As taps run dry across U.S., the kleptocracy in Washington keep pushing
for
more H1B guest workers, amnesty, and open borders with the Third World.
This has *got* to stop, now!

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/15/5255/

The US drought is now so acute that, in some southern communities, the
water
supply is cut off for 21 hours a day. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a
once-lush
region where the American dream has been reduced to a single four-letter
word: rain.

On Dancing Fern Mountain, in the hills above Chattanooga, Tennessee, two
brothers worry about a beaver dam which is blocking access to the only
fresh
water supply for miles. "The dam is ruining the water and every time we
tear
it down, the beaver builds it again," says Larry Fulfer. "People don't
think
we should, but we're gonna have to get that critter and kill him."

With a slap of his tail, the beaver disappears. His dam is at the mouth of
a
vast underground cave system, where enough pure spring water emerges to
supply the half-a-dozen families who live on Dancing Fern Mountain. "This
drought has turned us into hillbillies," says Larry's brother, Brian, with
evident disgust. "All we want is water in our taps."

Ten miles away, darkness is falling over the mountain village of Orme as
Tony Reames, the volunteer mayor, drives up a dusty track for an important
nightly ritual. He is turning on the water supply for a couple of hours.

These days, the plight of the village of Orme makes the national
television
news. And as the mayor drives up the hill for half a mile he is followed
by
a crocodile of gleaming 4×4s and rental cars, carrying among them a crew
from the Weather Channel, Fox News, ABC News and The Independent. Under
the
glare of the television arc lamps, Mayor Reames solemnly opens the spigot.

It is a daily task that has turned him into a symbol of global warming.
The
sight of a small village trying to cope without water for 21 hours a day
has
touched something in the national psyche.

A few years ago, Orme, like the rest of the normally lush southeast, had
plenty of water. But a powerful waterfall which supplied the village has
been bone dry for more than two years. Water in the wells is now
sulphurous
and undrinkable, thanks to the drought. All around, the old mining village
is surrounded by hills covered in a canopy of trees, their leaves changing
colour in the autumn chill. It is strange to think of a mountain village
running out of water, but the mayor believes the trees are dying a slow
death because there's been a lack of water for more than two years in a
row.
"The leaves are later every year, I don't see how they can survive much
longer without rain," he says.

He takes his role as guardian of the village's meagre water supply very
seriously. At the appointed moment, and with a look of deep concentration,
he turns a 4ft rusty lever, sending water spilling down the pipes to the
village below. All at once householders run showers and washing machines
and
collect drinking water. And as Mayor Reames turns his lever, reporters
press
their microphones up against the valve to record the gurgling flow. Then
they race down the valley to interview people doing the washing up.

What they find is a picture of shocking rural poverty. In one clapboard
house, John Anderson is helping out his arthritic mother. He stands
surrounded by jugs of water as camera crews wait in line to ask him over
and
over how it feels to have water in the tap for a couple of hours. "It's
been
pretty hard all summer," he says, "and it's not getting any easier."

Three days a week, a volunteer fire chief drives a mile down the road to
the
Alabama state line in a 1961 fire truck where he meets another truck and
pumps about 20,000 gallons of water for Orme's tank. As news of the town's
predicament worsens, more and more communities are offering water. On
Tuesday the mayor of another Alabama town came by to offer as much water
as
they needed, without charge.

In a couple of weeks' time, relief will come to Orme and its 120 residents
when a water pipe is finally connected to a neighbouring community. Mayor
Reames applied for and secured a federal grant to pay for it. The
half-inch
pipeline should ensure the continued survival of the tiny former mining
village, which came close to dying thanks to the worst drought in 100
years.

Many rural communities are suffering as the drought tightens its grip
across
a wide region, which includes much of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and
Florida. Here in scenic southern Tennessee, the drought is adding to the
problems of extreme rural poverty.

At a highway rest stop for tourists - near a bridge named for Senator
Albert
Gore Sr, a Tennesseean and father of Nobel laureate Al Gore Jr - the
toilets
are closed for lack of water. In a nearby town, the mayor orders the grass
regularly mown on the exposed banks of a reservoir that until recently was
below water.

