiner, he's a marine scientist and an oil spill consultant. He's based in Anchorage, Alaska. That's where we reached him today. Let us know what you think of what he had to say. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to the website cbc.ca/thecurrent. Stay with us. The news is next. Then...

SOUNDCLIP

DAVID FRUM: Donald Trump has caused judgement on the United States for not being good enough citizens and the only answer is to be better citizens.

AMT: He's a conservative commentator, a long-time Republican, but he says American democracy is under threat from the Trump administration. David Frum is my guest talking about Trumprocacy right after the news. This is The Current.

Back To Top »

David Frum was once 'Trump-curious' but now says his presidency is like America's gum disease

Guest: David Frum

Hello, I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

[Music: Theme]

AMT: Still to come, Cape Town, South Africa could run out of fresh water as soon as this April—making it the first major city in the world to do so. In half-an-hour, we'll hear what's behind Cape Town's water crisis... and how other cities around the world can work to avoid the same fate. But first, adventures in Trumpocracy...

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: We'll ask these folks to go back and have a good day and we're going to discuss our various reports. Mike?

MIKE PENCE: Thank you, Mr. President... keeping his word to the American people and assembling a team that's bringing real change, real prosperity, real strength back to our nation.

DONALD TRUMP: Thank you, Mike.

REINCE PRIEBUS: On behalf of the entire senior staff around you, Mr. President, we thank you for the opportunity and the blessing that you've given us to serve your agenda and the American people. And we're going to continue to work very hard every day to accomplish those goals.

AMT: It was the first, full gathering of U.S. president Donald Trump's cabinet—a televised meeting, last June, that looked—to some—unlike anything they'd witnessed in U.S. democracy before. You heard the vice president Mike Pence, and then-White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus paying homage to the commander in chief. To President Trump's opponents, it seemed a lot like the way party apparatchiks would speak to a strongman in charge. David Frum is one of the best known and most determined of those opposing this President—from within his own party. He is senior editor of The Atlantic magazine and the author of the new book, Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. David Frum is with me in Toronto. Hello.

DAVID FRUM: Hi. Thank you, Anna Maria.

AMT: What did that meeting say to you about this president and the men and women around him?

DAVID FRUM: I remember when people talked like that to President George W. Bush and the door would close and they would leave, and he would turn to the staff and he would just roll his eyes. That kind of flattery—I mean I suppose it goes with the job. But to actually believe it, I don't think Barack Obama would have believed it. I mean they might have liked it, but they wouldn't have believed it. They certainly wouldn't have insisted on it.. And that tells you that this person has broken these people. The assumption when Donald Trump came to power among a lot of Republicans was they would run him. He's running them.

AMT: What is Trumpocracy? How do you define it?

DAVID FRUM: Trumpocracy is Donald Trump as a system of power. That cabinet room you saw or at Camp David when he spoke those crazy things in the microphone and there are three or four people over each shoulder nodding along. Those people are part of the system. They enable him. And the question is, why has it worked? The whole system of the United States was supposedly designed to keep people like Donald Trump away from power. If they somehow slipped into power, to control them while there. That system is failing and Trumpocracy is the mode of government that has grown up in the failure of the American system.

AMT: Now, I want to ask you a bit more about that because you do say, enabling the bad people in the Trump orbit are the weak people. So who are we talking about here?

DAVID FRUM: Let me tell a story that actually sums this up. H.R. McMaster is the National Security Adviser: three star general, hero of Iraq and Afghanistan, author of an excellent book about the military in the Vietnam War, a real soldier intellectual, a man of integrity, one of the most admired soldiers of his generation. And it was a huge relief to friends of America around the world when H.R. McMaster replaced Michael Flynn who was compromised by the Russians and the Turks. McMaster made it his top goal to get President Trump finally to say an unequivocal defense of NATO. He booked a trip to NATO in April 2017. He arranged his speaking event where Donald Trump would stand literally in front of the monument to Article 5—a twisted girder from the World Trade Center, and would speak words to defend NATO. And just so there would be no mistake, McMaster wrote the words himself so the president would say exactly the right thing. On the plane over McMaster briefs reporters on—especially the New York Times—this is what the president will say and this will close forever the uncertainty about whether Trump is committed to NATO. Trump got the speech, came to that section, and whether because he has ideological commitments, whether the Russians have something on him or whether he just balks at being told what to do, he refused to read the key words. The reporters naturally asked McMaster, what happened? You told us that this would be in the speech. And MacMaster—an honourable solider full of patriotism—said, 'I don't know what you’re talking about. The president said exactly what we wanted him to say. Exactly what we expected him to say. Nobody could listen to that speech and hear anything other than defense of Article 5.'

AMT: So in other words, even the people who are least likely to enable him, end up enabling him.

DAVID FRUM: Exactly.

AMT: You say in your book, a rule of law state can withstand a certain amount of official corruption. What it cannot not withstand is a culture of impunity. How does that apply to this administration?

