Environmental News, Articles & Information | Global Warming News | EcoWorld

We’ve just waded through the “California Water Plan,” 2005 update, which is produced by the California Dept. of Water Resources and is the most comprehensive source available on California’s water. Some interesting facts pop out immediately:

California has the most extensive system of water reconveyances in the world.

(1) Here are the overall quantities: In a normal year, about 250 cubic kilometers (henceforth noted as km3) of fresh water are delivered to California, nearly all of it rainfall, with the only noteworthy exceptions to rainfall being the Colorado River aqueduct delivering 6.6 km3, and the Klamath River delivering 1.9 km3. The rest is rain.

Of this 250 km3 water supply, about 50 km3 goes into the ocean, about 100 km3 evaporates or percolates, and about 100 km3 is used by civilization. And of that 100 km3 that is diverted and used, about half is diverted for “environmental” uses – preserving the environment of the delta for example. Agriculture uses 40 km3 of water per year in California, and urban users consume 10 km3.

If you review the contents of the State report, you will note they prefer the term “million acre feet.” One million acre feet is 1.23 km3. We find km3 far more practical – it helps us grasp the scale of the California water system relative to other parts of the world, and it helps us relate large units to small ones more intuitively. One km3 is one billion cubic meters (m3), which in turn is 1,000 liters. Try doing that with cubic miles, millions of acre feet, or gallons…

(2) What a plumbing system! Reviewing the map provided in the report (Chapter 3) every year, 7.6 km3 of the annual 30 km3 flow of the Sacramento River is sent into the aqueducts of the California State Water Project – most of it for agriculture in the Central Valley. From the Owens Valley, east of the Sierra crest, 2.1 km3 are diverted into the Los Angeles Aqueduct. From the legendary Hetch Hetchy Valley, nearly 1.0 km3 makes its way to urban users in the San Francisco Bay Area. And every year, 6.6 km3 (as noted) comes in from the Colorado River, mostly for agriculture in the Imperial Valley – but combining with water from the California Aqueduct, some 3.7 km3 of this water from the north and from the east make the 2,000 foot lift over the Tehachapi Mountains into the Los Angeles Basin.

(3) There is a lot of above-ground water storage already in place, and groundwater storage appears to have a great deal of potential. Existing reservoirs in California provide for storage of just over 50 km3 of water. Groundwater storage is not yet comprehensively assessed. In the report (Chapter 4), there is a map of California with shaded areas denoting land with subsurface water storage – and every valley and lowland, including all of the vast Central Valley, and also nearly all of the vast areas to the south and east – are apparently atop groundwater resources.

The report provides incomplete information on California’s overall aquifer capacity, for example, it states “over a period of years, artificial recharge in these areas (Southern California) has increased the water now in groundwater storage by about 7 million acre feet (8.6 km3).” The report goes on to say there are another 11 km3 of groundwater storage that could be developed in California. It appears the potential groundwater storage capacity in California greatly exceeds current surface storage.

(4) Bring on desalination! Without going into the derivations, the information in this report (Chapter 6) suggests the capital costs for desalination plants are about $800 per consumer. Amortized over a desalination plant’s useful lifetime, this does not add all that much to the water bill of an urban consumer. As for power consumption to desalinate water – it is now reliably down to 4.0 kWh per cubic meter. Put another way, if you burned an 85 watt bulb year round, that’s all the electricity it would take for one person to desalinate all the fresh water they need. Not much.

Back in 1998 we wondered here how long the boom would last. In our EcoWorld post “Bulls & Bears” we noted that aggregate public stock multiples were much higher than historical norms, and wondered how they might experience a soft landing. As it turned out, stocks appreciated for nearly two more years, and the soft landing they got was because the housing bubble inflated to replace the deflating stock bubble, keeping employment up and the economy strong. Now the housing bubble is deflating. How bad will it get?

We have blamed the unaffordability of housing on the underlying cost increases, which are (1) land costs too much because environmentalists successfully oppose most development, which restricts the supply of available land, (2) construction materials cost too much, because environmentalists successfully oppose most new sources of building materials – mines, quarries, lumber – which restricts the supply of materials, and (3) public infrastructure costs too much, because public employees have taken over our state, county and local governments and have negotiated themselves (and their contractors) wages and benefits that are far higher than the market-driven wages and benefits that competitive private sector companies pay their employees.

The reasons nobody cared about these grossly inflated underlying costs, however, was because of the rise of one of the most irresponsible periods of lending practices in American history, the subprime “liars loans” that induced tens of millions of people into borrowing money at low initial rates – rates that are now resetting and destroying the ability of these millions of homeowners to afford the monthly payments for their grossly overpriced homes.

