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The world wants and desperately needs solutions and needs them now...
So lets get some eyes on this room, and bring solutions to the table here for discussion. If they tied to invest-able stocks even better. But that is not required.
Followed LWLG for 20 years.
They have a Polymer that when applied to Silicon Photonics Triples the Speed and CUTS POWER Requirements for the Modulators in DATA CENTERS IN HALF. I'm sure everyone is aware that Power used by data canters requires carbon not only to operate but to Cool The Heat Produced. One day this name will be as common as Teflon, Intel inside and will even b on the Transistor. Do your homework it makes sense from a green standpoint, and it reduces the cost of building and operating a data center.
Check it out, I've been following this for 20 year, This company finally made the Nasdaq.
Successful inventors take two unrelated products and combine them to solve a problem then patent it and this is exactly what Lightwave Logic has done, but wait because it solves far more than a few problems.
It will be Ubiquitous, Period Full Stop, We are Golden.
Think about life today and what is one of the biggest problems facing society? Answer: the need for faster computing/communications and the need to reduce energy. Look around the world we live in and one of the most widely used products is Plastic. Lightwave logic solves that problem by marrying Electo Optic Polymer (Plastic) by combining it with Silicon (used in computers) and InP (which is used to produce the laser in Fiber optic Communications). Lightwave has done just that, it Triples the Speed inside the computers, uses Half the Power AND it removes the need for a Driver. To date what the industry did to solve this problem was to put another power hungry modulator next to the other but after putting 8 of those together it has pretty much hit the wall because the next step is 16. Plus each modulator takes up room and Lightwave modulators are a fraction the size of today’s modulators.
Now we’ve all known that this will have many uses and 2 of the latest just coming into focus within the past few months are:
1. Lidar which is used in both the military and for driverless cars.
And
2. Light used in the medical field, not only can this be used to speed up solving what is wrong with somebody it can also be used to modify a Light beam to diagnose various diseases and correct them. Someone that I’m close to uses lasers in the pet world to heal wounds.
Anyone that doesn’t think a problem solving so many issues and set to be used in the Automotive, Military, Medical, Communications and Computing and Green frontier market is not going to explode is living in the past.
Best Part about this is the plastic is proprietary meaning it is only available from one place, Lightwave Logic. Furthermore, even when a competitor creates an Elector Optic Polymer material similar to Lightwaves if they put it in a device they run into Squarely into Lightwaves Device Patents.
Who did this, honestly there were many but let me hit this at a high level. Fred Leonberger who is credited with todays modulator technology, Joe Miller Credited with saving Corning the world's largest manufacture of Fiber Optics, Admiral Zelibor who led the carrier group on 9/11 and is now an advisor to space force, NSA cats, before he passed away Ross Fasick Senior Executive VP - Polymers at Dupont all are beyond reproach they are here for a legacy not a paycheck. As information Lightwave has a Polymer (Ross Fasick) that Modulates Light (Fred Leonberger) the sigal travels down Fiber Optics (Joe Miller). Then we have The CEO Michael Lebby (who was inducted into the Elected to National Academy of Inventors) submitting Lightwaves patents and communicating with the industry oh remember that he produced the first International Photonic Systems Roadmap (looking at the needs of the industry), after studying the entire industry, he joined Lighwave logic to submit patents, go figure.
My friends we truly are on the gold.
Wait for the Green Crypto crowd to get ahold of this (If that’s not an oxymoron I don’t know what is).
Lightwaves material holds the world record, put that in your pipe and smoke it.
Arctic stronghold of world’s seeds flooded after permafrost melts
No seeds were lost but the ability of the rock vault to provide failsafe protection against all disasters is now threatened by climate change
The Svalbard ‘doomsday’ seed vault was built to protect millions of food crops from climate change, wars and natural disasters. Photograph: John Mcconnico/AP
Damian Carrington Environment editor
Friday 19 May 2017 11.39 EDT
http://tinyurl.com/m3e5j9n
Arctic Death Rattle
by Robert Hunziker
August 22, 2016
http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/08/22/arctic-death-rattle/
> http://www.geoengineeringlawsuit.ca/ -
Please pass it along >>>>>>>>>>
Love You Healthy Nature -
God Bless -
Amen -
There has been a lot of recent news and stir over Climate change and with an international CO2 limit treaty looming in Paris in December this year, the news should explode. In fact it has already started. My interest is finding stocks that have cutting edge, outside of the box technology that has gotten little press that could help solve the problem in a huge way.
Here is some recent news showing the magnitude of the problem
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/06/25/3674149/alberta-canada-climate-change-wow/
This board is being revived today, please join us!!!
And thanks for the link below, great site I had not seen before. I am more of a high tech (bio-chemical engineer) reader, of patents and science journals so I sometimes miss great sites like the one you suggested. I used to read them 30-40 years ago before I went back to get my degrees and started doing research..But they were not online back then, had to hang out in an old school library.
http://www.resilience.org/stories-list/79718-environment
Awesome link and a great one to check daily for updates, thanks for sharing and enjoy that home grown garden food.
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-07-28/resilience-a-new-conservation-strategy-for-a-warming-world
Resilience: A New Conservation Strategy for a Warming World
by Jim Robbins, originally published by Yale Environment 360 | Jul 28, 2015
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-07-28/resilience-a-new-conservation-strategy-for-a-warming-world
The board title has been updated and the board is coming back to life, the ice age has ended here, and things are warming back up LOL
The board intro needs updating. I am looking for good suggestions!!!
But I wish the board topic was more current, like Climate Change News and Commentary?
With all the weather news and the Paris Climate change treaty in Paris in December this year and the Catholic pope changing sides on the political arena I think it is time to get this board cooking (LOL) weather or not it is a favorite dinner table topic LOL.
As the topic will become a huge money maker for many stocks now like MVTG
sumisu, sorry about Tokyo, were will all go? -
EVACUATE TOKYO, JAPAN NOW says Doctor due to FUKUSHIMA RADIATION -
Bruce Molnia's Repeat Photos of Alaska, and What He Says They Reveal About Our World
By Terrell Johnson Published: Nov 29, 2013, 8:54 AM EST
http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/alaskas-glaciers-capturing-earth-changing-our-eyes-20131125?hootPostID=6946fbe2913f06a6b2269ce617cb7ba8
NOTE: Please review the slideshow; unbelieveable!
Both companies are affected by global warming and it's effect on MVTG and IFUS.
What is the connection between MVTG and IFUS products to Climate Change and global warming?
Global warming CO2 emissions,droughts,and other side effects and articles listed below
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html
I am also in IFUS and MVTG because this last 6 months both companies have solutions to problems that will make them great stock plays.
Feast or famine, Colorado flood more proof of Climate change wild swings in the weather, and economic impacts. That is why I am invested in MVTG and IFUS, both forward thinking problem solvers working on solutions to these problems.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/17/us-usa-colorado-flooding-idUSBRE98B0KM20130917
Last week's downpour, the heaviest to hit the region in four decades, experts said, dumped up to 21 inches of rain in parts of Boulder city, northwest of Denver, nearly double the area's average annual rainfall.
The overall flood zone ultimately grew to encompass 17 Colorado counties, including the state's biggest urban centers, across a normally semi-arid region about the size of Delaware.
One more reason MVTG technology is needed.
Feast or famine news:
http://grist.org/news/deadly-1000-year-floods-strike-colorado/?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=update&utm_campaign=socialflow
HERE is a video on NBC news of more bad news for ranchers
Why is that bad news, good for IFUS?
"DROUGHT FOR RANCHERS AND CATTLE WILL CAUSE EXTREME increases in pps at IFUS"
DROUGHT FOR RANCHERS AND CATTLE WILL CAUSE EXTREME increases in pps at IFUS
I hear the atmosphere at IFUS is already warming up fast?
WHEN IFUS explodes to a dime I will slap the ask here with record volume.
Things warmed up at MVTG today as well!
Things warming up at IFUS
DROUGHTS affecting other countries too
http://www.weeklytimesnow.com.au/article/2013/07/06/575825_latest-news.html
Companies like IFUS have potential for being solution to global problems.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=91202890
Atlantic hurricane update post
Things are heating up here to, LOL.
Global warming affects everyone
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/a-warmer-world-likely-to-be-a-more-violent-world-study-shows-16299
Nice info,new to board not new to GLOBAL WARMING
And here is a good step by step read about each part of the story in that video
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/dimm-nf.html
In order to understand global warming and climate change, one must also understand global dimming!!! This is a must watch PBS/BCC broadcast of the story of the discovery of "Global Dimming" and its impact on CO2 global warming climate models.