DAVID FRUM: The United States is one of the more corrupt of the major democracies. That has always been true—partly because the federal system. It has always been easier to bribe a police officer in the United States than say England or Germany. But it has a lot of systems to catch corruption. Something like 10,000 people has been sent to prison in the United States since 1990 for governmental corruption. Most of those very, very—no sheriffs—low level people. What has been happening under Donald Trump is those systems are being turned off for the president of the United States. This president every day does something that will be the single biggest scandal of the whole administration if it had happened under another president. Another example, Donald Trump continues to operate as business. He says he's divested, but his sons run it. They report to him. There is no disclosure. No one knows anything. He receives millions of dollars of payments from partners in Turkey, the Philippines, United Arab Emirates, I think Azerbaijan, and India for the use of his name. How much? We don't know. Is it a flat fee or a percentage of something? We don't know. Those people have a grip on his livelihood. It's a grip so strong that the Filipinos sent as their ambassador to Washington, the developer of the Trump Tower—the guy who signs the president's cheque from the Philippines is the Filipino ambassador to Washington. It would be an enormous scandal. The way we would disclose it? Off. The investigations? Off. The actions? Off. He has turned off the burglar alarms. If you do something astonishing every day, eventually people will forget. That means there will only ever be one astonishing thing that people are talking about. One of my mottos I coined at the beginning of the administration is: the controversy's will do for you from the scandals. So he will say something racially inflammatory. He will insult Haiti and Africa. So we all talk about that. It's hard to keep focused on the everyday financial stories and the contacts with Russia. I am not asking people not to do it. And when the president spills into your lap, you have to look at the ink in your lap. But that's why it works on the press. One of the questions people ask me is, 'is there anything new in Trumpocracy?' And I answer, 'it will feel new because you've forgotten so much.'

AMT: Because there is so much. So in other words, we're drowning in all of these stories that individually we would stunned by. But now we're just so surrounded by it we don't know where to look anymore.

DAVID FRUM: Exactly. So there is only ever one—maybe two at a time—because that's the way our brains are organized. Why does the Congress put up with it? So this is a deeper question. Jimmy Carter had an all Democratic Congress. Bill Clinton in his first two years had an all Democratic Congress. Carter and Clinton found Congress [unintelligible]. There were lots of things that President Carter and Clinton wanted to do that Congress stopped them from doing. But since the middle 1990s, congresses have become more partisan and the only they check presidents of the opposite party. They just look away from presidents of their own. And there are various ways in the book that I document that this is so. So Donald Trump has basically an arrangement with the Republicans and Congress. Paul Ryan is a true believer. He believes in very limited government. He wants big tax cuts. He wants to dismantle a lot of the government that's existed since the 1930s. That's not a very popular agenda. No democratic president would ever sign any part of it. And probably no Republican president aiming at re-election would even think about it either because, you know, Mr. Ryan you have a much gerrymandered Congress. You have this one tiny little district. I have to worry about winning millions and millions of votes. I will lose if I do what you say. Donald Trump has agreed to accept this radical Republican agenda that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney would not have accepted. In return, Congress has extended him impunity. The most striking example of this is the way they are actively compromising the investigation into the Russian attack on the American election. Devin Nunes, the head of the House Intelligence Committee, is the point man in protecting Donald Trump. Paul Ryan protects Devin Nunes. And the House Intelligence Committee should be investigating this is, is completely neutralized.

AMT: So let me ask you, during the Bill Clinton scandals of the 90s, Republicans often said that the character of the president matters. Of course, a lot Democrats defended him back then. They're now having second thoughts about it. Did the character of a president in office ever really matter to the partisans?

DAVID FRUM: I think America used to be a less partisan country than it was. In certain aspects of the president matter. One of the big changes that have happened is—you can measure this I have data on this you can measure this—the group of people who were most likely to say 10 years ago, does it matter whether the president is personally good man, were evangelical Christians. They were the most likely to say yes. They are now the least likely to say yes. They have adapted to Donald Trump too. That's part of the structure of enabling what Donald Trump is. It's not just that multiple unfaithful the wives and involved with prostitutes and strippers. He's just cool in every way. He's cool to his own children. And you would think Evangelical Christians, who care so much about the integrity of the family that it would bother them all the time. But they have in complicated ways and for their own reasons made their peace with it.

AMT: David Frum, as you go through this book you are not and never were a Trump supporter. You point out in your book after the campaign some of the "Never Trumpers" have gone on to become his biggest boosters. What happened?

DAVID FRUM: Well I described myself at the beginning of the campaign as "Trump curious." I don't use the phrase "Never Trump" about myself because at the beginning I thought it was possible that he could do some good. In 2015, Trump emerged. The party was on its way to running as the "Paul Ryan party." It was going to campaign on—my joke was—the Republican base was telling you they want more health care, less immigration, and no more Bushes. And they are being offered less healthcare, more immigration, and one more Bush. That needed to be disrupted. Donald Trump was disrupting it. This is productive because he will show he's promised not to touch Medicare. He promised to protect social security. He talked about the dislocations of immigration. He was the first Republican to talk a lot about the opioid epidemic. Then I waited for some response from Scott Walker—somebody like that—to say, 'the way I'm going to beat Jeb Bush is by taking Donald Trump's issues and using them to put together a different kind of Republican platform and then we'll have a normal kind of battle. And we'll have a kind of nominee and maybe a normal kind of presidency.' I didn't anticipate ever that he would actually win the nomination. That seemed like a joke out of the Simpsons. But he did. Once he won the nomination and then the presidency, the power of negative partisanship took over. That's why those "Never Trump" people were reconciled rust people were reconciled. I don't know that term negative partisanship means things to people.

