Modeshift

OKUND, UTTARAKHAND, INDIA — We made the crossing at night from Chamoli, reaching this Himalayan foothill town after dark. The innkeeper, anxious for guests in a travel economy that came to a standstill in mid-June, cooked dal and nan bread for dinner and then showed us to a room that was unlit and unheated.

It didn’t matter. Thick blankets kept us warm. And at dawn we awoke to strong black coffee and the sun lighting the 21,000-foot Sumaru summit, turning the rock and snow from pink to orange to white. The lower slopes, terraced by generations, dove to the fast-moving Mandakini River. The current poured over gravel and boulders, the sound of it rising out of the tight valley like a beast’s heavy breathing.

For five long days I traversed this region of the Himalayas in the company of Dhruv Malhotra, a young New Delhi-based photographer, and Vinod, a professional driver raised in the hills. I’d come to understand the consequences of a flood in June that trapped and killed 30,000, maybe 40,000 Hindu pilgrims during days of terror.

Steep mountains. Fast moving water. Active towns are the principle metaphors of the Himalayas. So is danger. This is an unforgiving landscape. On June 16 and June 17 the mountains unleashed such fury that four towns on two rivers — the Mandakini and the Alaknanda – were washed away. Entire sides of mountains slid into rivers, and with them came whole sections of mountain highways. Dozens of one-way-in, one-way-out towns and several larger cities were cut off for weeks, supplied with food and fuel by the Indian army.

I’m back in India for a month, just as I was at this time in 2012. I’m here on assignment for Circle of Blue, and our partner, the Washington-based Wilson Center. Over the last three years we’ve collaborated on our Global Choke Point project to understand how nations are responding to the resource confrontation that now defines so much of our economy and our global condition — the rising demand for energy and food in an era of diminishing freshwater reserves.

Last year in Choke Point: India I reported on India’s cycle of risk involving surplus grain production in western states and rising coal production in the east. This year we want to dig deeper into India’s coal production and consumption cycle, its solar and wind sectors, and its ambitious hydro-electric development program.

It’s the latter that prompted this trip to the Himalayas, where India says it wants to build the bulk of the 292 new hydroelectric power projects that are either under construction or proposed. India already has 176 operating hydro projects that account for a bit less than 20 percent of the country’s electrical generating capacity. There are – or were – 15 operating projects in Uttarakhand before the flood. One was buried under boulders and rubble on the upper Alaknanda. Another was damaged by silt from the flood tide that poured into its powerhouse and fouled generating turbines.

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NEW YORK — Five years ago Linda Ragsdale, an artist and mother from Nashville, survived a terrrorist attack in Mumbai, India that killed 166 people. In a keynote speech at the BEIGIN H2O conference in Beijing, Linda described the orderly persistence of the attack on the hotel where she stayed. Not a soul stirred in the auditorium at the International School of Beijing as she recounted the sound, the smell, the sight of the gun barrel, and the determined and surprising empathy she felt for the attacker (he was about the same age as her son).

That gunman, neatly dressed in khakis, strode into the restaurant where she sat and unleashed bursts of bullets, like angry bees from a hive. One of them slashed through three feet of her torso. She was saved by strangers who pulled her into the restaurant kitchen and then into the back seat of a taxi that raced to the hospital. In the years since, Linda told 500 students, she’s devoted herself to founding a non-profit group, The Peace Dragon, and its signature The Peace Master Class, which helps students around the world “engage their human powers of view, voice, and choice to have a super life.” Her story, personal and riveting and inspiring, is all the more courageous because her life could be riven by resentment and revenge. “I know what a bullet can do to the human body,” Linda said. “And I’ve never held a gun.”

In early November I spent almost a week with Linda, and with four more people of accomplishment at BEIGIN 2013, a conference designed to immerse students from 42 elite international high schools from across Asia in the specifics of a dozen risks to global sustainability — among them global warming, fisheries depletion, poverty, disease, pollution, conflict, labor, deforestation, migration, weak Internet infrastructure and access, and water supply.

That’s a heavy list for the millennial generation to accept even as it’s compelled to think about solutions. It’s a dispiriting list for baby boomers. My generation developed and enforced the modern environmental policy and regulatory apparatus to limit industrial depradations in the West. We’ve been unable, though, to muster the resolve to adapt the rules to new conditions, and utterly failed to gain a grip in the developing world.

