Modeshift

Camels are still raised for milk and meat in Qatar, and for camel racing. But they no longer serve as beasts of burden or for transportation. Photo/Keith Schneider

DOHA, Qatar –Mohamed Ali Darwish, a principal investigator at the Qatar Environment and Energy Research Institute, and one of the Gulf region’s leading experts on desalination, is a mechanical engineer assigned to help this dry nation of nearly two million residents develop a more efficient and ecologically safer means for securing its freshwater supply. Since 1959, when a Scottish engineer developed what is called “multi-stage flash evaporation,” or MSFE, Gulf coast nations have ardently pursued the extraordinarily reliable but hyper energy-consuming technology to produce their drinking water.

Qatar, which operates eight major desalination plants, is so confident about the technology, regardless of the energy consumption, that it is preparing to build a ninth MSFE installation at the Ras Abu Fontas water plant on the Gulf shore south of Doha.

As I noted in an earlier post, risks to the Gulf’s ecology and energy security are tightly wrapped up in the program pursued by Qatar and its neighbors to produce desalinated water. Qatar’s production, 1.5 million cubic meters daily, is said by authorities here to represent five percent of the Gulf’s total production of desalinated water.

The new plant will increase production by roughly 10 percent annually when it opens in the spring of 2015. Plant managers, who led us in a discussion and tour of Ras Abu Fontas, declined to disclose the cost of construction. But they did note that of the 1.5 million cubic meters of desalinated water produced in Qatar, half by the Ras Abu Fontas Plant, about a third is wasted once it leaves the plant boundaries. Leaking pipes managed by a separate state-owned utility have not been repaired or replaced, and precious water is draining away, they said.

In an interview, Dr. Darvish noted that more than 10 percent of the nation’s domestic natural gas consumption and a fifth of its electricity is devoted to producing desalinated water. I mentioned what we’d been told earlier in the day, that a third of the water produced never makes it to domestic taps and toilets. Given the energy demands and cost of building a new plant to produce more water, I asked whether it would be more efficient and less expensive to upgrade the water transport infrastructure?

Darvish immediately arched his eyes and shifted in his chair. “You see,” he said. “This is Qatar.”

Since December 2008, when I joined colleagues at Circle of Blue to report on the drought-driven collapse of farm production in Australia’s Murray Darling River Basin, I’ve journeyed across the United States and the world to better understand the implications of the contest between rising demand for energy and food, and diminishing reserves of fresh water. The privilege of spending weeks in China, and in India, also produced events, generated new friendships, and yielded insights about how nations managed under the stress of providing enough water, food, and energy, even as they contended with the powerful collision between economic, ecological, civic, and governmental interests. Very clearly, the Earth is pushing back and human systems are being forced to adjust.

Qatar, small as it is, occupies a place at the table of nations that are part of the problem and at work on the solutions. Since 2008, when food grain supplies plummeted and prices jumped sharply around the world, in part because of the collapse of Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin rice industry, Qatar launched a new national project to develop a formula for making itself less vulnerable by pursuing an ecologically and economically sustainable way to produce energy, secure food, and yield a safer quality of life.

The basic ingredient fueling the new formula, though, is Qatar’s own treasure trove of oil and natural gas. While such alchemy is intensely significant, whether it’s possible to yield a golden future from an oil-rich present is not at all assured. But the process of exposing the basic ingredients to new substances and new ways to mix them also produces distinctive narratives that I call TIQ. This is Qatar: (more…)

Qatari women are cloaked in black robes, their faces hidden by veils. The nation, one of the more progressive in the Gulf, encourages women to assume leadership in academic, professional, technical and government positions. But their lives in public are conducted at a purposeful distance from men and emigres. Photo/Keith Schneider

DOHA, Qatar — Early next week Qatar hosts its third career fair in a year to “empower Qatari women in the nation’s workforce.” This is an Islamic Arab nation that thinks of itself as a relative haven of fairness for women, some of whom hold significant posts in philanthropy, education, and human resources.

The event’s organizers note in their promotional materials that Qatar ranks ahead of its Gulf coast neighbors in encouraging women to embrace work in the public realm.

Yet compared to the overall size of Qatar’s labor force, which government statistics put at just under 1.6 million workers, Qatar’s 87,000 native working age women hold just 27,500 jobs. Qatar’s 84,600 men of working age, for that matter, hold just under 57,000 jobs. Taken together, men and women, Qatar’s native born working age adults hold about two percent of all the jobs in this nation.

