Modeshift

ULAN BATOR — A hard rock and coal mining boom that really got rolling about a decade ago is literally leaving Mongolia’s capital in the dust. It’s also yielded 1) an aged Communist-era airport that is too small for the rapid rise in passenger traffic, and 2) monstrous traffic jams on the official two-lane highway leading from the airport to downtown.

Human ingenuity and need being what it is, Ulan Bator’s taxi drivers developed a solution: a single lane bypass atop the levee that protects the city from the Tuul River’s springtime floods. On Thursday my taxi driver scooted off the jammed dirt and rock main highway onto the even more pitted and rough dirt and rock levee road. He rushed at near highway speeds past brush and old factories and waste dumps. Maybe five kilometers down the levee he stopped, stepped out of the car to open a white metal gate that led to an apartment complex parking lot, drove through, stepped out of the car to close the gate, and then wove through heavy traffic to deposit me at the entrance to the Puma Imperial Hotel. It’s an early 20th century brick and stucco homage to 70 years of Soviet influence — ornate cornices, big windows, and a bit in tatters.

“Welcome to Mongolia,” he said, grinning.

I am on assignment for Circle of Blue, reporting on the contest for Mongolia’s water between this nation’s nomadic livestock herders and the international mining companies that are consuming groundwater and polluting surface water to keep their operations in business. In most developing countries the contest is a mismatch as economic goals outcompete resource safety.

It’s not clear yet though whether that is the case in Mongolia. On Monday I leave Ulan Bator to interview herders and mining executives in Mongolia’s south Gobi desert, where the world’s second largest copper mine just started producing copper concentrate for the market. Based on the interviews I’ve done in the capital, the herders and their allies in the domestic and international NGO community are doing a pretty good job pushing the government and the big mining companies to be much more careful in using water and land than they otherwise would be.

Much of that has to do with the magnificence of Mongolia’s natural treasury and the herding culture that makes its protection a national value. Mongolia has under 3 million residents living in a region of grasslands, steppes, mountains, deserts, and forests that is larger than Alaska. Forty percent of the country’s people are still tied to the land as nomads and herders managing a national livestock herd that numbers 40 million animals. The north is rich in water. The south is dry. And the grasslands to the east cover 69 million acres and support 2 million Mongolian gazelles, the third largest wild migrating herd in the world behind African wildebeest and North American caribou.

Outside of the capital city, Mongolia is one wild ass place. It’s been that way for centuries. The nomadic culture has kept the grazing animals moving, which keeps the grass alive at the roots and perennially healthy. Herders have historically been so focused on the condition of their animals, the land, and the water that Mongolia established water protection standards as far back as the 13th century.

Enkhtuya Oidou, the Nature Conservancy’s Mongolia program director and an American-educated economist, told me today that Mongolia also lays claim to developing the world’s first national park in 1778, under the country’s religious leadership, to safeguard Bogd Khan mountain and the high forested mountain range that flanks Ulan Bator’s southern boundary. Though history scholars in the U.S. could argue the point, that’s still almost a century before Yellowstone National Park was established by Congress in 1872. Yellowstone is commonly regarded as the world’s first national park.

Inside the capital city, the streets are a rapidly changing mix of dusty streets, tattered Communist designed and built apartments, and steel office tower superstructures under construction and topped by sky cranes. Following the Soviet collapse in 1989 Mongolia went through a rugged economic transition shaped by free market reforms and economic pain. The first democratically elected government took office in 1990 — led by a president, prime minister, and a parliament. Gold mining emerged in the 1990s, followed by hard rock and coal mines. Those mines are now driving the country’s economy, which has been expanding rapidly.

In an interview today Orchibat Chuluunbat, the 55-year-old deputy minister for economic development and a veteran banker trained in the Soviet Union, said that mines and mine-related activity accounts for half of Mongolia’s $10 billion annual economy, and half of the $4 billion national government’s revenue. When I asked him about how much priority the government gives to managing the water used by the mines, Chuluunbat said that issue is gaining higher priority. He also said Mongolia needs to do a better job of quantifying national water supply, as well as water use by the mining industry.

He closed by noting that Mongolia needs more people. “We work hard to increase the population,” he said, smiling, “day…and night.”

– Keith Schneider

BEIJING — Almost three years ago a team of reporters and photographers from Circle of Blue, assisted by Jennifer Turner and her staff at the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, mustered here in China’s capital city.

Our mission was straightforward and well-suited for a strong group of journalists. We wanted to know how China was managing its fast-rising demand for energy, which requires enormous quantities of fresh water, in a country that was getting drier.

