Running Out Of Water  

John Quiggin notes that the drought is far from over and agriculture inland is in trouble.

A couple of months ago, there seemed to be some hope that the record-breaking drought in south-eastern Australia was breaking. There was good rain, and the switch from El Nino to La Nina seemed to be established. Now, it seems, those hopes are gone. The really good rain was confined to coastal areas, most notably Sydney. Temporary water entitlements are now going for $1000 a megalitre, and irrigators are likely to receive something like 5 per cent of their normal allocations.

The water market should do some good in ensuring that water flows where it is most needed, most obviously in keeping tree crops alive. But water is also needed for cities and towns in the Murray-Darling Basin and for Adelaide, so the market will have to be combined with administrative allocation, and there may be a need for emergency measures.

In these circumstances, the last thing we need is the continuing squabbling between Federal and State governments, and within the Federal government between Nationals and Liberals, which has led to only marginal progress under the National Water Initiative. It’s likely that nothing much will happen until after the Federal election and, to be fair, there’s not much that can be done until we see how bad the summer is going to be. But it seems clear that the incoming government will have an emergency on its hands.

Nanni at RSMG has more on the limitations of demand management. This is not going to be an easy problem to solve.

Meanwhile, and relatedly, several species of coral and many seaweeds have been listed as vulnerable or critically endangered as a result of climate change, specifically the increasing frequency and severity of El Niño events.

The South Australian government is scrambling to secure Adelaide's water supply (and Olympic Dam's - Australia's radioactive jewel in the crown) amid predictions of rising water prices via a combination of enlarged dams and desalination plants.

Premier Mike Rann yesterday described as "inevitable" the building of two desalination plants, one for Adelaide and another to service the Olympic Dam mine, Whyalla and the Eyre Peninsula. He also promised an $850 million expansion of the Mt Bold reservoir to double Hills storage capacity.

Mr Rann said the desalination announcement was "a prediction and a promise", although he added that a final decision on the Adelaide plant would not be made until November when Cabinet will have seen a report from a working party examining the proposal. Sites at Pelican Point, Port Stanvac or further down the coast on the Fleurieu Peninsula under consideration.

Mr Rann said the Government had been examining a desalination plant and expansion of the Mt Bold Reservoir over the past six months and, based on interim reports, the preference was to build both. "This will be the biggest capital works project ever seen in the state's history," he said. A final site will depend on the report of the working party - headed by former Premier's Department chief executive Ian Kowalick - and environmental concerns. It will take about five years to build the 50-gigalitre plant.

Mr Rann also warned the cost of building the infrastructure would have to be reflected in the price of water and, as a result, the Government was reviewing its water pricing options.

One option the SA government has been urged to consider is wave power, with Carnegie Corp's "CETO" technology being proposed. This is the sort of thing I talked about in the "Nullarbor Solar Project".

A company hoping to generate electricity from waves off the south-east coast of South Australia says talks in the region have been positive.

Carnegie Corporation inspected the coast off Port MacDonnell for the first time yesterday in its national tour of potential sites. It is looking to build Australia's first wave energy power plant, that would also desalinate water, at a cost of $450 million.

Carnegie managing director Dr Michael Ottaviano says there are many factors in the region's favour. "The wave regime along the Limestone Coast is world class, so certainly there's an abundance of available energy to tap into, but also the power infrastructure down here is very good and it could allow South Australia to rather than be net importers of power, be an exporter of power," he said.

The Australian has a snippet on vapour to water company Island Sky.

Still on the green angle, Island Sky is seeking to raise $10 million to manufacture and market its water coolers which produce the precious liquid from vapour in the air.

The product, Skywater 14, is being touted as the answer for drought-ridden climes, and it uses less energy than existing methods. Skywater 14 can conjure at least eight litres a day, while a 1100 litre-a-day unit is in development. Under distribution agreements covering 30 countries, the distributors are obliged to buy a collective $US45 million of stock in the first year.

Despite the green credentials, we suspect Island Sky's units will have to compete with traditional coolers. It's also not the only air-into-water offering out there. As drinking water accounts for only a fraction of water consumption in Western countries, we can't really see Skywater as a drought-busting solution. It also doesn't work well when air humidity levels are less than 30 per cent.

If Island Sky finds a market, it will be through other factors such as price and obviating the need for refill deliveries.

The recent GoingGreen 100 list from AlwaysOn had a number of water related companies in the list:

AbTech Industries
Aqua Sciences
Aquarius Technologies
Atlantium Technologies
Bio-Pure Technology
Derceto
EnviroTower
GeoPure Water Technologies
IDE Technologies
Industrial Plug and Play
Microvi Biotech
MIOX Corporation
NanoH2O
Novazone
P2W Pollution To Water
PAX Water Technologies
Poseidon Resources
Seven Seas Water
Superall Products

The LA Times has an article on Free-lunch foragers (aka the freegans). I meant to include this in my "Climate in the Capital" post as there was a freegan subthread in "Fifty Degrees Below" but I forgot all about it at the time.