Still there is no disguising the purposeful distance that Qatar culture builds into the lives of its women. The workforce career fair will be held at the ladies campus of Qatar’s Community College, and is open solely to women.

During the week I’ve spent in Qatar, my first visit to the Gulf region, the questions I’ve been nervous to ask are those that concern culture, especially the patriarchal system and traditions that describe the roles of men, and the presence of women in public. What I learned is far from the complete story, but it’s a start.

Qatar women cloak themselves in black in public, honoring the traditions of their Islamic culture, and the constraints and norms defined by a society that treats men in public as clearly the superior gender. The black robes and dark veils also serve to bind the culture together, forming a distinct tribal identity that authoritatively declares Qatari women as separate and apart from the emigre women here, who dress in Western clothing and are much more numerous. It is illegal for a non-Qatari woman to wear the black robes except if they come from other Gulf nations where the robes are part of their daily dress. The black robes also form a protective barrier for women, I was told, to fend off the advances of rapacious adult males. (more…)

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — Hours after the teenage white hat bomber was taken into custody, the rain started. It was a warm rain, a renewing rain. This morning dogwoods were in white bloom. Puddles on the sidewalks were like mirrors, reflecting the grey sky and the long strides of runners along the Charles. It felt like the world had changed.

This metropolitan region, close to where the Pilgrims landed, where Revere rode to alert the Concord and Lexington settlers, where Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook, knows a thing or two about making history and influencing a nation. The four days of shock and outrage that started on Monday with the Boston marathon bombings on Boylston Street, and climaxed on Friday in Watertown with a flurry of bullets, was history-making in a much different dimension.

On Friday morning I arrived to a nearly empty Boston Logan Airport and joined one million residents in this region in an utterly unique experience in America. It was 9:15 a.m., normally a period of high passenger traffic. But airline personnel, detailed to counters two-by-two, outnumbered passengers at most of Delta’s gate areas. I already knew that Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick had ordered a region-wide “lockdown.” I knew public transit was shut and that taxis were barred from the airport. I followed Twitter feeds since Monday — #Boston, #marathon, #bombing — that had expanded since Thursday when the FBI released the photographs of black hat and white hat – #suspects — and then added #Watertown after midnight, when the suspects were cornered by the police.

My destination was Cambridge where I’d been invited to attend the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s forum for journalists who report on land and the built environment. I learned from a passenger coming into the airport that there was no restriction on private vehicles arriving at the airport. I learned from another passenger that car rental agencies were providing vehicles, so I knew that was an option for driving out of Logan. Outside the terminal’s departure area I noticed that taxis were dropping passengers. The obvious response to the transport choice was to flag one of them down and ask for a ride.

It was a fast trip to Harvard Square – 20 minutes max. In lockdown city, America’s newest version of urban crisis management, there’s no traffic. Storrow Drive, which runs along the south bank of the Charles River, was empty. Every lane was open, absolutely no vehicles like rural northern Michigan route 115 at a February dawn. As we made our way through the streets of Cambridge, there were no cars, no pedestrians. Stores were shuttered in Harvard Square. Residents voluntarily complied with lockdown city. They had to. A colleague who lives in Cambridge told me he watched police officers stop and question people, especially male students walking in front of his home.

The Lincoln Institute cancelled Friday’s program because some speakers were unable to reach Boston. Others were unable to reach the conference center. Some of the journalists attending were dispatched to cover the manhunt in Watertown, which is two miles away.

I retreated to the Sheraton Commander to follow the news and tweet. And that leads me to the three primary findings I made from Friday’s events, and a principal question:

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Two bombs. Three dead. Almost 180 wounded. Patriots Day in Boston, the day that everybody who lives there celebrates as a time to run and share, turns to mayhem. Photo/Ninian Reid

The week leading up to April 19 is turning out to be a gruesome one for the United States. On April 19, 1995 Timothy McVeigh blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and injuring 680. That attack, McVeigh said, was justified by the FBI assault two years earlier, April 19, 1993, on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. Seventy-six people died.

Waco and Oklahoma City crystalized menace in several new dimensions in the United States. The scale of the deaths in Texas, and the mortal focus on the calendar and commemoration in Oklahoma, illustrated a joining of wickedness and fanaticism rarely encountered in the country.

Yesterday’s Boston Marathon bombing unveiled another facet of evil. The idea that someone planned to maim and kill the innocent, perhaps even purposely aiming to blow off bystanders’ legs on a day focused on a long run, displays a vicious cunning designed to formalize the “at any moment” nature of big public gatherings in the United States that have steadily become more nervous.