To figure out how bad this is going to get, consider these excerpts from recent posts on four respected blogs that are covering this disaster:

“Finally, the Crossroad” by John Rubino – “the past two decades of low inflation and steady expansion have been purchased with ever-greater amounts of debt. In the 1960s it took about a buck-fifty of new debt to produce a new dollar of GDP. Today it takes about six bucks…” and “Total debt in the U.S. economy grew at a seasonally-adjusted annual rate of $3.7 trillion, and now stands at $46 trillion, up from $29 trillion in 2001…”

“Interview with Paul Kasriel” by Michael Shedlock – “Shedlock: Would you say that consumer debt in the US as opposed to the lack of consumer debt in Japan increases the deflationary pressures on the US economy? Kasriel: Yes, absolutely. The latest figures that I have show that banks’ exposure to the mortgage market is at 62% of their total earnings assets, an all time high. If a prolonged housing bust ensues, banks could be in big trouble. Shedlock: What if Bernanke cuts interest rates to 1 percent? Kasriel: In a sustained housing bust that causes banks to take a big hit to their capital it simply will not matter. This is essentially what happened recently in Japan and also in the US during the great depression…”

“Real Estate & Housing Update” by Mike Morgan – “The deterioration of the housing markets over the past six weeks has been devastating. I really don’t care what we hear on the conference calls this week, because I’m here to tell you from ground zero, it is much worse than anyone has discussed, and it is going to get far worse than any of the builders want to admit…”

“US Housing Crash Continues” by Patrick Killelea – “Prices are still disconnected from fundamentals. House prices are still far beyond any historically known relationship to rents or salaries. Yearly rents are 3% of purchase price. Mortgage rates are 6.5%, so it costs more than twice as much to rent money than it does to rent a house…”

So does it now appear the subprime loans and the housing bubble were necessary to postpone the inevitable? Perhaps, but meanwhile we’ve added another $29 trillion of debt to the US economy, and more importantly, banks can’t continue to lend, even if the Fed cuts the interest rate to zero, if 62% of their earnings assets are home mortgages, and the value of the underlying loan collateral – the homes themselves – has crashed.

It appears to this non-economist that managed inflation is the key – just as it appeared back in 1998. Let these homes grow into their inflated values, as the real value of the dollar slowly falls. But at this point, it is unlikely America can postpone their reckoning with unsustainable levels of consumer and government debt. And as we restore sustainability to our economy, if new homes are ever to become affordable, we must also address the issues of inflated costs. To complete this housing cycle we need to restore rationality to the environmentalist lobby, and fiscally reform the public sector. Bottom line: Sustainable economics are just as important as sustainable ecosystems.

Much has been made of “smart growth principles” and “smart energy policy” in California. But in reality, the assumptions which dominate and drive California’s land use and energy policies are seriously flawed. Failure to examine the quantitative realities that ought to inform these policies, and adjust accordingly, will condemn Californians to a future much darker than many rational alternatives.

The three primary questions facing California’s policymakers are how best to manage California’s land, water, and energy. In all three, stark choices are faced, which can be illuminated by comparing four types of land use: High density new homes, low density new homes, corn ethanol farms, and solar thermal power stations. In all four areas, elementary quantitative analysis may reveal surprising results.

There are 37 million people in California. Assume the population will grow over the next 25 years to 50 million people – an increase of 13 million. There are 158,000 square miles of land in California, and about 40,000 square miles of that area is farmland. So if 13 million people were settled on new land, not infill, at a high density of 20,000 people per square mile (at 3.5 people per household that is 9 residences per acre – an amount easily achieved according to current “smart growth” principles), it would consume 1.6% of California’s farmland, or a mere 0.4% of California’s total land area. Even that miniscule expansion is a constant, nearly impossible fight in today’s political environment – the conventional wisdom claims “infill” within the footprint of existing cities is supposed to accomodate all new growth!

If on the other hand, 13 million new Californians all chose to live in very low density developments – something that is extremely unlikely since many people prefer living in urban centers where the population often exceeds 50,000 per square mile – how much land would be consumed? Again the percentages are underwhelming. At a density of 2,000 people per square mile (less than one household per acre), literally 1/10th the “smart growth” densities, only 16.3% of California’s farmland will be lost; only 4.1% of California’s total land area. It is true that losing 16% of California’s farmland is not trivial, but nor is it overwhelming. And even in a scenario where new low-density developments are encouraged, most new development will not occur on farmland.

When considering land use, however, what sort of farmland is being lost? If agricultural land growing food crops is being lost, that is arguably a problematic tradeoff. But California is rushing headlong into development of a subsidized corn ethanol industry. So what are the water and energy tradeoffs between land for homes and land for biofuel? Let’s assume low density homeowners use a whopping 2,000 gallons per residence per day per person – an absurdly large amount; four times what the average resident uses in Los Angeles County. At the population density of 2,000 people per square mile (3.5 people per residence), it would take 3.7 cubic kilometers of fresh water per year to supply 13 million people living on 6,500 square miles of new low density residences.

That sounds like a lot until you consider the water requirements for 6,500 square miles of corn ethanol. A conservative estimate is that every gallon of corn ethanol – in arid regions like California’s Central Valley – requires at least 1,000 gallons of crop irrigation per season. Since corn ethanol, very best case, yields 5,000 gallons per acre per year, the yearly water requirement for 6,500 square miles of cornfields, instead of low density housing, is 5.2 cubic kilometers of fresh water – nearly twice as much as for housing!

And how much energy would allocating all this land and water to corn ethanol buy us, anyway? Californians consume 29 billion gallons of petroleum per year. Planting 6,500 square miles of corn ethanol will yield, best case, 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol, which at 80% the energy density of gasoline, equates to 3.7% of California’s current petroleum consumption.

On the other hand, utility scale solar thermal electric power can easily yield 5 watts per square foot – including the balance of plant. Moreover solar thermal power is rapidly becoming competitive with fossil fuel, and decentralized and utility grade electrical storage is almost here. At this energy density, 6,500 square miles of solar thermal installations would yield 123 gigawatt-years of energy per year, which is easily more than 100% of California’s current electricity and petroleum production combined.

So be careful what you want, policymakers, as you continue your ongoing destruction of every beautiful outlying suburb in our beautiful state with ultra high density “infill” developments, and at the same time subsidize corn ethanol – all in the name of being green.

