Waterblogged.info plays the blame game! (And points fingers, too!)

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Jared Simpson

It’s my deeply held conviction that BP is to blame for the ongoing destruction of life in the Gulf of Mexico and that every pointer digit of every person in the U.S. should be locked on the multinational behemoth—and its odious little weasel of a CEO, Tony Hayward. More moderate voices, such as Professor Noah Hall at the Great Lakes Law blog, for whom I generally have profound respect, counsel against such emotional and unproductive thinking. “We” need to stop playing the “blame game,” advises Hall, and instead heed President Obama’s call to “break our oil addiction.”

If I had Bill Maher’s power to establish new rules, my first one would be that nobody, particularly someone like Hall who is supposedly providing unbiased expert information, would be allowed to use the term “blame game.” Resorting to it is a lame game, a gotcha gambit that according to current rules, somehow establishes the superiority of the party that first flings it at his/her opponent or uses it to preemptively bolster his/her analysis. In Hall’s case, for those of us who rightfully blame BP, it’s an insult to nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah us with the notion that we are playing some kind of childish game. The reason people are aiming their index fingers at BP (another Noah no-no), is because BP is to blame. It isn’t a goddamn game.

BP is a criminal enterprise. It didn’t simply cut “. . .corners on safety and environmental regulations,” as Hall daintily suggests. As Jon Stewart shows in a laugh-so-as-not-to-cry segment, BP has committed 760 “egregious and willful” safety violations since 2007. A figure I hadn’t seen until today’s research is even more mind boggling: Per this article in the blog maintained by the Center for Public Integrity, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued 862 citations to BP between June 2007 and February 2010 for alleged violations at its refineries in Texas City and Toledo, Ohio. Of those, 760 were classified as “egregious willful” and 69 were classified as “willful.” I do not understand the distinction. If a decision to circumvent regulations is “willful,” it’s by definition “egregious,” right?

The reason that its key decision makers haven’t been (and, you heard it here first, won’t be) brought to justice is because of the massive resources the company wields to buy our legislators and to control the public narrative of the energy crisis and the solutions, all of which amazingly require the participation of BP.

Excerpts from a  May, 2010 article in the business section of the New York Times:

  • After BP’s Texas City, Tex., refinery blew up in 2005, killing 15 workers, the company vowed to address the safety shortfalls that caused the blast.
  • The next year, when a badly maintained oil pipeline ruptured and spilled 200,000 gallons of crude oil over Alaska’s North Slope, the oil giant once again promised to clean up its act.
  • In 2007, when Tony Hayward took over as chief executive, BP settled a series of criminal charges, including some related to Texas City, and agreed to pay $370 million in fines. The company pledged to improve its “risk management.”
  • Despite those repeated promises to reform, BP continues to lag other oil companies when it comes to safety, according to federal officials and industry analysts. Many problems still afflict its operations in Texas and Alaska, they say. Regulators are investigating a whistle-blower’s allegations of safety violations at the Atlantis, one of BP’s newest offshore drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Waterblogged.info is slammed!

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Jared Simpson

fandWWWhat does a water blog worthy of the name do when the editor-in-chief is slogging through the swamp of endless demands that constitutes an annoying yet relatively lucrative day gig? Why, said water blog links to a really great site like Food & Water Watch–and lets said really great site do the heavy lifting.

But Waterblogged.info, asks the intrigued reader, what is Food & Water Watch all about? Say, intrigued reader, isn’t that what About pages are for? So I don’t personally have to explain every little thing to you? I’m on deadline here.

I can say that, unlike the weepy whiners here at Waterblogged.info, the folks at F&WW are activists, and only to happy to help you be one, too.

Good stuff, with a pile of information about all sorts of water issues.

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Hello Golden Age Lake

Posted on July 18, 2009 by Jared Simpson
Turkmenistan's President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow's name has eleven syllables.

Turkmenistan's President (digging) Gurbanguly Mälikgulyýewiç Berdimuhamedow's name is really long.

Yesterday we posted an elegiac farewell to the venerable Euphrates River, or at least the Iraqi portion. Today it is our happier task to welcome the nascent  man-made Golden Age Lake into the family of planetary bodies of water. (See the essential WaterWired on the same topic, but proper netiquette requires that you read this first, of course. More resources below.)

