The scary part is not just that a GOP lawmaker who might become chair of an environmental committee may be an adherent of this group's extreme views, but the GOP selected the founder of Cornwall Alliance as a witness for Congressional hearing on climate policies.
Some of you may remember my piece on Fiji Water I did under my old handle: in Fiji, day in day out, over a million liters of fresh water are pumped from an aquifer beneath a rain forest on Vitu Levu, the largest island. It is odd when you think that a third of Fijians have no clean water and there are outbreaks of typhoid and dengue fever!
Three years ago, the Fijian government announced a tax on bottled water designed to conserve the island’s depleting natural resources, but they caved in were forced to abort the project following pressure from the powerful water bottling lobby group. Fiji Water is currently owned by billionaires Stewart and Lynda Resnick who purchased the company from another billionaire, David Gilmour.
Why is this relevant you may ask? Fiji Water on Monday closed its operations saying it was being singled out by the military-led government for a massive tax increase.
That's what scientists give the tiger. 12 years.
After that, look to textbooks and zoos to learn what a tiger was. The world our children will be inheriting will be an increasingly lonely one as we slowly (not so slowly it seems in terms of "normal" extinction rates) kill off the only planet we have.
Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.
Farmers in the Uluguru Mountains in Tanzania are fighting a losing battle against increasingly degraded land. Repeated plantings are quickly depleting the nutrients in the soil, leaving it nearly barren and vulnerable to erosion. Meanwhile, downstream, the water is dark with sediment, unfit for drinking and expensive to treat. "Downstream, people are complaining about the quality of water," says Lopa Dosteus, program manager for CARE International’s Equitable Payment for Watershed Management (EPWM) program. "And upstream, the farmers are struggling to grow enough food while their soil washes away."
They say in the Mountain West that whiskey is for drinking and water is for fighting. This simple saying shows how little water there really is and how critical it is a semi-arid environment like Colorado. There are more law practices that deal with water rights here than anywhere else in the United States. However what is the normal way of life for the Rockies might become the norm for large parts of the country and the world.
The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has released a new study combining 22 climate models. These models are not looking at global warming, but rather the chance of increased drought world wide as temperatures climb. (Just a quick aside, you see real scientists aren’t falling for the "debate" meme that climate change deniers push. They know what is going on and have moved on to what will happen)
"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"
Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.
In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, people are forced to travel long distances and several hours a day collecting the water for cooking and drinking. In this week’s episode of Nourishing the Planet TV, Nourishing the Planet research intern, Dan Kane, explains how one community in South Africa has developed a unique solution for the area’s lack of clean water. By setting up nets across a high mountain pass, the village of Cabazane is harvesting fog to produce water from thin air.
Dust Storm, Texas Panhandle 
Photo:Library of Congress Source: Red River Historian Desperation Road
In 2004 NASA's Siegfried Schubert discovered how ocean temperature anomalies caused the dust bowl drought in the Great Depression.
The study found cooler than normal tropical Pacific Ocean surface temperatures combined with warmer tropical Atlantic Ocean temperatures to create conditions in the atmosphere that turned America’s breadbasket into a dust bowl from 1931 to 1939. ...
These changes in sea surface temperatures created shifts in the large-scale weather patterns and low level winds that reduced the normal supply of moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and inhibited rainfall throughout the Great Plains.
The sea surface temperature anomaly patterns that caused the dust bowl drought have returned.
Oddly enough, not many politicians are paying attention to the incoming water crisis. Think about this: water is the essence of life, sustaining every single being on this planet and without it there would simply be no plants, animals or people. As a few of us have written here before, the global water supply isn't just at risk, it's already in crisis. This week's NYT article on Syria & Iraq is a harbinger of things to come.
Syria — The farmlands spreading north and east of this Euphrates River town were once the breadbasket of the region, a vast expanse of golden wheat fields and bucolic sheep herds. Now, after four consecutive years of drought, this heartland of the Fertile Crescent — including much of neighboring Iraq — appears to be turning barren, climate scientists say. Ancient irrigation systems have collapsed, underground water sources have run dry and hundreds of villages have been abandoned as farmlands turn to cracked desert and grazing animals die off. Sandstorms have become far more common, and vast tent cities of dispossessed farmers and their families have risen up around the larger towns and cities of Syria and Iraq.
