Three years of drought, decades of overuse and now the oil industry's outsize demands on water for fracking are running down reservoirs and underground aquifers.
By contrast, both oil trucks would make the GPI go down: remediation spending would be counted as a negative, and so would the cost to society of emissions from heating with oil and the costs of any long-term damage to aquifers and streams.
The underground aquifers needed far more rain to recharge, he said, and it just wasn't raining as hard as it did when he was growing up.
But despite living down the road, and on top of one of the country's largest aquifers, she says she struggles every day to find enough clean water to drink.
The city authorities argue that the water does not come from the local utility company, but from aquifers under the ground.
Some want to stay and finish singing along to anti-fracking campaigner Pamela Mudge-Wood's version of I Vow to Thee My Country ("I vow to thee, my countryside / My aquifers and lakes / To withstand against the frack machines / Earth's life-blood is at stake" goes the stirring chorus Pam presents to us in handouts).
Underground aquifers failed to regenerate.
Satellite maps released by America's NASA last month showed that north-western India's aquifers had fallen by a foot a year between 2002 and 2008: a loss of 109 cubic km (26 cubic miles) of water, or three times the volume of America's biggest man-made reservoir.This is storing up trouble.
As bore-holes run dry, as those over the hardrock aquifers of southern-central India do on a monthly basis, many poor people may be deprived of safe drinking water.
But the thought of using it to recharge aquifers let alone to pipe it direct to people's taps is currently more than Angelenos can stomach.Yet, an hour's drive to the south, water officials in Orange County recently opened a $480m recycling plant for recharging local aquifers and injecting the product into the littoral water table to prevent further incursion of seawater.
But like other Iowan towns, Hull's shallow aquifers left its water supply vulnerable to contamination.
