water

2044: Big Brother Inc.

Eric Lotke — Fri, 22 May 2009 08:13:26 -0700

I just finished a new novel, 2044.

2044 starts where George Orwell’s 1984 left off. The problem isn’t Big Brother and the leviathan government. The problem is Big Brother Inc., and the all-powerful marketplace.

Orwell was right for his time, of course. Europe lay in smoking ruins, and the statist Stalin peered over the wall with his Big Brother mustache. Orwell sounded the alarm.

But history didn’t unfold that way. The government didn’t take over. It got taken over. Nowadays the commercial sector is in control. Everything is produced en masse and for profit, from clothes to music to political campaigns. Amazon.com knows what I read. Microsoft makes me write with Windows™. ToysRUs tells my kids what they want.

Check out the fights over the new federal budget. Look what the insurance and pharmaceutical industries are doing to health care reform, and how the good old Military Industrial Complex grows the defense budget. Watch giant agribusiness conglomerates dress up like family farmers and milk the government for subsidies. 2044 follows the pattern to the endpoint.

The heroes of 2044 are two overworked professionals who spend long days at the office and short nights in tiny apartments. Malcolm Moore is an engineer who designs security devices for the titanic Tentek Corporation. Jessica Frey is a lawyer who defends such corporations in court. Both are single and both are lonely — though Jessica has a six-year-old son, her sperm-banked answer to isolation.

The story begins when Malcolm discovers a cheap, easy way to take the salt out of seawater. Fresh water is scarce enough right now. By the year 2044, people will die and countries will go to war for water. A microorganism that takes the salt out of seawater could benefit literally billions of people.

But it also threatens business interests who are happy the way things are. Malcolm’s effort to persuade Tentek to sell his discovery gets him fired. His effort to strike out on his own gets him branded a terrorist. People who assist him are harassed, jailed and even killed.

It’s an exciting ride. The action scenes are fun and the politics of terrorism are haunting. There are even touches of humor and occasional references to 1984 — like the corporate merger that creates the new Big Brother Inc., with its happy slogan, “Big Brother is looking out for you.”

I like it, anyway. But then I wrote the thing.

It started some years ago with the idea of a private sector sequel to 1984. The idea didn’t go away, and eventually I stopped waiting. I decided to do it myself. My precise inspiration: “You’ve read a lot of crappy books. You can probably write one that’s no worse.” So I did. And it turned out pretty good.

Publishing it was a different story, though. A story about consolidation in the publishing industry (someone could write a novel about that!), the devotion to proven authors, and the aversion to unhappy endings (true to the original, I’m sorry to say).

So I took the self-publishing route around industry bottlenecks. Now you can buy 2044 direct from the publisher or at Amazon.com, of course. You can read Chapter One for free on my web page or, if you ask me nicely, I’ll send you a PDF (though I kept the purchase price almost as low as the printing costs). If you have any other ideas for outreach or distribution, I’m all ears.

Now it’s onward, back to my nonfiction life (and the outline of a new novel, uplifting with a happy ending). Meanwhile, enjoy the book.

An America Flush with Infrastructure: Why They're ALL "Bridges to Nowhere"

David Wenbert — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:40:43 -0800

In the stampede to bring new infrastructure 'investment' programs onto the agenda of the incoming Obama Administration, Progressives are in the process of being seriously rolled by the Old Left, and some tragic public policy mistakes seem about to be made as a consequence. A chorus of calls for new "make work" spending on "Roads & Bridges" (led, behind the scenes, by the multinational Civil Engineering contractors who stand most to benefit), neglects obvioius facts of the 21st Century, as if this were the 1976 Transition that's upon us.

NOT THE CARS, BUT THE WASTE

Despite decades of exhortation to the better angels of our nature, automobile drivers do not park their cars to 'walk, bike, or take mass transit' in order to conserve energy, avert greenhouse gas emissions, or otherwise Save the Planet. Even high gas prices have little impact on the traffic volume of the average daily commute. Drivers, in any significant numbers, park their cars and choose other forms of transportation because of traffic congestion and its attendant delays, frustration, and inconvenience, and for no other reason. Building more roads and bridges - best justified to alleviate such congestion - merely encourages "Car Culture", at precisely the time when both the Global Climate and National Security demand exactly the opposite. The cumulative impact of any sizeable improvements in road transportation infrastructure in the United States will be tens of millions of additional passenger vehicle miles driven annually, each year thereafter, than would otherwise have been the case. The simple fact is that you can either invest infrastructure dollars in projects which combat Global Warming and reduce our Dependence on Foreign Oil, OR you can build Roads & Bridges; you cannot do both, as these are mutually exclusive objectives.

