Part of California’s renewables build-up process might well be, as Gov. Schwarzenegger suggests, a dynamic market in which renewable resourced energy is imported into the state. But part of California’s goal in doing this, admittedly, is to depend less on the volatility of imported energy. So there will have to be a major shift in the investment of public funds toward renewables infrastructure, within the state.

Keeping costs low is a priority, because to not bring down the costs of power generation for Californians means an already economically overstressed state will see itself pushed to the brink, as prolonged malaise —stemming from reduced consumer spending, sluggish credit markets and falling property values, and skyrocketing healthcare costs— nudges more families and small businesses toward bankruptcy.

To keep costs low, the state will have to both provide subsidies and channel federal green energy and infrastructure subsidies to new renewable energy-related projects. An end result of both building aggressively in-state and importing aggressively from out of state will be a significant reduction in the cost of renewable resourced energy, over time, and the eventual capacity to export a significant amount of energy from renewable resources.

This will give California a competitive edge in the coming age of battery-powered rechargeable vehicles (EV) and mandates for emissions reductions. Building and investing now for that later competitive edge will help the state and its residents (and businesses) save money later, when there is no longer any leeway in choosing between renewables and carbon-based fuels.

What’s more, California-based Tesla Motors will be releasing the most high-performance EV fleet ever built, for the mass commercial market, in a one to two-year time-frame. Having achieved not only that goal, but also having successfully integrated a robust renewable resource-based power grid with a network of EV “filling stations”, would put California at the global forefront for clean energy economic development.

This is more than just a fashionable claim the state could make in search of green subsidies and good PR: building a robust renewable resource economy could allow California to become one of the first major exporters of a top-priority commodity in the economic matrix of coming decades: electricity with little to zero environmental impact, a resource that will have not just moral and legal value, but economic incentives tied to it.

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Great Barrier Island is four and a half hours from Auckland, by boat, and its remote geography necessitates the kind of innovative green building choices visible in the home built by Lance and Nicola Herbst. When the South African-born couple first visited Great Barrier Island, they were taken with the unique beachside structures they encountered — “little timber shacks we had never experienced before—tiny buildings with 20 years’ accretion of stuff”.

They were smitten with the relaxed notion of the vacation bungalows (bachs — after “bachelors”, their traditional inhabitants) they found there, and also saw the scaled back standard requiring off-the-grid pragmatic innovation as a challenge to their design abilities. Achieving high-design innovation and stylistic and material “modesty” were part of the challenge.

The success of their experiment is encouraging, as it augurs a future in which individual homes are more self-sufficient and environmentally friendly. Having made the move there themselves, then established their home in a scaled down, off-the-grid bach, they were asked in 2003 to build a home nearby for a friend, Marc Lindale.

In the words of Dwell magazine’s Jeremy Hansen:

Lance says the lack of services on the island meant the home’s design became “a diagram of the basic provision of shelter,” not unlike early bachs. This straightforward approach was aided by their decision to dispense with the patterns of city life in favor ?of predominantly outdoor living in the island’s subtropical climate. There is no front door to the home, just a few steps up to the space that serves as its heart: a covered terrace with a large dining table, backed by a gabion wall made from local stone.

Stripping away standard fundamentals of home design, like the front door and landscaped run-up to a home designed in that way, allowed for building a home more optimized to its surroundings. The home features two bedrooms and one bathroom, with a small kitchen looking out on the dining and living area.

The underlying structure is a pine-wood frame, raised on a concrete foundation, and the outer cladding is cedar. The roofline is designed in such a way that it collects rainwater for storage in an underground tank, making it possible to provide a regular supply of fresh water for use in the home. Treated waste-water is used to irrigate the grounds.

Electricity in the Lindale house comes from four 150-watt solar panels arrayed on the roof. An electrical engineer was brought in to study electrical needs in the home and to optimize the planning to get the most out of those four solar-voltaic panels. Part of this is “targeted task lighting”, to use Lance Herbst’s words. The lighting was also planned to be low-intensity, with the home designed to favor ambient lighting.

Lit with natural light, the ambient light effect means the home need not be brashly lit as natural light diminishes. Candles and lanterns, traditional lighting techniques for the bach community, fit the atmosphere and the design, and help to manifest the low-intensity lighting scheme and reduce electricity consumption.