The primary environmentalist war of choice, today at least, is against the car. Environmentalists want to drive us out of our cars, in spite of the fact that cars are green and smart, and they are getting greener and smarter all the time.

The most liberating personal transportation innovation since the discovery of horseback riding must be systematically eliminated, or so one would think. What would the streets of our cities be like if bikes had to slow to pedestrian speed? Is this next? In the real world, goods and people have got to move fast and independently, and just like bikes, cars are the way to do it.

The GM “Flextreme” – a diesel series hybrid.

Green cars will proliferate. If every one of California’s 33 million registered vehicles used about 10kWh per day, it would only take about 50 gigawatts of output for eight hours to recharge them all each night. And that’s on the high side, overall electrical consumption if half the transportation miles in California were electric powered would probably only require a 15-20 gigawatt increase to off-peak output, since solo commuters drive lighter vehicles than average. So break out the solar thermal plants and store the steam, or build a few nuclear power stations – they are awesome generators. There are plenty of fuel options, and the superior energy density of gasoline and diesel will ensure heavy-lift and long haul transportation duty cycles remain mostly reliant on internal combustion – at least with today’s technology.

Cars are green. You can charge a car in the sun with today’s technology, a car with photovoltaic skin would store about 2.5 miles of range per hour in full sun – not bad supplemental fuel, and great in a pinch. The greatest breakthrough in automotive technology of the 21st century, the series hybrid, has now had its second iteration announced – General Motors announced last week the “Flextreme” concept car, another of what they term their “flexfuel” vehicles. The Flextreme runs on batteries only for up to 34 miles, using 16 kWh. But the Flextreme’s seven gallon diesel tank will propel it another 410 miles by turning an onboard generator to continue providing power to the all-electric drive train. The Flextreme’s diesel-only mileage is 59 miles per gallon!

Cars are green. You can charge a car using your roof with today’s technology, with 1,000 square feet of photovoltaics you’ll get about 25 miles of range per hour of full sun. You can recycle virtually every shred and scrap from a green car today, and build another car, or fire a furnace with the waste. Cars have zero emissions using today’s technology. Electric cars can run on abundant decentralized solar and wind generated energy and nothing more. Cars can use roadways with smart lanes. Smart green buses can extend transportation options to far more transit-dependent people. Cars are green.

The Series Hybrid: Onboard diesel powers generator powers electric motor.

Thanks to green cars, sprawling suburbs with green homes, no sidewalks, and giant new trees, watered by new rains brought by tree canopy, will moisturize and cleanse California’s Central Valley. New towns will arise spontaneously, instead of as walled-off square mile blocks of ultra high-density eco-concentration infill compounds.

Thanks to green cars, across the foothills along new aquaducts and ponds, and pretty much everywhere a free landowner and a free developer (in this free country) want to build something, new roads, wide and sweeping, blasted through the hillsides, will traverse ranchettes and gentleman farms with trees of all types planted and thriving, trees of all the world. What blasphemy! But cars are green. Whatever else some environmentalists may say about why they want to cram us all into infill, instead of letting cities grow naturally, don’t say it’s because of the cars.

Cars are green.

Sacramento, California, is arguably the epicenter of the green policy initiatives that are changing the world. But living here in the center of the storm, watching the impact as these new “enlightened” policies get implemented, is not as blissful an experience as one might think.

According to today’s environmentalist wisdom, if you have yard that requires water to grow life, you are a eco-criminal. Everyone must now live in cluster homes.

Having been an avid, utterly committed environmentalist for nearly 40 years, I think I’m entitled to a bit of skepticism while witnessing these latest, fairly intense iterations of environmentalism. I am increasingly convinced that much of the conventional wisdom of environmentalists today is dead wrong, and destructive to our way of life, our prosperity, and our freedom.

Being an environmentalist, to me, means being emphatically in favor of clean air, clean water, and clean soil. It means supporting reasonable efforts to preserve wilderness and wildlife, and more generally, to embrace a holistic world view that believes we should assess and mitigate all of our impacts so our civilization is sustainable, and nurtures the natural ecosystems of the planet. But in my opinion, this core set of beliefs has been perverted by environmentalists who are either well-intentioned but misguided, or who have hidden agendas.

A few years ago I was lucky enough to purchase a home in a quiet, semi-rural suburb. But today I see my lifestyle, and that of millions of hard working Californians just like me, under relentless attack. Why? Because our civic leaders have decided “open space” is so sacred that they have to declare “urban service boundaries” around the “footprint” of existing cities, beyond which no development can take place. Meanwhile, California’s population increases by over 500,000 persons per year. So “infill” developments of ultra high density are being crammed into every beautiful low density neighborhood within existing cities, with civic leaders designating “special planning areas” to get around zoning laws. There is no end in sight.

This is a bunch of communist nonsense. Why on earth did we bother spending a trillion dollars to defeat the Soviet Union, if today in the name of environmentalist values, property rights of anyone outside the “urban service boundary” are disregarded, and neighborhoods inside this prison wall (which is what it is) are utterly destroyed with hideous ultra-high density developments that make mockery of zoning laws which supposedly were designed to protect us?

