A couple of months ago, Coco raised a great question when I was riffing about the amusing implications of shipping lettuce from the Imperial Valley to Albuquerque so I could feed it to ants: Not enough water to grow lettuce in the Middle Rio Grande? Maybe someday. Depends. Someday, not enough cheap oil for schlepping …
Continue reading ‘In the long emergency, how far will we ship our lettuce?’ »
Coal burning and water supplies are integrally linked in the southwestern United States. When the Central Arizona Project was built in the 1960s, planners hoped to build hydroelectric power plants on the main stem of the Colorado River to generate the power to lift the artificial river they were building up a total of nearly …
In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security’ »
The failure of the Colorado River to reach the sea, Jonathan Foley argues, is evidence of dramatic challenges facing humanity that go beyond climate change. From an essay at Environment 360: Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of …
In early 2008, I did some inquiries on the data underlying Albuquerque’s “green” claims and we published what I found in the newspaper. With a mayoral election underway and the city pushing forward on a “Climate Action Plan”, it seemed like a good time to revisit the issue. The results: When Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chávez …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: ABQ Greenhouse Update’ »
Where I’d be Oct. 22-23 if I had plane fare, registration fees and a few free days (none of which I have): Water and Land for Renewable Energy in the Southwest.
New Mexico’s June 2009 gasoline sales were the lowest for the month since 1994:
Oil industry behind “energy citizens rallies” The U.S. oil industry’s main lobbying organization is behind a series of “energy citizens rallies” against pending climate change legislation, including two in New Mexico later this month, according to a memo obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace. “We don’t want critics to know our game plan,” American Petroleum …
I’ve wanted to write about Klaus Lackner’s air capture ideas for a long time. They originated in his work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the ’90s, and I met him and talked about the work at the time. But I didn’t really get it, and never wrote about it. In recent years I’ve been …
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David O. Williams highlights what’s likely to be one of the central struggles in managing our twin energy and water problems – the water needed if oil shale is going to be tapped to head off peak oil. Peak water, in other words, collides with peak oil: But numerous studies have indicated full-scale commercial oil …