From the air the impact of the drought is most obvious. The mighty
Tennessee
and Chattahoochee rivers have been reduced to narrow channels of muddy
brown
water. Sandbanks and islands have appeared and old tree stumps now poke
out
of lakes and reservoirs as the water level falls.

The government's "drought monitor" says that 32 per cent of the region is
in
"exceptional drought", its most severe designation. The first five months
of
this year were the driest in 118 years of record-keeping by the Tennessee
Valley authority. And adding to the problem is the region's booming
population, combined with a political culture that preaches against
government regulation and denies the very existence of global warming. The
drought is now hurting Atlanta, a city boasting one of the worst
environmental records in the US and whose political masters are among the
least enlightened when it comes to climate change. Atlanta is teeming with
Fortune 500 companies - including Coca Cola - and growing rapidly.

But the city's three million residents also endure some of the worst air
quality in the country from poorly regulated smokestack industries. Thanks
to profligate water consumption and drought, they may have no drinking
water
at all by January as the city's only source of drinking water, Lake
Lanier,
is running critically low. The reservoir's water must be shared by three
neighbouring states. Soon the level will be lower than when it was built
in
the 1950s.

On Tuesday, with Bibles and crucifixes held aloft, hundreds of church
ministers, lawmakers, unemployed landscapers and office workers, swayed
and
linked arms in a special prayer service for rain outside the Georgia
Capitol. A choir sang "What a Mighty God We Serve" and "Amazing Grace".

Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia and chief global warming sceptic, cut a
newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for a downpour. He even
acknowledged that the drought was a man-made, as well as natural, problem.
Georgians, he said, had not done "all we could do in conservation".

Then bowing his head, he said: "We have come together, very simply, for
one
reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a
storm."

But despite the looming catastrophe, and the publicity surrounding Al
Gore's
Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental campaigning, the issue of global
warming gets little consideration in these parts. Georgia's state assembly
recently organised a climate change summit in which three of the four
experts invited were global-warming sceptics.

"It's very backward here," says Patty Durand, head of the Georgia branch
of
the Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental groups in the US. "It
also
has to do with money as almost all the politicians here are funded by big
polluting industry. There is little awareness of the environmental impact
of
industry. In spite of the drought, Georgia now wants to build a new
coal-powered plant that will suck away another 25 million extra gallons of
water and pour ever more carbon into the atmosphere. They just don't get
it."

One reason environmentalists give for the state's poor record is Southern
Company, a huge electrical utility that wields huge influence all the way
to
the White House. More than any other company, Southern has been
responsible
for steering President George Bush away from action to halt global
warming.
It has done so by spreading largesse - $8m (£4m) on contributions to
politicians in the past nine years, an amount far outweighing the
political
contributions of any other utility.

As a method of controlling US environmental policy, it has proved highly
effective. On Tuesday, voters in Mississippi re-elected Republican
Governor
Haley Barbour, a backslapping former lobbyist of Southern Company. "The
White House is not the only one being influenced by the smokestack crowd,"
says Frank O' Donnell, head of Clean Air Watch. He points out that Sonny
Perdue has received large campaign contributions from Southern executives
and even hired his chief of staff from its subsidiary, Georgia Power.

"The company has an unrivalled impact on America's lack of a national
policy
on global warming," says Mr O'Donnell, "and the coal-burning lobby doesn't
seem to care much about the general public, so single-minded is it on
building more pollution-creating plants at the expense of climate change."

After two years of blue skies, entire crops have died in the fields, and
expensive lawns are turning brown thanks to sprinkler bans. The state's
leaders are also bickering, with Mr Perdue threatening to go to court to
reduce the amount of water sent south from Lake Lanier to Florida. The
water
flow - here as elsewhere in the US - is managed by the US Army Corps of
Engineers, which releases one billion gallons of water a day from the
lake.