Extreme heat waves to quadruple by 2040, study says
John Roach, NBC News
Aug. 14, 2013 at 6:59 PM ET
The type of heat waves that wilt crops, torch forests — and kill people — are expected to become more frequent and severe over the next 30 years regardless of whether humans curb emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, according to a new study.
These are heat waves akin to those that baked many regions of the U.S. in 2012 and devastated crops in Russia in 2010. Such bouts of extreme heat are so-called "three-sigma events," meaning they are three standard deviations warmer than the normal climate of a specific region for weeks in a row. In the Russia event, for example, July temperatures in Moscow were about 12 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal.
Since the 1950s, the frequency of these events has "strongly increased and right now they cover about 5 percent of the global land area," Dim Coumou, a climate scientist with the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told NBC News. The findings are published Thursday in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
He and colleagues used a suite of 29 models that they say accurately represent the historic, observed trend, giving them confidence the models' ability to project the trend into the future.
"If we look at the near-term, up to 2040, we see that this increase will continue and that by 2040 we will see about 20 percent of the land area affected, so about another fourfold increase compared to today," Coumou said.
If levels of carbon dioxide continue to increase in the atmosphere as they are today, the researchers find heat extremes might cover 85 percent of the planet's land area by 2100.
What's more, even hotter — so called five-sigma events, which are virtually non-existent today — would affect 60 percent of the global land area, according to the research.
"Possibly even a more important message from this study is that a further increase during the second half of the 21st century can be stopped if we reduce CO2 emissions fairly soon," Coumou said.
However, the impact of such reductions will not be felt for several decades given an inherent time lag in the climate system "and this is, of course, something that we have to deal with," he said.
Dealing may mean breeding crops that are more resilient to heat and drought, for example, and preparing the healthcare system to handle an increase in heat-stressed patients.
The findings in and of themselves contain "nothing especially new," Martin Hoerling, a research meteorologist who studies climate variability at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colo., said in an email to NBC News.
He noted other published studies have reached a similar conclusion — "a warming climate increases the frequency of temperature exceeding a high threshold."
What troubles Hoerling, who was not involved with the new study, is that it fails to consider the possibility that temperature variability will decrease in a warming world, as indicated by a recent study in Nature. If so, temperatures may not exceed a high threshold as often as projected by the new study.
"Of course, if temperature variability increases, then the frequency of exceeding a high threshold increases," he added.
Similarly, Martin Tingley, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University whose own research indicates recent summer heat waves are unprecedented, noted that the new paper is based on a short reference interval — 1951 to 1980, as was done in a 2012 paper by former NASA climate scientist James Hansen.
"It is quite a dangerous proposition" as discussed in commentary on the Hansen paper, Tingley told NBC News. "Because what happens is using a short reference interval, you underestimate the variance within that interval and artificially inflate them outside of that baseline. So it actually gives us more extreme behavior as you extrapolate."
Coumou said he is confident in the ability of the suite of models used in the new research to portray historic, observed temperature trends and thus what they say about the likelihood of increased frequency and severity of extreme heat in the coming decades.
"We know that such events can have strong impacts on society as well as ecosystems," he said. "Our study shows that in the near-term such events will become more regular, but it doesn't mean that we cannot adapt."
http://www.nbcnews.com/science/extreme-heat-waves-quadruple-2040-study-says-6C10919395
MVTG has a solution to the global warming problem, check it out! Pilot plant design news should be out soon and construction should start this year!!!! Patented ERC reactor makes Formic acid out of CO2, which is worth $1500/ton.
Canada, Alberta, Funding for CO2 conversion to useful products announced!
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=85712041
Sooo, who is interested in possibly reviving this zombie thread? LOL
I am!!!!
Wow, no posts here in 5 years? Amazing!!!!
I am looking for a board like this, or thinking of starting one like it. IS there anyone even reading this anymore?
Dont think they will have that problem this year. <G>
Methane Bubbling From Arctic Lakes, Now And At End Of Last Ice Age
UAF researcher Katey Walter lights a pocket of methane on a thermokarst lake in Siberia in March of 2007. Igniting the gas is a way to demonstrate, in the field, that it contains methane. (Credit: Photo by Sergey Zimov)
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/10/071025174618.htm
ScienceDaily (Oct. 26, 2007) — A team of scientists led by a researcher at the University of Alaska Fairbanks has identified a new likely source of a spike in atmospheric methane coming out of the North during the end of the last ice age.
Methane bubbling from arctic lakes could have been responsible for up to 87 percent of that methane spike, said UAF researcher Katey Walter, lead author of a report printed in the Oct. 26 issue of Science. The findings could help scientists understand how current warming might affect atmospheric levels of methane, a gas that is thought to contribute to climate change.
“It tells us that this isn’t just something that is ongoing now. It would have been a positive feedback to climate warming then, as it is today,” said Walter. “We estimate that as much as 10 times the amount of methane that is currently in the atmosphere will come out of these lakes as permafrost thaws in the future. The timing of this emission is uncertain, but likely we are talking about a time frame of hundreds to thousands of years, if climate warming continues as projected.”
Ice cores from Greenland and Antarctica have shown that during the early Holocene Period--about 14,000 to 11,500 years ago--the levels of methane in the atmosphere rose significantly, Walter said. “They found that an unidentified northern source (of methane) appeared during that time.”
Previous hypotheses suggested that the increase came from gas hydrates or wetlands. This study’s findings indicate that methane bubbling from thermokarst lakes, which are formed when permafrost thaws rapidly, is likely a third and major source.
Walter’s research focused on areas of Siberia and Alaska that, during the last ice age, were dry grasslands atop ice-rich permafrost. As the climate warmed, Walter said, that permafrost thawed, forming thermokarst lakes.
“Lakes really flared up on this icy permafrost landscape, emitting huge amounts of methane,” she said.
As the permafrost around and under the lakes thaws, the organic material in it--dead plants and animals--can enter the lake bottom and become food for the bacteria that produce methane.
“All that carbon that had been locked up in the ground for thousands of years is converted to potent greenhouse gases: methane and carbon dioxide,” Walter said. Walter’s paper hypothesizes that methane from the lakes contributed 33 to 87 percent of the early Holocene methane increase.
To arrive at the hypothesis, Walter and her colleagues traveled to Siberia and northern Alaska to examine lakes that currently release methane. In addition, they gathered samples of permafrost and thawed them in the laboratory to study how much methane permafrost soil can produce immediately after thawing.
“We found that it produced a lot very quickly,” she said.
Finally, she and other researchers studied when existing lakes and lakes in the past formed and found that their formation coincided with the early Holocene Period northern methane spike.
“We came up with a new hypothesis,” she said. “Thermokarst lake formation is a source of atmospheric methane today, but it was even more important during early Holocene warming. This suggests that large releases from lakes may occur again in the future with global warming.”
Co-authors on the paper include Mary Edwards of the University of Southampton and the UAF College of Natural Science and Mathematics; Guido Grosse, an International Polar Year postdoctoral fellow with the UAF Geophysical Institute; Sergey Zimov of the Russian Academy of Sciences; and Terry Chapin of the UAF Institute of Arctic Biology. Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation, the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Adapted from materials provided by University of Alaska Fairbanks.
The Future Is Drying Up
By JON GERTNER
Published: October 21, 2007
Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures, for The New York Times
Draining The 100-foot-high bathtub ring left by the dwindling waters of Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam.
Scientists sometimes refer to the effect a hotter world will have on this country’s fresh water as the other water problem, because global warming more commonly evokes the specter of rising oceans submerging our great coastal cities. By comparison, the steady decrease in mountain snowpack — the loss of the deep accumulation of high-altitude winter snow that melts each spring to provide the American West with most of its water — seems to be a more modest worry. But not all researchers agree with this ranking of dangers. Last May, for instance, Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate and the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, one of the United States government’s pre-eminent research facilities, remarked that diminished supplies of fresh water might prove a far more serious problem than slowly rising seas. When I met with Chu last summer in Berkeley, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada, which provides most of the water for Northern California, was at its lowest level in 20 years. Chu noted that even the most optimistic climate models for the second half of this century suggest that 30 to 70 percent of the snowpack will disappear. “There’s a two-thirds chance there will be a disaster,” Chu said, “and that’s in the best scenario.”
Simon Norfolk/NB Pictures, for The New York Times
Fishing Gone A fish-cleaning station at Las Vegas Bay from which the shoreline — and the fish — have retreated.