According to Dwell, “The Herbsts also disconnected the oven’s electric grill and Lindale banished the toaster after discovering ?that both would require energy surges the solar panels could not deliver.” The conservation thinking involved in living within one’s energetic resources might be taxing for some urbanites, but it fits the atmosphere, and enjoying the quality of life this sort of self-sufficient home affords requires awareness of energy sourcing and the dynamics of the lived environment.

According to a NASA report, hypoxia is so extreme in some areas, that total anoxia (zero oxygen availability) can be found, allowing for no animal life to exist. In the Mississippi River delta, feeding into the Gulf of Mexico, it is thought that agricultural waste is creating a glut of nutrients for phytoplankton, which leaves excess organic matter for bottom-dwelling bacteria to feed on.

“When the fertilizer reaches the ocean, it just becomes more nutrients for the phytoplankton, so they do what they do best: they grow and multiply. Which leads to more organic matter reaching the bottom, more bacterial respiration, and more anoxic bottom water.”

The water becomes anoxic because bacteria use oxygen and give off carbon dioxide, depleting the oxygen other life forms require to sustain life.

We need responsible, enforceable agricultural waste policies, clean water regulations, oceanic industry controls, and international consensus to put an end to these harmful outcomes of unchecked industrial farming, fish production and fossil-fuel use, all of which contribute to or feed back into the vicious cycle of oxygen depletion in the world’s oceans.

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. . . INTRODUCTION

Examining the manner in which financial news is reported in the popular media, The Hot Spring proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, come together to produce a reliable up-to-the-minute resource for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices.

It is often thought that in order to organize ideas or to put some kind of order to any analysis, one needs uniformity, a limited number of generic categories and a single system of uncomplicated parameters by which to categorize each subject under review. But the truth is, this uniformity is not and will not be the rule of any part of lived reality.

To emerge from the fog of flawed, incomplete and opportunistically limited economic and financial analysis, means we need to come to grips with the fact that all resources, all functions or ‘services’, be they natural or the product of human ingenuity, figure somehow in economic values at all levels. There may be no clear way to quantify their contribution or mercantilize them, but they are there, and nothing can be fully understood in economic terms without seeing this.

We could calculate, for instance, that to do by artificial means what nature does of its own accord in a handful of basic environmental ‘services’ (such as climate stabilization or the global fresh water supply—avoiding discussions of such complex processes such as new species evolution, deep-sea current patterning or ultraviolet light blockage and refraction), we would have to spend well in excess of 10 times the entire global economic output (using GDP in sum as a base).

This helps us to take note of the immense ecological influence we have erased from economic calculations, seeing it as inconvenient or in realistic terms unquantifiable. But it does not help us to place a useful economic value on such influence over the economic infrastructure of civilization, globally or locally.

It may be enough to say, though this shades all following calculations of any kind in a significant and problematic way, that they are indispensable and dynamic values. They exceed all calculable value of our own activities, which without their contribution would simply not make sense or could not take place at all.

Metaphorically, their incalculable immensity could be compared to the way the tides at the edge of a great sea shape and define the shoreline and the kind of activities that can be conducted at that point of contact. It is necessary to think of how such information could then be integrated into a more complete and less untruthful (it’s worth noting) matrix of economic calculations.

What parameters determine downward and upward trends, and what do such trends mean for our ‘traditional’ economic footing, financial activities, international treaty obligations on issues like trade, water, farm subsidies, and transportation? These questions only begin to gain relevance when we see that the ‘macro’ view is in fact far broader than the segmented vignette-style of economics we are accustomed to pursuing, for the level of mathematical and sociological comfort it affords.

So, everything is very big, all numbers are astronomical, nature is everything and more, we cannot make it all fit into a nice little frame… yes, yes, yes, this is true and it’s a problem. But what can we do to apply this observation to our economic outlook in general or to programming the calculations for this quixotic pursuit of an intregrated economics?

. . . 1. CORRECT THE ERRORS

We first need to correct the errors that are already built into our economic calculations, and which are part of the traditional economic outlook: for example, nuclear energy. Why do we not count the costs of long-term maintenance, security, protecting national technological secrets, pollution clean-up and, above all, the long-term hermetically-sealed containment of nuclear waste?