The Army has to provide enough to supply drinking water for Atlanta, to
irrigate crops, cool several coal-fired electricity generating plants in
the
US and provide water for industry. It is also obliged by federal law to
ensure enough reaches Florida to keep protected species alive, including
two
freshwater mussels and the Florida sturgeon, which are in danger of
extinction.

After a bitter round of arguments between the three states and the Army
this
week, the amount of water flowing to Florida's Apalachicola river was cut
by
16 per cent while the Fish and Wildlife Service assesses whether the
mussels
will survive.

Governor Perdue may have won round one at the expense of the freshwater
mussel and the sturgeon - but in the absence of prolonged rain, the
region's
problems are far from over.

Next week, on Thanksgiving, there will be an even bigger media circus in
the
village of Orme as the freshly piped water is finally turned on. The
village
will then return to the obscurity to which it has long grown accustomed
since its coalmines closed down in the late 1930s. "It's real quiet around
here and that's how we like it," says Mayor Reames. "But yet so much has
changed. As young boys we used to ride up to the waterfall on our ponies
and
take showers in the summertime. Something dramatic has happened to the
climate and it's beyond our control.

"In a few weeks we will have water here. But what's going to happen to
Atlanta where millions of people are running out of water? What are they
going to do if the rains don't come?"

(c) 2007 The Independent
I have a solution:

ALL WHITE PEOPLE MOVE BACK TO EUROPE.

Problem solved.

As taps run dry across U.S., the kleptocracy in Washington keep pushing
for
more H1B guest workers, amnesty, and open borders with the Third World.
This has *got* to stop, now!

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/15/5255/

The US drought is now so acute that, in some southern communities, the
water
supply is cut off for 21 hours a day. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a
once-lush
region where the American dream has been reduced to a single four-letter
word: rain.

On Dancing Fern Mountain, in the hills above Chattanooga, Tennessee, two
brothers worry about a beaver dam which is blocking access to the only
fresh
water supply for miles. "The dam is ruining the water and every time we
tear
it down, the beaver builds it again," says Larry Fulfer. "People don't
think
we should, but we're gonna have to get that critter and kill him."

With a slap of his tail, the beaver disappears. His dam is at the mouth of
a
vast underground cave system, where enough pure spring water emerges to
supply the half-a-dozen families who live on Dancing Fern Mountain. "This
drought has turned us into hillbillies," says Larry's brother, Brian, with
evident disgust. "All we want is water in our taps."

Ten miles away, darkness is falling over the mountain village of Orme as
Tony Reames, the volunteer mayor, drives up a dusty track for an important
nightly ritual. He is turning on the water supply for a couple of hours.

These days, the plight of the village of Orme makes the national
television
news. And as the mayor drives up the hill for half a mile he is followed
by
a crocodile of gleaming 4×4s and rental cars, carrying among them a crew
from the Weather Channel, Fox News, ABC News and The Independent. Under
the
glare of the television arc lamps, Mayor Reames solemnly opens the spigot.

It is a daily task that has turned him into a symbol of global warming.
The
sight of a small village trying to cope without water for 21 hours a day
has
touched something in the national psyche.

A few years ago, Orme, like the rest of the normally lush southeast, had
plenty of water. But a powerful waterfall which supplied the village has
been bone dry for more than two years. Water in the wells is now
sulphurous
and undrinkable, thanks to the drought. All around, the old mining village
is surrounded by hills covered in a canopy of trees, their leaves changing
colour in the autumn chill. It is strange to think of a mountain village
running out of water, but the mayor believes the trees are dying a slow
death because there's been a lack of water for more than two years in a
row.
"The leaves are later every year, I don't see how they can survive much
longer without rain," he says.

He takes his role as guardian of the village's meagre water supply very
seriously. At the appointed moment, and with a look of deep concentration,
he turns a 4ft rusty lever, sending water spilling down the pipes to the
village below. All at once householders run showers and washing machines
and
collect drinking water. And as Mayor Reames turns his lever, reporters
press
their microphones up against the valve to record the gurgling flow. Then
they race down the valley to interview people doing the washing up.

