Water

I'm in the process of reading an extraordinary issue of National Geographic. It's a special issue titled "Water: Our Thirsty World." This is not a happy topic, given the increasing desperation of increasingly thirsty human populations. Many of them haul their water long distances on their backs. But most of the victims of dwindling supplies of fresh water are not human beings. National Geographic has offered a series of video overviews of this special issue. This is a critically important issue that is well worth your attention.

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Why Can’t They Just Stop the Leak?

I've been watching the Gulf Oil leak reports with a technical eye. They report that citizens have sent in over 100,000 suggestions on how to stop the leak, and more on how to clean it up. It's so simple: Just plug it. But I'd wager that the bulk of the suggestions are innumerate; they have no comprehension of the scale of the problem. As though the oil leak is like oil dripping from a car. This is a column of oil at least 2 feet wide and thousands of feet long already moving fast and under pressure. Stopping it is like stopping a freight train with the engines running. And doing it in one of the the harshest environments man has ever tried to work in on this planet. Many of the clean up suggestions, even the ones based on home testing, neglect to consider the scale. What might work in a sink is not practical to do to an ocean. BP has already consumed most of the world's available dispersant Corexit™ in an attempt to keep much of the oil suspended in the water. Sawdust? Hay? Hair? There isn't enough on all the heads in America. People, please do basic arithmetic before sending in suggestions. I heard one fairly clever suggestion from a brother-in-law: Freeze it with liquid nitrogen. My instincts first boggled at the immense cost of doing it. But then I considered and replied with a more convincing argument: Consider wrapping a fire hose in dry ice. All you get is a hole in the dry ice because any cooled material is moved down the pipe before it can slow the flow. I looked up some more details when I got home: Nitrogen won't even evaporate at the the pressure down by the wellhead. I think it's great that people are thinking. But it also shows the world how distinct thinking is from reasoning.

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What Obama is doing about the oil spill disaster

Rolling Stone has published a blistering expose on President Obama's failures regarding the Gulf Oil spill disaster. Yes, the Bush Administration was spectacularly at fault, but President Obama is carrying on Bush's tradition with exuberance:

For weeks, the administration had been insisting that BP alone was to blame for the catastrophic oil spill in the Gulf – and the ongoing failure to stop the massive leak. "They have the technical expertise to plug the hole," White House spokesman Robert Gibbs had said only six days earlier. "It is their responsibility." The president, Gibbs added, lacked the authority to play anything more than a supervisory role – a curious line of argument from an administration that has reserved the right to assassinate American citizens abroad and has nationalized much of the auto industry. "If BP is not accomplishing the task, can you just federalize it?" a reporter asked. "No," Gibbs replied.
At page 6 of the online article, Rolling Stone documents the absurd government dishonest downplaying of the extent of the damage. Further, the U.S. government continues to allow BP to operate in near secrecy. See also this excerpt from this excellent highly-detailed article in Rolling Stone:
On the campaign trail, Obama had stressed that offshore drilling "will not make a real dent in current gas prices or meet the long-term challenge of energy independence." But once in office, he bowed to the politics of "drill, baby, drill." Hoping to use oil as a bargaining chip to win votes for climate legislation in Congress, Obama unveiled an aggressive push for new offshore drilling in the Arctic, the Southeastern seaboard and new waters in the Gulf, closer to Florida than ever before. In doing so, he ignored his administration's top experts on ocean science, who warned that the offshore plan dramatically understated the risks of an oil spill and petitioned Salazar to exempt the Arctic from drilling until more scientific studies could be conducted.

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Global warming as a market failure

At CNN, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway portray climate change as another victim of free market fundamentalism:

Since the early 1990s, there has been a sustained history of attempts to undermine any science that suggested that contemporary industrial society might be doing irreparable harm to human health and the natural environment. This included the science that demonstrated the harms of DDT, the dangers to children of second-hand smoke, the causes of acid rain, and the reality of the ozone hole. Often the same people were involved in several or even all of these attacks. The common feature in all these cases was a link to think tanks promoting free markets and opposing government regulations. One doesn't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see the pattern: People are loath to admit that our free market system has created problems that the free market has proved ineffectual to solve. Nicolas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, has called global warming "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen."

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