We are within a few years of abundant energy – solar thermal, photovoltaic and wind sources alone will easily disrupt energy price equilibriums and provide abundant, cheap and clean energy to power not only homes, but cars. We don’t need to eliminate freeways if cars are clean and energy is abundant. And we certainly don’t have to cram people into “transit villages” where there are 10 (or even 20!) single family homes per acre. Ultra high density developments, outside of the chic urban core, will inevitably degrade to become slums. And these slums, via infill, are going to innoculate every beautiful semi-rural suburb in California with congestion and crime, unless the open space fanatics are challenged, and their influence over our elected officials is broken.

Being an environmentalist does not mean you have to be a misanthropic communist. But in practice, that is exactly what is happening.

First of all, a gigaton is one billion metric tons. One metric ton (2,200 lbs.) is what a cubic meter of water weighs. One billion metric tons is what one cubic kilometer (one billion cubic meters) of water weighs, and it is called a gigaton.

Next, remember atmospheric CO2 includes two oxygen atoms, and weighs 3.7x the carbon feedstock. So if there are 70 gigatons of carbon in the Amazon, for example, burning the remaining Amazonian carbon will release 2.7x that many gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere (ref. Amazon Ecology Project). So far, tropical deforestation alone has resulted in the release of about 475 gigatons of CO2 into our atmosphere.

So how many gigatons of CO2 are we contending with, anyway, in our atmosphere? Referencing and extrapolating from J. Schlorrer’s 1994 study, “Why Does Atmospheric CO2 Rise?”, there are probably about 3,000 gigatons of CO2 in the earth’s atmosphere right now.

Forests are at best carbon neutral, they grow, absorbing CO2, and they expire in various ways, releasing it again. It is the permanent removal of forests, and the permanent addition of carbon mass to the atmosphere, that matters. Temperate zone forests don’t store nearly the carbon mass per area compared with tropical forests, more than negating the greater area of temperate forest that has been lost. And loss of temperate forests has far less impact on thermal or hydrological conditions – not nearly as much as tropical forests.

Clearly if total tropical rainforest restoration (impossible) were to be implemented, the permanent addition of fast growing trees permanently removing 475 gigatons of CO2 from the earths atmosphere (every 7.8 gigatons of carbon removed lowers CO2 concentrations by one PPM) would be a very good thing. But compared to CO2 impact, the hydrological and thermal impacts of adding or removing tropical rainforest is far more significant.

Each year, nearly 15,000 gigatons of H2O, that’s 15,000 cubic kilometers of water, is evaporated from what remains of our tropical rainforests. For perspective, consider there are only about 12,900 (ref. Nasa Earth Observatory) cubic kilometers of water in the entire atmosphere at any given time, and that each year only about 50,000 cubic kilometers of water rain onto the continents.

Where there is no longer tropical rainforest, and it is well over 50% gone, there is proportionally reduced evaporation, less rainfall, and complete loss of the reflective cloud cover that perennially forms over tropical rainforest. Add these even more significant hydrological and thermal effects of tropical deforestation to the 475 gigatons of atmospheric CO2 that will either be added or deleted based on whether or not we remove what’s left, or replace what’s gone.

There is a group in the USA (and elsewhere) known as the International Dark Sky Association who, since 1988, have been advocating not carbon reduction, but lumen reduction. With over 11,000 members – over 1,500 in California – the International Dark Sky Association has some clout.

Nonetheless, “glare bombs” are still available in bulk and can still be easily and inexpensively purchased (by anyone with an exterior wall on their dwelling) at the nearest big box retail outlet, and when deployed these always-on security lights, especially using flourescents, consume minimal energy and produce extremely maximal lumens. In fact, in spite of their energy sipping ways, just one of these security lighting fixtures could, if placed on the surface of the moon, be visible with a 20x telescope from earth. At least in a sufficiently dark location on earth.

But dark skies are only part of the mission of the International Dark Sky Association. They also lobby for smarter lumen management on the part of cities and other entities. After all, if excessive lumens from a “glare bomb” actually creates dark shadows, where unauthorized intruders can hide while surveying in full light the night surroundings, why have more lumens? Why would anyone want side-mounted always-on visible-from-the-moon night security lighting – who knows how many lumens – when a 10 watt incandescent would be more than enough to light the way?

If excess lumens temporarily blinds the rods (night vision receptors) in our retina, and creates no real benefit other than countering other excess lumens, why not have smarter lumen related laws and ordinances in our cities? Such a perspective applied – and even if incandescent / fluorescent indifferent would still reduce energy usage – would also help in creating night spaces that are inviting as well as secure. Light pollution is here, it is real, it is now, and the International Dark Sky Association intends to continue to do something about it.

The clean technology revolution is upon us, but investors and entrepreneurs should exercise caution when placing their bets. Here are some contrarian considerations that could well be vindicated in the coming years, and if they are, subsidies will dry up, the legislative and regulatory environment will shift dramatically, and entire industries that were built on today’s conventional wisdom will no longer exist.

Most of the investments made in energy today, for example, rest on the assumption that energy is scarce – but in reality energy is not scarce, what is scarce is energy that conventional wisdom defines as “clean energy.” This definition, in turn, has recently become far, far more restrictive, insofar as any energy production that causes CO2 emissions is no longer considered clean. But there are a growing number of climatologists, such as Dr. Richard Pielke, Sr. at the University of Colorado, who believe changes in land use – tropical deforestation in particular – have a role in climate change that current models greatly underestimate. What if the greater cause of droughts, extreme weather, and global warming were found to be the result of land use change? Would we still be burning rainforests in the tropics, and depleting aquifers on the high plains of North America to grow biofuel crops?