Blog Action Day is an annual event held every October 15 that unites the world’s bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day with the aim of sparking a global discussion and driving collective action.
This year's topic: water.
Right now, almost a billion people on the planet don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water. That’s one in eight of us who are subject to preventable disease and even death because of something that many of us take for granted.
Americans should be able to drink what comes out of their taps without worrying that it will make them sick. So why would anyone insert a loophole into the Safe Drinking Water Act that subverts that basic right?
If you can't guess the answer, a quick history refresher should tip you off.
In 2005, Congress passed an Energy Act that included (thanks to meddling by former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney) an exemption for hydraulic fracturing (fracking) from the protections of the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Clean Air Act. It's called the "Halliburton loophole" and it's a whopper.
In this week’s episode, Nourishing the Planet research intern, Elena Davert, introduces a counter-intuitive method of cleaning water. In 2004 Peter Njodzeka founded the Life and Water Development Group Cameroon (LWDGC) with a rather simple goal. “ I wanted to see the people in my area have clean water,” he said. “And we kept expanding. That’s how it started.” Now, LWDGC, with support from Engineers without Borders (EWB) and Thirst Relief International, is teaching households how to use dirt and bacteria to clean their water, greatly improving the quality of drinking water and all but eliminating diseases caused by contaminated water.
Here is the link: http://bit.ly/...
Referred to as a “supermarket on a trunk,” moringa is potentially one of the planet’s most valuable plants. Serving not only as a reliable source of diverse foods, moringa also provides lamp oil, wood, paper, liquid fuel, skin treatments, and the means to help purify water. But despite its multiple uses, and well-earned nickname, the tree is relatively unknown to most people in the United States.
Referred to as a “supermarket on a trunk,” moringa is potentially one of the planet’s most valuable plants.
Last year I wrote a little noticed diary about a man who is bringing clean, potable water to thousands of folks in parts of the world where it's badly needed. Read about Scott Harrison's charity: water. I posted it on New Year's Eve and that might explain the slow traffic.
This story is personal to me as one of my uncles lived in the Central African Republic, in Bangui, where he was stationed in the fifties and sixties to teach farming. As a kid I remember watching in awe the grainy B&W films he used to send to us twice a year.
Despite the economic downturn, charity: water has managed to perform miracles for the Bayaka in the Central African Republic.
Crossposted from the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet.
In 2004 Peter Njodzeka founded the Life and Water Development Group Cameroon (LWDGC) with a rather simple goal. " I wanted to see the people in my area have clean water," he said. "And we kept expanding. That’s how it started."
EnergizeUS is all about local energy jobs and the manufacturing needed to support that. EnergizeUS coalition member and Arizona Senate candidate Rodney Glassman has a background in arid land management and he immediately keyed in on the water issues associated with energy production.
This isn’t well known yet, but it is a very serious concern, and one we’d do well to address sooner rather than later.
Since much of the country is experiencing a record-breaking heat wave this week, it seems like yet another good opportunity to talk about water. While you’re sweating profusely and in desperate need of hydration, think for a moment about the water you’re drinking and how you get it. Even though we have one of the most accessible and safe water systems in the world here in the U.S., it’s falling into a state of disrepair. Many of the individual systems that carry our water are outdated. Old drinking water pipes lose 1.7 trillion gallons of treated water a year, while sewage overflows and storm runoff continue to be a problem. Remember the water main break in Boston recently? We need to turn our attention to how we can prepare our water infrastructure for the future. We need to Renew America’s Water.
At this point almost all of the precipitation that falls on the state of California is trapped by dams in reservoirs where it is controlled, managed and transported to other parts of the state. The vast system is an impressive engineering feat, but it grew out of a long history of conflicts over the use of water resources and has come with a great environmental impact.