But it’s also a list that can be solved with the help of the fine young minds coming up the pike. That was the point of the BEIGIN conference, which was organized by faculty and staff at the International School of Beijing. The conference’s transactional and communications hub was a three-person team that included Simon Parker, the assistant director of student activities, and his faculty colleagues Zerlina Cheng and Brad Philen. Parker, Cheng, and Philen clearly set out to make a strong case for what the conference smartly referred to as H2O – Hope. Humanity. Opportunity.

Indeed, the world contends with all manner of environmental and economic risks, much of it caused not by a shortage of resources or of recognition, but by a desert of empathy and a barren storehouse of courage to act.

In Australia, a nation wracked by drought and water scarcity, much of it influenced by burning the nation’s abundance of coal, new elections bring to power lawmakers that are set on producing and combusting even more coal.

In India, where water supplies are draining from beneath the land and coal production is soaring to keep pace with escalating energy demand, the 700 million people connected to agriculture are provided free energy and free water as a function of 50-year-old law and policy. The national decision to drive economic growth with reckless resource policy encourages more profligate water use, much higher climate-changing coal consumption, and built-in inefficiencies that are doing the opposite of what India wants. India is producing massive food surpluses that rot in warehouses. And the country’s economy is slowing.

I could go on. More than 40 years ago my Great Lakes home region in the United States helped lead the work to enact the Clean Water Act, which scrubbed industrial and municipal pollutants out of the five big lakes. The nation acted with intelligence and persistence to enforce the law. The water got clearer, in fact much clearer. New conditions today, though, are pouring phosphorous into the lakes, leading to great blooms of toxic algae, now the most important and visible threat to the Great Lakes. But the states and the nation that embraced the Clean Water Act are politically and culturally helpless to respond to these new conditions, the result of a democracy deformed by economic fear, selfishness, and irrational ideology.

Young people today are aware of the challenges they face. What they say they need are new operating principles, an approach to engaging information and the world that leads to promise in an era of apparent peril. In choosing the conference’s keynote speakers and workshop leaders, Parker and his colleagues sought people who could help lay that kind of pragmatic intellectual and emotional foundation.

What the keynoters and workshop leaders discovered during the six days we spent together — teaching in classes, hanging out at meals, touring the Great Wall, drinking beer downtown — was that we were as open to learning from each other as the students.

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Peter Salovey, a psychology scholar and bluegrass musician, was inaugurated as Yale University’s 23rd president on Sunday. The weekend festivities included dance parties, lectures, panels, performances, and an afternoon block party. Photo/Keith Schneider

NEW HAVEN, Conn. — The sound of trumpets and nearly 600 applauding guests greeted Peter Salovey and his wife, Marta Elisa Moret, as they arrived at the Yale University Commons on Saturday night for a sit-down celebratory dinner. The following afternoon Salovey, who is 55 years old and has spent his entire career at America’s third oldest university, was formally inaugurated as Yale’s 23rd president in a ceremony of music, oratory, and pageantry held at Woolsey Hall, which seats nearly 3,000 people, and was packed.

Salovey and his wife are known in New Haven, and across American academia, as genuinely down to earth, self-effacing, approachable, and modest. Salovey’s career at Yale, where he received his graduate degrees, and where he began teaching in 1986, is distinguished by the close personal rapport he built with students, and with his faculty and administrative peers.

Peter Salovey, Yale’s new president. Photo/Keith Schneider

Neither he nor his wife is especially devoted to making big public statements about their succession to the helm of a great American institution. Nor could the two have anticipated that the inaugural weekend here, a study in the best of what America is, would fall on the same days that, 300 miles south, political Washington, D.C. would be engulfed by a dangerous political crisis that reflected our very worst.

The juxtaposition, while painful,  was illustrative.

As professor, department chairman, dean, and provost, Salovey contributed to the emergence of Yale University as a citadel of diversity, scholarship, and citizenship. Yale’s administrators were led during the past two decades by former President Richard Levin, an economist, who charged his top aides with rebuilding the New Haven campus, working with the city to revitalize downtown and nearby neighborhoods, establishing international programs and ties to overseas universities, and providing more scholarships and financial aid for talented but less privileged students.

Yale accomplished all this and more while also adhering to its history of excellence in scholarship. The school attracted almost 30,000 applications last year and is tougher than ever to get into. Those accepted have the highest standardized test scores of any college in the country.

On Saturday night, during a driving dance party attended by well over 1,000 beautifully dressed undergraduates, the swirl of the university’s handiwork was in full view. Yale’s students are straight, gay, white, black, Latino, Asian, African,Christian, Jewish, Islamic, Budhist, and Hindu. They attend Yale to learn with their peers, the keenest minds of their generation. They leave here with a formidable liberal arts education and the knowledge that discipline, hard work, and smarts are only three ingredients in the formula for a successful life of service.