What they find is a picture of shocking rural poverty. In one clapboard
house, John Anderson is helping out his arthritic mother. He stands
surrounded by jugs of water as camera crews wait in line to ask him over
and
over how it feels to have water in the tap for a couple of hours. "It's
been
pretty hard all summer," he says, "and it's not getting any easier."

Three days a week, a volunteer fire chief drives a mile down the road to
the
Alabama state line in a 1961 fire truck where he meets another truck and
pumps about 20,000 gallons of water for Orme's tank. As news of the town's
predicament worsens, more and more communities are offering water. On
Tuesday the mayor of another Alabama town came by to offer as much water
as
they needed, without charge.

In a couple of weeks' time, relief will come to Orme and its 120 residents
when a water pipe is finally connected to a neighbouring community. Mayor
Reames applied for and secured a federal grant to pay for it. The
half-inch
pipeline should ensure the continued survival of the tiny former mining
village, which came close to dying thanks to the worst drought in 100
years.

Many rural communities are suffering as the drought tightens its grip
across
a wide region, which includes much of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and
Florida. Here in scenic southern Tennessee, the drought is adding to the
problems of extreme rural poverty.

At a highway rest stop for tourists - near a bridge named for Senator
Albert
Gore Sr, a Tennesseean and father of Nobel laureate Al Gore Jr - the
toilets
are closed for lack of water. In a nearby town, the mayor orders the grass
regularly mown on the exposed banks of a reservoir that until recently was
below water.

From the air the impact of the drought is most obvious. The mighty
Tennessee
and Chattahoochee rivers have been reduced to narrow channels of muddy
brown
water. Sandbanks and islands have appeared and old tree stumps now poke
out
of lakes and reservoirs as the water level falls.

The government's "drought monitor" says that 32 per cent of the region is
in
"exceptional drought", its most severe designation. The first five months
of
this year were the driest in 118 years of record-keeping by the Tennessee
Valley authority. And adding to the problem is the region's booming
population, combined with a political culture that preaches against
government regulation and denies the very existence of global warming. The
drought is now hurting Atlanta, a city boasting one of the worst
environmental records in the US and whose political masters are among the
least enlightened when it comes to climate change. Atlanta is teeming with
Fortune 500 companies - including Coca Cola - and growing rapidly.

But the city's three million residents also endure some of the worst air
quality in the country from poorly regulated smokestack industries. Thanks
to profligate water consumption and drought, they may have no drinking
water
at all by January as the city's only source of drinking water, Lake
Lanier,
is running critically low. The reservoir's water must be shared by three
neighbouring states. Soon the level will be lower than when it was built
in
the 1950s.

On Tuesday, with Bibles and crucifixes held aloft, hundreds of church
ministers, lawmakers, unemployed landscapers and office workers, swayed
and
linked arms in a special prayer service for rain outside the Georgia
Capitol. A choir sang "What a Mighty God We Serve" and "Amazing Grace".

Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia and chief global warming sceptic, cut a
newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for a downpour. He even
acknowledged that the drought was a man-made, as well as natural, problem.
Georgians, he said, had not done "all we could do in conservation".

Then bowing his head, he said: "We have come together, very simply, for
one
reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a
storm."

But despite the looming catastrophe, and the publicity surrounding Al
Gore's
Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental campaigning, the issue of global
warming gets little consideration in these parts. Georgia's state assembly
recently organised a climate change summit in which three of the four
experts invited were global-warming sceptics.

"It's very backward here," says Patty Durand, head of the Georgia branch
of
the Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental groups in the US. "It
also
has to do with money as almost all the politicians here are funded by big
polluting industry. There is little awareness of the environmental impact
of
industry. In spite of the drought, Georgia now wants to build a new
coal-powered plant that will suck away another 25 million extra gallons of
water and pour ever more carbon into the atmosphere. They just don't get
it."

One reason environmentalists give for the state's poor record is Southern
Company, a huge electrical utility that wields huge influence all the way
to
the White House. More than any other company, Southern has been
responsible
for steering President George Bush away from action to halt global
warming.
It has done so by spreading largesse - $8m (£4m) on contributions to
politicians in the past nine years, an amount far outweighing the
political
contributions of any other utility.