AMT: What does that mean?

DAVID FRUM: Okay. So one of the mysteries in political science a decade ago was if you asked Americans are you Republican, Democrat, or Independent, never in history had more people identified as independent—they were just leaving the parties. So what was very common to read in 2007—people say, 'well a third of the country is independent, why are we so polarized?' Because they always assumed that independent meant were centrist. In the middle they were leaving the party because the Republicans were too conservative, the Democrats are too liberal, and they were looking for Michael Bloomberg there in the middle. So a political scientist, Alan Abramowitz, got interested in this. And he’s begun studying these independents. And he found at two things. They weren't leaving from the middle. They were leaving from the edges. People thought the Democratic Party was too conservative, not too liberal. People thought the Republican Party was not conservative enough. And although they didn't like the Republican Party, although you got this big, 'I'm not sure. I'm not Republican or Democrat,' if you ask the question 'which party do you hate?' It turned out there are no independents. Every American hates one party much more strongly than he or she hates the other party. This is negative. I may be a weak Republican but I am a strong anti-Democrat or vice versa. So that's once you take over one of these parties. Even if you do it with maybe only a third of the voters in that party really liking you, which is what happened to Donald Trump. Once you've got the party apparatus you can then say, 'okay maybe you don't like me, but Hillary Clinton is literally Satan.' And when he said literally Satan, he meant literally Satan. Since she's literally Satan, obviously it's better to have Donald Trump than Satan.

AMT: That's right. So it's like I'm not that. I'm this.

DAVID FRUM: Let your hatred, not your loyalty, not your principles, not beliefs, let your hatred drive your [unintelligible].

AMT: You know that there is backlash against how you characterize this and how you see this. And a lot of that comes in the fact that you were George W. Bush's speechwriter. You have to make the case for the war against Iraq. The Conservative Washington Examiner in its review of your book writes, "Trumpocracy is the empire naked, stripped from neoconservatism's noble rhetoric, exposing our own hypocrisy in welcoming solutions from men like Frum." How you respond to that?

DAVID FRUM: Well, what we're seeing in the modern world is a convergence between certain elements of the far left—Bernie Sanders left—and certain alt-right people. They all hate the idea of a strong America at the centre or a strong alliance system. And they see in Donald Trump somebody who will smash that. And they see in people like me, people with more conventional politics—Bush Republican, supported the Iraq war, along with Hillary Clinton and John Kerry. And that's where the broad American centre was. What these guys believe in is they believe in an American-led world order. At least with Donald Trump he's going to wreck it. A book is an object. It exists independent of the author. Pick it up. Take a look. If you find it useful. It's useful. Everything in my life I had done was something that you agreed with and I wrote a non-useful book, why would you read it?

AMT: You said you feel a sense of karmic obligation.

DAVID FRUM: Yeah.

AMT: As for your role in the Bush administration. What does that mean?

DAVID FRUM: Well I served in an administration that didn't wasn't very successful. It didn't achieve and not just in foreign policy but in domestic policy. My joke about the Bush administration: it opened with Pearl Harbour and it ended with the crash of 1929 and it had Vietnam in between. It was a bumpy administration. It didn't deliver results. It's probably the only administration I'll ever work in and I was a part of it. So I feel like when you look back on your public service career you say, 'that didn't go that well.' I feel a lot weight of responsibility to make things go better.

AMT: I want to talk about that because it's like you're watching democracy shift in ways that will allow it to dissipate at some point. And your waving your hand and saying 'hang on. Like pay attention to this.' I quote in the book a survey that asks the question, 'is it very important to you personally to live in a democracy? Across the developed world—not just in the United States and Europe too—if you group people by age 70s, 60s, 50s, 40s, with each decade the proportion who say 'yes it is important to me goes down.' The people who are over 70 are the most likely to say 'it is very important to me personally to live in a democracy.' People under 30 radically less. And people under 30—if you ask the question 'would you rather be led by a strong man who will govern without regard to parliaments and laws?' About a third of young people across the developed world say 'yes they would like that idea.'

AMT: Why do you think that is?