Yale, in sum, embodies the best traditions and ambitions of the American experience. That is what Salovey chose to honor during his inaugural weekend. Yale students responded at every turn. On Sunday, during the block party, they lined up to have their picture taken with him.

Yale’s new president also is an accomplished bluegrass bass player. When Salovey arrived at the Saturday night party to play a short set with his band, the Professors of Bluegrass, students greeted him with the rhythmic chant of  Sal-O-Vey! Sal-O-Vey! Sal-O-Vey!

– Keith Schneider

The Deadly Gentlemen perform at Yale University presidential inaugural, October 2013. Photo/Keith Schneider

NEW YORK — This is the city and the new American experience that too many white suburban and rural voters loathe. Good leadership and smart taxpayer investments modernized the subways, scrubbed clean the shoreline, rebuilt Harlem, and turned Brooklyn into a multi-racial millennial hot spot for good jobs and housing. Crime is down, way down. City revenues are up. Voters here support an African American president, public education, gun control, gay marriage, the science of climate change, clean energy, immigration reform, and medical marijuana. Intelligent design describes a new energy-efficient office building, not an explanation for the origins of the 6,000-year-old Earth.

New York, in sum, is the capital of the newly dynamic America that is moving on from the era of dysfunction and disinvestment, the period of national reckoning and stagnation that followed 9/11 and the Great Recession. It turns out that many cities and regions across the country are thriving again. American democracy still works in places that reward insightful and strong leaders, and have replaced ideology and revenge with shared values and some measure of common decency.

Two hundred miles south of here, in political Washington, D.C., the nation watches in fascination and no small measure of horror the desperate acts of a minority — white suburban and rural voters — who either feel boxed in or have been ruthlessly misled. It’s probably a mix of both.

Fear, though, has led these voters to countenance an extortion attempt — demanding the rollback of the healthcare law in exchange for opening the government and approving a debt ceiling increase. Having lost an election that considered the healthcare law as a primary issue, the extortion bid displays contempt for law, democracy, and precedence. These same voters would find such tactics intolerable from foreign leaders seeking influence in the United States. And they certainly would recoil from these tactics if they were deployed by a Democrat or Al Qaeda.

Still, most House Republican voters support what their representatives are doing. Despite what Democrats here in New York hope, and mainstream editorialists predict — that the GOP will pay for this recklessness at the polls — I’m not convinced that is true. GOP voters are calling for their House representatives to be more strident, not less. Giving up is a sign of weakness. The disdain that GOP voters have for government will not recede because of this manufactured fiscal and political crisis.

What it’s producing is not just divided government. It’s splitting the nation. City from suburb. North and West from South and Plains states. White from every other American. Baby Boom from millennials. It is draining the country’s ingenuity and imagination. Anger and frustration, stridency and recklessness are hardening the lines between a blue America and a red America. Having failed to convince a majority of Americans that “government is the problem,” the next apparent goal of the right wing minority is to promote the politics of division. That goal, it seems to me, is precisely what GOP voters and their elected representative are after.

For a time earlier in my career I founded and directed the Michigan Land Use Institute, an advocacy organization that is quite adept at winning important public interest campaigns. The Institute’s policy achievements were due in no small way to how consistently we adhered to our rules of engagement. Respect those who disagree with you. Don’t call people names. Don’t draw lines in the sand. Don’t back people into corners.

Today is shutdown Sunday. It’s the sixth day of a momentous political confrontation over law, ideology, race, class, and region that the President and Democratic Senate leaders were winning. President Obama and his allies took a big risk by drawing a line in the sand, vowing not to negotiate unless the House dropped health care from a bill to fund the government. Their reasoning was airtight. Policy making by threat and coercion, they argued, was no way to manage a democracy. Market executives and corporate front offices, even those who backed the GOP, were on board with the White House position. House Speaker John Boehner late last week was privately telling his aides, who passed the message to DC reporters, that he would find a way out of the standoff.

Over the weekend, though, the confrontation turned dangerous. The reason: the White House and Senate Democratic leaders made it personal and simultaneously backed Boehner into a corner. How? They questioned Speaker John Boehner’s courage, disparaged his manhood. On Friday Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid actually called him a coward.

Regardless of what people think about Speaker Boehner, calling him soft is having the effect of steeling his nerve and amplifying his party’s beligerence. Today, in an interview with ABC News, Boehner stated that, unless the White House agrees to amend the health care law and visit several more issues, he’s prepared to let the nation slip into default. “That’s the path we’re on,” said the speaker.