As a method of controlling US environmental policy, it has proved highly
effective. On Tuesday, voters in Mississippi re-elected Republican
Governor
Haley Barbour, a backslapping former lobbyist of Southern Company. "The
White House is not the only one being influenced by the smokestack crowd,"
says Frank O' Donnell, head of Clean Air Watch. He points out that Sonny
Perdue has received large campaign contributions from Southern executives
and even hired his chief of staff from its subsidiary, Georgia Power.

"The company has an unrivalled impact on America's lack of a national
policy
on global warming," says Mr O'Donnell, "and the coal-burning lobby doesn't
seem to care much about the general public, so single-minded is it on
building more pollution-creating plants at the expense of climate change."

After two years of blue skies, entire crops have died in the fields, and
expensive lawns are turning brown thanks to sprinkler bans. The state's
leaders are also bickering, with Mr Perdue threatening to go to court to
reduce the amount of water sent south from Lake Lanier to Florida. The
water
flow - here as elsewhere in the US - is managed by the US Army Corps of
Engineers, which releases one billion gallons of water a day from the
lake.

The Army has to provide enough to supply drinking water for Atlanta, to
irrigate crops, cool several coal-fired electricity generating plants in
the
US and provide water for industry. It is also obliged by federal law to
ensure enough reaches Florida to keep protected species alive, including
two
freshwater mussels and the Florida sturgeon, which are in danger of
extinction.

After a bitter round of arguments between the three states and the Army
this
week, the amount of water flowing to Florida's Apalachicola river was cut
by
16 per cent while the Fish and Wildlife Service assesses whether the
mussels
will survive.

Governor Perdue may have won round one at the expense of the freshwater
mussel and the sturgeon - but in the absence of prolonged rain, the
region's
problems are far from over.

Next week, on Thanksgiving, there will be an even bigger media circus in
the
village of Orme as the freshly piped water is finally turned on. The
village
will then return to the obscurity to which it has long grown accustomed
since its coalmines closed down in the late 1930s. "It's real quiet around
here and that's how we like it," says Mayor Reames. "But yet so much has
changed. As young boys we used to ride up to the waterfall on our ponies
and
take showers in the summertime. Something dramatic has happened to the
climate and it's beyond our control.

"In a few weeks we will have water here. But what's going to happen to
Atlanta where millions of people are running out of water? What are they
going to do if the rains don't come?"

(c) 2007 The Independent

As taps run dry across U.S., the kleptocracy in Washington keep pushing
for
more H1B guest workers, amnesty, and open borders with the Third World.
This has *got* to stop, now!

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/11/15/5255/

The US drought is now so acute that, in some southern communities, the
water
supply is cut off for 21 hours a day. In Chattanooga, Tennessee, a
once-lush
region where the American dream has been reduced to a single four-letter
word: rain.

On Dancing Fern Mountain, in the hills above Chattanooga, Tennessee, two
brothers worry about a beaver dam which is blocking access to the only
fresh
water supply for miles. "The dam is ruining the water and every time we
tear
it down, the beaver builds it again," says Larry Fulfer. "People don't
think
we should, but we're gonna have to get that critter and kill him."

With a slap of his tail, the beaver disappears. His dam is at the mouth of
a
vast underground cave system, where enough pure spring water emerges to
supply the half-a-dozen families who live on Dancing Fern Mountain. "This
drought has turned us into hillbillies," says Larry's brother, Brian, with
evident disgust. "All we want is water in our taps."

Ten miles away, darkness is falling over the mountain village of Orme as
Tony Reames, the volunteer mayor, drives up a dusty track for an important
nightly ritual. He is turning on the water supply for a couple of hours.

These days, the plight of the village of Orme makes the national
television
news. And as the mayor drives up the hill for half a mile he is followed
by
a crocodile of gleaming 4×4s and rental cars, carrying among them a crew
from the Weather Channel, Fox News, ABC News and The Independent. Under
the
glare of the television arc lamps, Mayor Reames solemnly opens the spigot.