In the Southwest this past summer, the outlook was equally sobering. A catastrophic reduction in the flow of the Colorado River — which mostly consists of snowmelt from the Rocky Mountains — has always served as a kind of thought experiment for water engineers, a risk situation from the outer edge of their practical imaginations. Some 30 million people depend on that water. A greatly reduced river would wreak chaos in seven states: Colorado, Utah, Wyoming, New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada and California. An almost unfathomable legal morass might well result, with farmers suing the federal government; cities suing cities; states suing states; Indian nations suing state officials; and foreign nations (by treaty, Mexico has a small claim on the river) bringing international law to bear on the United States government. In addition, a lesser Colorado River would almost certainly lead to a considerable amount of economic havoc, as the future water supplies for the West’s industries, agriculture and growing municipalities are threatened. As one prominent Western water official described the possible future to me, if some of the Southwest’s largest reservoirs empty out, the region would experience an apocalypse, “an Armageddon.”
One day last June, an environmental engineer named Bradley Udall appeared before a Senate subcommittee that was seeking to understand how severe the country’s fresh-water problems might become in an era of global warming. As far as Washington hearings go, the testimony was an obscure affair, which was perhaps fitting: Udall is the head of an obscure organization, the Western Water Assessment. The bureau is located in the Boulder, Colo., offices of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, the government agency that collects obscure data about the sky and seas. Still, Udall has a name that commands some attention, at least within the Beltway. His father was Morris Udall, the congressman and onetime presidential candidate, and his uncle was Stewart Udall, the secretary of the interior under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Bradley Udall’s great-great-grandfather, John D. Lee, moreover, was the founder of Lee’s Ferry, a flyspeck spot in northern Arizona that means nothing to most Americans but holds near-mythic status to those who work with water for a living. Near Lee’s Ferry is where the annual flow of the Colorado River is measured in order to divvy up its water among the seven states that depend on it. To many politicians, economists and climatologists, there are few things more important than what has happened at Lee’s Ferry in the past, just as there are few things more important than what will happen at Lee’s Ferry in the future.
The importance of the water there was essentially what Udall came to talk about. A report by the National Academies on the Colorado River basin had recently concluded that the combination of limited Colorado River water supplies, increasing demands, warmer temperatures and the prospect of recurrent droughts “point to a future in which the potential for conflict” among those who use the river will be ever-present. Over the past few decades, the driest states in the United States have become some of our fastest-growing; meanwhile, an ongoing drought has brought the flow of the Colorado to its lowest levels since measurements at Lee’s Ferry began 85 years ago. At the Senate hearing, Udall stated that the Colorado River basin is already two degrees warmer than it was in 1976 and that it is foolhardy to imagine that the next 50 years will resemble the last 50. Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again. “As we move forward,” Udall told his audience, “all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”
A few weeks after his testimony, I flew to Boulder to meet with Udall, and we spent a day driving switchback roads high in the Rockies in his old Subaru. It had been a wet season on the east slope of the Rockies, but the farther west we went, the drier it became. Udall wanted to show me some of the local reservoirs and water systems that were built over the past century, so I could get a sense of their complexity as well as their vulnerability. As he put it, he wants to connect the disparate members of the water economy in a way that has never really been done before, so that utility executives, scientists, environmentalists, business leaders, farmers and politicians can begin discussing how to cope with the inevitable shortages of fresh water. In the American West, whose huge economy and political power derive from the ability of 20th-century engineers to conquer rivers like the Colorado and establish a reliable water supply, the prospect that there will be less water in the future, rather than the same amount, is unnerving. “We have a very short period of time here to get people educated on what this means,” Udall told me as we drove through the mountains. “Then once that occurs, perhaps we can start talking about how do we deal with it.”
Udall suggested that I meet a water manager named Peter Binney, who works for Aurora, Colo., a city — the 60th-largest in the United States — that sprawls over an enormous swath of flat, postagricultural land south of the Denver airport. It may be difficult for residents of the East Coast to understand the political celebrity of some Western water managers, but in a place like Aurora, where water, not available land, limits economic growth, Binney has enormous responsibilities. In effect, the city’s viability depends on his wherewithal to conjure new sources of water or increase the output of old ones. As Binney told me when we first spoke, “We have to find a new way of meeting the needs of all this population that’s turning up and still satisfy all of our recreational and environmental demands.” Aurora has a population of 310,000 now, Binney said, but that figure is projected to surpass 500,000 by 2035.
I asked if he had enough water for that many people. “Oh, no,” he replied. He seemed surprised that someone could even presume that he might. In fact, he explained, his job is to figure out how to find more water in a region where every drop is already spoken for and at a moment when there is little possibility that any more will ever be discovered.
Binney and I got together outside Dillon, a village in the Colorado Rockies 75 miles from Aurora and just a few miles west of the Continental Divide. We met in a small parking lot beside Dillon Reservoir, which sits at the bottom of a bowl of snow-capped mountains. Binney, a thickset 54-year-old with dark red hair and a fair complexion, had driven up in a large S.U.V. He still carries a strong accent from his native New Zealand, and in conversation he comes across as less a utility manager than a polymath with the combined savvy of an engineer, an economist and a politician. As we moved to a picnic table, Binney told me that we were looking at Denver’s water, not Aurora’s, and that it would eventually travel 70 miles through tunnels under the mountains to Denver’s taps. He admitted that he would love to have this water, which is pure snowmelt. To people in his job, snowmelt is the best source of water because it requires little chemical treatment to bring it up to federal drinking standards. But this water wasn’t available. Denver got here before him. And in Colorado, like most Western states, the rights to water follow a bloodline back to whoever got to it first.
One way to view the history of the American West is as a series of important moments in exploration or migration; another is to consider it, as Binney does, in terms of its water. In the 20th century, for example, all of our great dams and reservoirs were built — “heroic man-over-nature” achievements, in Binney’s words, that control floods, store water for droughts, generate vast amounts of hydroelectric power and enable agriculture to flourish in a region where the low annual rainfall otherwise makes it difficult. And in constructing projects like the Glen Canyon Dam — which backs up water to create Lake Powell, the vast reservoir in Arizona and Utah that feeds Lake Mead — the builders went beyond the needs of the moment. “They gave us about 40 to 50 years of excess capacity,” Binney says. “Now we’ve gotten to the end of that era.” At this point, every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities. And yet, he pointed out, the region’s population is expected to keep booming. California’s Department of Finance recently predicted that there will be 60 million Californians by midcentury, up from 36 million today. “In Colorado, we’re sitting at a little under five million people now, on our way to eight million people,” Binney said. Western settlers, who apportioned the region’s water long ago, never could have foreseen the thirst of its cities. Nor, he said, could they have anticipated our environmental mandates to keep water “in stream” for the benefit of fish and wildlife, as well as for rafters and kayakers.
The West’s predicament, though, isn’t just a matter of limited capacity, bigger populations and environmental regulations. It’s also a distributional one. Seventy-five years ago, cities like Denver made claims on — and from the state of Colorado received rights to — water in the mountains; those cities in turn built reservoirs for their water. As a result, older cities have access to more surface water (that is, water that comes from rivers and streams) than newer cities like Aurora, which have been forced to purchase existing water rights from farmers and mining companies. Towns that rely on groundwater (water pumped from deep underground) face an even bigger disadvantage. Water tables all over the United States have been dropping, sometimes drastically, from overuse. In the Denver area, some cities that use only groundwater will almost certainly exhaust their accessible supplies by 2050.
The biggest issue is that agriculture consumes most of the water, as much as 90 percent of it, in a state like Colorado. “The West has gone from a fur-trapping, to a mining, to an agricultural, to a manufacturing, to an urban-centric economy,” Binney explained. As the region evolved, however, its water ownership for the most part did not. “There’s no magical locked box of water that we can turn to,” Binney says of cities like Aurora, “so it’s going to have to come from an existing use.” Because the supply of water in the West can’t really change, water managers spend their time looking for ways to adjust its allocation in their favor.
Binney knew all this back in 2002, when he took the job in Aurora after a long career at an engineering firm. Over the course of a century, the city had established a reasonable water supply. About a quarter of its water is piped in from the Colorado River basin about 70 miles away; another quarter is taken from reservoirs in the Arkansas River basin far to the south. The rest comes from the South Platte, a lazy, meandering river that runs north through Aurora on its way toward Nebraska. Binney says he believes that a city like his needs at least five years of water in storage in case of drought; his first year there turned out to be one of the worst years for water managers in recorded history, and the town’s reservoirs dropped to 26 percent of capacity, meaning Aurora had at most nine months of reserves and could not endure another dry spring. During the summer and fall, Binney focused on both supply and demand. He negotiated with neighboring towns to buy water and accelerated a program to pay local farmers to fallow their fields so the city could lease their water rights. Meanwhile, the town asked residents to limit their showers and had water cops enforce new rules against lawn sprinklers. (“It’s interesting how many people were watering lawns in the middle of the night,” Binney said.)
