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Monday, September 17, 2007
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Water infrastructure is aging across the U.S. The midwest got a wake-up call with this summer's rains. Sewer systems need to be upgraded and replaced. Here's an article about our aging sewers from USA Today. They write:
Recent flooding in the Midwest has brought to the surface another crisis involving the nation's aging infrastructure: Heavy rains regularly overwhelm sewer systems, causing lake and river pollution. Overtaxed sewer systems send 860 billion gallons of raw or partially treated sewage each year into the nation's waterways, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. The problem of aging sewers -- some cities have sewage pipes that are 50 to 100 years old, the EPA says -- is growing worse as federal funding for repairs has fallen, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers. The society gave the nation's wastewater treatment plants a grade of D-minus in its latest Report Card for American's Infrastructure. That 2005 grade was down from a D in the previous report in 2001. A draft EPA report says cities should prepare for overflows to worsen, as climate change may lead to more rain and snow in the Great Lakes area and the Northeast.
"2008 pres"
5:55:41 PM 
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The elusive Northwest Passage is now navigable, according to the European Space Agency. They write: "Envisat ASAR mosaic of the Arctic Ocean for early September 2007, clearly showing the most direct route of the Northwest Pssage open (orange line) and the Northeast passage only partially blocked (blue line). The dark gray colour represents the ice-free areas, while green represents areas with sea ice."
Thanks to beSpacific for the link.
"2008 pres"
8:39:39 AM
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Jesus' General: "A true family values candidate enters the race. Alan Keyes."
"2008 pres"
8:16:54 AM
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TalkLeft: "Hillary Clinton's proposed health care plan is being released today. Like John Edwards and unlike Obama, her plan will call for mandatory insurance for all Americans. It will be much more streamlined and less complicated than the plan she introduced while Bill Clinton was President. For those who are already insured and happy with their plans, there won't be any required changes. Insurers will be required to provide insurance to everyone regardless of pre-existing conditions. The plan will provide tax subsidies to individuals and small businesses to help pay for health insurance. Part of the cost will be covered by rolling back some of Bush's tax cuts to those earning more than $250,000 a year."
"2008 pres"
8:13:06 AM
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Captain's Quarters: "An American security firm that has become synonymous with private security in Iraq will no longer have permission to operate there. The Iraqi Interior Ministry has revoked Blackwater's license after the fatal shooting of civilians after an attack on a US State Department motorcade. The move may put more pressure on the US military to provide support for such events in the future."
Andrew Sullivan: "Omar has a remarkable story of how al Qaeda managed to bring Shiites to the aid of neighboring Sunnis terrorized by an al Qaeda affiliate. Alas, the Baghdad government and US forces were not around to defend the Sunnis."
Juan Cole: "Alan Greenspan confirms that he urged the Bush administration to take out Saddam on grounds of petroleum security for the US, and says one official told him, 'unfortunately we can't talk about oil.' Long-time readers know that I think restructuring the architecture of US energy security was among the major motives for the Iraq War."
Daily Kos: "The cornerstone of [President] Bush's latest Iraq 'plan,' laid out in his prime-time speech Thursday, was reiterated in his radio address [Saturday]: 'return on success.' (Mr. Bush's spin team is seriously lacking in the waning days of his would-be reign.) That plan is, of course, playing out the clock. That plan is telling the soldiers they can return to their homes when they achieve success, but gives them no hope of finding that elusive goal. To make that goal even more unattainable, Bush provides no definition of what success is. He just tells them that reinforcing troops will be pulled out, stretching the remaining forces even thinner, bringing them that much closer to the breaking point."
NYT: " In a survey conducted Aug. 17-24 for ABC News, the BBC and NHK, the Japanese broadcaster, among a random national sample of 2,212 Iraqis, 72 percent in Anbar expressed no confidence whatsoever in United States forces. Seventy-six percent said the United States should withdraw now -- up from 49 percent when we polled there in March, and far above the national average. Withdrawal timetable aside, every Anbar respondent in our survey opposed the presence of American forces in Iraq -- 69 percent "strongly" so."