Central Asia's Turkmenistan is 80 percent desert. Its western border is defined by the saline southern portion of the Caspian Sea

Central Asia's Turkmenistan is 80 percent desert. Its western border is defined by the saline southern portion of the Caspian Sea

Recently conceived in the central Asian republic of Turkmenistan (you can locate it with the très cool Platial map in the right column), the lacustrine fetus is now in a lengthy period of gestation–to be slowly nourished by a intricate system of umbilical canals–in the sandy womb of the Karashor depression. (And with that, we drop the ridiculously overwrought birth metaphor.)

Eighty percent of Turkmenistan–which is roughly the size of California–is the black-sand Karakum desert. It’s understandable that the former Soviet republic would both want to “bring life” to the sand-covered immensity and to carry out what the AP article accurately calls “a Soviet-style engineering feat” to accomplish the transformation. What’s puzzling is why they think it will work.

You can read the article and the resources listed below for details. Broadly speaking, the Turkmen plan to create the lake by transferring excess water from the country’s soggy cotton fields to the northern Karashor depression via an enormous network of irrigation canals. Per the article:

Turkmen leaders say the massive lake will help drain water-logged cotton fields and encourage plant life and attract migratory birds to the desert.

And the hapless migratory birds will probably die, because, as critics of the project note, runoff from the cotton fields is heavily laced with toxic pesticides and fertilizers.

There is a long history of massive water transfers like this carried out by the Soviet Union that have devastated Central Asia’s water ecology. From the article:

For decades, Central Asia’s environment has suffered as a result of Soviet-era irrigation projects. The Aral Sea, which once lay on the border between the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, was the world’s fourth-largest lake, but has since shrunk by almost 90 percent, devastating fisheries as salinity levels spiked.

Please see our two-part ranting and raving about the Aral Sea calamity here and here: a brief and bitter history of a beautiful lake-based ecological system teeming with life, now, despite current efforts at revivification, remain a wasteland of  brackish  lifeless “water” and sand.

See WaterWired for a more detailed explanation of the Turkmenistan project, written in a sardonic voice that rivals our own. It’s the work Michael E. ‘Aquadoc’ Campana–hydrogeologist and Professor of Geosciences at Oregon State University–who writes on 6/9/09 that the project may be shelved due to almost unanimous global dismay and scorn, but it looks like the bulldozers and shovels are up and running at this point.

Resources:

Michael provides this link to an excellent comprehensive Science magazine article on the project.

A four-page report that looks to have been done by a French organization tied to UNESCO. Maps and charts.

Other articles:

Turkmenistan to create desert sea

Turkmenistan tries to green its desert with manmade lake

Giant Turkmen Lake Sets Off Environmental Alarms

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Eureka! California is No. 1!

Posted on September 4, 2008 by Jared Simpson

No. 1 in the heated global competition to annihilate natural hydrological systems, that is. This article by Rachel Olivieri of Alternet tells the whole obscene– almost NSFW–story. We’re not surprised at any particular item in this grim synopsis of California’s full-frontal and unrelenting assault on the environment, but seeing all of them distilled in a five-page article is truly distressing. The article’s subhed (that is not a typo; we insider editorial types spell it that way):

California has spared no expense to taxpayers or natural ecosystems to become the most hydrologically altered landmass on the planet.

But cheer up! Sure, as Oliviera points out, “Ninety percent of the coastal salt marshes between Morro Bay and San Diego are gone,” and “the [San Joaquin Delta] “is not on the verge of collapse, it is collapsing,” there’s always fun music! Click on the image to visit the MySpace page of a nice UK pop crew who inexplicably call themselves Pacific. They are also No. 1, if their latest album title isn’t some kind of Sarah Palin-type bald-faced prevarication. Warning: pretty sweet pop, if you’re watching the calories.

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It’s a drought, stupid! pt. 3: Georgia and the Chattahoochee River

Posted on November 3, 2007 by Jared Simpson

The first three words of the prologue of Jeffry Rothfeder’s 2001 book, Every Drop for Sale (at Amazon you can read the prologue; also a comprehensive review here) are The Chattahoochee River, set off from the text that follows with tasteful small caps. The Chattahoochee feeds Lake Lanier, Georgia’s rapidly-depleting primary reservoir.

Titled Beginning: Scenes of a Crisis, the chattahoochee_watershed.pngintroductory pages more or less predict Atlanta’s current desperate situation and help put the city’s water woes and the Southeast’s drought in perspective: Atlantans–or at least its ruling junta of developers and their cronies–are not victims of the current drought. They are victims of their own greed and failure to act responsibly.