Water use in the United States varies widely by region, influenced by climate, neighborhood density and landscaping, among other things. In the West, Los Angelenos use about 125 gallons per person per day in their homes, compared with 114 for Tucson residents. Binney’s customers generally use about 160 gallons per person per day. “In the depths of the drought,” he said, “we got down to about 123 gallons.”
Part of the cruelty of a Western drought is that a water manager never knows if it will last 1 year or 10. In 2002, Binney was at the earliest stages of what has since become a nearly continuous dry spell. Though he couldn’t see that at the time, he realized Aurora faced a permanent state of emergency if it didn’t boost its water supplies. But how? One option was to try to buy water rights in the mountains (most likely from farmers who were looking to quit agriculture), then build a new reservoir and a long supply line to Aurora. Obvious hurdles included environmental and political resistance, as well as an engineering difficulty: water is heavy, far heavier than oil, and incompressible; a system to move it long distances (especially if it involves tunneling through mountains or pumping water over them) can cost billions. Binney figured that without the help of the federal government, which has largely gotten out of the Western dam-and-reservoir-building business, Aurora would be unwise to pursue such a project. Even if the money could be raised, building a system would take decades. Aurora needed a solution within five years.
Another practice, sometimes used in Europe, is to drill wells alongside a river and pull river water up though them, using the gravel of the riverbank as a natural filter — sort of like digging a hole in the sand near the ocean’s edge as it fills from below. Half of Aurora’s water rights were on the South Platte already; the city also pours its treated wastewater back into the river, as do other cities in the Denver metro area. This gives the South Platte a steady, dependable flow. Binney and the township reasoned that they could conceivably, and legally, go some 20 or 30 miles downstream on the South Platte, buy agricultural land near the river, install wells there and retrieve their wastewater. Thus they could create a system whereby Aurora would use South Platte water; send it to a treatment plant that would discharge it back into the river; go downstream to recapture water from the same river; then pump it back to the city for purification and further use. The process would repeat, ad infinitum. Aurora would use its share of South Platte water “to extinction,” in the argot of water managers. A drop of the South Platte used by an Aurora resident would find its way back to the city’s taps as a half-drop in 45 to 60 days, a quarter-drop 45 to 60 days after that and so on. For every drop the town used from the South Platte, over time it would almost — as all the fractional drops added up — get another.
Many towns have a supply that includes previously treated water. The water from the Mississippi River, for instance, is reused many times by municipalities as it flows southward. But as far as Binney knew, no municipality in the United States had built the kind of closed loop that Aurora envisioned. Water from wells in the South Platte would taste different, because of its mineral and organic content, so Binney’s engineers would have to make it mimic mountain snowmelt. More delicate challenges involved selling local taxpayers on authorizing a project, marketed to them as “Prairie Waters,” that would capitalize on their own wastewater. The system, which meant building a 34-mile-long pipeline from the downstream South Platte riverbanks to a treatment facility in Aurora, would cost three-quarters of a billion dollars, making it one of the most expensive municipal infrastructure projects in the country.
When Binney and I chatted at the reservoir outside Dillon, he had already finished discussions with Moody’s and Fitch, the bond-rating agencies whose evaluations would help the town finance the project. Groundbreaking, which would be the next occasion we would see each other, was still a month away. “What we’re doing now is trading high levels of treatment and purification for building tunnels and chasing whatever remaining snowmelt there is in the hills, which I think isn’t a wise investment for the city,” he told me. “I would expect that what we’re going to do is the blueprint for a lot of cities in California, Arizona, Nevada — even the Carolinas and the Gulf states. They’re all going to be doing this in the future.”
Water managers in the West tend to think in terms of “acre-feet.” One acre-foot, equal to about 326,000 gallons, is enough to serve two typical Colorado families for one year. When measurements of the Colorado River began near Lee’s Ferry in the early 1920s, the region happened to be in the midst of an extremely wet series of years, and the river was famously misjudged to have an average flow of 17 million acre-feet per year — when in fact its average flow would often prove to be significantly less. Part of the legacy of that misjudgment is that the seven states that divided the water in the 1920s entered into a legal partnership that created unrealistic expectations about the river’s capacity. But there is another, lesser-known legacy too. As the 20th century progressed, many water managers came to believe that the 1950s, which included the most severe drought years since measurement of the river began, were the marker for a worst-case situation.
But recent studies of tree rings, in which academics drill core samples from the oldest Ponderosa pines or Douglas firs they can find in order to determine moisture levels hundreds of years ago, indicate that the dry times of the 1950s were mild and brief compared with other historical droughts. The latest research effort, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in late May, identified the existence of an epochal Southwestern megadrought that, if it recurred, would prove calamitous.
When Binney and I met at Dillon Reservoir, he brought graphs of Colorado River flows that go back nearly a thousand years. “There was this one in the 1150s,” he said, tracing a jagged line downward with his finger. “They think that’s when the Anasazi Indians were forced out. We see drought cycles here that can go up to 60 years of below-average precipitation.” What that would mean today, he said, is that states would have to make a sudden choice between agriculture and people, which would lead to bruising political debates and an unavoidable blow to the former. Binney says that as much as he believes that some farmers’ water is ultimately destined for the cities anyway, a big jolt like this would be tragic. “You hope you never get to that point,” he told me, “where you force those kinds of discussions, because they will change for hundreds of years the way that people live in the Western U.S. If you have to switch off agriculture, it’s not like you can get back into it readily. It took decades for the agricultural industry to establish itself. It may never come back.”
An even darker possibility is that a Western drought caused by climatic variation and a drought caused by global warming could arrive at the same time. Or perhaps they already have. This coming spring, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will issue a report identifying areas of the world most at risk of droughts and floods as the earth warms. Fresh-water shortages are already a global concern, especially in China, India and Africa. But the I.P.C.C., which along with Al Gore received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize earlier this month for its work on global-warming issues, will note that many problem zones are located within the United States, including California (where the Sierra Nevada snowpack is threatened) and the Colorado River basin. These assessments follow on the heels of a number of recent studies that analyze mountain snowpack and future Colorado River flows. Almost without exception, recent climate models envision reductions that range from the modest to the catastrophic by the second half of this century. One study in particular, by Martin Hoerling and Jon Eischeid, suggests the region is already “past peak water,” a milestone that means the river’s water supply will now forever trend downward.
Climatologists seem to agree that global warming means the earth will, on average, get wetter. According to Richard Seager, a scientist at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory who published a study on the Southwest last spring, more rain and snow will fall in those regions closer to the poles and more precipitation is likely to fall during sporadic, intense storms rather than from smaller, more frequent storms. But many subtropical regions closer to the equator will dry out. The models analyzed by Seager, which focus on regional climate rather than Colorado River flows, show that the Southwest will ultimately be subject to significant atmospheric and weather alterations. More alarming, perhaps, is that the models do not only concern the coming decades; they also address the present. “You know, it’s like, O.K., there’s trouble in the future, but how near in the future does it set in?” he told me. “In this case, it appears that it’s happening right now.” When I asked if the drought in his models would be permanent, he pondered the question for a moment, then replied: “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”
Climate models tend to be more accurate at predicting temperature than precipitation. Still, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that “something is happening,” as Peter Binney gently puts it. Everyone I spoke with in the West has noticed — less snow, earlier spring melts, warmer nights. Los Angeles this year went 150 days without a measurable rainfall. One afternoon in Boulder, I spent some time with Roger Pulwarty, a highly regarded climatologist at the National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration. Pulwarty, who has spent the past few years assessing adaptive solutions to a long drought, has a light sense of humor and an air of optimism about him, but he acknowledged that the big picture is worrisome. Even if the precipitation in the West does not decrease, higher temperatures by themselves create huge complications. Snowmelt runoff decreases. The immense reservoirs lose far more water to evaporation. Meanwhile, demand increases because crops are thirstier. Yet importing water from other river basins becomes more difficult, because those basins may face shortages, too.
“You don’t need to know all the numbers of the future exactly,” Pulwarty told me over lunch in a local Vietnamese restaurant. “You just need to know that we’re drying. And so the argument over whether it’s 15 percent drier or 20 percent drier? It’s irrelevant. Because in the long run, that decrease, accumulated over time, is going to dry out the system.” Pulwarty asked if I knew the projections for what it would take to refill Lake Powell, which is at about 50 percent of capacity. Twenty years of average flow on the Colorado River, he told me. “Good luck,” he said. “Even in normal conditions we don’t get 20 years of average flow. People are calling for more storage on the system, but if you can’t fill the reservoirs you have, I don’t know how more storage, or more dams, is going to help you. One has to ask if the normal strategies that we have are actually viable anymore.”
