Bitter Fruit

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I am frankly one of those who has celebrated higher oil prices, getting a quiet smile as I see the sign at the corner gas station hit $3 a gallon. Perhaps I wasn’t thinking this through, as Keith Johnson suggests:

What’s most striking is the bitter irony. Many proponents of alternative energy have long cheered for high oil prices. The more expensive oil is, the theory goes, the more incentive there is to move to other energy sources. The Anything But Oil mantra assumed the Anything has got to be cleaner than burning hydrocarbons.

And what happened? High oil prices made hard-to-recover fossil fuels—not just cleaner alternatives—an economic possibility. And the hard-to-recover fossil fuels are even dirtier than Middle East sweet crude.

Drinking Pee

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Eilene Zimmerman on efforts in Southern California to do that which seems both obvious but somehow icky: treat our sewage and then reuse it:

We don’t have enough water where we need it; if we don’t learn to deal with drinking toilet water, we’re going to be mighty thirsty.

Water in the Desert: Main Break Edition

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It’s sort of an infrastructure triple junction. Below, you’ve got a big open concrete channel that substitutes for what used to be arroyos carrying water off of what is now a city. Adjacent to it, you’ve got a buried water main, carrying drinking water to the residents of that city. Above it, you have one of the city’s main automobile arterials – importantly, one of the few big streets that cross the Rio Grande.

Water main breaks, undermining street. Hilarity ensues.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Forecast Edition

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On the current status of our snowpack:

Much of New Mexico is just like the forecasters said we should expect it to be: dry. With La Niña’s cool Pacific waters pushing storms away from us this year, Albuquerque and most points to the south and east have been drier than average since Oct. 1.
The federal government’s weekly Drought Monitor has raised warnings for much of New Mexico’s eastern plains, with the state’s far northeast corner in “moderate drought.”
But the key exception may be the one that matters most: New Mexico’s mountains, the source of our river runoff.
As of Friday, snowpack in the high country that feeds the Rio Grande headwaters was 59 percent above normal, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service. Snow in the headwaters of the San Juan is 50 percent above normal, and snowpack in the mountains that feed the Pecos is 25 percent above normal.

“Dank, cloudy and small”

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Dank, cloudy and small BritainBy way of describing its home island’s lack of suitability as a place to grow biofuels, the Economist in its Jan. 19 issue describes Britain as “dank, cloudy and small.”

Makes me want to fly over on one of Sir Richard’s biofuel jets to go on holiday.

Heath Ledger Survey

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I was puzzled by the range of reactions I heard from those around me yesterday to the death of actor Heath Ledger. So I’m conducting a survey. When you heard the news that Heath Ledger died, was your reaction:

  1. Who’s Heath Ledger?
  2. Wasn’t he that guy in that movie about those guys?
  3. OMG!
  4. Other (please explain)

Include your age in your answer. My hypothesis is that this is generational. A 20-something coworker’s instant response was “1”. Another 40-something coworker actually got a call from his college freshman daughter, who lives in another state, telling him the news.

For the record, my answer was “1”, and I’m 48.

Wal-Green

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I have no idea how to judge whether this is serious, as opposed to greenwashing, but I do know that Wal-Mart could probably do more than any three of the rest of us combined:

“We see customers having to choose between filling up their gas tanks or buying medicine and food and clothes,” ran Mr. Scott’s prepared remarks. “Somebody has to do something. And your Wal-Mart will.”

Among the prescriptions: Make the chain’s most energy-intensive products, from TVs to laptops, 25% more efficient over the next three years.

“We do not know exactly how we will get there. We do not even know if our suppliers can make items like hair dryers use 25% less energy,” Mr. Scott’s speech read, before adding ominously: “But we do know that our approach works–to partner with suppliers.”