In the influential book “Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage,” author Kenneth Deffeyes argues we are running out of oil and that a catastrophic collapse in oil supplies is inevitable. This point of view totally ignores the feasibility of extracting usable oil from the so called “heavy oil” reserves, as well as recovering oil from coal. At $70 per barrel, these technologies are viable today – and every time the price of oil rises, these technologies become more feasible. Oil from the Athabasca tar sands, for example, is recoverable at a price of $45 per barrel. Similar costs apply to the massive reserves in Venezuela’s Orinoco basin.

According to WorldEnergy.org, the world reserves of light crude oil, as of 2006, were roughly equal to the amount of oil that has been extracted so far, that is, about 800 billion barrels of light crude has been used so far, and about 1,000 billion barrels of conventional oil reserves remain – and this is the low number, some estimates go as high as 1,600 billion barrels remaining of conventional oil reserves. But recoverable reserves of heavy oil add another 2,400 billion barrels to that total. This means that at current rates of consumption, we have at least another 100 years of oil. Add technologies for coal-to-liquid conversions, and we have another 200 years of oil. Add the ultra-efficient innovations that high energy prices inevitably spawn, and the world economy can easily rely on fossil fuels for several generations to come.

Based on these facts, it becomes clear that the “shortage” of energy in the world is a political invention, more than anything else based on environmental concerns. But here is the environmental choice between fossil fuel and biofuel: We can dig up the entire Athabasca tar sands region, as well as the entire Orinoco basin, and if we do this, we will disrupt a combined area equivalent to 75,000 square miles. So for a 70 year supply of oil for the entire world economy at today’s rates of consumption, we would disrupt 75,000 square miles. But if we turn to biofuel instead, at an average yield per square mile of 5,000 barrels per year, to get the same amount of oil we would have to use up 5.8 million square miles of land, which is twice as big as all remaining tropical rainforests, or put another way, about 60% of all farmland on earth. Not only is this impossible, but this is far more disruptive to the environment.

There are other sources of biofuel besides crops, to be sure, but they are not yet commercially viable, and they have their own sets of problems. Cellulosic extraction of ethanol, for example, promises to use crop residue instead of crops as a feedstock for ethanol. The problem with this, however, is that crop residue is supposed to be plowed back into the fields to ensure a healthy organic content in the soil for crops in years to come. If these considerations are taken into account, the amount of feedstock for biofuels shrinks dramatically. Taking these restrictions into account, cellulosic feedstocks for biofuel may yield significant supplemental sources of fuel, but they will not replace crude oil. There is a 3rd generation technology for biofuel, also not yet commercialized, that promises to grow biofuel in tanks, where a feedstock such as algae is fed water, light and CO2, and out comes biofuel. Pioneering companies in this area are LS9 and Amyris, both based in the San Francisco Bay Area. These 3rd generation biofuel technologies, while potentially hazardous and not nearly commercially viable today, nonetheless bear watching.

When examining energy alternatives, it is important to realize that most of them are themselves potentially very disruptive to the environment in their own right, particularly if you scale these up to actually compete with conventional energy. Currently 80% of the energy consumed in the world comes from fossil fuel, 10% comes from biomass (i.e., the cooking fires from gathering wood throughout the undeveloped tropics), about 6.5% comes from nuclear power and 3% comes from hydroelectric power. Only one-half of one percent comes from alternative energy, and 80% of that comes from geothermal power. So power from wind, tides and currents, and solar sources, right now, only produce two-tenths of one percent of the world’s energy. What if half the energy production in the developed world, say 200 quadrillion BTUs per year, were to come from these alternative sources, as certain prominent activists would have us pledge to do within the next generation

This would equate to about 6,600 gigawatt-years of electric power, which could take the form of 3,000 very large nuclear power stations, each station consisting of three 750 megawatt reactors. Depending on your opinion of nuclear power, this may or may not sound horrendous. But imagine if this were accomplished with windmills? The biggest windmills we’ve got can generate five megawatts at full output. Over time they will yield about half that, since even in excellent locations the wind doesn’t blow constantly. So for each of your 9,000 nuclear reactors that put out 750 megawatts each, you instead will require 300 of the biggest windmills ever built – a total of 2.7 million. How much concrete will each of these 2.7 million windmills require? How much skyline will their 300 foot rotors consume?

The point is most alternative energy requires massive allocations of land and capital. How long will the global environmental lobby, more powerful than ever, turn a blind eye to the destruction of our rainforests for biofuel, and the disruption of every windy hill or tidal estuary on earth for another windmill or marine current turbine? This is a lobby that has choked off every ambitious land development or new oil refinery for the last 30 years – but they will tolerate us covering the earth with windmills and the seabed with underwater turbines? Wait until there is one good volcanic eruption – something that will cool the earth for decades – or one credible refutation of the theory that industrial CO2 is more significant than land use changes in causing global warming. When either of these things occur, and they probably will, regulations and subsidies for biofuel, along with wind and tidal generators, will melt away, wiping out vast sectors of these industries.

On the other hand, solar power – photovoltaics in particular – may be relatively undervalued by investors. In 2006, total world production of photovoltaics was only about 3.0 gigawatts, and the thin-film technologies only represented about 5% of that total. With the shortages of polysilicon easing, and thin film and concentrator technologies beginning to mature, estimates of world photovoltaic production are probably grossly understated. Earlier this year in Oregon, Applied Materials Corp. broke ground on a single plant that they expect will output 500 megawatts per year. That is 15% of production in the entire world last year! Manufacturing on this scale is being built everywhere, and the global output of photovoltaics may very well increase by 200-300 percent per year for many years to come. And photovoltaics, unlike biofuel or wind and tidal sources of energy, is not vulnerable to changes in political sentiment or scientific consensus.

