[LINK] "Brazil Dries Up and Blacks Out"

[rfmcdonald]

Bloomberg View's Mac Margolis notes that the drought facing Sao Paulo is really getting quite serious.

Water is to Brazilian politicians what oil is to Latin American petrocrats -- just a pipeline away, too abundant to fret over. Except when it's not.

Despite a summer storm over the weekend, Rio de Janeiro is parched, and its reservoirs are depleted. Sao Paulo is worse: the Cantareira System of interconnected lakes that supplies water to 8 million people is dipping into its "dead volume," roughly the equivalent of the red zone on your car's gas gauge.

January rains were enough to cause flash floods and craters in the streets, including one that swallowed a motorcycle in Sao Paulo, but not to top up the nation's depleted reservoirs and hydroelectric dams.

For months now, specialists have been waving the windsock over the gathering weather emergency -- not least because some 68 percent of the nation's power is hydroelectric. In Brazil, water supply is power supply. Power cuts on Jan. 19 darkened Rio, Sao Paulo and seven other Brazilian states for several hours.

Climate scientists blame forest-cutting in the Amazon basin, which damages the rainforest's capacity to pump humidity back into the atmosphere. The official response has been that this crisis is a one-off, an unseasonable conspiracy of spiking temperatures and scant rains. Mines and Energy Minister Eduardo Braga recently dismissed rationed power cuts, allowing that Brazil had technical glitches but no dearth of grid capacity. Because God is not always Brazilian, Braga also announced a rate hike plus incentives for consumers who conserve water. "Sincerely, I see no risks," he said.