Admittedly, Rothfeder is an unusually well-informed fellow, but we can probably assume that if he knew of the dangers in 2001, then powerful Atlantans knew as well and just ignored them and hoped for the best. If Atlanta runs out of water, it is their fault.

Atlanta has shown an almost bizarre disregard for the inevitable consequences of unbridled growth in an area that relies almost solely on one source of water, the mightily overused and abused Chattahoochee, which has got to be the hardest working river in flow business. [Ed note: Sorry.] A small body of water north of Atlanta, Allatoona Lake, is a secondary source, but the city currently faces losing rights to some of that.

But the developers and their political enablers in the behemoth of northern Georgia have also shown similar indifference to their fellow citizens, not just those of Florida and Alabama (related story here), who also depend on the Chattahootchee, but also fellow Georgians to the south who use the river’s water for irrigation.

The map above highlights the Apalachicola River system—the more detailed river at the left, which forms half of the Georgia/Alabama border, is the Chattahoochee, which Georgians refer to as the Hooch. The juncture of the Chattahoochee and Flint river near Florida’s border marks the beginning of the Apalachicola River, which eventually pours into the Apalachicola Bay.

As the astute Waterblogged.info notes in this entry about Atlanta’s predicament, (gracias a information from Cynthia Barnett’s book Mirage):

The [Apachicola] bay remains pristine not because of high-minded environmental concerns on the part of Floridians–don’t make us snort tap water out of our noses–but because it is the home of a thriving shellfish industry. A continued flow of freshwater dilutes the seawater, keeping ocean-based predators out of the bay and guaranteeing that their prey will be served in the restaurants and homes of land-based predators.

In 1991, Atlanta pumped 3.8 billion gallons of water from the Hooch; in 2001 the figure jumped to 20 billion gallons. Rationality would dictate that the powers-that-be advocate conserving water and limiting growth. But until very recently rationality has been off the table in greed-driven Atlanta, and the city’s “leaders” have chosen instead to grab more of the beleaguered Hooch’s water with new dams and reservoirs and to merrily continue building out every square foot of the region. All of this of course is enraging municipalities, regions, and states to the south.

Oh, and Atlanta is polluting the Hooch’s water for the folks downstream as well. This blog entry from North Georgia writer and naturalist, Randy Golden, traces the flow of the Chattahoochee, from a tiny stream north of Atlanta to a river that provides water to millions of Georgians:

Finally, the river passes to its death, at least for the next 50 miles downstream. The city of Atlanta so heavily pollutes its waters that the river becomes a wasteland. And according to the city, little can be done to prevent the pollution that costs Atlanta millions of dollars a year in EPA fines.

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Praying for a rainy night in Georgia, and soon

Posted on October 21, 2007 by Jared Simpson

(Update: The blog Atlanta Water Shortage seems to have closed its doors. The url is now occupied by the web host and domain name sleazebags at Godaddy.com)

This just in from our generally reliable Atlanta source: Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue cover1-1_50.jpghas declared a state of emergency due to the alarmingly persistent statewide drought. Georgians are waking up to the fact that they are running out of water and that the weather isn’t poised to perform a last-second rescue–meteorologists predict an unusually dry winter. For an ongoing source of clear-headed updates on the drought, visit the aptly-named blog, Atlanta Water Shortage.

Read this page of archived news stories beginning early this year that tracks Georgia’s slow awakening to the hard dry facts. Ain’t it funny how water drains away? Especially when it’s obvious that there is an unusually tenacious drought and everyone completely ignores it.

What would an unquestionably professional news outlet–say, Fox News–do in this situation? Why, march down southern-vintageladywpinkroses1.jpgSouth quicker than Sherman and get the point of view of the average Georgian–the crucial human angle with a touch of down-home wisdom that is most convincingly delivered with a southern accent.

Not wishing to be regarded as any less professional than the fab Faux, we sent our top investigative reporter to visit the très southern Southern Lady’s Vintage (caveat: The site’s deep-south ambience is enhanced with music that you can’t turn off.) to get the proprietor’s take on the situation.

Good call! Turns out that Barbara (her About Me gives no last name, but does inform us that she’s from the Sweet South, Georgia and that’s all the bona fides we need) is so concerned that she took time off from posting many seasonal pictures of punkins and way many of her extremely cute grandson, to entreat her readers to pray for the end of the drought! Hey, God, get ‘er done!