Democrats are foolish if they believe Boehner is kidding. He’s not. GOP lawmakers have been awaiting this moment for years. They are supported by voters who operate in an alternate American universe that is armed to the teeth, believes Barack Obama is not a native-born American, that the Earth is 6,000 years old, that climate change is a scientific fiction, and that Social Security and Medicare are somehow different from other taxpayer-supported programs. That constituency, deeply religious and indoctrinated by Fox News and the hard right media, appears to be inviting, even cheering an economic wreck that weakens the government they hate, and that draws closer by the day. Just as perilous, at this point the GOP constituency seems prepared to penalize only those House lawmakers, Speaker Boehner among them, who back down.

Like other Americans I’m confused about the aims of this confrontation or where it leads. Make no mistake, though. An insurgency is unfolding in the U.S. Government.

– Keith Schneider

OWENSBORO, KY — Senator Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky native and Senate Republican leader, took his place several years ago at the head of his party’s pack of ideologues who countenanced disinvestment, lower taxes, and less spending on public projects with public purposes. But here in Owensboro, a small city perched on a high bluff on a big bend of the Ohio River, the senator’s name graces a year-old riverwalk and plaza in Smothers Park, the centerpiece of the city’s $225 million downtown redevelopment. The magnificent park, designed by EDSA, was constructed with the help of $40 million in federal funds secured by Sen. McConnell.

That little piece of political irony describes much of the governing and policymaking that is transforming Owensboro into one of the urban jewels of the Ohio River Valley. Owensboro, a city of nearly 60,000 residents, is 753 miles downstream from Pittsburgh, where the 981-mile Ohio River starts. As such, Owensboro lies near the southern terminus of an industrial region that sustained massive economic transformation over the last half century, and now is rebuilding and reinventing a new economic era for the U.S., and doing so at a furious pace.

Much of that is due to the capacity of local government leaders to update their operating systems to not only keep pace with the velocity of change but also to be skillful enough to measure what market opportunities fit and to seize them. In Owensboro, the emerging result is an uncommon American community. This is a city and a metropolitan region of 150,000 where pride in place, and optimism about the future is authentic.

But it’s also a city and a region that is deeply conflicted about its priorities. Voters here now consistently send the most ardent anti-government, anti-tax lawmakers to Washington.

That, of course, is not the formula that produced the economic renewal now emerging in Owensboro. The scenario of aspiration that is coming out of the ground along Owensboro’s riverfront reflects what is possible when sound judgment joins with adequate public investment. You can read my 2011 study of Owensboro, What’s Done, What’s Next, here.

Owensboro in 2009 chose to reckon with the era of stalemate and stagnation that is scarring the United States. City and county leaders approved an $80 million local tax increase to finance the redesign and reconstruction of Owensboro’s riverfront district. That decision is producing $225 million in public and private investment along a 1.4 mile stretch of riverfront and the city’s downtown that had been mouldering for 30 years.

Today that same stretch is adorned with cascading fountains that, at night, lift streams of watery gold that attract hundreds of people downtown. Smothers Park, which joins the city to the Ohio River, is already among the most beautiful civic spaces in the country. More is coming.

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New York was a beautiful city on 9/11/01. It’s a better city now. The Freedom Tower under construction in the fall of 2012. Photo/Keith Schneider

The day of the 9/11 attack I was in Manistee, Michigan, a 45-year-old journalist and non-profit executive focused on the usefulness of a new and greener development strategy called “Smart Growth.” My brother watched the attack from his office window in lower Manhattan. My cousin was inside the South Tower and escaped unharmed before it was hit. At the end of the month I toured the still-smouldering piles of rubble at Ground Zero with my father, a lifelong New Yorker. I never before or since witnessed such anguish in his eyes.

A lot has changed in 12 years, a good deal of it for the better in my view. One of those good changes is how the energy-efficient, resource-aware, city-building, transit-constructing, locally-focused principles of Smart Growth have become the standards by which cities and suburbs are developing all over the world. In large part because of Smart Growth the U.S. consumes less energy, produces lower levels of air pollution, invests in transit, draws young people to its compact urban centers, provides more space for parks and clean shorelines, and now boasts some of the most beautiful cities in the world.

In the weeks after 9/11, critics of Smart Growth — many of them from the mostly white outer suburban and rural communities that produced the Tea Party treachery of the last half-decade — used the 9/11 attack to lay seige to America’s cities. As I wrote in an article for the Michigan Land Use Institute in 2001, “One of the odd and troubling ideas that crossed the nation in the weeks after September 11 was the notion that as a safeguard against terror, urban sprawl might be a good thing after all.”

