Want to predict how the economy is moving? There’s no better indicator to watch than trash.

In an analysis at Bloomberg (by way of the Washington Post), Michael McDonough and Bob Willis assessed which rail-transported material tracked most closely with broader economic indicators. The least correlation was between carloads of coal. The most? Waste. McDonough and Willis found that the index of how much garbage moved by rail had an 82 percent correlation with the GDP.

Which makes this graph worrisome.

Image courtesy of Michael McDonough.

The drop-off in that blue line, indicating waste carloads, mirrors a similar drop-off in 2009 — and you know what happened then. (Or, if you don’t: The economy tanked.)

The American thing to do, then, is have all of your garbage shipped by rail from now on. U-S-A. U-S-A.

This is not a repeat from yesterday. It is worse.

For the second day in a row, power consumption in India vastly exceeded available supply, due in part to high temperatures. The result: grid failure that first struck the northern part of the country — which had the same issue yesterday — then, the eastern. Reuters suggests that the outage affected 670 million people — 9.5 percent of all people on Earth. For nearly four hours, power and transportation systems in the nation’s capital were at a standstill, forcing hospitals and “VIP zones” to rely on generator backups. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:

Hundreds of trains stalled across the country and traffic lights went out, causing widespread traffic jams in New Delhi. Electric crematoria stopped operating, some with bodies half burnt, power officials said. Emergency workers rushed generators to coal mines to rescue miners trapped underground.

At least 46 of the 200 trapped miners have since been rescued.

That coal miners were trapped is not without irony. The root of India’s electricity problem, exposed by surging demand in high temperatures, is that a wobbly infrastructure is combined with too little generation. A business trade group puts the blame for generation issues specifically on “the nonavailability of coal.” As we noted last week, the quality of India’s domestic coal is largely too poor for recent-generation coal plants.

The Times’ Andy Revkin has a good round-up of deeper explanations for the power failures, further explaining the link between India’s power problems and its coal problems. He cites the Wall Street Journal, which blames environmental regulations:

More than half of India’s power-generation capacity of 205 gigawatts is coal-based, and Coal India Ltd., the world’s biggest coal producer, is unable to produce enough owing to delays in getting environmental clearances for mining. Meanwhile, government giveaways in the form of free electricity to farmers and a reluctance among politicians to raise power tariffs to sufficiently cover costs have drained cash reserves from the largely state-run electricity-distribution companies, leaving them with mounting debt and hampered ability to purchase power.

But again, it’s not clear that mining more coal would solve the country’s problems. If generation facilities can’t use the coal, there’s not much point in sending more people down to retrieve it.

For more on the power outage (which is now largely resolved): The BBC has a good gallery of images. The Times of India is running a liveblog.

There were at least four major protests this weekend targeting fracking, nuclear power, pollution, and mountaintop-removal mining. Here’s a quiz: How many of these protests did you know about?

There was Saturday’s banjo-festooned fracking protest in Washington, D.C. It was called “Stop the Frack Attack,” and it called on politicians to stop the frack attack. Some estimates suggest that 5,000 people participated in the action; UPI asked a pro-fracking guy how many were there and he said that he heard 1,500 from a cop, so UPI went with 1,500.

Anti-fracking protestors march in Washington, D.C. (Photo by TXsharon.)

There were also protests in Japan and China. Earlier this month, some 100,000 people rallied in Tokyo to try and prevent a nuclear generator from being turned back on. Over the weekend, tens of thousands more marched outside of Parliament with the same aim: calling on the prime minister to halt the use of nuclear power. (There were no reports of banjos.)

Police, in blue, clash with protestors in Qidong. (Photo via TeaLeafNation.)

In Qidong, China, a huge protest halted plans to run a wastewater pipeline from a paper plant into the ocean.

The pipeline that residents fear will pollute their water will not be built, the government promised on the Qidong police micro-blog and the website of Nantong city, which oversees Qidong.

This apparent victory for residents follows another one this month when protesters in the southwest city of Shifang, in Sichuan province, forced officials to scrap a planned copper refinery. A large demonstration halted a petrochemicals plant in Dalian, in eastern China, last year.

Environmental experts cheer the growing rights awareness among China’s citizens that forced the Qidong decision, but they caution that China will face many more such protests unless the government overhauls its opaque decision-making process and allows the public to participate.

Thousands of people overturned cars and stormed city hall to demonstrate their opposition. (There are more pictures here.) A massive police presence eventually restored order.