Primarily, because that last figure requires examining the huge costs of sealing radioactive materials in a hermitically-sealed, non-conductive container, for between 1 million and 10 million years, which may take us only to the half-life of the radioactivity of the spent fuel.

Depleted uranium, for example, which is used as a heavy metal for armor and bomb-casings in US military machinery, has a radioactive half-life of 4.5 billion years. 1 to 10 million years to abide by public health and safety laws and prevent widespread radioactive contamination of the natural environment or of human habitat.

We can calculate these costs, but they remain unimaginably vast. Imagine telling a businessman —it is irrelevant whether he is serious or not, talented or not— we would like you to build a nuclear plant for electricity generation, move toward taking a profit after a few decades, maybe make a few billion dollars over another few decades, then pay for decomissioning the plant, clean-up of all dangerous substances or contaminated panels or constructions, then pay all the expenses for containment and security, for 1 to 10 million years, during which you will not be able to take any profit from your activities.

The offer would not be convincing. So, in our calculation of the usefulness of such technologies, we need to take very seriously the reality that those costs will be paid or those operations will not be successfully carried out. Though we may see the economic value now, and tell ourselves as a society, it’s worth it to get the gain we get from “cheap” energy now, we need to see clearly what those costs look like, and what they will take away from us in the future.

The calculations need to be wholecloth and transparent. The healthy functioning of any market depends on there not being unreliable pockets of secrecy and deceit where the eye is fooled and the ‘magic’ of economic value just a trick.

. . . 2. INTEGRATE AND COMPREHEND

The founding principle, the goal and the challenge of this undertaking is to integrate and comprehend in an integrated manner the economic, ecological, financial and spending data that account for real long-term viability and prosperity at the human level. It begins in the theoretical realm, and through analysis and discussion, could reach the moment of practical application, likely with much new information technology put into the process. The model will be the physical metaphor of the Inca quipu, a tool for measuring taxation in an empire that combined urban centers, agriculture and nomadic hunter-gatherer bands.

The quipu was a system of strings, knots, colors and patterns, created in each case by the individual agent whose job was to oversee the history of taxation and tributes offered to the Inca by his subjects in a given region. It provides an evaluation of geography, social composition, currency and chronicle.

The quipu was used to evaluate the state of affairs through a dynamic system of spontaneous coding, a system open to the introduction of new elements, categories and coding patterns, at nearly any time. The quipu’s creator might have been the only living soul able to fully decode its meaning, which was, in itself, a way of establishing enhanced economic value in the work of formatting and maintaining the document itself.

The problem will be, evidently, how do we program into a matrix for moment-by-moment calculation of an international economic outlook, values we cannot quantify? and, how do we allow for a dynamic, bottom-up intregration of new code, new parameters, and new paradigms into what should be, in theory, a consistent model for evaluating global economic trends, beyond the bounds of the traditionally ‘economic’?

. . . 3. MOMENT VS. METHOD

These are questions that need answers, and will form the basis of Project Quipu. Allow for discussion, criticism, analysis and the contest of ideas, to guide us toward a series of solutions that help make such a matrix possible.

Project Quipu proposes as a rule not shying away from seemingly impossible calculations, because they likely contain vital economic data which may come to us in forms not quantifiable but in fact relevant and comprehensible, when seen through the adequate lens.

One key feature will be timing: as with any economic reality, the moment brings context that cannot be discarded, and two moments which may appear numerically similar may in fact have amply divergent significance. It is therefore vital to understand that any data with real impact will emerge either more slowly or more rapidly than our ability to perceive it, just out of reach of our attempts to ‘capture the moment’.

We cannot take a ‘snapshot’ and live the captured moment at the same time, so we must manage that lapse in time appropriately and understand that it carves out a hollow in the information available to us. This nature of the moment helps to shape the method, so to top off the aggravating complexity of this challenge: we cannot assume at any time that we have rendered the definitive picture of a global economy. It escapes our grip like water…

More than 1 billion people already face fresh water scarcity, figure expected to double in 20 years’ time

Water is one of the “fundamental building-blocks of life”, as is often said in science, in biology classrooms, in medicine, theology, environmental policy debates, and in cosmology and space exploration. It is also a commodity whose economic reality is increasingly defined by chronic scarcity and often intensely uneven distribution.