On this anniversary of 9/11, I dug out the article from the Institute’s archive. It continued:

On the right, for example, the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal called for cities to spread out further. The op-ed page of the Detroit News noted that “in the wake of Sept. 11, the constituency for density has probably thinned out.”

On the left, editors of Newcolonist.com, a Web site that pays attention to urban and suburban design, interviewed national experts to “get an early feel for how the attacks may affect perceptions of density, transportation, and city life.”

With the murderous collapse of New York City’s tallest buildings, both proponents and critics of the useful work to contain sprawl can be excused for wondering whether skyscrapers have outlived their usefulness and spreadout suburbs are a safer bet. But viewing dense city neighborhoods as somehow an easy target and the suburbs as a haven from terrorism overlooks some of the underlying causes of the Sept. 11 attack. Continuing to spread out across the landscape will only aggravate the situation.

It takes only the first raw scent of the smoldering piles of debris at Ground Zero in New York, and a quick glance at the guts of blasted, black-charred buildings fluttering in a smoky wind, to immediately agree with President George W. Bush that the attacks were a direct strike at what he called “the American way of life.” That way of life is not only tied to our freedom and mobility. It’s also expressed in the wasteful design of our sprawling communities and the need to sustain them by reaching ever deeper into the far corners of the globe to satisfy American demand for oil, minerals, timber, labor and capital.

To the extent the horrendous attacks laid bare America’s oil dependence, or our unwelcome presence in the Middle East, the Smart Growth vision of more energy-efficient, environmentally sensitive, livable communities is certainly one of the most cogent long-term responses yet put forward about how to truly strengthen national security.

To see the entire article click here.

– Keith Schneider

Chicago is one of the greenest cities in the world now because of Smart Growth. Photo/Keith Schneider

Cincinnati is considering a streetcar line and is building homes and businesses along the cleaner Ohio River, where it once dumped its chemicals and sewage. Photo/Keith Schneider

The six-state Ohio River Valley is surging economically, getting environmentally cleaner, and leading the U.S. recovery. My report for the Wilson Center and Circle of Blue explains why. Click here for the full report.

ATHENS, OHIO – Few places in the United States better understand the economically essential and ecologically risky accord between energy and water than this southeast Ohio town.

Athens, where Ohio University was founded in 1804 as a Northwest Territories frontier institution, was once surrounded by dozens of working underground coal mines. Thousands of miners spent much of the 19^th and half of the 20^th centuries digging long horizontal and vertical shafts that essentially hollowed out most of the rounded hills of the Hocking River Valley. Coal from southeast Ohio fired steel mills and fueled electricity-generating boilers that turned Ohio into an industrial powerhouse.

Then, as now, water was critical to every stage of the mining, processing, shipping, and burning of coal in southeast Ohio, which is at the center of the six-state Ohio River Valley. The ecological consequences of the rugged, unregulated mining before 1950 are manifest in a present day water mess. Water fills the dormant shafts and pours out of the old mines of the Hocking Valley in springs and streams so saturated in trace minerals they are too acidic for aquatic life to survive.

Ohio River tows are transporting more steel and less coal, a sign of big changes in manufacturing and energy development. Photo/Keith Schneider

Natalie Kruse, a hydrogeologist and assistant professor at Ohio University, has distinguished her young academic career through research to develop practices that restrain the acid mine drainage, and restore some streams to conditions that support small fisheries. In that sense, Dr. Kruse is a kind of capstone figure working to clean up the remnant byproduct of Ohio’s first great era of carbon-fueled development.

Dr. Kruse, though, is also emerging here as a prominent researcher helping citizens and state officials gain a clearer understanding of the effects on the state’s freshwater reserves from Ohio’s next chapter of hydrocarbon production. More than a mile beneath east and southeast Ohio, and much of Pennsylvania and West Virginia, lies an astonishing abundance of natural gas embedded in the deep hydrocarbon-rich shales of the Utica and Marcellus geologic formations. In the last five years, over 8,000 deep Marcellus shale gas wells were drilled in Pennsylvania, and 1,700 were drilled in West Virginia. Ohio’s Utica shale gas developers have drilled 367 wells since 2010, when the natural gas boom started in this state.

