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Hydro Hogs
Our annual list of the biggest hosers in Portland.
Ian Demsky, Willamette Week
So how do Portlanders fare at conserving this precious resource [water]? Quite well, thank you. In fact, Portlanders cut their daily household water use from 181 gallons in 2001 to 163 last year. That’s impressive when you consider the national average is about 100 gallons higher, according to the American Water Works Association.
But the bad news is, not everyone in Portland or the surrounding suburbs has caught the civic spirit of conservation, as underlined by our (mostly) annual “Hydro Hogs” survey of the area’s top residential water users.
The average Portland household uses nearly 60,000 gallons of water a year. But our Hogs averaged 12 times that much!
…Here, then, are the region’s top water users, the market value of their homes as kept by county assessor’s offices (these tend to be lower than what they would actually sell for because the information is 18 months old and prices have continued to climb), the size of their property, how much water they used in the fiscal year ending in June and where they ranked in past surveys.
(27 Sept 2006)
One way of reducing resource consumption: shame. It works. -BA
In India, Water Crisis Means Foul Sludge
Somini Sengupta, NY Times
NEW DELHI — The quest for water can drive a woman mad.
Ask Ritu Prasher. Every day, Mrs. Prasher, a homemaker in a middle-class neighborhood of this capital, rises at 6:30 a.m. and begins fretting about water.
It is a rare morning when water trickles through the pipes. More often, not a drop will come. So Mrs. Prasher will have to call a private water tanker, wait for it to show up, call again, wait some more and worry about whether enough buckets are filled in the bathroom in case no water arrives.
“Your whole day goes just planning how you’ll get water,” a weary Mrs. Prasher, 45, recounted one morning this summer, cellphone in hand and ready to press redial for the water tanker. “You become so edgy all the time.”
In the richest city in India, with the nation’s economy marching ahead at an enviable clip, middle-class people like Mrs. Prasher are reduced to foraging for water. Their predicament testifies to the government’s astonishing inability to deliver the most basic services to its citizens at a time when India asserts itself as a global power.
The crisis, decades in the making, has grown as fast as India in recent years. A soaring population, the warp-speed sprawl of cities, and a vast and thirsty farm belt have all put new strains on a feeble, ill-kept public water and sanitation network.
(28 Sept 2006)
First in a three-part series. Saturday: Farmers’ wells are running dry. Sunday: Floods and how to harvest ample rains.
Beetles trigger gold rush in B.C.
Michael Kane, Vancouver Sun
The deadly march of the pine beetle is clearing the way for a new gold rush in central British Columbia.
Discovery of “significant concentrations” of gold and copper has triggered staking to some 600,000 hectares in the Anahim Lake and Nechako River areas, east of Tweedsmuir Park, said Lyn Anglin, president of Geoscience BC.
The hope is that drilling by exploration companies will uncover sufficient deposits to diversify forest-dependent communities at the heart of the mountain pine beetle infestation.
By removing tree cover and opening up access, the beetles have made it easier to carry out geochemical surveys in a relatively unexplored part of the province, Anglin said in an interview Wednesday. ..
(28 Sept 2006)
Let’s see… global warming -> pine beetle infestation -> deforestation -> geochemical surveys -> new mining. -BA
Forests Worth Far More Alive Than Dead
Stephen Leahy, Inter Press Service via Common Dreams
Boreal forests provide 250 billion dollars a year in ecosystem services like reducing atmospheric carbon and water filtration, but which have gone unacknowledged by governments and industry, experts say.
Governments need to begin accounting for those services before allowing timber, oil and gas and mining to carve up the world’s remaining northern forests, argues the Edmonton, Canada-based ecological economist Mark Anielski.
The globe-spanning boreal forest is the last great forest ecosystem — larger even than the Amazon. The boreal is also the largest terrestrial storehouse of carbon, making it one of the world’s best defences against global climate change.
“The boreal is like a giant carbon bank account. The forests and peatlands store an estimated 67 billion tonnes of carbon in Canada alone — almost eight times the amount of carbon produced worldwide in the year 2000,” Anielski told IPS.
Storing carbon and absorbing carbon dioxide are just one of 16 ecological services the boreal provides.
(28 Sept 2006)
This is no news to many the world over, the question is whether economics can adapt to pricing in the real cost of business, and whether politics is capable of making it happen.-LJ
Mystery of Methane Levels in 90’s Seems Solved
Andrew Revkin, New York Times
For years, scientists have been trying to figure out why the atmospheric concentration of methane, a heat-trapping gas, stopped increasing in the early 1990’s after tripling during the preceding 200 years.
Some scientists and environmental groups said the change could be a sign of success in efforts to stem emissions of methane, a gas that contributes to global warming. They included stanching pipeline leaks and capturing methane from landfills.
Now a new study by an international research team supports the suspicions of some experts that the leveling off was probably temporary and caused by a downturn in emissions from industry and most likely related to the collapse of the Soviet Union and its economy. ..
(28 Sept 2006)
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