Adopting the courtly deference of a southern gentleman, Waterblogged.info makes way for a lady. Barbara on the drought:

Georgia is in a level 4 state of emergency due to it’s ongoing drought. Currently 85 of our northern counties are in a state of disaster. All exterior watering in North Georgia is banned. Restaurants are asked to only serve water to customers who ask for water. Extreme rationing will most likely be on the horizon. Many businesses are already affected by our lack of water. Our lakes are drying up and the authorities are saying that we have less than a three months supply of water in our Lake Lanier (emphasis–and punctuation–Barbara’s).

Lake Lanier is a crucially important reservoir, but federal law requires that much of its water be released to Florida lake_lanier_satellite_map.jpgso that it can feed the Apalachicola Bay, which water expert Cynthia Barnett (see below) describes as “the last unspoiled bay in Florida.”

The bay remains pristine not because of high-minded environmental concerns on the part of Floridians–don’t make us snort tap water out of our noses–but because it is the home of a thriving shellfish industry. A continued flow of freshwater dilutes the seawater, keeping ocean-based predators out of the bay and guaranteeing that their prey will be served in the restaurants and homes of land-based predators.

What, we asked Barbara–with that wheedling, high-pitched urgency practiced by actors posing as concerned journalists on television–can people do to help? Says Barbara:

I am again asking that you please remember to pray for God’s intervention and for God’s blessings on our state to help us avoid running out of water. Not only do we need rain, but please also pray that God gives our authorities the wisdom needed to guide us thru this drought (emphasis ours this time).

0472115634.jpgWhoooaaa, Barbara, nice thought, but that last one is a toughie, even for God, if you’re defining wisdom as enlightened knowledge. You see, your authorities already have their own brand of wisdom–let’s call it unenlightened self-interest–which tells them that the best way for them and their developer buddies to get even richer than they already are is to avoid doing anything until the problem gets so serious that they can’t ignore it anymore. And then they sue the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who, bless their incompetent little hearts, are just doing their job.

Hey, you might as well pray. You might as well do a goddamn rain dance–or precipitation rite, as we prefer over here at the scientifically-inclined Waterblogged.info–and you might as well attribute any eventual water falling from the sky to your superstitious supplications. The gods help those who help themselves, drawls Waterblogged.info, and until the South–particularly Georgia and the criminally wasteful state of Florida–starts responsibly addressing the problem of too-little-water-for-too-many-sweet-Southerners by passing stringent conservation laws and imposing limits on growth, it faces inevitable disaster.

At this moment, our minds turn, without a hint of ironic sarcasm, to Barbara’s grandson, who aside from being cuter than a water bug’s ear, happens to be a resident of Georgia. It’s his water, too.

To understand how one of the soggiest places on the continent can suddenly find itself running out of water, we suggest that you buy and–here’s the important part–read, Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S., by Cynthia Barnett, a real investigative reporter. The title, as titles do these days, says it all. The focus is on Floridian water follies which take place in the context of a full frontal assault on the environment waged by the entire Southeast.
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Congress is failing to act!

Posted on September 19, 2007 by Jared Simpson

When Waterblogged.info’s sources* revealed that the move to restore California’s San Joaquin River is stalled in Congress, an eerie hush fell over our newsroom; the clattering of the typewriters ceased, the editor stopped chewing on her cigar, the copy boy tip-toed out the door to find a better job. Why, we asked ourselves individually and collectively (in italics the way we always do when dumbfounded), why would Congress fail to fund an agreement that’s been almost 20 year in the making, and that has been ordered by a federal judge?

Our sources cleared up the mystery, and restored Waterblogged.info’s characteristic water-news-mongering din, by adding this:

The delay in Congress, according to supporters of the bill, is being caused by new Pay as You Go requirements, meaning the money needed for the restoration has to be offset somewhere else in the budget.

Oooohh, pay as you gooooo! Just like the war in Iraq! Well, that explains it! Satisfied that sanity had be reestablished, we turned back to editing and writing, and in the case of our star reporter, to finishing what the old-timer calls a snort from the bottle he keeps in his top left desk drawer.

Our sources, graciously—and for no additional fees—added the following, in case the reader needs additional information to fuel his or her outrage about the destruction of California’s second-largest river:

The once-mighty river, which literally foamed with spawning salmon back in the day, was dammed in 1943. Now, during summer months, two long sections of the river often dry up for more than 60 miles.