DAVID FRUM: That's a profound question. In part it's because of the fading of the memories of World War II. If you're 30 you think a strong will be a powerful leader who will of course agree with me and do what I want and overrun all those petty naysayers who don't want to do what I do. I'll get my way with less trouble. And maybe we'll deliver better results for my generation than we've been having till now. If your over 70, I know what that means. It means the truncheon. It means war. It means oppression. And if you're in your 50s, you say, 'my parents told me what it means.' The memories are getting fading. I think it's also true if you're of a certain age you'll remember that the democratic system not only prevailed in the greatest conflict in world history, but then set up a stable peace. A generous peace in which former enemies became friends and delivered the fastest rate of increase in standard of living for ordinary people in the history of the world. It worked. You remember the 40s, 50s, the 60s, and early 70s. Democracy proved itself. It wasn't just that everything was bad This was affirmatively good. The delivery rate has become less successful and especially in the 21st century. And so people who only know that are receptive to messages. And whatever else the Russians are bad at—one of the things they're very good at is micro-targeting grievances. There's some research the other day that looked at people who tweet Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter—anti-police pro-police slogans. And they get into like flame wars on Twitter. The most combative of these Black Lives Matter hashtags and Blue Lives, were bots. And probably Russian. What seems to be happening is that there are people sitting in rows in Petersburg and the person at desk number one whose job is to make people believe in Black Lives Matter hate people who believe in Blue Lives Matter. And the next desk is with somebody who has the opposite job. And we are vulnerable to this. Russians didn't create this, but they exploit it.

AMT: I want to play a clip from President Trump. This is Donald Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference last February.

SOUNDCLIP

DONALD TRUMP: And I want you all to know that we are fighting the fake news. It's fake! Phoney! Fake! A few days ago I called the fake news the enemy of the people, and they are. They are the enemy of the brave people.

[Sound: Applause and cheering]

AMT: The enemy of the people. David Frum, Republican Senator Jeff Flake last week said President Trump's description of the U.S. media as enemies of the people is Stalinist.

DAVID FRUM: Well that is the phrase that Stalin's prosecutor Vyshinsky shouted at people at the Moscow trials of the 1930s before sending them after death. It's important to decode. When Donald Trump says 'fake news' he means accurate reporting. When he says 'deep state' he means the rule of law. Everything is upside down. This is one of Trump's gifts. Trump has an instinct for weak points. There is such a thing as fake news. Fake news is what the Russians created to promote the candidacy of Donald Trump. Deliberate invention spread through social media in order to effect behaviour. This concept when it was introduced was a dangerous concept to Donald Trump, as he owed so much to fake news of the literal kind. So as he so often does, he took this weapon against him and he shamelessly without any regard for truth turned it around and said 'when people report accurately on what I do and what I say that is the fake news.

AMT: You have a passage that I'm going to actually read because it really speaks to what you're telling us: "The thing to fear from the Trump presidency is not the bold overthrow of the Constitution, but the stealthy paralysis of governance. Not the defiance of law, but an accumulating subversion version of norms. Not the deployment of state power to intimidate dissidents, but the incitement of private violence to radicalize supporters." I'm looking at that phrase again the other day, and I'm reading: okay paralysis of government—underway. Private violence—Charlottesville. Is this by design?

DAVID FRUM: It's instinct. Trump is not strategic, but he is brilliantly intuitive. He follows the course of least resistance. When Donald Trump was first elected, a lot of alarmist people would compare what happened to Germany in the 1930s. When I started this, I tried explaining that this is wrong. You don't take the most extreme case of democratic breakdown in the entire history of the world with the most horrible consequences afterwards and say, 'right, it's going to be like that.' That's the outlier. There are a lot of stops on the train line of bad before you get to Hitler station. Donald Trump—it's not a sudden seizure. It's not a heart attack. It's gum disease. You can die from gum disease, but you don't die right away. Your body just corrodes and it begins to emit toxins and the toxins get into the bloodstream and the toxins eventually affect the heart and you can die. But you also have time. One of the problems that also goes along with this view that 'oh my gosh it's going to some sudden crisis,' is it invites everyone to say 'I'll be a hero later.' When the crisis comes and a lot of Republicans in the Senate think this: 'if Donald Trump tries to arrest anybody. I'll be there to stop it.' But that's not what we need you to act against. We need you a long time before then. We need you to work on those gums and to notice that things are just festering. Don't wait for the dramatic hour to be a hero. If it actually ever does come to that it'll be too late.

AMT: President Trump's supporters and some others would say 'we don't like what he's doing but the economy is booming. ISIS has basically been defeated. Neil Gorsuch is in the Supreme Court. Fewer people than ever are trying to cross into the United States from Mexico. What's not to like?

DAVID FRUM: The economy is strengthening. And those who think that Donald Trump is going to go away all by himself, need to keep this in mind, as the economy strengthens, I hypothesize one of the stories of 2018 is that Donald Trump's poll numbers are at last begin to go up. He will be stronger in 2018 than he has been in 2017. And if the Republicans take losses in the midterm elections in 2018, for the Republican party and conservatives, Donald Trump will then be maybe the only game in town. They will be more loyal to him. As the Republican Party weakens within America. Donald Trump gets stronger within the Republican Party.

AMT: David Frum, you make us think. Thank you.

DAVID FRUM: Thank you very much.