Nelson, 51, once earned a six-figure income as director of communications at Barnes and Noble. Tired of representing a multimillion dollar company, she quit in 2005 and became a "freegan" -- the word combining "vegan" and "free" -- a growing subculture of people who have reduced their spending habits and live off consumer waste. Though many of its pioneers are vegans, people who neither eat nor use any animal-based products, the concept has caught on with Nelson and other meat-eaters who do not want to depend on businesses that they believe waste resources, harm the environment or allow unfair labor practices.

"We're doing something that is really socially unacceptable," Nelson said. "Not everyone is going to do it, but we hope it leads people to push their own limits and quit spending."

Nelson used to spend more than $100,000 a year for her food, clothes, books, transportation and a mortgage on a two-bedroom co-op in Greenwich Village. Now, she lives off savings, volunteers instead of works, and forages for groceries.

She garnishes her salad with tangy weeds picked from neighbors' yards. She freezes bagels and soup from the trash to make them last longer. She sold her co-op and bought a one-bedroom apartment in Flatbush, Brooklyn, about an hour from Manhattan by bike. Her annual expenditures now total about $25,000.

"I used to have 40 work blouses," said Nelson, sipping hot tea with mint leaves and stevia, a sweet plant she picked from a community garden. She shook her head in shame. "Forty tops, just for work."

Freeganism was born out of environmental justice and anti-globalization movements dating to the 1980s. The concept was inspired in part by groups like "Food Not Bombs," an international organization that feeds the homeless with surplus food that's often donated by businesses.

Freegans are often college-educated people from middle-class families.

Adam Weissman, whose New York group Freegan.info has been around for about four years, lives with his father, a pediatrician, and mother, a teacher. The 29-year-old is unemployed by choice, taking care of his elderly grandparents daily and working odd jobs when he needs to. The rest of his time is spent furthering the freegan cause, he said, which is "about opting out of capitalism in any way that we can."

Speaking of anti-capitalists, I still can't get the mental image of Joel Makower going out into the desert and sitting down with a bunch of naked burners and (unsuccessfully) asking them what it would take for them to see Walmart as green out of my head.

Joel has a new post on Google's $10 Million Search for the Keys to the Plug-in - trying to jump start the V2G revolution.

Google today is launching a fascinating experiment in clean-tech investing in the form of a worldwide search for products, services, and technologies that can advance the market for plug-in electric vehicles. And it plans to invest a total of $10 million in the ones it likes.

The request for proposal just issued by Google.org, the company's philanthropic arm, invites "entrepreneurs and companies to show us their best ideas" with the aim of making "catalytic investments to support technologies, products and services that are critical to accelerating plug-in vehicle commercialization." Google.org says it will invest between $500,000 and $2 million in the companies it believes stand the best chance of advancing plug-in technology.

Think of it as "The Apprentice" meets "An Inconvenient Truth."

As the company explains in a "Googlegram" it distributed this morning:

We realize that this type of open call for proposals is not the usual model for investment, but we wanted to use a process that was open to new ideas and new entrants. Part of our goal is to get as many people as possible to work on solutions to our vehicle emissions challenges. We welcome and expect to receive submissions from a wide variety of companies -- from cutting edge battery technologies to innovative service businesses - and from companies of all sizes. We also encourage participants from all over the world to submit proposals. This is a global challenge, and it will take all of us to solve it.

Entrants are asked to submit a five-page proposal by October 15. Those entries selected will be asked to submit a more complete business plan, which will then go through the usual vetting and due diligence processes. (Read an FAQ doc here.)

Why the open RFP? "It is, admittedly, an unusual approach, but we felt as though we wanted to reach the largest number of people with potentially interesting products, services, or technologies that could advance plug-in vehicles," Dan Reicher, Director of Climate Change and Energy Initiatives at Google.org, told me earlier this week. "We felt these technologies, services, products need to be developed sooner rather than later given the climate challenge that we've got. We thought this would be an interesting way to get maximum response."

A worldwide competition for the chance to have Google invest two million bucks in your fledgling firm? "Interesting way," indeed.

As the Googlegram puts it:

This open RFP process is a new approach to mission-focused investing, and we're interested to see what we can learn from it, both in terms of opportunities and gaps that exist in this space today, as well as ways that we can improve on this solicitation process for future investments. Our focus on learning is the primary reason we decided to narrow this first RFP to investments in private companies, rather than a combination of grants and investments.

The RFP is the latest in a string of efforts by Google to advance electric vehicles. Earlier this year, Google.org launched the RechargeIT Initiative that aims to "reduce CO2 emissions, cut oil use, and stabilize the electrical grid by accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles and vehicle-to-grid technology." RechargeIT to date has focused on philanthropy, committing $1 million in donations to nonprofits, and has created a small demonstration project that, the company says, will eventually lead to 100 or more plug-in hybrids in Google's corporate fleet. In addition, the foundation is putting its money toward advocacy and policy matters related to growing the plug-in hybrid market.