Pulwarty is convinced that the economic impacts could be profound. The worst outcome, he suggested, would be mass migrations out of the region, along with bitter interstate court battles over the dwindling water supplies. But well before that, if too much water is siphoned from agriculture, farm towns and ranch towns will wither. Meanwhile, Colorado’s largest industry, tourism, might collapse if river flows became a trickle during summertime. Already, warmer temperatures have brought on an outbreak of pine beetles that are destroying pine forests; Pulwarty wonders how many tourists will want to visit a state full of dead trees. “A crisis is an interesting thing,” he said. In his view, a crisis is a point in a story, a moment in a narrative, that presents an opportunity for characters to think their way through a problem. A catastrophe, on the other hand, is something different: it is one of several possible outcomes that follow from a crisis. “We’re at the point of crisis on the Colorado,” Pulwarty concluded. “And it’s at this point that we decide, O.K., which way are we going to go?”
It is all but imposible to look into the future of the Western states without calling on Pat Mulroy, the head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Mulroy has no real counterpart on the East Coast; her nearest analog might be Robert Moses, the notorious New York City planner who built massive infrastructure projects and who almost always found a way around institutional obstructions and financing constraints. She is arguably the most influential and outspoken water manager in the country — a “woman without fear,” as Pulwarty describes her. Pulwarty and Peter Binney respect her willingness to challenge historical water-sharing agreements that, in Mulroy’s view, no longer suit the modern West (meaning they don’t suit Las Vegas). According to Binney, however, Nevada’s scant resources give Mulroy little choice. She has to keep her city from drying out. That makes hers the most difficult job in the water business, he told me.
Las Vegas is almost certainly more vulnerable to water shortages than any metro area in the country. Partly that’s a result of the city’s explosive growth. But the state of Nevada has the historical misfortune of receiving a smaller share of Colorado River water (300,000 acre-feet annually) than the other six states with which it signed a water-sharing compact in the 1920s. That modest share, stored in Lake Mead along with water destined for Southern California, Arizona and northern Mexico, now means everything to Las Vegas. I traveled to Lake Mead on a 99-degree day last June. The narrow, 110-mile-long lake, which at full capacity holds 28 million acre-feet of water (making it the largest reservoir in the United States), was at 49 percent of capacity. When riding into the valley and glimpsing it from afar — an astonishing slash of blue in the desert — my guide for the day, Bronson Mack of the Southern Nevada Water Authority, remarked that he had never seen it so low. The white bathtub ring on the sides of the canyon that marks the level of full capacity was visible about 100 feet above the water. “I have a photograph of my mother on her honeymoon, standing in front of the lake,” Mack, a Las Vegas native, said. That was in 1970. “It was almost that low, but not quite.”
Over the past year, it has become conceivable that the lake could eventually drop below the level of the water authority’s intake pipes, the straws that suck the water out for the Las Vegas Valley. The authority recently hired an engineering firm to drill through several miles of rock and create a deeper intake pipe near the bottom of the lake. To say the project is being fast-tracked is an understatement. The day after visiting Lake Mead, I met with Mulroy in her Las Vegas office. “We have everything in line to get it running by 2012,” she said of the new intake. But she added that she is looking to cut as much time off construction as possible. Building the new intake is a race against the clock, or rather a race against a lake that keeps going down, down, down.
Mulroy is not gambling the entire future of Las Vegas on this project. One catchphrase of the water trade is that water flows uphill toward money, which is another way of saying that a city with ample funds can, at least theoretically, augment its supplies indefinitely. In a tight water market like that of the West, this isn’t an absolute truth, but in many instances money can move rivers. The trade-off is that new water tends to be of lower quality (requiring more expensive purification) or far away (requiring more expensive transport). Thanks to Las Vegas’s growth — the metro area is now at 1.8 million people — cost is currently no object. The city’s cash reserves have made it possible for Mulroy to pay Arizona $330 million for water she can use in emergencies and to plan a controversial multibillion-dollar pipeline to east-central Nevada, where the water authority has identified groundwater it wants to extract and transport. Wealth allows for the additional possibility of a sophisticated trading scheme whereby Las Vegas might pay for a desalination plant on the Pacific Coast that would transform seawater into potable water for use in California and Mexico. In exchange, Nevada could get a portion of their Colorado River water in Lake Mead.
So money does make a kind of sustainability possible for Las Vegas. On the other hand, buying water is quite unlike buying anything else. At the moment, water doesn’t really function like a private good; its value, which Peter Binney calls “infinite,” is often only vaguely related to its price, which can vary from 50 cents an acre-foot (what Mulroy pays to take water from Lake Mead) to $12,000 an acre-foot (the most Binney has paid farmers in Colorado for their rights). Moreover, water is so necessary to human life, and hence so heavily subsidized and regulated, that it can’t really be bought and sold freely across state lines. (Enron tried to start a water market called Azurix in the late 1990s, only to see it fail spectacularly.) The more successful water markets have instead been local, like one in the late 1980s in California, where farmers agreed to reduce their water use and sell the savings to a state water bank. Mulroy and Binney each told me they think a true free-market water exchange would create too many winners and losers. “What you would have is affluent communities being able to buy the lifeblood right out from under those that are less well heeled,” Mulroy said. More practical, in her mind, would be a regional market that gives states, cities and farmers greater freedom to strike mutually beneficial agreements, but with protections so that municipalities aren’t pitted against one another.
More-efficient water markets might ease shortages, but they can’t replace a big city’s principal source. What if, I asked Mulroy, Lake Mead drained nearly to the bottom? Even if drought conditions ease over the next year or two, several people I spoke with think the odds are greater that Lake Powell, the 27-million-acre-foot reservoir that supplies Lake Mead, will drop to unusable levels before it ever fills again. Mulroy didn’t immediately dismiss the possibility; she is certain that the reduced circumstances of the two big Western reservoirs are tied to global warming and that Las Vegas is this country’s first victim of climate change. An empty Lake Mead, she began, would mean there is nothing in Lake Powell.
“It’s well outside probabilities,” she said — but it could happen. “In that case, it’s not just a Las Vegas problem. You have three entire states wiped out: Arizona, California and Nevada. Because you can’t replace those volumes with desalted ocean water.” What seems more likely, she said, is that the legal framework governing the Colorado River would preclude such a dire turn of events. Recently, the states that use the Colorado reached a tentative agreement that guarantees Lake Mead will remain partly full under current conditions, even if upstream users have to cut back their withdrawals as a result. The deal supplements a more fundamental understanding that dates to the 1920s. If the river is failing to carry a certain, guaranteed volume of water to Lee’s Ferry, which is just below Lake Powell, the river’s lower-basin states (Nevada, Arizona and California) can legally force the upper-basin states (Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico and Utah) to reduce or stop their water withdrawals. This contingency, known as a “compact call,” sets the lower-basin states against the upper, but it has never occurred; it is deeply feared by many water managers, because it would ravage the fragile relationship among states and almost certainly lead to a scrum of lawsuits. Yet, last year water managers in Colorado began meeting for the first time to discuss the possibility. In our conversations, Mulroy denied that there would be a compact call, but she pointed out that Las Vegas’s groundwater and desalination plans were going ahead anyway for precautionary reasons.
I asked if limiting the growth of the Las Vegas metro area wouldn’t help. Mulroy bristled. “This country is going to have 100 million additional people in it in the next 25 to 30 years,” she replied. “Tell me where they’re supposed to go. Seriously. Every community says, ‘Not here,’ ‘No growth here,’ ‘There’s too many people here already.’ For a large urban area that is the core economic hub of any particular area, to even attempt to throw up walls? I’m not sure it can be done.” Besides, she added, the problem isn’t growth alone: “We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue.” Americans, she went on to say, are the most voracious users of natural resources in the world. Maybe we need to talk about that as well. “The people who move to the West today need to realize they’re moving into a desert,” Mulroy said. “If they want to live in a desert, they have to adapt to a desert lifestyle.” That means a shift from the mindset of the 1930s, when the federal government encouraged people to settle in the West, plant water-intensive crops and make it look like the East Coast. It means landscapes of parched dirt. It means mesquite bushes and palo verde trees for vegetation. It means recycled water. It means gravel lawns. It is the West’s new deal, she seemed to be saying, and I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.