AMT: David Frum, senior editor of The Atlantic magazine, author of the new book Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic. He joined me in Toronto. Let us know what you think of what he's saying. You can tweet us @TheCurrentCBC. Find us on Facebook. Go to our website cbc.ca/thecurrent. In our next half hour, there may be water, water everywhere in Cape Town, on the South African coast—sooner or later there may not be a drop to drink. Inside Cape Town's water crisis and what it means for the rest of the world—in about 90 seconds. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. This is The Current.

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Cape Town is about to become the first major city in the world to run out of water

Guests: Simon Gear, Rupert Koopman, Mike Young

AMT: I'm Anna Maria Tremonti and you're listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

PATRICIA DE LILLE: We have really reached a point of no return. Despite our urging for months now—and you can testify to that as the media—60 percent of Capetonians are callously using more than 87 litres of water per person per day. And it's quite unbelievable that a majority of people do not seem to care and are sending all of us headlong towards “Day Zero.” We can no longer ask people to stop wasting water. We now have to force them to stop wasting water.

AMT: "Day Zero"—That's what they're calling the day when the water will run out in Cape Town, South Africa. That was the city's mayor, Patricia de Lille, issuing a stern warning to residents about the impending arrival of “Day Zero.” When the day finally comes, Cape Town's nearly four million residents will have to line up at water collection points, because the city taps will have run dry. And “Day Zero” is expected to arrive.... on April 21st. It's a combination of factors that have brought Cape Town to this dire point—and which seem likely to make it the first major city in the world to run dry... though it almost certainly won't be the last. Simon Gear is an environmental scientist and climatologist. He's in Johannesburg. Hello.

SIMON GEAR: Yes, good day.

AMT: It all sounds a bit dystopian. “Day Zero.” People in a capital city lining up for water. What's brought Cape Town to a point where it's just months away from running out of water.

SIMON GEAR: Yeah, this is quite scary. I've been lecturing on climate change and running sort of media career around weather and the climate for nearly 20 years now. And we've been talking climate change for all that time. Our concerns around Cape Town have been highlighted by the experts for that entire period—from about the change of the century. And Cape Town specifically because it is in a fairly dry environment anyway. Its seen massive immigration into it by mostly fairly wealthy middle-class people. So we've seen a massive boom in things like housing estates and golf estates. Those are the things which are very, very thirsty. Plus from a climate change point of view it is forecast to get hotter and drier over the next 50 or 60 years. And anyone who works in climate change will know that we have given lots of quite doomsday-type scenarios in the last two decades. This is the first one which I've really seen come true in a way that I think none of us could even have imagined. The thought of what is essentially a first world city running out of water in the next three months. So there has been under investment in water infrastructure across Africa, not just in Cape Town, since we changed over to democracy in 1994. That has been an ongoing theme and a problem that has been highlighted in many different parts of South Africa. And I think it's a combination of that and the fact that Cape Town is experiencing the worst drought in a century that has brought us to this point.

AMT: You have had a drought there. Would a healthy dose of rain do much?

SIMON GEAR: Well it's actually raining in Cape Town today, funny enough. Cape Town gets winter rainfall. So your summer and South Africa's winter, which is usually May, June, and July is when they get most of their rain. So it's fairly normal for us to have a very dry period now over the summer. As I said we're getting a little bit of rain now, but the dams are right around the 20 percent or 23 percent mark. And when they get below about 13 or 14 percent that's when we can no longer get access water from them. So even if we have a really, really good rainfall season, it's going to take quite a while for those dams to recharge. And the forecast is that if we hit “Day Zero” in April, and we then have a normal rainfall season, which is by no means guaranteed. But the temps might only run again in the middle to late winter, maybe even as late as October.

AMT: We heard the mayor admonishing residents for callously overusing water. What are Cape Town residents using so much water on?

SIMON GEAR: Yeah, that was a really, really interesting release that came out a few days ago, where essentially the city of Cape Town gave their own residents [unintelligible] both barrels for ignoring the water demands. This is a city that has a very, very high tourist population. Also a very high population of particularly Europeans who have summer homes here and come out for a portion of the year. And they've also just been through the December holidays and Cape Town is chockablock over that period. So I think a lot of it was probably people on holiday who feel that they deserve to have two or three showers a day and not be particularly careful about the sort of thing. Cape Town is also can be very, very hot over this time of year. It's a very outdoorsy city with a lot of people cycling and running them, and all of those sort of things. And so I think people were just carrying on their business as usual.

AMT: What would happen on “Day Zero”? Literally, people would be lining up?

SIMON GEAR: Yeah. People are going to be lining up on the streets for water. So the City of Cape Town has identified 200 distribution sites where water will be distributed. And there will be an allocation of 25 litres per person a day. But if you do the math, I think 3.75 million people in Cape Town—so if one person sends one family member to a distribution centre every day, that's 5,000 people, per cent, or per day. And that person has got to figure out how to carry a 100 litres of water back with them for themselves and all their family. So they're not going to be just going on it on their own. So these things are going to be incredibly busy 24 hours a day. And so just from a purely logistical point of view it's going to be an absolute nightmare.