Environmentalists have characterized the draining of the San Joaquin as one of the most egregious examples anywhere of habitat destruction to quench man’s thirst for water.

*The San Francisco Chronicle—that in a rare courageous move—printed a great, well-researched story.

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Ten water-related reasons to leave California

Posted on September 14, 2007 by Jared Simpson

Many faithful Waterblogged.info readers have expressed urgent concern about the lack of new postings in the last few days. We do apologize, but there’s good reason: Turmoil. Editorial turmoil. Grumblings from the Waterblogged.info editorial board—”a complete lack of focus disguised as a global perspective,” and “no apparent mission aside from complaining and hand-wringing about water,” and “writers and editors being all over the map,”—have led to a classic full-blown board-versus-staff power struggle that has brought production to a standstill.

Why not just focus on California—the location of Waterblogged.info’s home state—our board members ask in a manner they mistakenly perceive to be reasonable. There’s enough critical water issues to produce an endless amount of entries, especially those insistently depressing ones that you seem to like so much, and that by the way are never goingwaterblogged-beat-final.jpg to get you much in the way of readership.

Think about it, they persist. This state is Katrina on steroids waiting to happen: Take the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta for starters. Now that’s a lifetime’s worth of whining and finger-pointing right there. Or the thousands of turbid lakes and dam-choked and polluted rivers and streams. The lack of effective legal limits on further development in areas that are already desperately scrambling to find new sources of water. Big agriculture that sucks up fully 85% of the state’s highest-quality water. The alarming increase of contaminated drinking water. Arnold Schwarzenegger!

But the Waterblogged.info staff remains united and defiant. We cover the waterfront. We want it all. We “pwn” water, as the kids would put it for some reason unclear to us. Wherever there is water, there we are as well. All over the map.

But conceding that the board members may have a point, and also hoping to get them off our backs and out of our business, we’ve decided to start posting more entries about our home state’s water woes. Below, we kick off our new commitment with another sop to our audience-obsessed board: a top-ten list.

Top 10 Water-related Reasons to Leave California

1. The imminent ecological collapse of the San Joaquin Delta

2. The imminent infrastructural collapse of the San Joaquin Delta (see linked article above)

3. The imminent, or more accurately, continued flooding of huge areas around the San Joaquin Delta

4. The lack of a coherent plan now or in the foreseeable future to deal with an antiquated water delivery system that mainly serves agriculture and Southern California

5. Californians drink polluted tap water (the linked page is information from a company that sells water filters and it has a very misleading name: Free Drinking Water.com. But there is a lot of well-organized data and reports.)

6. 85% of California’s managed water goes directly to agriculture; only 9% to domestic needs. (yes, the linked site wins the a-site-so-cheesy-looking-that-it-discredits-itself award—but it honors and accurately represents the work and thoughts of an unsung California conservationist, the late, great, California state senator John Nejedly.)

7. Agriculture uses pristine water; there are plans on the table to make up domestic water shortfalls with reclaimed sewage. Really.

8. Southern California

9. The Fed’s be way up in our water business (our researchers are following up on this 2005 article to see if there are updates)

10. Arnold Schwarzenegger is in charge of our water (or at least the portion not controlled by the federal government.) Reading the linked article is a good way to get a feel for the water-related stories that will soon dominate the news in California.

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Desalination back in the day

Posted on August 27, 2007 by Jared Simpson

Introductory articles about desalination invariably point out that simple schemes for desalting seawater have been practiced since very ancient times—sometimes to get at the salt rather than water. aristotle and quoteFor example, Waterblogged.info’s crack researchers have lost count of the number of times they’ve read that Aristotle wrote about a basic distillation process for separating salt and water. (He didn’t attempt to actually do it, but there’s a philosopher for you.)

The mini-history on this site states that there are references to desalination in ancient Egyptian, Sanskrit, Hebrew, Phoenician writings. The historical gloss here notes that the first recorded use of desalination was carried out by Japanese sailors using a system of earthenware jugs and bamboo tubes. All of this garners a collective shrug over here at Waterblogged.info headquarters, where we’re not at all surprised that ancient folk were smart enough to understand and utilize such obvious natural processes as evaporation and distillation. At any rate, Waterblogged.info, like the good web citizen it is, dutifully cites Aristotle and raises the bar by including a head shot and a quote.*

Relatively large-scale desal efforts took place much earlier than you might think, and much of it seemed to be driven by the need to supply ocean-going vessels with adequate drinking water. As far back as 1869, the first land-based steam distillation plant was established in Britain to deliver fresh water to ships. In his book, When Rivers Run Dry, global water expert Fred Pearce states that the first modern method for distillation of seawater was developed by the U.S. Navy to supply water to Pacific island bases during World War II.

