A Drought-Stricken Land Offers Help With Water:
After more than a decade of failed rains, the Murray-Darling river system in the southeast of Australia — the catchment basin for roughly one-seventh of the country — dries up before it reaches the sea.
Intense drought has forced Australians to adapt and think about how to manage water. Despite usage restrictions and the building of new desalination plants, water remains scarce. At the end of August, reservoir storage levels in some metropolitan cities were as low as 28.4 percent of maximum capacity. The Pykes Creek reservoir in the state of Victoria, with a capacity of 22 billion liters, or 5.8 billion gallons, was barely 2.5 percent full.
“The approach is now to diversify supply, rather than relying on surface water,” said Andrew Speers, industry programs manager of the Australian Water Association, the industry’s main representative body.
Will we learn how to use water much more intelligently? Of course. Will it be enough to prevent some major human and economic impacts? Not a chance.
Climate change bill is in trouble:
If you think the partisan divide over healthcare reform is ugly, take a look at the animus in the Senate as debate continues on a key climate change bill. So wide is the gulf that long-held Senate traditions on decorum are breaking down. And as Washington fiddles, the Earth burns.
The Senate version of a House bill aimed at capping greenhouse gas emissions was stalled last week by Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee, who boycotted the discussion, demanding that the Environmental Protection Agency agree to do a more thorough study of the bill’s economic impact. It was an ugly and highly unusual tactic aimed at delaying a bill that has already been thoroughly vetted by the EPA, leaving Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), the committee chair, little choice but to resort to extremes herself. She put the bill, S. 1733, up for a vote Thursday without a single Republican present. That angered Republicans but was even more frustrating for Democrats — several wanted to amend the bill, but with no one from the minority party present, no amendments were allowed. The bill passed, 11-1.
This doesn’t bode well. Wiser heads are working to salvage the legislation, with John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Joe Lieberman (I-Connecticut) announcing plans to craft a bill that can attract the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. But Democrats from Southern and coal-producing states are reluctant to sign on, and attracting any GOP votes will be a challenge; many believe the chances are slim that the bill, which sets a cap on emissions while allowing polluters to trade carbon credits, will be approved this year.
Such a failure would be disastrous in more ways than one. With no commitment to cut greenhouse gases in the U.S., it would be next to impossible to get other big polluter nations on board in Copenhagen in December for a global agreement on fighting climate change. Another year’s delay will make future efforts more expensive and less effective. With a third of all Senate seats up for election in 2010, it will become even harder to pass controversial legislation.
Climate skeptics would celebrate all this as a victory. They are not swayed by the dire forecasts of the International Panel on Climate Change, nor the endorsements of those findings by the national academies of science of the U.S., Russia, China, Britain and Brazil. Confronted by a crisis whose most terrible repercussions will come after they’re dead, they’d rather stick their children with the bill.
I’m shocked — shocked I tell you!– to find out that there’s myopia-induced idiocy warping the legislative process when trying to create public policy that has a major portion of its benefits many election cycles in the future.
Britain’s nuclear strategy threatens destruction of Kalahari:
The hidden cost of Britain’s new generation of nuclear power could be the destruction of the Kalahari desert in Namibia and millions of tonnes of extra greenhouse gas emissions a year, the Observer has discovered.=
The desert, with its towering sand dunes and spectacular lunar-like landscapes, is at the centre of an international uranium rush led by Rössing Uranium, a subsidiary of the British mining giant Rio Tinto, and the French state-owned company, Areva, which part-manages the nuclear complex at Sellafield and wants to build others in Britain.
Tomorrow, Ed Miliband, the energy secretary, will release a batch of plans covering every aspect of Britain’s strategy to replace its ageing nuclear power stations.
The documents are expected to set out the government’s case on the need for nuclear power, based on the demand for secure, low-carbon energy supplies, the suitable sites and designs for new reactors, and how the decommissioning and safe storage of radioactive waste can be guaranteed.
It is not expected to consider the source of the fuel needed for the new reactors. But Rössing is expanding its existing giant mine – which already provides nearly 8% of the world’s uranium – into the Namib-Naukluft national park. Areva has leased hundreds of square kilometres of the desert near Trekkopje, where it plans to build one of the world’s largest uranium mines.
It’s almost as if all these different parts of the world were somehow interconnected in one giant, oh, I don’t know, call it an “environment”. Go figure.
Environmental Change To Impact Health of Millions Via Threats To Food, Air and Water, Report Finds:
In the run-up to historic climate talks in Copenhagen, a new report by the Worldwatch Institute and United Nations Foundation (U.N.F) warns that mankind’s impact on the environment threatens not just the health of other species, but of the human race as well.
The report, Global Environmental Change: The Threat to Human Health, notes that rapid changes in climate and land are shifting the distribution of diseases like malaria, making more people sick in many cases. These shifts pose the biggest threat to poor populations in developing countries, according to the report. Most of the damage can be prevented, though, via national-level risk assessments and technical and financial assistance that help countries adapt to the health impacts of accelerating environmental change.
The report was authored by Samuel S. Myers, MD, an instructor at Harvard Medical School and a research associate at the Harvard University Center for the Environment.
“It is increasingly apparent that the breadth and depth of the changes we are wreaking on the environment are imperiling not only many of the other species with which we share the ecological stage, but the health and well being of our own species as well,” Myers wrote.
Heart of Dryness: Climate Change Coping Strategies:
Circle of Blue’s “Water + Climate: Words” highlights literary investigations of water and climate intersections. As politicians debate the line-by-line contents of a global climate change treaty, the human and environmental drama is playing out around the world, from the deserts of Africa to the shores of Greenland. In Heart of Dryness journalist and author James Workman shares the lives of Botswana’s Bushmen, an indigenous hunter-gatherer population that has been forced to relocate by the national government since the 1990s. As he follows this population’s struggle for land, he comes face-first with the multi-layered reality of a world increasingly struggling for water while battling the effects of a warming planet.
“The main thing was to have a story that would illustrate to the lay person so that they understand these water issues,” Workman tells Circle of Blue. “If your bring these issues down to the people who laugh, dance and have babies like you, you care about them and see the parallels and connections between their life in the Kalahari and yours – you see their humanity.
“When we hear the statistic that 2.2 billion people live without sanitation, it’s shocking, but at the same time it’s meaningless.”
For two years Workman lived and traveled with the Bushmen as they battled the national government in court over access to the Central Kalahari Game Reserve (CKGR). At the end of 2006, the Bushmen won the right to return to the CKGR while Workman was blacklisted from the country for his stories.
Now he shares these intimate stories with Circle of Blue, weaving each installment into the themes of our Water+Climate series. The first excerpt examines their struggle for food in the face of political and environmental obstacles.