AMT: What about businesses, schools, and other institutions in the midst of something like that, what happens?

SIMON GEAR: Yeah, that is probably the major issue. So I have friends who work down in Cape Town. Certainly some of them who work for the big banks have just informed those banks that they're going to move up to Johannesburg and stay with family through this period. So you can imagine if you work in a high rise building with no flush toilets, you're drinking water can be taken care of. I suspect what will happen is that we will see chemical toilets brought from all over the country and installed in Capetown. So when you need to go to the loo—you're working in a high rise—you will take the elevator down and you will go on the side of the road with everybody else for your chance to use the loo and come back up. So there's going to be significant productivity hits as well. Not only for people who have to have to spend hours queuing for water, but also for just the mission that toilets and those things are going to entail just during a normal work day.

AMT: Are we talking about a new normal here? Are we talking about a finite period of time that this “Day Zero” practice would go for?

SIMON GEAR: Certainly, no one has really wanted to think too much ahead of the immediate season. But all of the climate change forecast for the Western Cape are for hotter and drier. And so what we might find is a new normal with the sort of thing does crop up—maybe once a decade or once every eight years or so. One of the problems with the Western Cape is it doesn't have any massive rivers flowing through it. So the water resource is just about as tapped out as it can be—the surface water resource that is. We can't build anymore dams in the Western Cape. So we're now looking at stepping into aquifers; groundwater which has its own problems because we start really sucking that entire up that the groundwater level will drop and will create other problems. And there is a lot of water that flows out of Table Mountain. And I think they're looking at trying to utilize that as much as they can. So things like desalinization plants and so on. I think we'll start getting more and more water from unusual sources in the Western Cape. But certainly I would imagine a new normal where water restrictions at least are in place pretty much permanently.

AMT: And are we talking only Cape Town? You've got townships right outside of Cape Town. Are they affected?

SIMON GEAR: They certainly are. And not only within the Western Cape, but Eastern Cape province and in Northern Cape Province, essentially the central and western half of South Africa are all incredibly dry and have all experienced severe drought.

AMT: Simon Gear, thank you for taking us through that. It's quite something. Thank you very much.

SIMON GEAR: Absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.

AMT: Simon Gear, environmental scientist and climatologist. He's in Johannesburg, South Africa. The water crisis in Cape Town has been a long time in the making. Last year there was an interfaith gathering at the top of Table Mountain to pray for rain.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Prayer, not in English]

VOICE 1: In the name of Jesus, we pray. Let your hands and let your face shine upon the city of Cape Town and the entire Western Cape.

AMT: The South African farming community has also been hard hit by the back-to-back dry seasons brought on by the El Nino climate cycle. This is farmer Angus Buchan speaking at a prayer rally.

SOUNDCLIP

ANGUS BUCHAN: It breaks my heart man I wanna cry when I hear of young men committing suicide because they can't take the pressure anymore. Marriages under stress because of this drought. It's from the pit of hell I'm telling you. El Nino doesn't come from heaven, it comes from hell and it's going back to hell.

AMT: But even the most devout in South Africa agree that prayer can only do so much. William Slattery is the Archbishop of the second of South Africa's three capital cities, Pretoria.

SOUNDCLIP

WILLIAM SLATTERY: People are asking the question: Where is God when there is a drought? You know what I mean? They think God sends down rain like he just turns the tap up in Heaven. But we know that rain is controlled by climatic conditions.

AMT: Rupert Koopman is a resident of Cape Town who has been thinking about the impending drought for a long time—long before it got to this point. He's a botanist with CapeNature, which is a government organization that maintains wilderness areas and public nature reserves and looks at biodiversity across the Western Cape province. He's three hours from Cape Town today, in the mountains south of McGregor. Hello.

RUPERT KOOPMAN: Hi.

AMT: How worried are you about the impending arrival of “Day Zero”?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: As a resident who hasn't gone through the trouble of putting in [unintelligible] or buying extra storage and so forth, I am quite worried. We also got a two-year-old daughter at home. The logistics, as Simon was describing, do seem to be quite daunting.

AMT: So what kind of impact would this have on your day-to-day life at home?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: Well, we have to figure out a way of going to queue and searching out our daily resources. But also we've been doing for the last two years now, operating at the level required by the people everyone to have enough water. So it's a little bit of a slap in the face. It's almost like you've been studying for an exam and no one else has been studying, but everyone has been kept behind for detention.

AMT: So you've been limiting your water. How many litres a day have you been trying to limit to?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: We're a household of three, and the first restrictions gave us a number of 87 litres per person per day. We've largely been comfortably under that for the last two years.

AMT: But we just heard from the mayor that a lot of people aren't sticking to the water limits. What are they doing? What do you see?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: As a botanist the first thing I was looking out for is people's garden. So I moved into a house in September 2015 with quite a lush garden, but these are mostly plants that are not from South Africa and also from tropical areas. And people have been going on with lawns and so forth for the longest time and I said no. And against the council of my wife, I got a bit of a [unintelligible] at the moment. And what we've been doing is trying to introduce things like gravel walkways and native plants which do not require as much water. That's good thing because most people are not producing food or anything out of their garden. It's been very slow for people who [unintelligible] have been dropped these are not essential services.