The clean technology revolution is in many ways similar to the internet boom – a great deal of financial opportunity, with a lot of new entrants who are placing huge bets. The clean technology revolution also promises to be even more transformative than the internet boom, which is saying a lot. But unlike the internet boom which simply underwent a financial correction, along with that risk, many clean technologies are far more dependent on public policy priorities. Investors and entrepreneurs should remember that seismic shifts in sentiment could happen any day, and hedge accordingly.

Editor’s Note: An edited version of this post was posted on AlwaysOn on September 10th, 2007. This post was originally published in the Summer 2007 edition of AlwaysOn magazine.

The Great Cascade Mountains So far, the snowpack does not appear threatened.

The Grand Coulee Dam So far, there’s plenty of water year-round.

Not surprisingly, global warming is getting the blame for drought conditions in many parts of the American West. For example, in the January 31, 2003, issue of Science, researchers from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that recent droughts in the West are caused at least partly by global warming-induced rises in western Pacific and Indian ocean temperatures. Pointing to data between 1950 and 1995 showing that snowpack accumulation in the Cascade Mountains had decreased 50 percent, Todd Myers of the Washington Policy Center, said this: “In a state where salmon, hydroelectric power, and water resources generally depend on snowpack, the claim is a potential blockbuster.”

Before jumping on the mayor’s bandwagon, however, it is important to note just how careful we must be in making causal inferences based on selected data. The Washington Policy Center reports that Associate State Climatologist Mark Albright saw different trends in the data, casting doubt on this so called “blockbuster.” In a memo to scientists at the University of Washington, Albright suggested that there may have been some “cherry picking” with the 1950 to 1995 data. As he put it,

“I believe a more accurate statement would be along the lines of 1) The average snowpack in the Cascades has increased over the past 30 years in spite of the steady upward trend in global temperature, or

2) Long term data indicates no signifcant trend in Cascade Mountains snowpack over the past 90 years, or

3) The snowpack (1997-2007) at Mt. Rainier Paradise has increased 11% since the 1940s.”

For his reinterpretation, he was told that he could no longer use the title of Associate State Climatologist.

Such controversies permeate the global warming debate because it has become so politicized. In the case of water supplies in the American West, for example, there is nothing more political than the plumbing system created by the Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers. As moisture patterns shift, whether due to global warming or other causes, agricultural users may find their irrigation water gone, salmon may be left high and dry, and hydroelectric producers may be called on to replace more fossil fuel production. Making these tradeoffs in the context of the West’s water pork barrel, however, will not be easy.

For this reason, stories such as those in this issue of Reports none of the proposed global warming policies, including doing everything proposed in the Kyoto Protocol, will have any meaningful effect on temperature or sea level changes. Moreover, predictions of local impacts of global warming as indicated by the above example are less than precise, making governmental planning problematic.

Assuming that predictions from the global warming models regarding higher temperatures and increased variance in precipitation patterns come to pass and that there is little we can do to reverse the predicted trends, the best alternative is adaptation. For centuries markets and their prices have led demanders and suppliers alike to adapt to food shortages and abundances, to energy crises, and to weather patterns. The same will be true for global warming impacts if we let the invisible hand of the marketplace do its work.

Specifically, in the case of changing water supplies, markets have the potential to encourage adaptation if water rights are clearly defined and transferable. For decades western farmers and ranchers have transferred water rights between one another to accommodate variable stream flows. More recently, growing demands for environmental water uses such as pollution dilution or instream flows for fish and wildlife have been met through willing buyer-willing seller trades. Traditional “use it or lose it” rules are being modified to allow irrigators to transfer their rights, permanently or temporarily, to instream flows. In Idaho, for example, the 2007 legislature unanimously approved the Wood River Legacy Project, which allows ranchers to temporarily dedicate their irrigation water to instream flows without the risk of losing their diversion rights. Between 1998 and 2005, approximately 6 million acre-feet of water in the West were restored to instream flows through leasing, permanent transfers, and donations.

Where water prices signal the true scarcity value of water, people find innovative ways to conserve and trade; where prices do not reflect scarcity value, water is wasted and political battles rage. Opening markets to non-traditional environmental uses is a major step toward making prices reflect alternative values. The more that we reform legal institutions to lower the cost of water transfers from one use to another, the more we can adapt to changing demands and supplies regardless of what is causing those changes. With water markets, Mark Twain’s adage that “whiskey’s for drinkin’ and water’s for fightin” transforms into “water’s for tradin’ leavin’ more time for drinkin’.”

About the Author:
Terry Anderson is the Executive Director of the Property & Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana, a nonprofit institute dedicated to improving environmental quality through markets. Mr. Anderson is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and an economics professor (emeritus) at Montana State University and co-author of Water Markets: Priming the Invisible Pump (Cato Institute, 1997). In his “On Target” column, PERC’s executive director TERRY L. ANDERSON confronts issues surrounding free market environmentalism. Anderson can be reached at perc@perc.org.

Water Harvesting: Using a sari to funnel raindrops into a container

The drought-flood cycle. How can water abundance be harvested instead of cause harm?

With about 20 percent of the global population, India is struggling to meet her water needs with just five percent of the world’s available water.

The gap between these numbers is widening, and experts predict that by the year 2020, demand will exceed supply.