Curiously, lost beneath the Roads & Bridges hype [paid for by the likes of Halliburton, Brown & Root, CH2M Hill, BRPH, PBS&J, etc.,] is America's dirty little infrastructure secret: that our 'dirty infrastructure' - specifically Sewage ("wastewater") and Garbage ("solid waste") facilities are in far worse shape than the road transportation network, require more serious overhaul, would employ far more people for a much longer period to upgrade, and represent truly legitimate 'investments', complete with a financial return to the taxpayers and other parties who fund the transformation necessary.

Together with municipal Water production and treatment facilities, the Sewage and Garbage systems in use virtually throughout the United States are of woefully inadequate capacity and badly in need of structural maintenance; moreoveer, they invariably rely upon archaic, obsolete technologies originated in the 19th Century, at the dawn of public sanitation, with little substantive advancement since then. Outdated methodologies for the production of clean water and the disposal of wastes threaten our environment in numerous ways, from the destruction of watersheds and wildlife habitat to stormwater runoff and the poisoning of maine ecosystems, but the most serious impacts are in the form of Greenhouse Gas emissions. The decomposition of America's Sewage and Garbage releases billions of cubic feet of Methane into the atmosphere each year; being between 20x and 70x as potent a GHG as Carbon Dioxide, this makes our waste managment infrastructure one of the world's largest contributors to anthropogenic Climate Change. Of course, this does not account for toxic leachate into the water table from so-called 'sanitary' landfills, or the cascading effects of eutrophication in our waterways from sewage effluent over-fertillizing estuarine flora.

Nationiwide, more than 250 Billion tons of Garbage and Sewage are produced each year. A variety of modern technologies, including Wet Thermal Oxidation/Supercritical Water Oxidation (producing Syncrude), Exothermic Plasma Synthesis (producing Syngas), and others, have been commercially demonstrated to cleanly convert these wastes into energy, on an economical - even, dare we say it, 'profitable' - basis. Today, many methods of processing fecal sludge, cellulosic, and polymeric wastes into alcohol, biodiesel, and even directly into gasoline have been demonstrated. Every pound of Garbage that isnt landfilled and every gallon of Sewage that isnt 'treated', but are instead converted to fuels and electricity, provide Carbon-neutral energy to the nation instead of Greenhouse pollution to the atmosphere. At the systems level, its a strongly Carbon Negative approach to environmental energy production, of the sort that any technologically sophisticated civilization should have adopted long ago as a matter of course.

Twenty years ago, this writer was impressed that archeologists had identified the ancient presence of the Ayce Indians in Central Florida, by discovering the "kitchen middens" left behind by these pre-historic peoples, some 5,000 years earlier. Their solution to the disposal of wastes was to pile it up into a heap, and let it rot. Fifty Centuries later, the bulldozers of Melbourne's putrid 'sanitary' landfill were perpetually engaged in the same technology, but with diesel engines roaring to accomplish it to boot. Meanwhile, a few moments drive to the east, the Indian River Lagoon was being turned into a giant 'dead zone', with marine life suffocated by the vast quantities of Sewage effluent discharged into it on a daily basis. Twenty years later, nothing has changed, only the quantities have increased with a growing population. It is the same story in nearly every city and county in the United States.

Nearly everywhere, municipal and county governments face daunting financial challenges in trying to expand Water, Sewage, and Garbage capacity to meet rising demand due to population growth, let alone any improvements in the level of technology employed, or deferred maintenance on existing facilities. Many local governments are at or near statutory limits on their bonded indebtedness; landfill space is rapidly running out, nobody wants a smelly old landfill or sewage plant in their communities, and transporting wastes ever greater distances (remember New York's infamous "Garbage Barge"?) makes less and less sense as the fuel and climate costs of doing so escalate. Recently, Honolulu made arrangements to ship 500,000 tons of Garbage to the U.S. mainland each year, for landfilling in the Pacific Northwest. Where is the Love?

