March 29, 2024

In Era of Climate Change and Water Scarcity, Meeting National Energy Demand Confronts Major Impediments

Photo © Brent Stirton / Reportage by Getty Images for Circle of Blue The All-American Canal, the main water conduit from the Colorado River into the Imperial Dam, flows through the Imperial Valley, Calif. The U.S. consumes about 100 billion gallons of water a day. Nearly 85 percent is used for crop and livestock production. Of the 16.1 billion gallons that remain, half is devoted to producing energy. In November 2009, in pursuit of a …

Read More

Before Big China Climate Conference, New Senate Support For Clean Energy

I’ll be in Beijing later this week, and then on to Tianjin to cover China’s first UN-sponsored climate summit, which begins October 4. Before leaving, though, I wanted to note that on September 22,  a group of Republican and Democratic Senators sent a rare bipartisan signal to the world that the United States has not abandoned the hard work of reducing climate emissions and speeding the clean energy transition. The group introduced a bill to …

Read More

A Building Named In His Honor, Stewart Udall Declared “Greatest Secretary of the Interior”

There have been 50 Interior secretaries since the department was established in 1849 and President Zachary Taylor named Thomas Ewing its first secretary. On Tuesday, September 21, 2010, in a Washington dedication ceremony that brought Republicans and Democrats together for an all too rare moment of inspiring reflection, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally declared that his predecessor, Stewart Lee Udall, was the “greatest secretary of the Interior in United States history.” Salazar  — in pix …

Read More

The Next Era of Hydrocarbon Development: Well Underway and Dirtier Than the First

The most direct path to the nation’s newest big oil and gas fields is U.S. Highway12, two lanes of black top that unfolds from Grays Harbor in Washington State and heads east across the top of the country to Detroit. The 2,500-mile route, parts of which were used by Lewis and Clark to open the American frontier, has quickly become an essential supply line for the energy industry. With astonishing speed and influence, American oil …

Read More

Cody Bates, My Son, Is A U.S. Marine

My son, Cody Bates, graduated from Marine boot camp on Friday. There were 565 other young Marines there too — and 2,500 or so friends and family members — from states west of the Mississippi who are trained at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. Marine graduation, at least for this parent, is a study in the satisfaction of a son’s accomplishment and the lingering dread of what it means at a time of …

Read More

Note To Tom Friedman on Choke Point: U.S. Findings

Carl Ganter, the director of Circle of Blue and a colleague, was in China this week attending a World Economic Forum conference. He ran into New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, and talked about the new details Circle of Blue was uncovering about the tightening contest between rising energy demand and diminishing supplies of fresh water. Carl sent a message last night that Tom seemed interested and asked me to prepare a short summary of …

Read More

North Dakota’s Bakken Shale Oil Boom and Risks To Water

Over at Circle of Blue, where I serve as senior editor, we’ve been working on Choke Point: U.S., a series of original articles about the tightening contest between rising energy demand and diminishing supplies of fresh water. In our latest chapter, we explored the big boom in oil and gas production on the northern Great Plains, where energy companies are tapping the “unconventional” Bakken Shale. Two miles beneath North Dakota, and below parts of Montana …

Read More

Grassroots Opposition to Clean Energy Power Lines in Texas

Kate Gailbraith, a reporter for the very accomplished non-profit and online Texas Tribune, has a report from the Lone Star state about grassroots opposition to a new $5 billion transmission line to carry power from all those windmills down there. Texas is the largest wind generating state in the country, with a capacity of nearly 9,500 megawatts at the end of 2009, or roughly equal to 10 big coal-fired plants. Opposition to new transmission lines, …

Read More

Energy Department Blocks Disclosure of Road Map to Relieve Critical U.S. Energy-Water Choke Points

The Illinois River Energy biofuels plant in Rochelle releases plumes of steam at sunrise. The ethanol plant processes over 40 million bushels of corn into 115 million gallons of fuel grade ethanol annually. Earlier this summer my colleagues and I began probing the tightening environmental and economic choke points around the United States caused by rising energy production and diminishing quantities of fresh water. This week we broke a new chapter in the story that …

Read More