You have to wonder whether the April 15 date was a factor. Over the last generation the third week of April has become a stage for escalating mayhem in the United States.

On April 20, 1999 two students at Columbine High School in Colorado murdered 12 classmates, a teacher, and killed themselves. Twenty-four people were injured.

On April 16, 2007 a student at Virginia Tech killed 32 people, wounded 17, and killed himself.

The Boston Marathon bombing occurred on the day race organizers honored and remembered the 20 children and six adults who were killed in an elementary school in Newtown, Conn. That day the shooter also killed his mother and himself. And no accounting of the recent list of horribles should omit the 12 people killed and 58 injured last July in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting. Or, for that matter, 9/11.

The pathology of violence, the determination to disrupt, the focus on turning the public space into a gallery of blood; that all seems plainly evident. But why have these killings occurred over the last generation, a period when other statistics show America is getting safer? Deaths from traffic accidents are way down. Rates of violent crime have declined dramatically since the peak years of the 1970s and early 1980s. Rates of murder are the lowest they’ve been since the 1960s. See the charts below, which are based on FBI Uniform Crime Statistics.

The gunners and bombers are testing America’s mettle. Our purpose is to be strong, and not let this kind of random bloodletting succeed in convincing Americans that big public gatherings are dangerous, especially during an era of improved personal safety.

– Keith Schneider

The president’s commanders are falling. Bob Gates at left, David Petraeus at right with President Obama.

Have we forgotten that the United States is at war?  Well, we just lost one commander at the Central Intelligence Agency for being unfaithful to his spouse. And we are damaging the credibility of a second general, who actually is Commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan, for the suspicion of being unfaithful to his spouse. And we’re doing this at a time when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is leaving and other members of our national security team are in flux.

An al-Qaeda attack on intelligence and military command centers would not have been more damaging to our national security than the high-level, harrassing accusations that prompted David Petraeus to submit his resignation the very day after President Obama was re-elected. And now this same tactic is damaging General John Allen’s position at the helm of a nasty war that is killing and maiming young Americans who are risking their lives to free the world of terrorists.

So dare we investigate, what is producing this scenario? Why are we allowing the toppling of two top commanders at a time of war? What was their crime? Having sex with women who are not their wives?  It doesn’t add up. Granted, long marriages and the lives of women and children are regrettably affected. And there is the erosion of trust and discipline expected from men in command positions, the pain felt by families and friends.  But that’s all personal.

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More than 70 percent of China’s coal comes from the dry north, where water reserves are declining. Trucks in Inner Mongolia haul coal to coastal cities. Photo/Keith Schneider

Tom Friedman, the New York Times columnist, yesterday described the confrontation between population growth and water in China, arguing that a nation developing as fast as that one is bound to hit big economic and ecological impediments.

For readers of Circle of Blue, where I serve as senior editor and a global correspondent, this is not a new thought. In fact, in recent months we’re seeing lots of fresh evidence that the groundbreaking reporting we’ve done on the contest between energy, water, and food is having influence in the media and in non-profit circles.

Last year in Choke Point: China, we reported on the domestic and global implications of China’s irresistible drive for modernization and development.

– Its markets are the largest in the world.

– Its energy demands and production top any other nation’s.

– China is the largest producer of greenhouse gases.

– The confrontation in China between rising demand for energy and food, and declining freshwater reserves is more acute and urgent than in any other industrial nation.

“To say China needs its own dream in no way excuses Americans or Europeans from redefining theirs,” Friedman writes. “We all need to be rethinking how we sustain rising middle classes with rising incomes in a warming world.”

For a tiny science and reporting group like Circle of Blue, which punches well above its weight, it’s gratifying to know that your work matters.

In August, in another example, the Times reported on how the production of deep shale oil and gas pits energy producers against farmers for access to water on the dry American Great Plains. “A new race for water is rippling through the drought-scorched heartland,” the paper reported.

Two years ago, in Circle of Blue’s Choke Point: U.S., we were among the first to report on the developing contest for water in North Dakota and other states where tens of millions of gallons of water were being used to frack deep shale oil and gas wells. The duel between farmers and the oil industry was a political mismatch, we reported, and that when it came to scarce water, the oil and gas industry would secure all that it needed, regardless of who stood in its way.

This is tough work to do and it’s  good that people are taking notice. Greenpeace followed up on our report on coal production and water use in China with a strong study of its own in August.  The Union of Concerned Scientists has been reporting for almost a year on energy and water in the United States in its Energy In A Warming World Initiative. Last week USA Today followed up on Circle of Blue’s terrific original reporting on water pricing in American cities with a big take out of its own.