The sudden surge of natural gas is the most important factor in why federal figures show that coal production and electrical generation fueled by coal, the dirtiest fuel, have declined since 2010 in the Ohio River Valley. Utilities in Ohio and the other states along the 981-mile Ohio River, which stretches from Pittsburgh to Cairo, Illinois, are opening more natural gas-fueled turbines, the newest of which operate with far lower requirements for cooling water, and don’t have fuel piles that pollute waterways. Emissions of climate-changing gases are falling because carbon emissions from burning gas are 40 percent lower than from burning coal.

Marietta, Ohio, on the river’s north shore, is where developers of the Northwest Ordinance, which expanded the nation and outlawed slavery, settled in the late 18th century. Photo/Keith Schneider

The readily apparent and well-documented benefits of the surge in fuel supplies, though, are pitched on the slippery rocks of watery risks. Developers bring the gas to the surface by pumping, at ultra-high pressure, a 4-million to 6-million-gallon mixture of sand, water, and chemicals into each well to fracture the rock and release the fuel. Gas developers build roads, pipelines, and processing infrastructure at heavily wooded drill sites, often in steep terrain. The result is deforestation, erosion, and siltation in mountain streams.

Earlier this month, in support of a Wilson Center-Circle of Blue speaking tour in Beijing, I prepared a paper that updates the findings of our 2010 Choke Point: U.S. report. That project identified the Southwest, Great Plains, and Southeast as the regions at greatest risk of shortages of energy and water. Choke Point: U.S. also reported that access to adequate supplies of water and wastewater treatment were the primary impediments to the shale oil and shale gas production boom overtaking the country.

A special focus of this new paper — available on the Circle of Blue Web site here — is to explore energy production and water supply in Ohio and its neighboring Ohio River Valley states. The development of natural gas and natural gas liquids from deep shale is reshaping long-standing trends in the region’s energy mix, water consumption and treatment patterns, climate emissions, and economy. Moreover, global trends in energy and food supply and water use, especially in China and the Persian Gulf, are dramatically influencing natural gas and oil development, coal consumption, food production, water use, and the economy along the Ohio River Valley.

The six-state region is now a useful laboratory to understand how the convergence of new domestic energy technology, and overseas water, energy and food production patterns form an interlocking web of market signals that affect U.S. state economies and environmental conditions. Growing demand for grain in Asia and the Persian Gulf has produced record-high prices for corn and soybeans in the U.S. over the last five years. Rising demand for grain, and for energy, also prompted higher sales of the planting, harvesting, and construction equipment made by John Deere, International Harvester, and Caterpillar in the Ohio River Valley states.

Asia’s rising demand for coal, to fuel its fast-developing economies, is propping up prices in the Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky coal industry, which is exporting more coal than ever before to Europe, and putting pressure on Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia to open a western deepwater port for American coal exports to Asia.

China’s growing demand for liquid fuels keeps oil prices high enough to finance the expensive development of shale oil in the U.S.. Demand from China, and the higher prices international consumers pay for natural gas and natural gas liquids is prompting U.S. shale gas developers to produce enough methane, ethane, and propane to export from the Ohio River Valley states to overseas markets. Congress is debating whether to lift export restraints on natural gas and natural gas liquids, and new export terminals are proposed on the Atlantic and Gulf coasts.

The expanding markets for natural gas in the U.S., and in global markets, has produced mounting sales in support industries, including the construction of five new steel plants in Ohio since 2011, the first new plants since the 1980s.

The steady expansion of Ohio’s gas fields, along with smaller increases in renewable energy production, is part of a similarly powerful and, to some extent, surprising pivot point transition that is occurring across the United States in the energy and water sectors. America, alone among the world’s big economies, appears to be accomplishing a feat that nobody forecast just three years ago. Simply put, the United States is using less energy, growing its economy, and steadily shifting to cleaner, less water-consuming fuel sources.

For a full copy of the report click here.

Also here at Circle of Blue.

– Keith Schneider

ULAN BATOR, Mongolia – Paved roads are still a rarity in this country, which is larger than Alaska and where 1.2 million people – 40 percent of the resident population – earn their keep herding livestock.

The country is all grass and trees in the north, less grass and more sand in the south. Traveling overland between this capital of 1.3 million people and the dusty towns of the South Gobi is a 700-kilometer trip. It takes 15 hours. Four hundred kilometers are on hard-packed dirt roads. Closer to the capital, the informal dirt rights of way expand to encompass multiple paths that climb and descend high ridges.

The multi-tracking, caused by drivers seeking less muddy and more passable routes following rain, form braids that are unique in the world. They also ruin tens of thousands of hectares of grassland.