An intelligent Infrastructure Initiative of the Obama Administration would eschew the 'Roads & Bridges' corporate welfare to the Civil Engineering conglomerates, and would instead "bank" the financing to underwrite every municipal/county public works agency in the United States to enter into Public/Private Partnerships with Investor Owner/Operators to replace all Garbage and Sewage infrastructure with 'Zero Emission/Zero Effluent' 100% energy recovery systems, within 10 years. Among a dozen or so major third-generation Waste-to-Energy technology options that have now been proven, domestic American emerging growth, high technology ventures are now at the forefront. This is the heart of the Green Industrial Revolution, so often mentioned yet so little discussed. Once constructed, such advanced Waste-to-Energy facilities will continue to generate net positive revenue for their participating municipal partners on a perpetual basis, instead of being a permanent drag on local finances, as old-fashioned waste management used to be, the way they did things back in the primitive 20th Century.

Spend those infrastructure dollars to build our green energy technology base, not to perpetuate 20th Century "car culture". BAN the practice of landfilling, and the discharge of ANY wastewater effluent, and prohibit ALL atmospheric emissions from ALL municipal waste management facilities nationwide within a decade. Only after we begin to reconceptualize our secret dirty waste streams as valuable - and clean - energy feedstocks, will we have the chance to make real progress on Climate Change and Energy Independence.

It must also be mentioned that declining mountain snow melt, a casualty of Climate Change, is already diminishing many of the nation's most important rivers, and reservoirs which are the source of many cities' drinking water. Major metropolitan areas, including Las Vegas, Phoenix, Tucson, and Albuquerque, now face the very real prospect of becoming uninhabitable in ten years due to catastrophic drought. Unless major seawater pipeline and solar desalination projects are brought online during the interim, tens of millions of Americans will become 'water refugees' right here in North America. There is a strong case to be made that massive seawater pipelines, running deep inland - with solar desalination executed in discrete increments along their rights-of-way - will be to 21st Century commerce what the Interstate Highways were in the 20th Century, and the Railroads were in the 19th. Such infrastructure projects would be on a massive, geoengineering scale, and require many years to complete; unfortunately, the drought will arrive in a decade, predictably, whether such pipelines have been constructed in the mean time, or not.

'MAKE WORK' vs. 'MAKE GREEN'

Given the environmental and economic benefits of rebuilding our Sewage/Garbage infrastructure using contemporary technologies, and the catastrophic disaster which awaits us if we neglect to deliver new sources of clean, fresh Water to our fastest growing population centers, it would be astonishing for the new Administration to focus its Infrastructure policy on laying asphalt for ill-conceived transportation projects which are outmoded before they are even undertaken. When the environmental issues specific to asphalt and cement processing are also taken into account, no Progressive can defend in good conscience a "Roads & Bridges" infrastructure program. With vast sources of avoidable GHG pollution and equally vast sources of new clean fuels and electricity in the balance, an "Environmental Energy & Water" infrastructure focus is the only credible approach that President Obama and the new Congress should consider.

US Population Reduction is the Root of the Progressive Agenda

Robert Stein — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 23:20:16 -0700

The earth has a limited abilty to sustain more people, living in increasing affluence, and using increasingly destructive technologies. There are many scientific and government papers reporting that both our national and global populations are over that limit by a factor of two or three -- even if we stop using fossil fuels immediately. We must either cut our standard of living by more than half or cut our population by half. We can choose to reduce our population in a controlled way or nature will do it quickly as we overload our resource base. Below is an incomplete survey.

To avoid future drastic reductions in our standard of living due to energy and resource shortfalls, in addition to conservation efforts we must:

1. Advocate an optimal sustainable U.S. economy with a smaller population and consumption. The Holdren-Ehrlich formula I = P x A x T states that human impact (I) on environments are equal to Population numbers (P) multiplied by the Affluence (A) of the society (consumption per capita), multiplied by the level of environmental harm done by the Technologies employed (T). Either our population or our standard of living will fall by at least half. (A variety of United Nations in university studies have suggested an optimal sustainable US population of less than 200 million and a global population of between 1.5 billion and 3 billion to maintain a reasonable standard of living. http://www.ecofuture.org/pop/reports.html , http://dieoff.org/page136.htm, and http://www.optimumpopulation.org/opt.more.climate.html among others.) The “growthist” mantra that better science makes unlimited growth possible has no basis in scientific fact.

2. In order to bring these issues into the public consciousness, we must ask Congress to debate the pros and cons of U.S. population growth and optimal US population size. A good starting point for this is the Letter of Transmission of the 1972 Rockefeller Commission Report to the Congress. The letter states, "After two years of concentrated effort, we have concluded that, in the long run, no substantial benefits will result from further growth of the Nation's population, rather that the gradual stabilization of our population would contribute significantly to the Nation's ability to solve its problems. We have looked for, and have not found, any convincing economic argument for continued population growth. The health of our country does not depend on it, nor does the vitality of business nor the welfare of the average person."