The first impulse when confronted with the West’s water problems may be to wonder how, as scarcity becomes more acute, the region will engineer its way back to health. What can be built, what can technology accomplish, to ease any shortages? Yet this is almost certainly the wrong way to think about the situation. To be sure, construction projects like a pipeline from east-central Nevada could help Las Vegas. But the larger difficulty facing Pat Mulroy and Peter Binney, as they describe it, is re-engineering the culture and conventions of the West before it becomes too late. Whether or not there is enough water in the region for, say, the next 30 or 50 years isn’t necessarily a question with a yes-or-no answer. The water managers I spoke with believe the total volume of available water could be great enough to sustain the cities, many farms and perhaps the natural flow of the area’s rivers. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that if things continue as they have — with so much water going to agriculture; with conservation only beginning to take hold among residents, industry and farmers; with supplies diminishing slowly but steadily as the Earth warms; with the population growing faster than anywhere else in the United States; and with some of our most economically vital states constricted by antique water agreements — the region will become a topography of crisis and perhaps catastrophe. This is an old prophecy, dating back more than a century to one of the original American explorers of the West, John Wesley Powell, who doubted the territory could support large populations and intense development. (Powell presciently argued that river basins, not arbitrary mapmakers, should determine the boundaries of the Western states, in order to avoid inevitable conflicts over water.) An earlier explorer, J. C. Ives, visited the present location of Hoover Dam, between Arizona and Nevada, in 1857. The desiccated landscape was “valueless,” Ives reported. “There is nothing there to do but leave.”
Roger Pulwarty, for his part, rejects the notion of environmental determinism. Nature, in other words, isn’t inexorably pushing the region into a grim, suffering century. Things can be done. Redoubling efforts to prevent further climate change, Pulwarty says, is one place to start; another is getting the states that share the Colorado River to reach cooperative arrangements, as they have begun to discuss, for coping with long-term droughts. Other parts of the solution are less obvious. To Peter Gleick, head of the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit based in Oakland, Calif., that focuses on global water issues, whether we can adapt to a drier future depends on whether we can rethink the functions, and value, of fresh water. Can we can do the same things using less of it? How we use our water, Gleick believes, is considerably more complex than it appears. First of all, there are consumptive and nonconsumptive uses of water. Consumptive use, roughly speaking, refers to water taken from a reservoir that cannot be recovered. “It’s embedded in a product like a liter of Coca-Cola, or it’s contaminated so badly we can’t reuse it,” Gleick says. In agriculture, the vast majority of water use is also consumptive, because it evaporates or transpires from crops into the atmosphere. Evaporated water may fall as rain 1,000 miles away — that’s how Earth’s water cycle works — but it is gone locally. A similar consumptive process characterizes the water we put on our lawns or gardens: it mostly disappears. Meanwhile, most of the water used by metropolitan areas is nonconsumptive. It goes down the drain and empties into nearby rivers, like Colorado’s South Platte, as treated wastewater.
Gleick calls the Colorado River “the most complicated water system in the world,” and he isn’t convinced it will be easy, or practical, to change the laws that govern its usage. “But I think it’s less hard to change how we use water,” he says. He accepts that climate change is confronting the West with serious problems. (He was also one of the country’s first scientists, in the mid-1980s, to point out that reductions in mountain snowpack could present huge challenges.) He makes a persuasive case, however, that there are immense opportunities — even in cities like Las Vegas, which has made strides in conservation — to reduce both consumptive and nonconsumptive demand for water. These include installing more low-flow home appliances and adopting more efficient irrigation methods. And they include economic tools too: for example, many municipalities have reduced consumption by making water more expensive (the more you use, the higher your per-gallon rate). The United States uses less water than it did 25 years ago, Gleick points out: “We haven’t even paid too much attention to it, and we’ve accomplished this.” To go further, he says he believes we could alter not only demand but also supply. “Treated wastewater isn’t a liability, it’s an asset,” he says. We don’t need potable water to flush our toilets or water our lawns. “One might say that’s a ridiculous use of potable water. In fact, I might say that. But that’s the way we’ve set it up. And that’s going to change, that’s got to change, in this century.”
Among Colorado’s water managers, Peter Binney’s Prairie Waters project is considered both innovative and important not on account of its technology but because it seems to mark a new era of finding water sources in the drying West. It also proves that the next generation’s water will not come cheap, or come easy. In late July, I went to Aurora to meet up again with Binney. It was the groundbreaking day for Prairie Waters, which had been on the local television news: Binney and several other officials grinned for the cameras and signed a section of six-foot steel pipe, the same kind that would transport water from the South Platte wells to the Aurora treatment facility. That evening, Binney and I had dinner together at a steakhouse in an Aurora shopping mall. When he remarked that we may have exceeded what he calls the “carrying capacity” of the West, I asked him whether our desert civilizations could last. Binney seemed dubious. “Not the way we’ve got it set up,” he said. “We’ve decoupled land use from water use. Water is the limiting resource in the West. I think we need to match them back together again.” There was a decent amount of water out there, he went on to explain, but it was a false presumption that it could sustain all the farms, all the cities, all the rivers. Something will have to give. It was also wrong to assume, he said, that cities could continue to grow without experiencing something akin to a religious awakening about the scarcity of water. Soon, he predicted, we would talk about our “water footprint” just as we now talk about our carbon footprint.
Indeed, any conversations about the one will in short order expand to include the other, Binney went on to say. Many water managers have known this for a while. The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.
Meanwhile, it is a perverse side effect of global warming that we may have to emit large volumes of carbon dioxide to obtain the clean water that is becoming scarcer because of the carbon dioxide we’ve already put into the atmosphere. A dry region that turns to desalination, for example, would need vast amounts of energy (and money) to purify its water. While wind-powered desalination could perhaps meet this challenge — such a plant was recently built outside Perth, Australia — it isn’t clear that coastal residents in, say, California would welcome such projects. Unclear, too, is how dumping the brine that is a by-product of the process back into the ocean would affect ecosystems.
Similar energy challenges face other plans. In past years, various schemes have arisen to move water from Canada or the Great Lakes to arid parts of the United States. Beyond the environmental implications and construction costs (probably hundreds of billions of dollars), such continental-scale plumbing would require stupendous amounts of electricity. And yet, fears that such plans will resurface in a drier, more populous world are partly behind current efforts by the Great Lakes states to certify a pact that protects their fresh water from outside exploitation.
Just pumping water from the Prairie Waters site to Aurora will cost a small fortune. Binney told me this the day after the groundbreaking, as we drove north from Aurora to the site. Along the 45-minute journey, Binney narrated where his pipeline would go — along the edge of the highway here, over in that field there and so on. Eventually we turned off the highway and onto a small country road, and Binney slowed down so I could take in the surroundings. “Here’s where you see it all coming together and all of it coming into conflict,” he told me. To him, it was a perfect tableau of the West in the 21st century. There was a housing development on one side of the road and fields of irrigated crops on the other. Farther ahead was a gravel pit, a remnant of the old Colorado mineral-extraction economy.
He drove on, and soon we turned onto a dirt road that bisected some open fields. We rumbled along for a quarter mile or so, spewing dust and passing over the South Platte in the process. Binney parked by a wire fence near a sign marking it as Aurora property. We got out of the truck, hopped over a locked gate and walked into a farm field.
For miles along the highway, we passed barren acreage that formerly grew winter wheat but was now slated for new houses. The land we stood on once grew corn, but tangles of weeds covered it now. As we walked, Binney explained that the collection wells on the South Platte would soon be dug a few hundred yards away; that water would be pumped into collection basins on this field, where sand and gravel would purify it further. Then it would be pumped back to the chemical treatment plants in Aurora before being piped to residents. “We’re standing 34 miles from there,” Binney said.
It was a location as ordinary as I could have imagined, an empty place, far from anything, and yet Binney saw it as something else. Earlier, when we crossed over the gravel banks of the South Platte, I found the river disappointing: broad and shallow, dun-colored and slow-moving, its unimpressive flow somehow incorporating water Aurora had already used upstream. James Michener, in writing about this region years ago, was dead-on in calling it “a sad, bewildered nothing of a river.” Still, the South Platte was dependable. It was also Aurora’s lifeline, buying the city 20 or 30 years of time. “What I really like about it,” Binney said, smiling as we walked from the field back to his truck, “is that it’s wet.”
Jon Gertner is a contributing writer for the magazine.
Point Of Skew
INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY
http://www.investors.com/editorial/editorialcontent.asp?secid=1501&status=article&id=2716382...
