The Dry Garden: “If you want to save energy, save water”
Posted on | August 28, 2009 | 4 Comments
WEEK before last, more than 1,000 climate experts from around the world gathered in Stockholm for World Water Week. If you didn’t read about it or hear about it on TV, it’s not necessarily because of the crisis besetting modern journalism. It could easily be the subject. If there is anything that can clear a room faster than a plague of toads, it’s discussion of climate change and water.
Peter Gleick, a MacArthur fellow and president of the Pacific Institute in Oakland, was in Stockholm for the meeting. He is, above any Californian, our man on the unmentionable.
So are there ways to address this topic, I asked Gleick recently, without leaving everyone feeling utterably depressed and helpless? Absolutely, Gleick responded. “If you want to save energy, save water.”
To keep reading Emily Green’s latest Dry Garden column in the Los Angeles Times, click here.
Correction: In an early version of the article, I stated that “the pumps that convey and treat California’s water account for roughly 20% of the energy consumed in the state.” This was incorrect. It accounts for 20% of the electricity, along with 30% of California’s natural gas and 88 billion gallons of diesel fuel every year. — EG
Smoke, heat in Los Angeles
Posted on | August 28, 2009 | 1 Comment
For a special Greater Los Angeles weather advisory, click here
Tags: chance of rain > Emily Green > Los Angeles > National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
“Glen Canyon is talking back”
Posted on | August 27, 2009 | No Comments
“I don’t know that there’s very many people in the world who want to kiss, love, hug, lick, touch, and talk to sandstone,” says 89-year-old Katie Lee, as she sums up the loss she felt when the 170-mile Glen Canyon in Arizona was dammed in 1965. The Colorado River backed up, creating one of the largest reservoirs in the United States, Lake Powell, etching about 2,000 miles of shoreline as it flooded the main canyon and nearly 200 side canyons.
… To read more from a purely magical story in the environment pages of the Christian Science Monitor, click here.
Via the Great Basin Water Network and Aquafornia.
Too silly to water?
Posted on | August 27, 2009 | No Comments
THANKS to Thirsty in Suburbia for posting this ad from Denver Water. Click on the blades to see what grass would say if grass could speak.
The governor’s spokesman speaks
Posted on | August 27, 2009 | 3 Comments
UPDATED AUGUST 28TH, 11.59AM and again at 4.35pm: In response to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s insistence that he will not sign a water bill to solve California’s quagmire in the Bay-Delta “if it fails to include a water infrastructure bond that expands our water storage capacity – both surface storage and groundwater” this question was put to the governor’s press office on Tuesday August 25th:
Q: “Does he have any specific groundwater storage sites in mind? While underground storage has much to be said for it in preventing evaporative loss, one private groundwater ‘storage’ company is already advertising the governor’s endorsement. On June 5, the private water speculator Cadiz, Inc released an otherwise untraceable endorsement from him for a controversial groundwater project in the Mojave. This also includes mining the native groundwater.
(See graphic for the stock market bump in Cadiz shares caused by the endorsement)
Click here for the response from the Governor’s office
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