The Mongolian government expresses strong intent to build paved highways. Mongolia’s prime minister this month complained to the news media that highway construction is proceeding too slowly. But the pace of road building in a developing nation with a $10 billion economy is slow. The national statistics office reports that in the decade from 2000 to 2010, construction crews built 1,100 kilometers of paved highway, or an average of 110 kilometers annually.

At the moment, a good deal of Mongolia’s road building energy is pouring into the country’s southern region to link the capital and the coal and hard rocking mining districts to China. During my trip to report on water supply, herding, and mining in the South Gobi, we used the portions of the new road that were open, speeding along an empty highway at near 80 miles per hour.

By late next year, the entire two-lane highway will be finished and open. In my mind there are many ways to think about that day. The trip south will be faster and easier. The highway will end the multi-tracking, and prompt the recovery of damaged grasslands and desert. In a nation beset by alcoholism, the paved road also will encourage higher driving speeds and many more traffic accidents and deaths.

But the paved road means that visitors will not be able experience the overland route the way we did — with a Mongolian driver watching every hole and bump, and slipping past the big ones. With camels kneeling and grazing by the roadside. With the need to stop every two hours to loosen road-tossed muscles and joints. We moved at a speed slow enough to see the tops of desert grasses. We were aware that there was some peril from a tire blowout or engine failure in the pitch black of a desert night far from the nearest town. It could be hours, maybe a day, before another vehicle passed.

The overland route was an adventure, the closest thing to a stagecoach trip that still exists on the planet. Mongolia’s modernization is visible in the paved roads gradually replacing dirt multi-tracks. It’s visible in blistering bad traffic jams and skycranes atop high-rise office towers in Ulan Bator, in photovoltaic panels and satellite dishes outside Gobi gers, in westerners venturing across the wild landscape to race on horses, mountain bikes, and fossil-fueled vehicles. TIM: This is Mongolia.

Here are other thoughts:

No Beggars — In the five days that I spent in Ulan Bator, I saw one panhandler. He was aged, sitting on Peace Street, the city’s most important commercial boulevard; a small bucket rested on the ground between his knees. I’ve spent time in big cities on four continents. Rich ones like New York and Sydney, Paris and Shanghai. Poor ones like Manila and Detroit. I’ve never been in a big city with fewer beggars. Begging is an act of capitulation, a public display of need and vulnerability. None of those are contained in the Mongolian spirit, drawn from the toughness of a land that broils in summer, freezes hard in winter, and earns much of its wealth milking camels and shearing sheep. Mongols are givers — gifts of food and drink to strangers they meet for the first time, and generous helpings of their time and intelligence. TIM: Mongols aren’t takers.

No Water – The Gobi Desert, which encompasses all of southern Mongolia and almost all of northern China, is the second largest desert in the world, exceeded only by the Sahara. It feels like that, too. Heading south out of Ulan Bator, the worn highway bridges the Tuul River and then crosses no other river or stream for hundreds and hundreds of kilometers. Eighty percent of Mongolia’s water is underground and a good bit of it is too saline for human consumption without treatment. Just 20 percent of the country’s water is in lakes and rivers, and almost all of that is in Mongolia’s north, close to the border with Russia’s Siberian wilderness. The only running surface water I saw in the Gobi occurred in a spring in Khan Bogh, a Gobi mining and herding town near the Chinese border. It flowed from the wind-rounded boulders of a high ridge, tumbled down through a narrow valley of grass and sand, and poured out into pools so clear and welcoming it was evident why people had settled there. A herd of horses, led by a black stallion with a long and shaggy mane, loped off the desert range, settled into a single file, and nervously navigated the knee-high boulders along the spring’s edge. The mares stood in a circle around the stallion, taking their drinks only after he’d taken his. The colts drank last, nose deep in the water, sucking fast because the stallion was already on the move back to the range.

Livestock Everywhere — The world is terribly concerned at the moment about the effects of coal and hard rock mining on the Mongolian landscape and the centuries old culture of nomadic herding. Nomadic herding, though, appears very healthy. The Mongolian livestock herd numbers 40 million animals, according to government figures, or 13 times more than the human population.The expanding herds of cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and camels graze, and overgraze, a natural banquet of grass. From north to south, as the land gets progressively dryer the herds change – from cattle, to sheep and goats, to horses, and camels. The latter are a delight to the eye of a westerner. They pad across the desert on soft feet. They gather in tight groups to rest. Silent and patient, they wait for herders to pour water into metal troughs, then nose each other aside to take a drink. On the way north back to Ulan Bator we crossed the path of a rare white camel, a female, resting in the road’s cool dirt. I slowly approached her with my camera, clucking and chirping at her. She watched me, then lifted her head and seemed to brighten her smile. Behind her the other adult camels watched the session with traces of irony mixed with jealousy. Very plainly, I wasn’t the first foreigner who’d taken this beauty’s portrait.