It is a daily task that has turned him into a symbol of global warming.
The
sight of a small village trying to cope without water for 21 hours a day
has
touched something in the national psyche.

A few years ago, Orme, like the rest of the normally lush southeast, had
plenty of water. But a powerful waterfall which supplied the village has
been bone dry for more than two years. Water in the wells is now
sulphurous
and undrinkable, thanks to the drought. All around, the old mining village
is surrounded by hills covered in a canopy of trees, their leaves changing
colour in the autumn chill. It is strange to think of a mountain village
running out of water, but the mayor believes the trees are dying a slow
death because there's been a lack of water for more than two years in a
row.
"The leaves are later every year, I don't see how they can survive much
longer without rain," he says.

He takes his role as guardian of the village's meagre water supply very
seriously. At the appointed moment, and with a look of deep concentration,
he turns a 4ft rusty lever, sending water spilling down the pipes to the
village below. All at once householders run showers and washing machines
and
collect drinking water. And as Mayor Reames turns his lever, reporters
press
their microphones up against the valve to record the gurgling flow. Then
they race down the valley to interview people doing the washing up.

What they find is a picture of shocking rural poverty. In one clapboard
house, John Anderson is helping out his arthritic mother. He stands
surrounded by jugs of water as camera crews wait in line to ask him over
and
over how it feels to have water in the tap for a couple of hours. "It's
been
pretty hard all summer," he says, "and it's not getting any easier."

Three days a week, a volunteer fire chief drives a mile down the road to
the
Alabama state line in a 1961 fire truck where he meets another truck and
pumps about 20,000 gallons of water for Orme's tank. As news of the town's
predicament worsens, more and more communities are offering water. On
Tuesday the mayor of another Alabama town came by to offer as much water
as
they needed, without charge.

In a couple of weeks' time, relief will come to Orme and its 120 residents
when a water pipe is finally connected to a neighbouring community. Mayor
Reames applied for and secured a federal grant to pay for it. The
half-inch
pipeline should ensure the continued survival of the tiny former mining
village, which came close to dying thanks to the worst drought in 100
years.

Many rural communities are suffering as the drought tightens its grip
across
a wide region, which includes much of Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and
Florida. Here in scenic southern Tennessee, the drought is adding to the
problems of extreme rural poverty.

At a highway rest stop for tourists - near a bridge named for Senator
Albert
Gore Sr, a Tennesseean and father of Nobel laureate Al Gore Jr - the
toilets
are closed for lack of water. In a nearby town, the mayor orders the grass
regularly mown on the exposed banks of a reservoir that until recently was
below water.

From the air the impact of the drought is most obvious. The mighty
Tennessee
and Chattahoochee rivers have been reduced to narrow channels of muddy
brown
water. Sandbanks and islands have appeared and old tree stumps now poke
out
of lakes and reservoirs as the water level falls.

The government's "drought monitor" says that 32 per cent of the region is
in
"exceptional drought", its most severe designation. The first five months
of
this year were the driest in 118 years of record-keeping by the Tennessee
Valley authority. And adding to the problem is the region's booming
population, combined with a political culture that preaches against
government regulation and denies the very existence of global warming. The
drought is now hurting Atlanta, a city boasting one of the worst
environmental records in the US and whose political masters are among the
least enlightened when it comes to climate change. Atlanta is teeming with
Fortune 500 companies - including Coca Cola - and growing rapidly.

But the city's three million residents also endure some of the worst air
quality in the country from poorly regulated smokestack industries. Thanks
to profligate water consumption and drought, they may have no drinking
water
at all by January as the city's only source of drinking water, Lake
Lanier,
is running critically low. The reservoir's water must be shared by three
neighbouring states. Soon the level will be lower than when it was built
in
the 1950s.