One of the most vital problems regarding the global water supply is the fact that we are already over-exploiting it, draining vital fluvial systems and ancient underground aquifers that cannot be replenished. This, coupled with the population boom and increasing industrialization, urbanization and consumerization of emerging economies, means global scarcity is fast becoming the rule.

Population, Migration & Conflict

In highly populated regions with little or highly-variable rainfall, irrigation and industrial uses are putting unsustainable pressures on the supply of safe drinking water. At least 1 billion people worldwide currently suffer the perils and hardships of a lack of clean drinkable water.

Experts calculate that by the year 2025, some 1.8 billion people will be living in regions with “absolute scarcity” of water resources, meaning they will be unable to meet demand for drinking water, irrigation or industry. The result is likely to be widespread economic chaos, famine, migration, and conflict, if no remedies are put in place ahead of time.

The first and most obvious result of such shortages is mass migration, the other is the spread of water-borne bacteria and infectious diseases. The human body can only survive a few days without hydration, so “absolute scarcity” has 3 key effects:

1. MASS MIGRATION: those who suffer the most extreme scarcity must move in search of survival;
2. DISEASE: water that carries toxins, disease and even raw sewage is a last resort, but becomes a tempting resource, and so disease takes root and spreads among afflicted and displaced populations;
3. COLLAPSE OF THE FOOD SUPPLY: extreme drought and desertification often follow a period of intense or prolonged degradation of agricultural water resources…

In such situations, the problem is massive and severe enough to generate real political instability and be a security concern for national governments. This means law, treaty and military power come into play, and economic crisis can rapidly evolve, or degenerate, into armed conflict.

Some researchers downplay the reality of “water wars”, but then-secretary-general of the UN, Kofi Annan, has warned of the risk to international and even global peace and stability from conflicts tied to water scarcity. And, even those who call water wars a “hydro-myth” do so saying that in the last half century there have only been 37 water-related armed conflicts. 157 treaties have been signed in that same period, to deal with this vital issue, but one shudders to think how many wars would demonstrate the risk is no longer a mere “myth”.

Dams, Irrigation & the Environment

Competition by nations for fresh water is intense, and major dam projects are an example: the Nile River basin (including the Blue and White branches of the river upstream) is managed by 10 major dams, with 6 more under construction, across Uganda, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea, and Egypt.

Uganda has dammed the White Nile at its source at the edge of Lake Victoria, and Ethiopia has dammed the Blue Nile at its source, to prevent much-needed water from flowing out of the country before it can be diverted and exploited. Egypt’s downstream exploitation of the overtapped river means the Nile delta is often underserved and the river has failed to reach the sea for some period during some recent years.

But, without these dam projects, Egypt, Sudan, and Ethiopia, would be severely inhibited in terms of economic development. In fact, it is highly possible that failure to manage these resources for economic benefit could destabilize several countries in the region. In this light, the intense competition between human civilization and the natural environment becomes evident.

Major dam projects, long thought to be the supreme solution to water-related economic problems, tend to have devastating negative effects on local ecosystems. In the most catastrophic case to date, diversion of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers of central Asia has led to the loss of 80% of the water of the Aral Sea, which they feed into and which was, when the project began, the world’s fourth largest sea.

The Aral is now split in two, and while some reports suggest there may be some recovery in the smaller, northern section, in Kazakhstan, the overall volume may be continuing to decrease as environmental factors create an atmosphere entirely hostile to the sort of ecosystems that once flourished across this area the size of Ireland. The Uzbek government has been criticized for not taking any serious measures to restore the water lost across the majority of the Aral basin.

The US Bureau of Reclamation, created to prepare and oversea major public works projects, has recognized that the massive hydroelectric dams of the 1930s, 40s and 50s, like Hoover Dam, Glen Canyon and Grand Coulee, will likely never recover the costs of construction and operation, even as it has recognized the nearly incalculable toll these great feats of engineering have taken on the environment.

India’s Andhra Pradesh is home to a grass-roots movement organizing to oppose the near comprehensive damming, containment and diversion of major rivers, including the Krishna, the Godavari, and the Ganges. The projects, as planned, appear likely to leave the poorest and least capable of dealing with scarcity without their most basic resource, in a nation of 1.1 billion people, whose megacities are already overtaxed in all major resource areas.