Really large-scale desalting of seawater requires tremendous amounts of energy, and it has thus been a prohibitively expensive solution for most parts of the world. In the Middle East however, there is energy to ummm…burn, but very little fresh water. So it’s no surprise that the first really large-scale desalination plants were built in the freshwater-deprived and oil-glutted Gulf states.

Pearce also notes that roughly 20 percent of the world’s desalinated water—3 percent of the world’s drinking water supply (and 60 percent of that in the Middle East)—is produced by distillation. Waterblogged.info hastens to point out that this isn’t just about heating water and collecting all the little drops; state-of-the art seawater distillation is a complex, multi-step process, with a lot of variations. This paper about desalination technology provided by the California Coastal Commission will give the reader an overview that our overburdened staff has balked at writing.

But for concerned environmentalists—and until further notice Waterblogged.info stands proudly with them—large-scale desalination as the sole or even a major answer to replenishing rapidly disappearing fresh water is yet another Soviet desalination planthigh-tech fix that is going to do more harm than good. It will discourage the rescue and restoration of natural systems and water sources, diminish the already low level of enthusiasm for conservation, and possibly do great and irreparable harm to the oceans themselves. We will end up with a high-tech, industrialized dystopia of ugly, gigantic plants with huge, unwieldy, environment-unfriendly, and extremely costly distribution systems. (Full disclosure: Waterblogged.info has playfully included the photo of an old Soviet-era desal plant on the Caspian Sea. Under pressure from its editorial board, who see the image as misleading—probably because it’s most likely the ugliest example on the globe—Waterblogged.info directs you to a more positive image of desalination, albeit a futuristic fantasy, at Alexander Trevi’s wonderful Pruned.) See this list from Public Citizen to get a quick overview of the objections to desalination: Top 10 Reasons to Oppose Ocean Desalination.

* Don’t break out your ancient Greek dictionaries—it’s a fake quote. Here’s a real one:

“A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.”

More Aristotelian musings here. There are myriad quotation sites, but this one performs the valuable service of ranking Aristotle against others quotable notables, presumably so that you don’t have to. )

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Will desalination solve the global water crisis and end thirst as we know it?

Posted on August 26, 2007 by Jared Simpson

Of course not, but everyone—including the stridently gloomy and pessimistic Waterblogged.info—would like it to be true. An unlimited supply of water delivered to us just in the nick of time by heroic hydrologists is an appealing and comforting concept. The problem is that too many in the world see desal as a panacea that renders continued fretting about water shortages pointless.

When Waterblogged.info insists on spoiling the mood at social gatherings by going on about the looming global water crisis, rowdy revelers often retaliate by bringing up desalination pacific-institute-desal-pdf.jpgin a manner that suggests that we are hopelessly uninformed and a drag as well, and make a mental note to forget to invite us the next time.

Yes, Virginia, retorts Waterblogged.info, archly and knowledgeably, there is desalination and there are over 7,000 large-scale desal plants in operation all over the world—60% or so in the truly parched Middle East. In California, the home of Waterblogged.info’s North American headquarters, there are many desalination projects in various stages of planning and completion.

Desalination works, but it is also maddeningly complex and otherwise problematic when implemented on a large scale. The Pacific Institute (PI), an Oakland-based think tank, has posted a comprehensive report in PDF form about the future of desalination in California, called Desalination, With a Grain of Salt. You can go to PI’s download page by clicking on the image at the left. PI’s elevator pitch would probably be that desalination is a costly and otherwise problematic source of water that should be considered only when there are no other alternatives.

If the 100-page report seems daunting or, if you, like the CEO of this blog, are an important and busy executive, you can download the executive summary. Another relatively painless introduction is to view the following video—and the other three of a four-part series on YouTube—in which an astonishingly inarticulate San Francisco television host interviews Heather Cooley, a representative of PI, about the prospects for desalination in California. Be patient and let the host babble incoherently for a few minutes; Cooley is sharp and knowledgeable and the four short vids are a great introduction to desalination.

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