So, how will Google vet what could be a tsunami of investment proposals? "We're going to take advantage of the talent we have here at Google," explains Kirsten Olsen, Project Manager for RechargeIT initiative. "We have a lot of people here who have experience either screening business plans or have worked for electric vehicle companies."

Eco Chick points to an article in The Independent on a World Bank initiative to bring LED lighting to Africa. Guys (if you are still reading) - bring solar panels along with them - a solar panel + LED lights + OLPC laptops is a massive and sudden leap forward for the average African village.

Even in Africa's most cosmopolitan cities - Johannesburg, Nairobi and Dakar - where the electricity grid is well-established, power cuts are a common aggravation, with neighbourhoods suddenly plunged into darkness. To counteract this, the clatter of back-up generators has become a familiar soundtrack to life in the wealthier suburbs.

Development experts have long fretted about the knock-on effect that power shortages have on the continent's ability to haul itself out of poverty. Put in simple human terms, an estimated half a billion people do not have any electricity whatsoever.

"There is not enough time in the day to extend the electricity grid," says Russell Sturm, an energy expert for the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector investment arm of the World Bank. "We need a more immediate solution."

It is with a view to plugging the gap that the World Bank is set to unveil its Lighting Africa initiative. The target is to get 250 million Africans supplied with clean-energy lighting by 2030.

Many of the continent's poorest people are dependent on kerosene lamps or candles, and typically spend at least a 10th of their income on lighting their shacks. The lamps often kick out more smoke than light, and there are frequent stories of huts going up in flames as they get knocked over. People with a bit of extra cash may invest in a small diesel generator, but the extra illumination and the reduced danger does not quite compensate for the noise and the polluting fumes.

The future, according to the World Bank, is LED lighting. In the UK, LEDs (light emitting diodes) are more commonly thought of as the tiny red and blue dots of light on household remote control units, but the new generation of LEDs give out useable white light. And these devices could help switch on the lights in Africa, in the same way that mobile phones have changed the continent.

"When the cellphone arrived, suddenly it made no sense to wire countries up to the landline network," says Mr Sturm. "I think you can have the same impact with LED lighting."

LEDs are very efficient, in that they use a very small amount of power (typically one watt) but produce enough light to read by. They can also be recharged with mechanically-operated chargers such as hand cranks or pedal power, which makes them particularly suitable for African villages far from the grid.

Energy experts say that with the slow uptake of electrification,LEDs are good for the short term. "There's definitely room for targeted rural initiatives. They are starting from such a low base. In rural areas, we are talking about a 2 per cent access rate," explains Anton Eberhard, a former electricity regulator and professor at the University of Cape Town.

The Register reports that Taiwan's bees may be disappearing but they still have some fight in them - "Enraged bee bursts Taiwanese woman's breast implant".

A Taiwanese woman was sporting a brand spanking new breast implant this week after her previous joy bag was punctured in a freak bee stinging incident. The apine dive bomber attacked the 31 year old last month as she was riding her motorcycle while wearing a low cut dress, Ananova reports. Despite the fact that saline implants are supposed to withstand pressures of 200Kg, the woman said her right breast “disappeared” in just two days.

Subsequent investigations showed the saline from the boob propper-upper had leaked as a result of the bee attack.

The surgeon who reinstalled the girl’s right Bulgarian air bag put the incident down to the fact that she was “very skinny” which meant the skin on her breasts was therefore very thin and prone to puncturing when attacked by enraged pollen collectors. He has now advised her to avoid acupuncture in future, and, curiously, yoga.

Funnily enough, the attack comes just months after Taiwanese scientists were left scratching their heads over the sudden disappearance of millions of honey bees.

Links:

* Dave Roberts - WSJ on the carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade debate
* Grist - Debunking Bjorn Lomborg: Part I. Something's rotten in the state of Denmark - see also the "Lomborg-errors" web site.
* Grist - Greentech and EEStor: Ultracapacitor company claims it will revolutionize electric cars
* After Gutenberg - New Method to make Iron-doped Titanate Nanotubes
* Conde Nast Portfolio - GM's Weak Arguments Against Increased Fuel Economy
* SMH - New Sydney east-west train line may cut congestion
* Crikey - It’s not easy being green when you’re flogging power stations
* Karl Schroeder - Bussard Fusion Update
* EcoGeek - EcoGeek of the week: Karl Schroeder
* WorldChanging - Don't Just Be the Change, Mass-Produce It. "We need to redesign civilization. Anything less is failure.".
* That's Fit - Russian region needs more children, declares today a "sex day". Would have fitted well into my "Children Of Men" post earlier in the week.
* TED Talks - Jeff Skoll: Making movies that make change. Upcoming movies from Participant Productions: Chicago 10, Charlie Wilson's War and The Kite Runner.
* Editor And Publisher - Two of Seven Soldiers Who Wrote 'NYT' Op-Ed Die in Iraq
* NicheGeek - 10 Google Video Documentaries You Have To Watch
* Vagabox - Burn This Book" - Selected Quotes
* The Onion - Should Americans Return To A Simpler, Stone Age Lifestyle?