There is even an “Inter-State Water Dispute Tribunal” that deals with situations where one Indian state plans a dam, reservoir or irrigation project which may negatively impact another state. Police from Maharashtra reportedly attacked demonstrators from Andhra Pradesh when they assembled to complain that a Maharashtra irrigation project would rob citizens of neighboring Andhra Pradesh of much-needed water from the Godavari River.

Sandra Postel, of the Global Water Policy Project, writes that 25% of India’s food supply depends on an unsustainable use of water. When underground aquifers dry up and farmers are unable to replace that resource, she predicts a kind of rural anarchy, where the entire fabric of agricultural society is likely to come undone.

Postel also comments, as a fundamental socio-economic example, that Sumerian civilization collapsed when increased soil-salinity resulting from irrigation practices could not be reversed. The Sumerians, the first culture to organize their society around irrigation, were forced to abandon the “fertile crescent” between the Tigris and Euphrates of ancient Mesopotamia, and move north.

Competing Interests, Threats Posed

At present, water is no longer just a “building-block” for life to exist, or the primary ingredient in biological organisms like human beings; it is also a fundamental tool in industrial production and in enhancing agricultural output. As arable land is shifted from food-production to fuel-production, it is also becoming a means of making combustible fuels, further distancing the quantity of fresh water available from our capacity to exploit it efficiently.

Technology is partly to do with this: desalinization plants are expensive and have not been a comfortable means of producing massive quantities of drinkable water, though desperately poor, unstable and extremely dry places, like Yemen, have turned to desalinization as an option to prevent further economic decay from chronic drought.

But it is also a matter of human priorities: do we place conservation of the water supply above consumer principles? Do we legislate conservation? Do we ration water-supplies to industry, agribusiness, small independent farmers, hotels and luxury resorts, or to individuals? Who gives up convenience and ease of use first?

The biomass-fuel boom, increasingly invading the renewable resources calendar and causing nations like Brazil to devote huge swaths of arable and semi-arable land to cultivating grains whose sole purpose is to produce the necessary ingredients for bio-fuels, puts cars and people in competition for water. Food supplies come under threat, as cultivated farmland is turned from food-production to fuel-production.

Chronic water shortages mean cities as well as individuals have a harder time achieving high levels of regular hygiene, and assigning existing (and dwindling) water supplies to such diverse and competing interests means one or more of those interests must be shut out. Will personal water use take a backseat to agricultural use and food-production? Will hospitals be able to afford the amounts of water needed to maintain safe levels of hygiene and prevent the spread of disease from contaminated materials?

Will suppliers price water out of the range of many individuals, families and even municipailities, as happened in Bolivia a few years ago? Will the exploding demand for water be too tempting financially to permit sound regulation with human interest in mind to trump commercial interests?

Chronic scarcity could lead to industry failing to meet its needs, economic slow-downs, inconvenience at the consumer level across the world, cost-of-living price jumps, and social and international competition for water resources. In the worst cases, severe economic disorder and armed conflict could arise if increasingly scarce water resources are not distributed in the most efficient and intelligent way possible, with a mind to conservation and a goal of optimizing water exploitation.

Introductory Conclusions

Global water use is not going to be able to keep expanding at the rate demand is growing presently. A global policy procedure, based on sound, scientific evidence, democratic standards, economic imperatives and ecological research, needs to be implemented. Water can not be commoditized solely according to market forces without causing widespread suffering and ecological degradation.

Commercial considerations aside, the era of cheap, clean water is likely behind us. Paying less than the high biological value of water implies, within the context of an advanced, post-industrial society, means water resources are undervalued and consumed in excess. But, the great humanitarian and civic challenge of this process will be to ensure that water is treated as a basic right for all human beings.

This may in fact be the most fundamental challenge facing global society today: bringing to life an elastic system for funding, organizing and maintaining fair and sustainable water-distribution, globally, without degrading the environment, and without disrupting the commercial and economic patterns that operate within free societies.

Failure to achieve these multiple goals could lead to a multi-level collapse of the global water supply along with the environmental degradation that accompanies over-consumption of water resources. Rivers, lakes, and even seas, may disappear, their unique ecosystems dying out, and dependent agricultural zones failing, if political and technological innovation does not keep pace with booming hydrological demand.

• Originally published 14 August 2007, for Sentido.tv — now CafeSentido.com
• Republished 19 September 2007, as part of The Hot Spring’s water scarcity report