Making the issue of water management even more pressing is the fact that many states get as much as 90 percent of their rainfall in the four months of the summer monsoon season, leading to a drought-flood cycle. While the main enemy is drought, flooding also kills hundreds and displaces millions of people each year. And, after decades of debate, the government’s main answer is grandiose river linking schemes that would relocate the water to where it is needed– plans that are yet to reach the drawing board, but extremely expensive, invasive, environmentally risky and possibly impossible (ref. “India’s Interlinking Rivers”).

Since the 1960′s, as the water crisis in India grew more serious, people drilled deeper and deeper into the ground to tap fresh water. The idea was a success at first: the water was used for irrigation for crops needed to feed India’s ever-growing population, and farmers began focusing on water-thirsty cash crops. This, along with other “modern” amenities and the shift from rural to urban lifestyles set India on the path to unsustainable water management.

Mumbai, 2007. Without water management, monsoons cause flooding, while during the dry season wells deplete irreplaceable groundwater

Approximately 70 percent of India’s irrigation water and 80 percent of its domestic water supplies come from groundwater rather than from surface water.

In a recent report, the World Bank said that India has no proper water management system at all – her groundwater is disappearing and her river bodies are turning into sewers.

The annual monsoon that once was capable of filling the rivers and recharging the underground aquifers through the soil is losing ground– or, rather, losing water. In parts of New Delhi, the groundwater level drops by up to 10 meters (33 feet) each year. Rupert Talbot, a water consultant with the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), described the situation in many areas as irreversible.

“You can go to parts where they are drilling so deep that they are mining fossil water that is 20,000 years old. It will never be recharged (by rains),” he said.

If she continues down this path, Mother India is headed for the official title of being in “water stress” in about 10 years, according to the World Bank. This is indicated by the annual availability of freshwater per head, which is expected at that time to fall below 1,700 cubic metres. By 2025, with an estimated 1,000 cubic metres per head, the situation will be categorized as water scarcity.

Even with numbers like these staring them in the face, there is still “widespread complacency” in government circles about the water situation, according to the World Bank report– although public promises of safe water and sanitation are abundant, getting there is not quite so easy.

For water, as with every resource, money separates the haves from the have-nots. When the government fails to provide a constant supply of water even in the national capital of New Delhi, those who can afford it find their own ways of getting it. The result is a kind of free market, with no incentive to conserve water.

“What has happened in the last 20 or 30 years is a shift to self-provision. Every farmer sinks a tubewell and every house in Delhi has a pump pumping groundwater,” said Briscoe, a water issues specialist at the World Bank. “Once that water stops you get into a situation where towns will not be able to function.”

Globally, increasing numbers of poor people are deprived of access to water of the quality and quantity necessary to meet even the most basic levels of health and sanitation. And in situations of scarcity, the poor are of course the first ones to suffer, losing out to those who can afford more powerful machinery for extracting water or those who have more political influence. In India, this means that owners of more expensive pumps and deeper-boring wells are able to continue pumping groundwater, despite rapidly depleting aquifers, leaving the hand pumps and shallow irrigation pumps of the poor high and dry.

Clearly, this is an area where the government should step in–poor people should not be the ones who are disproportionately forced to conserve water, or go without it. If anything, more responsibility for water conservation should fall on the larger, wealthier water users.

But, while it is easy to agree on the magnitude of the problem, it is not so easy to agree on the solution, or even the general direction of the solution. Most people, or at least the most vocal people, seem to favor huge government projects and interventions like the interlinking of rivers — perhaps many of these people are part of the government themselves. Or perhaps, as a result of urbanization, we have all gotten too used to our resources being someone else’s responsibility– if there is no heat, or no light, or no water coming from the tap to drink or to flush, someone ought to fix it.

Water Distribution: Using rocks, bamboo and gravity to transport water

What is needed, in part, is a shift in consciousness: a movement towards awareness of ourselves, the resources we consume, where they come from and where they go to. This is not only true of Earth’s water, but of all our requirements – food, land, air, energy, everything.

Greater self-awareness will lead to greater self-sufficiency – and, simultaneously, greater consciousness of the interdependence and interconnectedness of all things. Becoming more aware of and able to meet our own needs can, in a perfect world, make us more aware that everyone needs the same things. We will be better equipped to help each other on the local, personal, practical level – if you know that your neighbor dug his own compost pit, you will feel more confident (and perhaps even more obligated) to do the same, especially if he knows what you are going through and offers to help you. And, as more people in the neighborhood talk about it and do it, the design and effectiveness of the pits are likely to become better and better.

This is all, however, up in the air. In the real world, one tree-hugger’ might make the effort, and the neighbors will do little more than complain about the dust, or the noise, or whatever else they can think of.

This is where bigger groups and ideas come in: the responsibility of government and non-government organizations to organize and mobilize people. Isn’t this what we originally hired them to do? A balance must be struck between personal responsibility and the government (or non-government) promotion, organization, facilitation, and execution of plans and methods to meet our needs.

Sound like a good dream? Now it seems far away, but this kind of communal and personal consciousness of resources actually composes most of human history – out of necessity. For the 70-80% of the Indian population still living in rural villages, this is still a reality.

Everyone in the village knows where the water and food and electricity comes from, and where they go to. But the modernization, for lack of a better word, that has swept across the world judges these conditions and values as old-fashioned and time-consuming. Instant gratification, in every element of life, is becoming extreme, and actually eroding the quality of life it claims to improve.