We posted the answer in 2011 in Choke Point: China, a series of frontline multi-media reports on the immense confrontation between water supply and energy production. Among our many findings, perhaps the most striking was this one: At current rates of economic growth and energy production, China will not have enough water in its dry northern desert provinces to simultaneously produce food, supply farms, and mine, process, and combust coal in the region that produces 70 percent of the nation’s coal. We calculated that China’s northern coal-producing provinces would be 20 billion cubic meters short of water by the end of the decade.

In other words China’s economic development strategy, firmly planted in the growth-at-any-cost principles of the 20th century, is running to ground on the rocky reality of the drying, resource-scarce, climate-altered conditions of the 21st.

Today, we learned just how influential the 2011 Choke Point: China project, as well as follow-up reporting in 2012, has been in China. This morning, a team of American and Chinese water and energy specialists met in Beijing with the environmental scientists and sustainability experts of the Development Research Center of the State Council, the government research group that provides policy recommendations to China’s highest executive agency.

While introducing more than a dozen of his colleagues, Zhang Yongsheng, a senior research fellow and the deputy director general of a department in the Development Research Center, explained how the coal sector, which uses a fifth of the country’s fresh water, is being buffeted by drying conditions. Zhang said the contest for the two resources was a focus of research and policy development that is steadily elevating in priority in the central government. Zhang pointed to the Choke Point findings as a galvanizing influence that is helping to push China to a new and powerful thought about its development.

“We need to find a new growth model,” said Zhang. “This is especially true in the water and energy areas. We need to transfer the economy to a green economy. The economy needs to be more sustainable. This is the choke point for the country. We like your report. What you are doing is very important.”

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BEIJING — On a hot morning here in China’s capital, the air is grey and the sky dark with pollution. It’s my seventh trip to China and the evidence of industrial overreach is so readily apparent. I’m here to participate in a speaking and convening event organized by Jennifer Turner, my colleague and director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum.

It is five days in Beijing, then I fly to Ulan Bator, the capital of Mongolia, to report on energy, food and water for Circle of Blue. It looks to be a busy season of international travel from now until year-end. In September it looks as though I’ll be back in Qatar for reporting on oil and sustainability. Then to Beijing for a speaking tour. Then to India for a month. The year closes and the new year opens with a trip to Italy – Rome, Sicily, and Malta.

There is no Facebook or Twitter access here in China, so keep tabs here on ModeShift. I plan to be active over the next 16 days.

– Keith Schneider

BUFFALO – In 2002, when he was recruited to help turn 120 acres of this city’s underperforming downtown into a jobs-producing, world-class campus for medical research, education, and clinical care, Matt Enstice was among a select few of the city’s young professionals who was convinced the idea wasn’t a joke.

Mr Enstice knows jokes. Prior to returning home and becoming the president and chief executive of the Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus, Inc., the non-profit group overseeing the development, Mr. Enstice spent five years in New York in the late 1990s helping Lorne Michaels produce Saturday Night Live.

Mr. Enstice, who turns 40 next month, also knows this recovering Great Lakes city, which peaked in population and prosperity 60 years ago. “When I came back, it felt different than when I left,” said Mr. Enstice, who was born and raised in Buffalo. “I’m an optimist by nature. People my age were returning to the city. I could see the potential for what’s happened.”

On a bright summer morning, Mr. Enstice bounds across a medical campus that has huffed and growled with construction for a decade, and never more intently than this year. Work just started on a $100 million, 287,000-square-foot medical office building. Two blocks away excavators prepare the site of the $243 million, 410,000-square-foot Women and Children’s Hospital.

In the fall, construction starts on two more buildings: the $375 million, 500,000-square-foot State University of New York at Buffalo School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences; and the $40 million, 142,000-square foot Roswell Park Cancer Institute. The four buildings, which total 1.34 million square feet and a $758 million investment, are scheduled to be completed over the next three years.

By any measure, the numbers are impressive. They also match the goals initially envisioned by former Mayor Anthony Masiello, who is credited with coming up with the concept of leveraging a medical research and education campus as an economic development strategy.

After Mr. Masiello left office in late December 2005, his successor, Mayor Byron W. Brown, who’s completing his second term, directed his economic development aides to support the project with city funds, fast-track permitting, and strategic business and professional recruitment.

Brendan R. Mehaffy, the executive director of the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Planning, said the Buffalo Niagara campus is building the city’s credibility as a center of innovation, and influencing the construction of new hotels, luxury residential development, and retail construction. Home prices in the neighborhoods closest to the medical campus have climbed 15 percent in the last two years, according to the city’s latest real estate figures.

