The corruption of the leaders and the complacency of the West in accepting that corruption is a recurring theme. If the USA does not stop supporting dictators and embracing corruption as part of the “status quo” then no amount of good will or aid will suffice.
2004, needs updating and a web site, July 28, 2008
Robin Clarke
Published in 2004, this is an extraordinary book for its combination of authoritative sources, visualizations, and the plain fact that water, not energy, is the Achilles' heel of civilization.
The authors are extremely well-qualified, and I really appreciate their source references, many of which are online. Sadly, they have not created a web-site as a companion to the book, and so we are stuck with the best that analog hard copy can do, and no where near the power of digital interactive visualization and modeling.
Normally I would take one star away becuase the publisher has not done their job in listing this book at Amazon. They should have posted the table of contents at a minimum, and ideally also offered Amazon “inside the book” privileges. Below is the table of contents, the easiest way for me to both praise the book and inform prospective buyers.
Part 1: A Finite Resource
Fresh Out of Water
More People, Less Water
Rising Demand
Robbing the Bank
Part 2: Uses and Abuses
Water at Home
Water for Food
Irrigation
Agricultural Pollution
Water for Industry
Industrial Pollution
Water for Power
The Damned
Part 3: Water Health
Access to Water
Sanitation
Dirty Water Kills
Harbouring Disease
Insidious Contamination
Part 4: Re-shaping the Natural World
Diverting the Flow
Draining Wetlands
Groundwater Mining
Expanding Cities
Desperate Measures
Floods
Droughts
Part 5: Water Conflicts
The Need for Cooperation
Pressure Points
Weapon of War
Part 6: Ways Forward
The Water Business
Conserving Supplies
Setting Priorities
Vision of the Future
Part 7: Tables
Needs and Resources
Uses and Abuses
Double Spaced Very Useful Tour of the Energy Horizon, May 2, 2008
Miriam Horn
I like this book and recommend it for students of any age from high school to the geriatric crowd that I represent. It has a super index but no mention of Lester Brown or Herman Daly, but that is offset by back cover recomendations from E. O. Wilson, Mark Lewis, and Michael Bloomberg.
Highlights from my fly leaf notes:
+ 1977 Clean Air was a command and control one size fits all that did not pass the market test
+ Lead author and others with the Environmental Defense Fund were instrumental in getting the 1990 Clear Air Act passed.
+ Making clean air a commodity makes the environment a profit center
+ The author is fully aware that Acts of God are in fact Acts of Man. Another book, I cannot remember which, tells us that changes to the planet that used to take 10,000 years now take three. Not only do we need real time science, but we also need The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal
+ Clean energy is described by one sources as “the mother of all markets.”
+ The author considers the energy markets to be completely “rigged” and notes that grain based ethanol, which I have called idiocy on more than one occasion, exists because of lobbying from Archer Daniels Midland among others.
+ In 2005 solar power grew by 45%.
+ Solar is distributed power, storage is a major obstacle.
+ The author clearly excited by Silicon Valley nano-tech, and also cautious about what we do not know when it is destabilized.
+ The solar energy industry is shooting for the Home Depot marketplace, stuff so simple I could install it. The author also tells us that banks are starting to get into power purchase agreements that will finance clean energy the way a home or car might be mortgaged. Home depot level will also mean graceful degradation and no “crash” or energy equivalent of Bill Gate's “blue screen of death”.
+ Concentrating the sun is another promising approach. The author tells us that solar energy is six times more land efficient than wind energy.
+ Cuba is sitting on a sugar cane gold mine, biofuels with zero emissions are on the way from sugar modification.
+ Algae is covered, as well as bacteria.
+ Ocean power is also making headway, and is consistent, predictable, and has a high energy density.
+ Earth thermal includes hot water that comes with oil, previously considered a nusiance.
+ Coal is getting a make-over, and biomimicry is helping. It must get a make-over because it is an essential part of the mid-term power solution.
+ Sequestration is working and will work long enough to matter.
+ Regenerative reserves (e.g. the Amazon) are an essential part of the future. More more on this see the lovely and informative Climate Change and Biodiversity
+ Manure is turning into a major league energy source (when it's not contaminating our spinach, there is a whole land under surface water use deal here that we just do not understand.
+ Energy efficiency, hybrid cars, and smarter land use (compacting towns and cities to increase efficiency of public transportation) are part of the solution.
