My two and a half year old daughter likes conversations about pee. She is not the only one in my life, apparently. To my infinite surprise, one of the top rated posts on GBLB over the past year was the one I did in February on waterless urinal problems.
Hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking,” a controversial practice used to drill for natural gas, also causes uranium trapped inside shale formations to be released, according to a new study.
After mapping Marcellus shale concentrations in Western New York and
Farmers and horticulturists are being advised to act now in order to survive the years of drought ahead.
A recent report commissioned by the Royal Agricultural Society of England (RASE) shows that higher temperatures and lower annual rainfall in summer is likely to reduce river flow
For thousands of years, nomadic herdsmen have roamed the harsh, semi-arid lowlands that stretch across 80 percent of Kenya and 60 percent of Ethiopia. Descendants of the oldest tribal societies in the world, they survive thanks to the animals they raise and the crops they grow, their travels determined by the search for water and grazing lands.
Water. Most Americans think nothing of it. Turn on the faucet and we expect clean water to flow under good pressure at the temperature of our choosing. But to make all that happen, water requires energy and lots of it. A full 3 percent of electrical power generation is used to treat, pump and distribute water in the U.S. (to say nothing of heating it). And in California, that figure is
“Water, Water everyone, nor any drop to drink”
-Rime of the ancient mariner by Coleridge
We’ve all heard or read that “water is the new oil”, often as a pundit’s shorthand for some market prediction. Drinking water, we are told by analysts and environmentalists, is a rare, limited resource which the world is
A Texas company has announced that it is moving forward with a plan to ship 2.9 billion to 9 billion gallons of water a year from the small Alaskan town of Sitka to the west coast of India. If the company, S2C Global Systems, succeeds in carrying out the shipments, the deal would represent the world’s first regular, bulk exports of water via tanker. The city of Sitka, a water-rich community of 8,600 people located on Baranof Island off Alaska’s southeast coast, is supporting the plan to export the water for a penny a gallon from its Blue Lake reservoir.
Though Smart Water offers equal or potentially greater benefits than Smart Energy, Smart Water isn’t getting equal coverage.
It’s been a great year for the Smart Grid. Entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, analysts, journalists, and regulators can’t stop talking about it. Experts are competing to project greater market potential. Zpryme puts the Smart Appliance market alone at $15.2 billion by 2015, Lux Research talks about $15.8 billion, Cisco estimates the overall opportunity at $100 billion and Pike research uses a whopping $200 billion figure.
One of the core issues surrounding the planting of trees and maintenance of crops or plantations is how to efficiently water them. Currently 1/3 of the world’s population lives in regions where water is scarce and this number is expected to double by 2025. These areas of dry land also have other soil issues, like erosion, which mean that the substrate is no longer able to support plant life.
A device created by Dutch inventor, Pieter Hoff, has the potential to mitigate some of the issues faced by farmers and business in areas of drought – the Groasis Waterboxx. The Waterboxx was recently listed as one of Popular Science’s top 10 inventions of 2010, and is designed to trap condensation that falls from the plant’s leaves during the night.
It might seem odd that South America, too often the victim of corporations looking for cheap labor and even cheaper natural resources, would become Mother Earth’s most vociferous advocate.
Yet it has, confirming a belief that suggests adversity creates heroes. This is certainly true in South American countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia and even Venezuela , where some of the most egregious examples of corporate pollution have left South Americans, and their indigenous counterparts, thoroughly disgusted not only with capitalism but with Western civilization as a whole.
Take, for example, the Cochabamba protests of 2000 , incited by the privatization of Bolivia’s municipal water supply by the Bechtel Corporation. Cochabama, Bolivia’s third largest city, has since become the permanent site for a yearly festival, the Feria del Agua (Water Fair).
With nearly $800 billion in drugs sold worldwide, pharmaceuticals are increasingly being released into the environment. The “green pharmacy” movement seeks to reduce the ecological impact of these drugs, which have caused mass bird die-offs and spawned antibiotic-resistant pathogens.
The standard that new drugs be safe for human consumption was first enshrined in U.S. regulations in 1938, after an antibacterial drug dissolved in a poisonous solvent killed 100 children. Now, armed with a range of evidence suggesting that wildlife and human health may be threatened by pharmaceutical residues that escape into waterways and elsewhere, a growing band of concerned ecotoxicologists and environmental chemists are calling for yet another standard for new medications: that they be designed to be safe for the environment.
The movement for “green pharmacy,” as it has been dubbed, has grown as new technology has allowed scientists to discern the presence of chemicals in the environment at minute concentrations, revealing the wide dispersal of human and veterinary drugs across the planet.
Hydro fracturing is a profitable method of natural gas extraction that uses large quantities of water and chemicals to free gas from underground rock formations. But New York City’s concerns that the practice would threaten its water supply have slowed a juggernaut that has been sweeping across parts of the northeastern United States.
The highly productive method of natural gas extraction known as “hydro fracturing” has spread rapidly across the United States in recent years, opening up vast new reserves in Texas, Wyoming, Pennsylvania, and other states.
Last fall, however, the process — also known as “fracking” — ran headlong into opposition from New York City. And for now at least, stiff resistance from the city, which fears the contamination of its pristine water supply in upstate New York, seems to have slowed the momentum behind this highly touted — and highly controversial — drilling technique.
The Earth is truly a blue planet; 70 percent of its surface is covered with water. Unfortunately 97.5 percent of that is salt water, unusable for humans. Fresh water accounts for the other 2.5 percent, however, about two thirds of that is locked up in glaciers and in the icy poles. That leaves humans (and every other living creature on land) only about one percent of all the water on Earth to use.
- If we break this down even further, we see more limitations. Of the one percent usable water, only one percent is actually on the surface and can be easily accessed. This includes lakes, rivers, and swamps. The rest is underground. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated the actual quantities in cubic miles for water distribution on Earth and is as follows:
In recognition of World Water Day, Underwriters Laboratories (UL) has launched its new “Save Your Water” consumption calculator.
This device allows people to calculate their daily, weekly and annual water consumption by participating in an interactive virtual home walk-through online.
Their Web site also provides statistics on water consumption, as well as offering solutions to excessive household water use.