“There’s been a decade of focused work here to redevelop the city,” said Mr. Mehaffy, who is 39 years old.  “You can see the results now really coming out of the ground. We have $1.7 billion in projects either announced this year or under construction in Buffalo. We haven’t experienced anything like this kind of interest and investment in generations. I grew up in one of our suburbs. I can tell you, it’s amazing to see this transition in downtown.”

The New York Times today published my article on Buffalo, the latest in a series of dispatches I’ve reported in the Times on recovering Rust Belt cities. Other cities reported in the series include Cleveland, Toledo, Grand Rapids, Akron, Cincinnati, Louisville, and Owensboro and are available in the Rustbelt Revives section of ModeShift. This article on ModeShift is a longer version of the Times article. Read the rest of this entry »

FRANKFORT, MI – The public event of the year in Benzie County, Michigan occurs here on July 4. The day begins with a parade on Main Street, continues with an art fair, a carnival, and this year a sand castle design contest on the Lake Michigan beachfront. Thousands of people roll into town while the sun is high. And as it sets thousands more come for the meteoric spectacle – the fireworks show that lights the town’s harbor and fills the sky with an escalating tempest of white sizzle, and red and blue flare.

Along with the day’s expert choreography another facet of Frankfort’s July 4 is its staging in a Lake Michigan shoreline town that dates to the 1850s, houses 1,280 residents, and has gradually emerged, like an oaf who’s worked himself into six-pack peak condition, as one of the truly handsome small ports on the Great Lakes. It’s an evolution, decades in the making, that was delayed in part by an indecorous period in Frankfort’s history when residents chased out Jewish vacationers in the years after World War Two. Had the town not made it clear with signs in restaurant windows, golf courses, and lodges  — “Gentiles Only” — it certainly would have been enriched by the energy, ideas, loyalty, and investment that Jewish visitors bring.

Instead, befuddled by a short seasonal economy, content to plug along even as its population grew old and dropped by 31 percent from its 1950 peak of 1,858 residents, Frankfort withered. When I first arrived in Benzie County in 1990, Frankfort was a town preserved in clouded amber. Though it was friendly and quiet, the town felt like an antique parlor that needed a good dusting.

In the last five years or so, even with a national recession that worried shopkeepers and investors, Frankfort has more than perked up. The town’s leafy streets have been repaved and are accompanied by lovely early 20th century homes with gables and porches. All major avenues have broad sidewalks and lead west to the city’s beach and harbor, and the wide breakwater that ends at the black and white steel base of the Frankfort Lighthouse.

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AKRON, OH. – Until LeBron James became this city’s signature global brand, that honor belonged to the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.  The world’s third largest tire manufacturer, with $21 billion in sales revenue last year, was founded here in 1898 and stayed put even as B.F. Goodrich, Firestone, and General Tire, its biggest competitors, closed their Akron plants and left in the 1980s.

In a word, Goodyear and Mr. James, who was born and raised in Akron, and last month won his second NBA championship in a row with the Miami Heat, are devoted to this 188-year-old Northeast Ohio city.

Both also turned to real estate development to sink deeper roots here. Mr. James, whose foundation is based in Akron and who has vowed publicly to become a billionaire, just purchased two properties that adjoin his gated compound on Akron’s west side. City officials say he is preparing to expand his holdings there, which include a 35,000-square-foot home.

More than matching him is Goodyear. On May 13, the company’ top executives gathered in the city’s east end to formally open a 639,000-square-foot, seven-story, $140 million world headquarters, by far the largest office building ever constructed in Akron.

A week ago The New York Times posted and published my article on Akron, the latest in a series of piece I’ve reported for the paper on the reviving Rust Belt. Later this month I write about Buffalo, NY for the Times.

During the ribbon-cutting ceremony, Richard J. Kramer, Goodyear’s chairman, president, and chief executive noted the building’s advanced communications capacity, energy efficiency, and other high-tech features. He described how the seven-story building, which is connected to the company’s 860,000-square-foot Innovation Center, renovated at a cost of $30 million, enables the company’s professional and research staff to more easily collaborate.

But the most important facet of the new building, he said, is its location. “We’re proud,” he said, raising a closed hand. “We’re very proud to be The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company of Akron, Ohio.”

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NAWANSHAR, Punjab, India – On the way to Mandeep Sekhon’s wheat and rice farm, a 8-hectare (20-acre) expanse of irrigated paddies, the road swings past continuous fields of winter wheat, the first shoots of green peeking from the stubble of last summer’s rice.