Posted 8/10/2007
Climate Change: 1998 was a year to remember for the global warming alarmists. The hottest on record, they'd say, proof that man-made emissions were helping scorch the planet. So how do they explain 1934?
NASA has silently, according to dailytech.com, revised its temperature figures, this time without the apparent Y2K bug that skewed the data. As it turns out, 1934, not 1998, is the hottest year in the continental U.S. since 1880.
The new numbers also show that four of the country's 10 warmest years were in the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939. Five of the hottest 10 occurred before World War II. The past 10 years are not as well represented: Only three years from the past decade are among the 10 warmest: 1998, 1999 and 2006.
None of this is good news for the global warming faithful, who argue that the burning of fossil fuel is warming the planet because the carbon dioxide emissions are creating a greenhouse effect. Because man's CO2 emissions in the hot 1930s are nowhere as large as they have been in the past 10 years, their theory doesn't hold up well.
We're on the record as being skeptical of the notion that there is a measurable "global temperature" and the same could be said for a "national temperature." So this news doesn't mean that much to us.
But the alarmists have staked their faith on the numbers and use them to hector everyone about our habit of burning oil. Now they have to live with the new numbers.
They also have to live with the fact that global warming alarmist in chief, James Hansen of NASA, seemed willing to let the flawed data continue to be considered accurate. Steve McIntyre of climateaudit.org asked Hansen for the algorithm he used to create the chart that allegedly proves the warming theory after McIntyre had noted odd spikes on the graph. But Hansen refused.
McIntyre, by the way, along with environmental economist Ross McKitrick, found serious statistical errors in the famous "hockey stick" chart of global temperatures that is supposed to be further evidence that the world is warming.
Eventually, Hansen's NASA colleague who helped him create the chart admitted there was a problem. The data were corrected.
The parting clouds at NASA reveal a valid lesson. Maybe Al Gore will learn something, correct his mistake and call off the whole global warming movement. Unlikely, though. Once an ego is fixated to the point of meltdown on saving the planet, there's no cooling off.
woops nukes NOT the answer:
UPDATE:Japan Nuclear Plant's Quake Damage Worse Than AnnouncedLast update: 7/18/2007 7:15:38 AM(combines various stories on nuclear power plant damage) KASHIWAZAKI, Japan (AP)--An earthquake-ravaged nuclear plant was shuttered indefinitely Wednesday, amid revelations damage was worse than initially announced and mounting international concern about Japanese nuclear stewardship. The mayor of Kashiwazaki city ordered the damaged Kashiwazaki-Kariwa facility closed until its safety could be confirmed, escalating a showdown over a long list of problems at the world's largest nuclear power plant, in terms of output capacity. The International Atomic Energy Agency meanwhile pressed Japan to undertake a transparent and thorough investigation of the accidents to see if there are lessons that can be applied to nuclear plants elsewhere in the world. Adding to the urgency was new data from aftershocks of Monday's deadly 6.8-magnitude quake suggesting a fault line may run underneath the mammoth power plant. Tsunehisa Katsumata, president of plant operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. (9501.TO), visited the site Wednesday morning, declaring it "a mess." The previous evening, his company released a list of dozens of problems triggered by the quake. A tour later given to Japan's Communist Party chief, Kazuo Shii, and a handful of reporters revealed widespread damage across its sprawling compound, including large cracks in roads, toppled concrete fences and buckled sidewalks. "This is unforgivable," Shii told Tepco Deputy Superintendent Masakazu Minamidate. "You say there's no leak before you really know. ... The delay in information was especially inexcusable." Katsumata earlier apologized for "all the worry and trouble we have caused," but defended the safety standards. "We will conduct an investigation from the ground up. But I think fundamentally we have confirmed that our safety measures worked," he said. "It is hard to make everything go perfectly." Tepco, Japan's largest power company, said the quake was stronger than planned for at the seven-reactor plant in the northern prefecture of Niigata. But none of the problems posed serious threats to people or the environment, it said. Still, the plant suffered a fire, broken pipes, water leaks and spills of radioactive waste. After Katsumata's plant tour, Tepco announced that a leak of radioactive water into the Sea of Japan was actually 50% bigger than announced Monday night. But the levels were still well below danger levels, it said. "We made a mistake in calculating the amount that leaked into the ocean. We apologize and are making a correction," the statement said. Spokesman Jun Oshima said the amount was still "one-billionth of Japan's legal limit." Later Wednesday, the company also said about 400 barrels containing low-level nuclear waste tipped over at a storage facility at the plant, revising an earlier figure of 100. The impact knocked the lids off about 40 barrels, spilling their contents onto the floor, Tepco spokesman Tsutomu Uehara told reporters in Tokyo. But Uehara said no radiation has been detected outside the facility. Akira Fukushima, deputy director of a government nuclear watchdog, backed that up, saying inspectors had not detected any hazardous abnormalities at the site. Still unconvinced was Hiroshi Aida, the mayor of Kashiwazaki, a city near the quake's epicenter and home to the plant and 93,500 people. He ordered operations at the plant to be halted Wednesday for "safety reasons." "I am worried," he said. "It would be difficult to restart operations at this time. ... The safety of the plant must be assured before it is reopened." Speaking in Malaysia, IAEA chief Mohamed ElBaradei said a thorough review was key and offered to have his Vienna-based agency pull together global experts. "It doesn't mean that the reactor structure or system has been damaged," ElBaradei said. "I would hope and I trust that Japan would be fully transparent in its investigation of that accident. The agency would be ready to join Japan through an international team in reviewing that accident and drawing the necessary lessons." Chief Cabinet Secretary Yasuhisa Shiozaki urged Tepco to be more "honest" and "quick" in reporting problems, especially those that could impact the public. Similar concerns were echoed across the country, which depends on 55 nuclear power plants for about 30% of its electricity needs. Tepco spokesman Hiroshi Itagaki said aftershock data indicate a fault under the ocean floor near the plant. While it was unclear how close the line came to the plant, Meteorological Agency official Osamu Kamigaichi said it may stretch under its grounds. The plant lies only 19 kilometers from the epicenter of the quake, just off the nearby coast of the Sea of Japan, Tepco said. Monday's temblor killed nine people, damaged hundreds of buildings, buckled roads and severed utilities. Kashiwazaki-Kariwa generates 8.2 million kilowatts of electricity, but has been plagued with mishaps. In 2001, a radioactive leak was found in a turbine room. (END) Dow Jones Newswires
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Guyana criticizes carbon credit scheme of Kyoto Protocol
Jul 12 02:27 PM US/Eastern
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Guyana's President Bharrat Jagdeo on Thursday criticized the Kyoto Protocol on climate change for failing to allow countries like his nation with pristine unharvested forests to earn carbon credits.
"The Kyoto Protocol is limited in that sense, and it's short-sighted in that it encourages bad behaviour basically among countries; if you cut down trees and you plant them back you get money, if you preserve them, you don't get anything," Jagdeo told a forum on agro-energy.
The Guyanese leader noted that Guyana would reap "miniscule" assistance under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol when the South American country begins large-scale production of ethanol and other types of agro-based energy.
He said Guyana has decided to get into the production of bio-fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel. But "assistance is miniscule through the Clean Development Mechanism as compared to the carbon credits we could get from standing forests," said Jagdeo, a Russian-trained economist.
Carbon credits are the center of a system of credits that allows a company or country that reduces its carbon-dioxide emissions below a target level to sell the extra reduction as a credit to a company or country that has not met the target level.
Under the Clean Development Mechanism of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, developed countries can take up a greenhouse gas reduction project in a developing country where the cost of greenhouse gas reduction projects is usually much lower.
Guyana has already set aside 80,940 ha (200,000 acres) of land in the eastern part of the country for investors to plant special varieties of sugar cane to make ethanol.
In northwestern Guyana near Venezuela, a company is planting oil palm to make biodiesel for use in that area to reduce fuel costs and at the same time clamp down on illegal fuel smuggling from the neighboring nation.
Copyright AFP 2005, AFP stories and photos shall not be published, broadcast, rewritten for broadcast or publication or redistributed directly or indirectly in any medium
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Cutting CO2 or a Sneak Attack on Porsche, Ferrari?: Doron Levin
By Doron Levin
The Porsche Boxster S limited edition July 10 (Bloomberg) -- If one of the more extreme responses to global warming comes true, driving a sports car anywhere but on a racetrack might be relegated to history's dustbin.
Fast, powerful cars within a few years may be outlawed in Europe, an idea that has been raised ostensibly because Ferraris and Porsches produce too much carbon dioxide. For those who abhor sports cars as vulgar symbols of affluence (along with vacation homes, furs and fancy jewelry), such a ban could be a two-fer: Saving the planet while cutting economic inequality.