On Tuesday, with Bibles and crucifixes held aloft, hundreds of church
ministers, lawmakers, unemployed landscapers and office workers, swayed
and
linked arms in a special prayer service for rain outside the Georgia
Capitol. A choir sang "What a Mighty God We Serve" and "Amazing Grace".

Sonny Perdue, governor of Georgia and chief global warming sceptic, cut a
newly repentant figure as he publicly prayed for a downpour. He even
acknowledged that the drought was a man-made, as well as natural, problem.
Georgians, he said, had not done "all we could do in conservation".

Then bowing his head, he said: "We have come together, very simply, for
one
reason and one reason only: To very reverently and respectfully pray up a
storm."

But despite the looming catastrophe, and the publicity surrounding Al
Gore's
Nobel Peace Prize for his environmental campaigning, the issue of global
warming gets little consideration in these parts. Georgia's state assembly
recently organised a climate change summit in which three of the four
experts invited were global-warming sceptics.

"It's very backward here," says Patty Durand, head of the Georgia branch
of
the Sierra Club, one of the largest environmental groups in the US. "It
also
has to do with money as almost all the politicians here are funded by big
polluting industry. There is little awareness of the environmental impact
of
industry. In spite of the drought, Georgia now wants to build a new
coal-powered plant that will suck away another 25 million extra gallons of
water and pour ever more carbon into the atmosphere. They just don't get
it."

One reason environmentalists give for the state's poor record is Southern
Company, a huge electrical utility that wields huge influence all the way
to
the White House. More than any other company, Southern has been
responsible
for steering President George Bush away from action to halt global
warming.
It has done so by spreading largesse - $8m (£4m) on contributions to
politicians in the past nine years, an amount far outweighing the
political
contributions of any other utility.

As a method of controlling US environmental policy, it has proved highly
effective. On Tuesday, voters in Mississippi re-elected Republican
Governor
Haley Barbour, a backslapping former lobbyist of Southern Company. "The
White House is not the only one being influenced by the smokestack crowd,"
says Frank O' Donnell, head of Clean Air Watch. He points out that Sonny
Perdue has received large campaign contributions from Southern executives
and even hired his chief of staff from its subsidiary, Georgia Power.

"The company has an unrivalled impact on America's lack of a national
policy
on global warming," says Mr O'Donnell, "and the coal-burning lobby doesn't
seem to care much about the general public, so single-minded is it on
building more pollution-creating plants at the expense of climate change."

After two years of blue skies, entire crops have died in the fields, and
expensive lawns are turning brown thanks to sprinkler bans. The state's
leaders are also bickering, with Mr Perdue threatening to go to court to
reduce the amount of water sent south from Lake Lanier to Florida. The
water
flow - here as elsewhere in the US - is managed by the US Army Corps of
Engineers, which releases one billion gallons of water a day from the
lake.

The Army has to provide enough to supply drinking water for Atlanta, to
irrigate crops, cool several coal-fired electricity generating plants in
the
US and provide water for industry. It is also obliged by federal law to
ensure enough reaches Florida to keep protected species alive, including
two
freshwater mussels and the Florida sturgeon, which are in danger of
extinction.

After a bitter round of arguments between the three states and the Army
this
week, the amount of water flowing to Florida's Apalachicola river was cut
by
16 per cent while the Fish and Wildlife Service assesses whether the
mussels
will survive.

Governor Perdue may have won round one at the expense of the freshwater
mussel and the sturgeon - but in the absence of prolonged rain, the
region's
problems are far from over.

Next week, on Thanksgiving, there will be an even bigger media circus in
the
village of Orme as the freshly piped water is finally turned on. The
village
will then return to the obscurity to which it has long grown accustomed
since its coalmines closed down in the late 1930s. "It's real quiet around
here and that's how we like it," says Mayor Reames. "But yet so much has
changed. As young boys we used to ride up to the waterfall on our ponies
and
take showers in the summertime. Something dramatic has happened to the
climate and it's beyond our control.

"In a few weeks we will have water here. But what's going to happen to
Atlanta where millions of people are running out of water? What are they
going to do if the rains don't come?"

(c) 2007 The Independent