Early on a December afternoon, 32-year-old Sekhon displays the principal source of India’s farm plenty and its illogic – two streams of pure water that pour from the mouths of his farm’s irrigation wells. The wells run 24 hours a day, whether the soil is dry or not. As Sekhon watched, Desraj Khai, the farm’s 57-year-old superintendent, clawed gaps in the walls of a narrow channel with a stout wooden rod, directing one stream of water to paddies green with young wheat. The other stream poured into a concrete cistern near Sekhon’s house and barn, then drained without supervision into a copse of aspen.

Both wells operate with electric pumps. And as is the case with all of the other rice and wheat farms in India, the state government provides the water and the power for free. “It’s like anything else that’s free,” Sekhon remarks as he gazes at the free-flowing water. “If you don’t have to pay for it you don’t pay much attention to how much you use. Human nature, you know.”

Last week Circle of Blue posted the second article in our Choke Point: India project, our report on the endemic mismanagement of India’s water, energy, and food resources. By overseeing its resources as social welfare policy to assist the poor, providing free water and power to farmers, India is encouraging corruption, enormous waste, pollution, and water depletion.

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OWENSBORO, KY — When Gabrielle Gray was recruited ten years ago from Somerset, KY to direct the International Bluegrass Music Museum here, and to found an annual bluegrass music festival, this was a comfortable southern city stuck in a mid-American mustiness, a city in need of a fresh scrub. Two hours downriver from Louisville, Owensboro’s populous, 54,000 residents in 2000, was barely growing. Its downtown largely consisted of parking lots and empty turn of the 20th century brick storefront buildings. The Ohio River made a big and impressive turn at the place where the city was founded in 1817. But Owensboro greeted the spectacle with a big yawn of a boring shoreline where a once great downtown hotel stood.

In 2004, Gray organized the first River of Music Party — ROMP — in English Park. It attracted no more than a few thousand people to the river’s shoreline during the last weekend in June. But the line-up, reflecting Gray’s ability to attract talent, included Earl Scruggs, Doc Watson, Ricky Skaggs, and Sam Bush.

On Thursday night, the 10th annual ROMP Bluegrass Roots and Branches Festival opened six miles east in Daviess County’s Yellow Creek Park, and things are different. Much different. Gray, her professional museum staff, and a squadron of volunteers have built the gold standard festival in the world of bluegrass music in the United States and around the globe. Last year, following a festival that drew rave reviews from the Messenger-Inquirer, this city’s feisty and often querulous daily newspaper, and after a global evaluation, ROMP was named the Bluegrass Festival of the Year by the International Bluegrass Music Association. Over 20,000 people are attending this year’s three-day event to dance and cheer a lineup that includes renowned veteran artists — Merle Haggard, Dell McCoury, David Grisman, Sam Bush, Leftover Salmon, and Doyle Lawson.

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For a month at the end of 2012, I joined J. Carl Ganter, the director of Circle of Blue and a top American photojournalist, and Aubrey Parker, Circle of Blue’s young and exacting news editor, on an absorbing fact-gathering trip to India.  Our work focused on understanding the consequences of the contest between rising demand for energy and grain, and diminishing supplies of fresh water in a nation of 1.2 billion people.

The first of the four articles in our new Choke Point: India project posted this week. This work is not possible without our Washington-based partners and collaborators: Jennifer Turner, Michael Kugelman and other experts at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Circle of Blue’s research took us to the offices of businesses, think tanks, and government agencies in New Delhi, to the rice farms and mills in Punjab and Haryana, and to the open pit coal mines and a renewable energy field in Chhattisgarh.

Everything about that we learned about India was fascinating. Much of it was troubling. We found, for instance, that electricity shortages are a principal reason that after more than a decade of strong economic expansion, India’s GDP last year grew by 6.5 percent, the lowest since 2008, according to the World Bank.

Here is a sampling of other findings:

– A serious contest between energy, food, and water hinders Chhattisgarh, a coal-rich and energy-wasting eastern state. Though 2.5 kilograms of dried rice husk produce the same energy as one kilogram of coal, the water needed to produce the crop, and the diesel fuel required to transport thousands of tons of hulls to generating stations each week work out to a choke point that is stressing Chhattisgarh’s capacity to develop alternatives to coal.

– Climate change is a big problem. The warming climate in India is producing new and erratic patterns of rainfall, even in Chhattisgarh, a state where moisture once was abundant.

– Another issue is the condition of the soil, which has been depleted by decades of intensive modern farm production practices across India. Soil doesn’t retain as much water as it once did.

– Demand for water that is needed to produce steam and cool India’s  growing number of big coal-fired power plants is producing conflicts in the farm sector, and in cities that need water and electricity.

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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: Read the rest of this entry »