3. Insist that sex education in schools be factual and age-appropriate with proven programs to discourage children from having children.

4. Support Freedom of Choice and universal access to reproductive health care. This would include appropriate counseling for minor children without the consent of the parents.

5. Remove tax credits and deductions for more than two children. Since the United States government should not have policies that give economic incentive to those who unfairly strain the carrying capacity of our economy by having excessive numbers of children, and since there is significant scientific evidence* that we should be trying to reduce the population by approximately half, there should be an additional taxes imposed on persons who have more than two children. *See http://www.npg.org/

6. Call for replacement immigration (immigration no more than emigration) with immigration numbers tied to U.S. resident unemployment numbers. Illegal immigrants currently in the United States can be encouraged to leave voluntarily through employer penalties and disincentives.

Scientists have been aware of, and have been tracking, the development of energy, resource, and environmental problems we face today for over 50 years. The basic concepts have been available to us for much longer. The failure that has led to our current problems is the result of our leaders' lack of interest in planning beyond their own political careers. This must not continue. While the problems we face today seem large, they are the beginning of a cascade effect that, without significant intervention, will reduce our standard of living precipitously at some time in the next 20 years. Our current issues with oil supply are trivial compared to the effect of the coming sudden and major disruptions in food or water supplies. These are foreshadowed by the increasing frequency and severity of global famine as well as water supply shortages that are becoming common even in major US cities.

History is littered with the remains of those who failed to use their intelligence to plan -- those who became addicted to convention and refused to see the future consequences of their actions. The United States is well on its way to joining their ranks. We are at least 30 years past assuring a smooth transition to a sustainable economy. Failure to act now exposes us to natural processes which will provide citizens of the United States with a future of poverty approaching that of the current Third World countries. Democratic republics do not survive with citizens in extreme poverty. We must take a variety of decisive actions now to choose a prosperous and democratic future.

More Water Woes

Tom Sullivan — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 06:40:20 -0700

Rick Perlstein took up Atlanta's water problems yesterday, and I wanted to add my two cents. It's funny hearing Atlanta's water problems discussed as something recent.

The Associated Press reported in November how the drought had impacted residents of a Tennessee town north of Atlanta:

As twilight falls over this Tennessee town, Mayor Tony Reames drives up a dusty dirt road to the community’s towering water tank and begins his nightly ritual in front of a rusty metal valve.

With a twist of the wrist, he releases the tank’s meager water supply, and suddenly this sleepy town is alive with activity. Washing machines whir, kitchen sinks fill and showers run.

About three hours later, Reames will return and reverse the process, cutting off water to the town’s 145 residents.

The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.

The mayor wonders what the 4.5 million people in Atlanta will do. I have my own perspective on the problem.

As Richard Dreyfuss once said, “Well, this is not a boat accident! And it wasn’t any propeller; and it wasn’t any coral reef; and it wasn’t Jack the Ripper!” But for Atlanta, anyway, it wasn’t a shark or the drought either. It was overdevelopment.

The drought just precipitated the crisis that’s been a long time coming. Atlanta’s been sucking hard on the Flint River Aquifer for years without regard to what sprawl was doing to the water supply.

“Heavens, we can’t tell developers no. That would interfere with their personal freedom and right to put their land to its ‘highest and best use’.”

In 1998, I put in a wastewater neutralization system for a lens coating operation in an office park in Alpharetta, north of Atlanta. I asked what the small out-building was at the edge of the parking lot. The Culligan rep told me it was a well house (in an upscale office park!).

He knew clients (including hospitals) drilling wells all over Atlanta because the county wouldn’t let people use all the water they wanted (both because of the MSD infrastructure capacity and water source limits, I think). So they were drilling their own wells to get unmetered water.

I was on the edge of another client’s lawsuit in Duluth, GA, in 1999 when the county reneged on its water contract to supply the water needed for a new, water-heavy manufacturing operation we helped design.

The drought is just the straw that’s broken the camel’s back. The Flint River Aquifer has been under strain for a decade as Atlanta keeps growing, the developers keep developing, and the water supply keeps shrinking.

It was only a matter of time before the taps started running dry. Nobody listens. Nobody cares. Anyone who raises the alarm is an anti-business kook.