Who are these people anyway who decide on behalf of everyone what car is proper to drive? In the U.S. they're members of Congress, which is considering fuel-efficiency standards that will affect vehicle size. In Europe, it's the ministers and parliamentarians of the European Union, which wants to limit how much CO2 cars can emit as a proxy for a fuel- consumption standard.
Chris Davies, a British member of the European Parliament, is proposing one of the most-extreme measures -- a prohibition on any car that goes faster than 162 kilometers (101 miles) an hour, a speed that everything from the humble Honda Civic on up can exceed. He ridiculed fast cars as ``boys' toys.''
The proposed ban would take effect in 2013. Davies told the Guardian newspaper that ``cars designed to go at stupid speeds have to be built to withstand the effects of a crash at those speeds. They are heavier than necessary, less fuel-efficient and produce too many emissions.''
His last point is telling, even though there are many reasons why cars are heavier, including safety measures such as air bags and steel-reinforced crumple zones.
Focused on Cars
The idea is to limit CO2, a so-called greenhouse gas blamed for causing the earth's temperature to rise.
But the debate isn't just about how much carbon dioxide to allow into the atmosphere and whether the amount actually matters. It's also about disdain some hold for the size or speed of the cars others drive.
``Automobiles always seem to be the focus, even though they only consume 15 percent or 20 percent of energy,'' said Csaba Csere, editor of Car & Driver magazine. If politicians really cared about the atmosphere they might concentrate first on power plants or factories, he said.
The folks against sports cars in Europe and big sport utility vehicles in the U.S. often are same ones who hate McMansion-sized homes, corporate jets, jumbo freezers, yachts, 60-inch flat-screens TVs, overnight-delivery services and other trappings of Western-style wealth and energy use.
Do people demonize these goods because they can't afford them? Or because they think others shouldn't have them? Proposals to limit carbon dioxide often sound like basic opposition to prosperity and rising living standards.
Planet in Peril?
Outside of a handful of command economies, few today would agree that a central authority ought to regulate who owns what. But attacking those who ``waste'' energy achieves the same goal.
Many ardent environmentalists are convinced that the planet is in peril. Why can't they be just a bit cautious, humble or skeptical in their advocacy of reduced energy consumption, which in turn must mean reduced global economic growth?
The main reason I'm wary of Al Gore's call for radical, immediate reduction of worldwide energy consumption is that he's way too sure that the human race is on the cusp of catastrophe. With no credentials of his own, Gore relies on scientists who insist we must hurry because we're approaching a point of no return.
But how about other scientists, ones who aren't sure we're on the brink? Richard Lindzen of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leading climatologist, says that even if nothing is done to limit CO2, the world will heat up by 1 degree Celsius, or a couple of degrees Fahrenheit, in the next 50 to 100 years.
Move Inland
We know from everyday experience that weather forecasting is a notoriously inexact. And if the world got a bit warmer there might be more arable land and longer growing seasons in northern latitudes. Is it heresy to suggest that if seas rise, moving back from the shore might be more practical than trying to change the weather?
The polar bear population, supposedly close to being wiped out, is ``not going extinct, or even appear to be affected at present,'' Mitchell Taylor of the Department of the Environment, Government of Nunavut, told the Toronto Star last year. One population in the eastern Arctic has grown to 2,100 from 850 since the mid-1980s, he said.
A half-century ago Rachel Carson popularized the modern environmental movement with ``The Silent Spring,'' a book claiming that the pesticide DDT was destroying America's wildlife. The book's impact was reduced use of the pesticide DDT, thereby leading to the unintended consequence of more mosquitoes and more malaria deaths in developing countries.
One Little Bite
The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other health agencies noted an alarming rise of malaria in places like South Africa and Peru after DDT was banned in the late 1970s. Since the mid-1990s, when DDT spraying resumed, the incidence of the disease has fallen.
Calls for limits on carbon dioxide ignore a basic point. People are likely to be better judges of the benefits of fast cars, TVs, air conditioners, and jets than government planners.
Besides, the brunt of government limits on energy use may well fall on the world's poorest nations, which need more energy -- thus generating more carbon dioxide -- to provide lighting, refrigeration, harvesting, water purification and transportation.
What right do environmentalists in rich countries have to deny residents of poorer ones the benefits of higher living standards?
I have a hunch that a ban on sports cars won't be enacted soon in Europe, largely because the Italians love their Lamborghinis, the British their Bentleys and the Germans their Porsches. But this won't be the last time that anti-consumption crusaders come disguised as guardians of the Earth.
(Doron Levin is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)
To contact the writer of this column: Doron Levin in Southfield, Michigan, at dlevin5@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: July 10, 2007 00:01 EDT
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Human greed takes lion's share of solar energy
Email Print Normal font Large font July 3, 2007
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AdvertisementHUMANS are just one of the millions of species on Earth, but we use up almost a quarter of the sun's energy captured by plants - the most of any species.
The human dominance of this natural resource is affecting other species, reducing the amount of energy available to them by almost 10 per cent, scientists report.
Researchers said the findings showed humans were using "a remarkable share" of the earth's plant productivity "to meet the needs and wants of one species".
They also warned that the increased use of biofuels - such as ethanol and canola - should be viewed cautiously, given the potential for further pressure on ecosystems.
The scientists, from Austria and Germany, who publish their results today in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, analysed data on land use, agriculture and forestry from 161 countries, representing 97 per cent of the world's land mass.
This showed humans used 24 per cent of the energy that was captured by plants. More than half of this was due to the harvesting of crops or other plants.
The human use of the natural resource varied across the globe, ranging from 11 per cent in Oceania and Australia, to 63 per cent in southern Asia.
An agriculture professor at the University of Melbourne, Snow Barlow, said the paper showed humans were taking up too much of an important natural resource.
"Here we are, just one species on the earth, and we're grabbing a quarter of the renewable resources … we're probably being a bit greedy."
Chee Chee Leung
Clean Air Watch Warns of Windfall Profits to Global WarmersLast update: 6/25/2007 12:44:00 PMWASHINGTON, June 25, 2007 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Should big polluters own the sky? That's one of the key questions as we consider how to limit and reduce global warming pollution. A U.S. Senate committee is set to examine this and related issues on June 28. Many of the biggest coal-burning power companies claim they own the sky -- and should be paid billions of dollars to reduce their emissions. A new Clean Air Watch white paper concludes that the 10 most polluting electric power companies collectively could pocket $9 billion annually under the wrong kind of cap-and-trade program. One company alone -- Ohio-based American Electric Power -- could rake in more than a billion and a half dollars every year. AEP has been among the polluters that have argued in favor of handing out global warming emission credits free to companies based on past pollution levels. "The very companies that have polluted the upper atmosphere now want to be rewarded," noted Frank O'Donnell, president of Clean Air Watch. "It would be unconscionable to reward their destructive behavior by simply giving them free credits -- and windfall profits," O'Donnell said. "The polluters should have to pay to clean up the mess they've made for us, and for future generations." The white paper argues that rather than subsidizing big polluters by handing out free emission credits or "allowances" based on past pollution levels -- as Congress did with the 1990 acid rain program -- the government should embrace the "polluter pays" principle used in other federal environmental laws including Superfund. Specifically, it recommends that the federal government auction off allowances. Polluting companies would have to bid against each other for a portion of the atmosphere they intend to use -- within overall limits that reduce carbon dioxide levels. Auction proceeds could be used for socially beneficial programs, which could include help for low-income residents, worker transition assistance or protecting wildlife. In a foreword to the white paper, Larry J. Schweiger, President and CEO of the National Wildlife Federation, said "it's time these companies started getting the bill." Schweiger added that "a cap-and-trade program that does not require companies to pay for carbon permits, and instead gives them away for free in perpetuity, would be fundamentally unjust. No-cost licenses to pollute would deprive the public of the resources and revenues with which to aid the economic transition to a low-pollution world, and with which to address the impacts of global warming." The white paper echoes a call made last week on public radio's Marketplace by former Labor Secretary Robert Reich: "I mean, it's our atmosphere, right?" Reich said. "Think of a national park or a national forest. No company is simply allowed to take what they want from it, free of charge. Why should the atmosphere be any different?" he added. The white paper is online at Clean Air Watch's web site, SOURCE Clean Air Watch
Frank O'Donnell of Clean Air Watch, +1-202-558-3527 or +1-202-302-2065Copyright (C) 2007 PR Newswire. All rights reserved Copyright © 2007
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