AMT: And so how frustrating is it for you to see that gardens when you are doing so much to try to conserve water?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: Look, I work in conservation as well. So this is the place we're used to giving people warnings and they don't listen. But you would have thought that with your livelihood and life on the line that people would have a little bit more urgency and that hasn't been the case until last week really. People are suddenly waking up.

AMT: And we've heard that there's a lot of development. There's been real development in Cape Town over the last several years. What about things like golf courses? What about recreational facilities? Have those cut back?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: Well luckily they haven't for the last two years or so mostly not been using [unintelligible] water so golf courses and sports facilities have been buying water from the city which is treated different. So I grew up in an era which when I was young, quite rural, and now a really pretty urban and urban for large swathes. And what you got to understand is not only are people using water but you've got added hard surfaces which means the ground isn't being replenished as well. So everyone is saying, 'okay we will mix the lack of water in the dams with groundwater, but at the same time minimizing the amount of water that is infiltrating into the ground.

AMT: You look at biodiversity across the Western Cape province. So what kind of impact could this crisis have on plants and wildlife?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: The thing about the Western Cape is that it is the most bio-diverse [unintelligible]. I just look at Canada's figures and Canada has about 6,000 species in Canada. And we've got about 12,000 only in the Western Cape, which is much smaller than in one of your provinces—Ontario. The key that you have many species which are restricted to very small areas and very specific nations crammed into a small area. And they have water requirements. Even though they're adapted to [unintelligible]. But some of them are species only found in Wickland. And we're trying to get a figure of what we span to lose. And then the second thing of course with the drought is that [unintelligible] vegetation so it burns down every now and then. New research has indicated that if the rain doesn't come when it's supposed to after that fire, we stand a good chance of losing species as well. And the scary thing is you can't predict which ones we're going to.

AMT: Sounds pretty dire.

RUPERT KOOPMAN: Yeah [laughs]. No it is kind of apocalyptic.

AMT: You mention that you have a three-year-old. What do you think your three-year-old's world will look like when it comes to water in that region 20 years from now?

RUPERT KOOPMAN: We've had droughts here before and we've actually been quite close to this level as well. But the scale is what is nailing us. I'd hope that by the time she hits that age that people have learned to be more responsible in terms of using what they're supposed. She's already unused to the fact of having daily bowls because we her pull into the shower with us and wipe her down. And also more investment in our areas to manage them properly so that they can deliver more water, as well great monitoring which means we don't lose species.

AMT: Okay, well Rupert Koopman. Thank you for speaking to me today.

RUPERT KOOPMAN: Thanks Anna Maria. Take care.

AMT: Rupert Koopman, he's a botanist with CapeNature. We reached him today outside of Cape Town in a place called McGregor. Cape Town's crisis is something many other places around the world are likely to face soon unless a major shift takes place globally. That is according to Mike Young, who is a specialist in water policy reform. He holds a research chair in water and environmental policy at the University of Adelaide in Australia. He's advised governments in many countries, including the U.S., New Zealand, the U.K., France - all on how to best manage their water resources. Mike Young joins us from Adelaide, Australia. Hello.

MIKE YOUNG: Hi, how are you Anne Maria?

AMT: Well I'm wondering what you're thinking as you listen to our guests from Cape Town talk about preparation for “Day Zero.”

MIKE YOUNG: I am surprised from the way they're talking about it. If you look at the structures in other parts of the world and the experience, they seemed to have strived to have taken the early obvious steps. In countries like Australia—Brisbane almost ran out of water in 2006 and 2007, and they have a sophisticated seven stage program to managing these situations. And this massive effort in terms of demand management, working in education, getting high compliance and community support for solving these problems. Barcelona ran out of water in 2008 and they had to bring in tankers of water by sea. Places in California like Porterville ran out of water. They started tracking it in. And out of this is a lot of experience in how you plan for this and what you do so it doesn't become a crisis—a “Day Zero.”

AMT: And so Cape Town sounds like it's catching up and that it's going to pay for the fact that it is in this possession.

MIKE YOUNG: Yes, exactly.

AMT: And you mentioned some other cities. What other major cities are in danger worldwide?

MIKE YOUNG: What's happening in the world globally with water is people living with absolute scarcity. Places like much of Australia is about 20 percent of the world's population. By about 2030 to 2050 it's expected this is going to rise. Half of the world's population is going to be living with what's called "water scarcity" which may there will be times when situations like you find in Cape Town will arise and list their structures in place to manage really well. And particularly to deal with changing demand that can come very, very quickly and changing supplies can come very, very quickly. This requires a totally different approach toward water management that's robust. Robust systems focus on dealing with crises really well rather than looking at averages. Perth was a really interesting city. In 1974 there was a climate shift. The amount of water that flows into the city dams in Western Australia collapsed and there was a massive panic. Since then, not once in all the years since 1974 has Perth actually ever received its old average supply. So essentially it's lost half its water supply. For the first few years, all the planners said 'it's going to rain. It's going to rain.' And then they started investing in new systems. So this rich experience, while people are very keen to talk about climate change, the shift really as much due to a rising population but as people's incomes rise they want to use more water because they may like lawns, they like having cars, and all the other things, and they like eating more food. And then as populations increase the massive shifts to country from mostly rural areas through the urban areas like Cape Town, and puts even more strains on city supplies. But all this can be planned and dealt with and managed.