– Keith Schneider

Fracking requires millions of gallons of water per well. A new deep shale natural gas field opened this year in West Virginia. Photo/Keith Schneider

On a tense day of skirmish and confrontation, olive trees are planted in Palestine. Photo/The People & The Olive

Bravo to Aaron Dennis, Jacob Wheeler, and all the rest of the Run Across Palestine crew for producing an event and a piece of courageous journalism that matters to the world. In The People & The Olive, a 70-minute documentary that received its premiere Monday night in Traverse City’s downtown State Theatre, Aaron and Jacob join camera, reporting, and story-making skills to explore the dangerous irony of a native people, Palestinian olive farmers, walled off and occupied by a Jewish nation that itself was formed to escape oppression.

And bravo to Traverse City. The restless little city near the top of Lake Michigan is producing a new generation of talented artists and business owners who are reaching across continents to connect with communities confronting the limits of poverty, ecology, education, and liberty.

In political advocacy and community branding terms there is almost nothing like a good film to boost both ideas. The People & The Olive is not just a first-rate exploration of injustice. It is a study in how Aaron and Jacob stitched the fine silk of character, place, music, and pacing to create a narrative brocade that, at times, dances in the brightness of laughter and human connection, and at other moments, many other moments in fact, reflect the dark colors of indignation and contempt.

The movie’s director and producer weave this tale from the simplest of human stories — a five-day, 129-mile Run Across Palestine by a small group of marathoners, most of them from Traverse City, that occurred in February to raise money and elevate to western attention the daily trials of West Bank olive farmers.

In a strong article in Tikkun, Jacob describes the olive industry’s perilous conditions:

Largely forgotten amidst a political debate that too often focuses on rocks and bulldozers, fear and hatred, intifadas and historical trauma, the Israeli occupation has prevented many West Bank farmers from harvesting the olive trees their grandfathers planted, and caring for the land they know and love like their own children. Nearly 60 percent of the arable land in the West Bank is used for growing olive trees, employing over 100,000 Palestinians, making it by far the most lucrative agricultural industry for an aspiring nation that suffers from a crushing unemployment rate of 30 percent.

Among the film’s heroes is Nasser Abufarha, the founder of the  Palestine Fair Trade Association, a group of 1,700 olive farmers who’ve allied themselves and generated a commanding market presence. In one of the film’s most telling scenes, nervous Israeli security forces arrest Abufarha on the side of the highway, on the morning of the run’s first day, and charge him with organizing an illegal demonstration. Abufarha attended the Traverse City premiere and told the packed house that during his hearing in June, and with the help of the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem, he learned that the charges had been dismissed.
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Bill Clinton hoists a lush Monica Lewinsky to lust land. A friend asked,"He's not that well built is he?" Photo/Keith Schneider

CHENGDU, China — Peter Marsters, a colleague, friend, and Fulbright Fellow studying at Sichuan University, led me to the basement of the Shangri-La Hotel here the other night. “You have to see this painting of Bill Clinton and Monica,” he said.

The back story is that a Chinese artist and friend of the hotel owner painted an homage to Bill, Monica, and one of America’s great political sex scandals. The hotel owner displays the painting in a lower level hallway of one of Chengdu’s best hotels that’s said to be near the entrance to a brothel.

I had no time to verify or vouch for the accuracy of the back story. But the painting, about six feet tall, is genuine. I especially admire the Hillary figure scrambling in the rear — beseeching, aghast, embarrassed.

– Keith Schneider

Joel Bleth, a lawyer and engineer who co-founded Solar Bee, a very successful Dickinson, N.D.-based manufacturer of solar-powered equipment to circulate wastewater at treatment plants, sent a message here today asking how long the oil and gas boom in his state would persist.

Dickinson, a prairie city of 18,000, has grown more than 10 percent since the turn of the century and for several years has experienced swelling markets for retail and office buildings, hotels and motels, and housing. Much of that is related to the Bakken shale oil and gas boom, centered in Williston 132 miles north, but which is steadily surrounding Dickinson and other communities closer to the border with South Dakota.

I interviewed Joel (see pix above) at the Solar Bee plant last month. He’s one of the rare executives in the alternative energy sector in what is now the fourth largest oil producing state.

My reporting in the United States, and from three other continents in the last few years, clearly indicates that the Bakken development, as well as drilling in the Tyler and Three Forks shale formations, which lie above and below the Bakken, is very likely to persist for at least a generation.