+ All parties will spend $10 trillion over the next thirty years to achieve clean energy.
This is a fine book. See also the WIRED Magazine Cover Story from 2000, it came out the same month Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon executives.
Superb Primer for Any Level, Needs Two Missing Pieces, April 25, 2008
Worldwatch Institute
This a superb edited work that melds chapters (with notes at the end) from world-class authors on a broad range of topics.
I kept this at five stars until the end and then I could not stand it anymore. There are at least five reasons to reduce it to four. Here are the first two.
1. As someone who grew up with Banks & Textor and have created four analytic models in my lifetime, I am growing increasing impatient with the continued fragmentation of research and writing. There is a model available: ten threats (from the UN High Level Threat Panel), twelve policies, eight challengers. We need to start fusing, analyzing, visualizing and discussing all ten threats in relation to all ten policies. I am no longer content to read about water in one chapter, meat in another, and so on. Stop putzing around and create the EarthGame with all information, all languages, all the time–geospatially grounded of course–and let's get on with the task of identifying with precision the global range of gifts table down to the household level, from $1 to $100 million.
2. I am increasingly irritated by the little cabals that strive to cite only themselves, and furthermore, have their own language to distinguish them. “Get the price right” instead of “true cost”? Get over it. Enough already. I am also increasingly of the view that the Notes must be indexed. The notes are good, but when the lead chapter talks about “Adjust Economic Scale” and fails to cite Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries or Human Scale I growl.
Together with Plan 3.0 and Vital Signs, both linked by another reviewer, this book represents a fine stand-alone study set if you want to limit yourself to the WorldWatch oracles and dismiss all others.
Here is what grabbed me about this book:
+ Opens with utterly sensational four pages of “timeline” for 2007 with little blocks that are priceless. I really like this.
+ Chapter 1 does a fine job of listing:
– Four flawed economic assumptions:
– 1. Independence of economic activity from “infinite” nature
– 2. Growth should be the primary economic objective
– 3. Markets are always superior to governments at allocating resources
– 4. Humans are economic maximizers and place no value on community
This may sound simple but I admire it.
– The seven big ideas for economic reform:
– 1. Adjust economic scale
– 2. Shift from growth to development
– 3. Make prices tell the ecological truth [note: for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility–WISER–to not be in index irritates me so much I almost take the fifth star again).
– 4. Account for nature's contributions [I am infuriated by a second hand citation. I am not familiar with more than a couple of books, but to not mention Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications or The Future of Life moves this book, as very good as it is–toward Classic Comics book shallowness.
– 7. Value women [here I am irritated by the isolation of these authors and their citations from a broader understanding of why we should value women: because it is a proven fact that there is no better investment, dollar for development dollar, than a dollar spend educating women. That ripples through society and impacts on the men big time.]
The second chapter has a prices Figure showing that computer diffusion is growing arithmetically while cell phone diffusion is growing logrithmically plus. My comment: Nokia is slowing beginning to grasp what I told their Chairman a year ago: give the cell phones to the poor free, sell the call, not the phone (and my other idea, educate the poor one cell call at a time, starting with call centers in India and China, and then monetize the transactions. Having six farmers call in asking about the same animal disease is PRICELESS! How governments cannot understand this simple logic is beyond my comprehension.
Across the book the tables and figures are powerful but they are not integrated into a total model (e.g. you should not grow grain with water you cannot afford to create fuel instead of feeding a family when you could run 35 million cars a year on Cuban sugar cane sap).
Toward the end are two very important chapters, one on the financial implications of sustainability (i.e. what alternative vehicles can be used to push back on predatory lending, absentee ownership, and wasteful food practices) and on harnessing human energy (e.g. to plant trees).
I put the book down with irritation–Open Money, Collective Intelligence, even the word Citizen are not in this book–and I again harken to the need for an EarthGame in which all knowledge, all budgets, all citizens, can come together to game, understand, dialog, and decide.
We knew most of this stuff in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's–at the academic level–but the politicians were able to ignore us because a) the people were unwitting and b) low gas prices and high Exxon bribes were great for the smokey room crowd. That's over. It's time for the academy to start producing explicit recommendations and budgets, at the zip code level, that we can use to beat politicians into submission or out of office.
Please have it online by 4 July 2008, and thank you for all the wonderful work up to this point. Time to bring this program home.