"2008 pres"
8:07:03 AM
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Here's a recap of last Friday's Colorado River District seminar, "Water: Fueling the Future", from The Aspen Times "reg". From the article:
"Half of the world's oil shale is within 100 miles of this room," Randy Udall of the Community Office for Resource Efficiency told the audience at the Two Rivers Convention Center in Grand Junction. And he thinks the oil shale should stay in the ground. "We have one energy boom in our region and that's plenty," he said. He said that oil shale has low energy content and it is not worth the environmental degradation, water use, and intense electricity use that would go along with intense oil shale production. Udall believes that pursuing energy efficiency measures makes far more sense than developing elaborate and technically complex schemes to heat the oil shale in the ground as part of the process of turning it into fuel. "I do think there are better ways to address our energy needs than oil shale," he said. "The way we are using petroleum right now in the United States today is a tragedy and it's kind of a bad joke and we will not use it this stupidly and this wastefully in the future. So oil shale will have to compete with all kinds of ways to save this precious fluid we call oil or 'black magic.'"
But Tony Dammer, the director of the Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves with U.S. Department of Energy, said the federal government is bullish on oil shale development and that the potential exists for 2 trillion barrels of oil to be extracted from the oil shale in the Green River Basin region. "It is a huge, secure source," he said...
The Energy Policy Act of 2005 calls for an acceleration of research into the potential to turn oil shale into fuel. The law calls for a reduction in regulations and the creation of incentives for the oil and gas sector to research how to produce oil from oil shale on federal lands. Dammer said the oil shale industry is growing and when the price of oil gets high enough, oil shale could become feasible. As he spoke on Friday, the price for a barrel of crude oil was at a record high of more than $80 a barrel...
Udall and Dammer do agree that the world has passed "peak oil" production and that fuels that seem far fetched today will become less so as shortages increase and prices rise. They also both agree that oil shale production would require vast amounts of water, with conservative estimates suggesting it would take three barrels of water for each barrel of oil produced. "We could be looking at putting an additional demand, in terms of extraction of water from the Colorado River, of between 180,000 acre feet per year to 418,000 acre feet per year," said Cathy Wilson, the acting deputy division leader of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division at the Los Alamos National Laboratory...Wilson said there would be enough water in the Colorado River system for regional oil shale development, but that new dams and reservoirs would be needed to keep water levels artificially high during dry years.
The federal government is also preparing rules and regulations in order to lease land for oil shale, tar sand and other forms of "unconventional" fuel sources. Jamie Connell, the field manager for the BLM's Glenwood Springs office, said that 70 percent of oil shale deposits are on federal land. The BLM is preparing a draft environmental impact statement regarding new regulations for the leasing of federal lands for oil shale and tar sands production in the U.S., including oil shale resources in western Colorado, eastern Utah and southeastern Wyoming. "It's still rather unclear what the exact development will look like, so it makes it a little bit difficult to evaluate the exact impacts," Connell said, adding that three different companies, including Shell and Chevron, are now researching oil shale production techniques. The draft EIS is expected to be out this winter.
More coverage from The Montrose Daily Press. They write:
Higher gas prices after hurricanes Rita and Katrina has driven the energy industry, prompting more resources to be tapped into, Brian Macke said. Macke is the director of the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission.
Steve Gunderson, who is the director of the Water Quality Control Division at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, said that water near drilling sites is susceptible to containing high levels of salinity. Gunderson said high-salinity water is perfectly fine for livestock, and in fact is often sought out by ranchers. However, the same water that is good for cattle can wreak havoc on crops. So somewhere along the line, Gunderson said, a balance must be struck to ensure there is enough water for both agricultural uses...
What needs to happen in terms of energy development and water is better balance and open communication, according to Dr. John Redifer, executive director of the Natural Resource and Land Policy Institute at Mesa State College. "We need to have an honest dialogue about what those risks and problems are and find solutions," Redifer said, referring to the controversy between oil shale development and water quality. Brian Hall, a senior economics major at Colorado College and a former researcher with the State of the Rockies Project, said that through proper enforcement, energy development could pose a subtle threat to water.
More Coyote Gulch coverage here.
"2008 pres"
6:18:55 AM
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© Copyright 2009 John Orr.
Last update: 3/15/09; 1:26:30 PM.
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