For years, I’ve wondered when we’d start seeing bumper stickers that said, “Suppose they gave a subdivision and nobody came?”

Maybe soon, now.

From the LA Times last November:

But experts say the Southeast’s struggles over water resources are far from over.
“What was not on the table, and what has got to be on the table, is Atlanta’s unrestricted growth and cavalier attitude to water use,” said Sally Bethea, executive director of Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper, a watchdog group.

[. . .]

“Atlanta is a greedy, poorly designed behemoth of a city incapable of hearing the word ‘no’ and dealing with it,” said a recent editorial in the Valdosta (Ga.) Daily Times.

The editorial said Atlanta’s “politicians can’t bring themselves to tell their greedy constituents complaining about the low flows in their toilets this week that perhaps if they didn’t have six bathrooms, it might ease the situation a bit.”

A friend at CNN told me last week that having a conspicuous well in your front yard (for landscaping) has become a status symbol in Atlanta's fashionable Buckhead neighborhood.

There is sowing, and then there is reaping.

Let's Bank On Rebuilding America

Isaiah J. Poole — Tue, 06 May 2008 08:48:40 -0700

Instead of a silly argument over a "gas tax holiday," we desperately need a serious discussion about the nation's infrastructure. And there is a good legislative proposal that could be the basis for that discussion.

There are bills in the House (HR 3401) and the Senate (S 1926) that would create a national infrastructure bank. It could be one way to bring some common sense to the task of rebuilding America's roads, bridges, sewers and public buildings. The creation of this bank should be part of the effort progressives are making in Congress to enact a second stimulus bill this month.

Such a bank would allow the federal government to finance these projects in the same way that states do: by issuing long-term, tax-exempt bonds or by making loan guarantees.

Both Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have said they support the idea of an infrastructure bank, although it rarely comes up in their campaign speeches. And that's a shame, because they both need to spend their time reinforcing an emerging national mandate for repairing and improving our crumbling foundations.

Just last month, the blog Infrastructure Watch notes, the Government Accountability Office estimated that the nation's total water infrastructure needs would cost between $485 billion to $1.2 trillion. However, funding for the largest federal drinking water and wastewater infrastructure programs have been flat or declining.

Also, the Congressional Budget Office told Congress last year that the Highway Trust Fund, which is made up largely of the revenue from the gasoline tax, will run out of money in 2009. Spending is outpacing money flowing into the fund. (High gasoline prices, in fact, worsens that problem. When high prices force cutbacks in driving, less money flows into the fund; the federal gasoline tax is a per-gallon tax; it does not increase proportionately to the cost of a gallon of gasoline.) One key reason for the exhaustion of the fund is that prices for materials such as asphalt and concrete are exceeding the general rate of inflation.

In March, the president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, David G. Mongan, reminded the House Banking Committee that in 2005 the organization gave a grade of "D" to the state of the nation's infrastructure and said that an investment of $1.6 trillion by 2010 would be needed to bring the fix these public resources. At the time, that bad grade got a fair amount of attention. Since then:

Nothing approaching that level of investment has been made. Indeed, little has changed in the three years since we handed out that dismal grade, and establishing a longterm plan to finance the development and maintenance of our infrastructure remains a pressing national priority.

This nation continues to under-invest in infrastructure at the national level. The total of all federal spending for infrastructure as a share of all federal spending has steadily declined over the last 30 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

One of the more shameful examples of what Robert Kuttner adroitly calls "the squandering of America" is the failure of America to take care of its basic public assets, especially after the Bush administration inherited a government with a budget surplus that gave it the leeway to tackle that challenge intelligently. (Colleague Bill Scher has linked to some NBC News reports on how we're literally falling apart and is asking why the media, including NBC, isn't doing more to press this into the national debate.) Under the guise of controlling spending, the administration has shifted an increasing share of the national burden to state and local governments—where the same conservatives who say the federal government shouldn't tax to pay for these needs make the same argument at the state and local level—or encouraged turning public assets into private profit centers.

Now that the country is moving through a recession, there is an even more critical need to target government resources on projects that will produce jobs in the short run and leave the nation in the long run with the clean water, transportation, schools and other public facilities that a nation needs to be healthy and economically vibrant. As Congress considers a second economic stimulus package for short-term relief this month, it should authorize the creation of that infrastructure bank. Then let's have a serious debate about how to fund it and how to use it when the next president takes office.

Jon Keesecker

Jon Keesecker — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:26:37 -0800