Production in North Dakota (see pix below by Scott Terrell) has already reached 500,000 barrels per day and, according to industry executives and state oil and gas regulators, will reach 1 million barrels daily within a year. The Bakken contains some 22 billion recoverable barrels, say state officials. The two other shale reserves also contain billions of recoverable barrels, they say. 

Moreover, the market for the crude oil and natural gas pouring out of the energy fields of the northern Great Plains, which includes Montana and two Canadian provinces, is huge and growing. While it is true that U.S. demand for crude oil has temporarily declined in recent years, largely because of the Great Recession, demand for oil in China is rising fast.

In 2000, China imported 1.4 million barrels per day, or 29 percent of the 4.8 million barrels it consumed each day that year. In 2011, China imported 5.4 million barrels a day, or 58 percent of the 9.2 million barrels it consumed daily. In the last decade, in other words, China’s oil imports more than tripled and its overall oil consumption nearly doubled.

The Energy Information Administration said that the growth in China’s consumption in 2010 and 2011 represented almost 40 percent of the increase in world oil demand during the two-year period.

Having spent weeks in China during four trips from November 2010 to September 2011, and having reported on energy, water, and China’s soaring economy, I saw no evidence that China has any plan other than accelerating its development. China, which last year overtook the U.S. as the largest energy consumer on the planet, is also now the largest market in the world for grain, cars, coal, steel, cement, glass, chemicals, trucks, trains, construction equipment, power plants, dams, etc. The risk to the United States and the global economy from China is that it’s growing so fast, any number of factors — commodity shortages, price increases, inflation, domestic unrest, droughts, floods — will cause Chinese markets to implode.

Barring that, China will continue to drive the market for oil, a global commodity. And as North Dakota and the other big shale oil production fields in the United States expand, helping to lead the U.S. out of recession, the improved domestic American economy will also prompt higher consumption of oil and gas. So for those reasons, and others, it’s my conclusion that the Great Plains energy surge will persist for decades because the resource is there.

Joel, though, sent the chart below comparing gold and oil prices over time:

“How long will the high oil price and corresponding drilling last?” he asks. “The answer depends on whether the price of oil is being held up by (a) demand for fuel, now and in the future  vs. (b) oil is a commodity being purchased mostly to hedge against inflation.

“The chart comparing gold to oil prices over the past 5 years seems to confirm, with other info on oil use, that demand (neither present or future) is not the driving factor in the price of oil, and that oil is just another commodity that money has flocked to for protection against inflation as the governments around the print money to solve the debt crisis.

“If demand for fuel is keeping oil high, than a general economic recovery will make it go even higher since fuel usage will go up.  If, as I suspect and the attached chart would indicate, oil is just another commodity being purchased to hedge against inflation, then when a recovery occurs that same money holding up oil now will probably be moved into the stock market (more reactive to the 70% of economy driven by consumers), and then oil will fall.  In that case this drilling would end in perhaps 2-3 years instead of 40 years.”

Interesting thesis but I don’t think it’s going to turn out that way.

– Keith Schneider

More reporting in this series:

In North Dakota’s Bakken Oil Field, The Smell of Diesel, the Sound of Trucks

Boom in Bakken Oil Play, and Elsewhere Starting to Drive U.S. Economy

Bakken Oil Wells Surround North Dakota National Park

Is American Energy Exploration and Production Breaking the Great Recession?

Bakken and Other Big Oil and Gas Plays Produced 600,000 New Jobs Since 2005

Great Plains Bakken Riches Describe New Wealth, New Risks

North Dakota Oil Boom Like Air Ambulance Flying In Storm

The New York Times today published my latest piece on places that are doing many of the right things to prosper and thrive in the 21st century. In this case it’s the collaboration between city officials, developers, institutions, universities, foundations, and bankers in Cleveland to produce the new Uptown District along Euclid Avenue.

In the last couple of months I’ve reported on how Toledo is recruiting Chinese investment capital to redevelop its Maumee River waterfront. And how Owensboro, Kentucky found the nerve to enact an $80 million tax increase to rebuild its downtown.

Cleveland, too, is finding ways to rebuild itself around successful clusters in health care, higher education, fresh food, transit, and entertainment. The daily newspaper last summer reported that $5 billion in new development is under construction or close to getting under way.

Public investment in each of these cities is attracting significant private investment and new jobs. The University Circle area of Cleveland has generated 5,000 new jobs in the last five years.

For those in Congress and state legislatures fixed to the idea that austerity and disinvestment produces new wealth, the lessons produced by these cities and many others provides valuable evidence of the foolishness of that approach.

– Keith Schneider