Food Not Found In My Grocery — In a desert ger not far from the Mongolia/China border I tasted camel’s milk for the first time. It was thin, cloudy, and carried the scent of the animal that produced it. It also was the first of a short list of exotic animal foods that I allowed to part my lips. In Mongolia, where the diet is heavy in animal fat and protein and food grains, there’s no end to such fare. Fruits and vegetables are not emphasized. Adult Mongolians, as a result, tend to be rounded at the shoulders and hips, and amply stocked in the breast and belly. Most restaurant menus are not translated into English, which makes ordering without assistance precarious. Sheep’s head is a popular item. Brains also are regular fair. Horse meat is a staple. My favorite dish was almost anything with vegetables mixed with lamb and rice. And Mongolia’s Altan Gobi beer is very good.

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KHAN BOGH, Mongolia — “And this,” says Battsengel Lkhamdoorov, a South Gobi herder who once managed 600 animals, “is our new spring.”

Laughing, he lifted the lid of a brown steel box, its hard lines unusual in a landscape of layered sand and rounded clouds. The tank rests on four metal legs, contains about 1,000 gallons of water, is filled twice a week, and is small enough to fit in the bed of a pickup. It’s located along the south fence guarding the 80-square-kilometer Oyu Tolgoi hard rock copper, gold, and molybdenum mine.

Had the tank been set in one of the dusty towns in the South Gobi it would not have attracted much attention. The fact that it’s here — in a landscape of sand, tufted grass, and hot sun — and that it was brought here by Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest mining companies, has turned the unadorned brown metal box into an object of regional significance, and perhaps a lesson in the new principles at work in 21st century water management and resource development.

Last month the Oyu Tolgoi mine delivered the first shipments of concentrated ore to market, the product of an expanding open pit. The shipment culminated a decade of mine development and would not have been possible without the state-of-the-art water supply, treatment, monitoring, and recycling system that Oyu Tolgoi installed.

That closed loop system was designed and engineered under the oversight of Mark Newby, Oyu Tolgoi’s 42-year-old environment manager and a British-trained civil engineer. I talked to Newby on Thursday and learned that water supply and management are viewed by mine managers as
priorities equal in importance as digging and processing the ore.

The brown tank, though, lies beyond the closed loop. It is an outlier that is giving the mine’s leadership and a number of the region’s herders a shared headache. It is part of a much disputed water management project to divert the ephemeral rain-fed flow of a dry stream bed, the Undai River, away from the mine’s open pit. Right now, early in the mine’s development, the river’s dry channel skirts the pit’s edge. But as the mine expands over time and the pit widens, its southeastern edge will eventually meet the Undai’s path and the river’s waters will pour into the mine.

Oyu Tolgoi set out to fix that problem by digging a new channel that bypasses the mine pit. But doing so also means halting the flow of water to Boor Ovu, a natural spring in the river channel that herders have used to water their livestock for generations. Newby and his staff proposed to fix that problem by developing a manmade spring several kilometers downstream and outside the mine’s fence line.

The company’s consultants suggested placing the manmade spring 500-meters from the fence so that wild animals could take a drink. That spot is now marked by the brown water tank, which makes it a bit of an eyesore, and a summary of distaste for the mine and its effect on their lives that some herders here openly express.

Local government officials also aren’t thrilled. The region’s governor recently stopped construction of the Undai diversion pending a review by a citizens working group of the manmade spring.

Oyu Tolgoi had already built most of what was needed to change the river channel, and a year ago it closed the spring. Six weeks ago, the company completed the construction of wells and a pipeline that delivers the waters of the ruined natural spring to a spot in the Undai channel just outside the perimeter fence.

The new wells provide a light stream of water to the riverbed. They also make the brown water tank superfluous.

“The tank was put as a replacement water source until we finished,” Newby told me on Thursday. “We have a new water source there now inside the mine’s licensed area. Maybe we need to see whether the tank serves any additional benefit.”

But the tank remains, heating up in the desert. Until its fate is decided it will attract attention and ridicule. On the day of my visit, Battsengel showed me the tank’s interior. Desert light reflected from the water surface. On the outside a stopcock valve and a faucet curved over the closest end of a steel watering trough. Battsnagel leaned down and turned the valve. Solar-heated warm water ran out, more brown than the desert sand.

“Our new spring,” Battsengel said again. This time he wasn’t laughing.

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