We can speed up the pace of life, but we cannot change human nature. Instant food, water, shelter, and sex leave us without nutrition, love, or peace of mind… and the so-called developed countries are developing insanity, addiction, suicide and war faster than anything else – not to mention polluting the planet to the brink of disaster.

In the immortal words of Yoda: Sometimes the way forward is the way back. What is needed is a combination of the fruits of modern technology and development and the self-awareness that brought balance in the past. Now the necessity is different, the risks are different, but the situation is just as urgent; and the first thing we have to change is our consciousness.

Anil Agarwal, 1947-2002 The visionary founder of India’s Center for Science & the Environment (Photo: www.IndianNGOs.com)

One of the first things we might notice if we were more aware is the amount of water we could save by simply catching the rainwater.

In the realm of water management in India, this is a movement called rainwater harvesting. One of its biggest champions, Anil Agarwal, is the founder and director of the Centre for Science and Environment and the editor of Down to Earth magazine. On the Editor’s Page of the March 4th issue, he wrote:

“Until the start of the 20th century most of water use in a highly developed country like India – we must remember that until the British came, it was one of the world’s richest, most urbanized and literate nations – was of rainwater and flood water. Indians knew that almost all the water they got in a year – in a country that is relatively rich in rainfall – was in just 100 hours. The remaining 8,660 hours in a year, the gods gave them nothing. So they built a civilization on these drops of nectar from heaven. Bengal and the Thanjavur delta were one of the most agriculturally prosperous regions in the country and they depended almost entirely on the capture of flood water for irrigation.”

The population, however, is much larger now than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. Combine this with problems like salinity, mercury poisoning and rising levels of other heavy metals in water which have significantly decreased the useable ground water, and the result is that even if every drop of rainwater was harvested, it would no longer be enough for everyone.

But the emphasis on personal and community responsibility is right on the money, and people are starting to take notice – like the last State of India Report, which focused on traditional methods of rainwater harvesting.

For more than two decades now, the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a New Delhi-based non-governmental organization (NGO), has been promoting the revival of traditional systems of water harvesting, with appropriate adaptation and integration of modern systems.

From tanks and talabs to rooftop harvesting systems in the city, rainwater harvesting, with government support, is the most logical and practical way to start trying to solve the water crisis in both rural and urban, domestic and industrial, India. CSE conducts training workshops that are open to everyone – from engineers, NGO’s and politicians to concerned citizens. And, they have undertaken the awesome project of documenting hundreds of traditional and contemporary Indian rainwater harvesting systems on the website (http://www.rainwaterharvesting.org).

Water Storage: With more water harvesting, India can to raise the water tables in the jheels, and everywhere else

Even a passing glance at these widely varying and often brilliant methods is inspirational – from delicate bamboo pipeline irrigation to check dams, modern percolation ponds, tankas, kundis, you name it. It is truly an essential and even beautiful collection. By comparison, it makes government plans like “connecting all the rivers” seem incredibly heavy-handed.

India’s population is increasingly becoming the densest on the planet – but the bureaucracy seems even denser, particularly when it comes to tackling the difficult issue of water management. So many projects and committees and objectives are formed and rarely met, it seems tedious to even think of listing them; but the largest desk animal of them all is the ILR Project.

In the discussion of consciousness, one disturbing aspect of the Interlinking of Rivers project is that since the government will not have the money to implement the hugely ambitious project, it will go the build-own-operate-transfer route and lease rivers to concessionaires. These operators will own the water resources for several years and will charge users, both urban and rural, for that time period. This goes against India’s tradition of treating water as a community, not private, resource. While money, or the lack of it, already determines the availability and quality of water directly or indirectly for most people, it leaves a strange taste in the mouth – this is the same country that once respected every river as a goddess.

The interlinking of rivers, while perhaps being a visionary idea, doesn’t seem to have much chance. If it is literally possible or not has not been shown – and if it is possible, it still seems financially and politically doomed, and most importantly, environmentally risky.

It is a hard gamble to claim acceptable losses of any kind of life – plants, animals, and people will be undoubtedly displaced and in many cases destroyed. Will that water save more lives than it takes? Maybe. It is worth researching, it is worth asking. Every vision is worth trying. But India cannot afford to wait and see if these daydreams can come true or not.

Meanwhile, although rainwater harvesting is the appropriate place to start, this alone is not going to solve all India’s water problems. We have to look for ways to increase the available ground water supply and decrease the dependence on underground aquifers. We have to find more and more ways to stop wasting, and recycle, the water we have – in most cases, innovative technology is already there, it is just not cost-effective.

Low-flow toilets, faucets and showers should be mandatory in new construction; composting toilets and many other options exist, but are in most cases too complicated and expensive.

The development of these and other new ideas, like natural pollution- and wastewater-cleaning systems (ref. “Clean the Ganges”) should be funded; investment in water and environmental technology is an investment in life.

Furthermore, industries and corporations must be held accountable for their actions, taxed and prodded to stop making the situation worse.

This is the government’s place – to protect the people, and their water, from money-hungry predators. It can also provide incentives for the public to move toward ecologically sound products and practices, as it has already done gracefully on the issue of population control, offering financial and educational advantages to smaller families.

In the end it is a tightrope balancing act – self-sufficiency and awareness as far as it will go on one hand, and outside organization and direction on the other. While they may seem contradictory, they are not; the solutions are sure to stem from a seat of self-awareness, personal and community responsibility – not only in water management, but every aspect of life.