AMT: So when you meet with the governments of the countries or the other municipalities or jurisdictions that you advise on water resources, what do you tell them?

MIKE YOUNG: To put a robust sharing system in place. To get their pricing structures right. To get the restrictions right. And also to work with the community rather than fight it. One of the most powerful things that happen in Australia's decade-long drought at the start of this century, was a very big program that worked through the schools. So every school child in Australia did projects on water conservation and they did audits on their house as part of the school project. It was amazing to see how quickly the children forced parents to look after their lawns. To say 'why are we still having sprinklers? Why haven't we converted troops? Why do we have a dual flush toilet?' It became the family discussion where it's a cultural change. But it was done by stopping to think about just water supply, but thinking about water conservation.

AMT: Now you've talked about water sharing. What does sharing planning mean? What does that look like?

MIKE YOUNG: What you do is you allocate a free group of water users for large water right down to individual shares in the system. Just like shares in a company. They have a very simple rule that if somebody wants a larger share of a system, they have to find someone else who is prepared to take a smaller share. Then you require everybody who has shares to have a water account with a quantity of water in it. As they use it, it's deducted. Just like a bank account. So people are forced to plan. Forced to see the value of water. And to manage day by day. And you give them capacity to do that. And in countries like Australia we now have well-established water markets where people trade water willingly. And cities by water from irrigators. It's taken Australia about 30 years of dealing with water scarcity to put these systems in place. That's what is needed globally. A mechanism that forces everybody to think about water, to see how valuable it is, and to save it, and treat it with the same respect as people look at the money and manage money.

AMT: As I listen to you I look at the numbers for Canada. The statistics are about seven years old. But we use an average of 271 litres per day, per person. Obviously it's a big country and there are areas where there are boil water alerts and people barely use water. But as I listen to you, we need to ask what we're doing for planning in our own country to.

MIKE YOUNG: And also to get the accounting right. You'll probably find in Canada that most of the 250 litres that is used flows back into rivers and is used again. So the big difference between the growth and the net amount of water use. If you're living in inland as so many Canadians do, when you have a shower the water goes back through the sewage system back into the river and flows down. That's not use. You might consume energy. But you're not actually evaporating the water. Practices which evaporate water like actually watering golf courses, watering crops and gardens—that's real use. And one big listen to the Australian is you need to carefully understand the difference between gross and net.

AMT: Mike Young, we have to leave it there. Thank you for your insights.

MIKE YOUNG: Pleasure.

AMT: Mike Young, specialist in water policy reform. He holds the research chair in water and environmental policy at the University of Adelaide in Australia. That's where we reached him today. That's our program for today. Stay tuned to Radio One for Q. Oscar nominations are out, and Q is bringing together a special panel to look at the nominees. And remember—you can always take The Current with you to go on the CBC Radio app. It's free from the App Store or Google Play. Finally, we started today's show by looking at the potential environmental impacts of a major oil spill off the East Coast of China. An Iranian oil tanker, the Sanchi, was carrying one million barrels of condensate when it was involved in a collision. There was one—and only one—rescue mission sent to the boat before it sank. A team of four Chinese rescue workers briefly boarded the flaming ship. They managed to retrieve the vessel's "black box" recording device... as well as the bodies of two sailors. They spoke with Chinese media about their thirty-minute mission onto the ship... which sank less than a day later. Here is some of that press conference. I'm Anna Maria Tremonti. Thanks for listening to The Current.

SOUNDCLIP

[Sound: Motor running]

VOICE 1: We reached the deck through a suspension crew. We were not sure if we could come back alive. So we took a group photo before we went.

VOICE 2: The scenario was the worst I've ever seen. The moment we approached the tanker the heat of the blaze and the strong smell of smoke triggered by.

[Sound: Beeping].

VOICE 2: I immediately turned on my oxygen carrier. Our mission is find the black box and the crew members—dead or alive. We must bring them back with some dignity.

VOICE 3: We were planning to wear anti-chemical suits, but it will restrict our movement. So we decided last minute just to wear ordinary suits. We only had limited time because we only planned to stay on board for 30 minutes. We knew we were in huge danger when we located the black box. The wind direction suddenly changed toward us and we immediately felt the smell the toxic smoke. So we shouted, 'just pull it off and go now!' I pulled the black box off from the ship. I also sensed a change in the wind. But all I was thinking was to get the black box and bring the data back.

[Music: Theme]

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January 23, 2018 Episode Transcript

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