And finally: A protest in Lincoln County, W. Va. — in the region heavily impacted by mountaintop-removal mining — shut down one mine for three hours on Saturday. Twenty protestors were taken to jail. A press release from the group behind the action, RAMPS, explained what happened:

More than 50 protesters affiliated with the R.A.M.P.S. Campaign have walked onto Patriot Coal’s Hobet mine and shut it down. Ten people locked to a rock truck, boarded it and dropped banners: “Coal Leaves, Cancer Stays.” At least three have been arrested [Editor's note: This figure was preliminary] with another in a tree being threatened by miners with a chain saw. Earlier in the day, two people were arrested at Kanawha State Forest before a group of protesters headed to the state capitol.

Patriot Coal, the parent company of the mine, recently filed for bankruptcy. So that’s good news, anyway.

And that was your “What Protests Happened Over the Weekend?” quiz. How many of those protests had you heard about? One? None?

Now ask yourself this: Did you hear that people were upset that NBC tape-delayed the Olympics?

We’ve previously mentioned the link between hot days and increased power demand. Not like we’re genius scientists for doing so; it’s a pretty obvious connection. The hotter the day, the greater the demand for air conditioning and fans, the more strain on the electrical grid. Today, India faced the worst-case scenario.

The power grid across northern India failed Monday, halting hundreds of trains and leaving millions of people sweating in the heat in one of the worst blackouts in a decade, highlighting the country’s inability to feed a growing hunger for energy. …

It was the first time since 2001 that the northern grid had collapsed. But India’s demand for electricity has soared since then as its economy has grown sharply, and the outage was a reminder of the country’s long road ahead in upgrading its infrastructure to meet its aspirations of being an economic superpower.

In addition, a weak monsoon has kept temperatures higher this year, further increasing electricity usage as people seek to cool off. Shivpal Singh Yadav, the power minister in the state of Uttar Pradesh, home to 200 million people, said that while demand during peak hours hits 11,000 megawatts, the state can only provide 9,000 megawatts.

Today’s temperatures in India. (Image by Weather-Forecast.com.)

Temperatures in New Delhi hovered around 31 degrees C, or about 89 degrees F. With humidity, it felt like 100. The city’s metro system shut down and hospitals reverted to generator backup.

The population in the city, India’s capital, is over 12 million. NPR estimated that the outage affected 370 million people — as though the populations of the United States, Canada, and Australia all lost power at once.

Last week, we noted that India is struggling to figure out how to generate electricity more inexpensively, moving away from domestic coal that is too low-quality for modern electrical plants. That Uttar Pradesh — the region mentioned in the excerpt above — generates only about 80 percent of what is needed for peak demand bodes poorly as demand continues to spike with increased temperatures.

In no particular order, and, despite the headline, certainly not everything:

• The Olympic Games’ official sustainability site!
• How organizers plan to make the Games green!
• The top six green buildings at the Olympics!
• How the Games precipitated a green building boom!
• A U.N. guy, giving the London Games props!
• Action Sustainability, taking said props away!
• An article called: “London Olympics — Green Olympics?”
• A video, from the BBC!
• All about toilets!

In case other people write other things about it in the future, here are links to Google searches for “olympics green” and “olympics sustainability.”

Now let us say no more about it.

Those of us who grew up in the Space Shuttle era remember watching tiny, scratchy televisions on various mornings, at home or in school; remember the adrenaline of seeing that odd craft sitting on the launchpad. That visual is the one that sticks because it’s the one we watched the most. A shuttle launch for us was all about the promise, the build-up. It’s coming, it’s coming. Five minutes. One minute. 30 seconds. You have X amount of time before something spectacular happens.

Sally Ride on the flight deck of Challenger. (Photo by NASA.)

Sally Ride lived a life of inspiration, engagement, exhortation. Her first trip into space was an accomplishment that lasted beyond that initial spark of the engines, a rare flight for which the anticipation of the launch was only a precursor to what we would learn and experience and appreciate. She was not only the first American woman to hover above the atmosphere, but she was a brilliant, savvy, compelling woman whom everyone, even a kid like me, understood was exceptional.

Ride’s commitment, first and foremost, was to broadening understanding. After her time with NASA, she formed Sally Ride Science, with the goal of getting students engaged in and excited about science. (Who better to do it? What kid is going to look Dr. Sally Ride in the eye and say, “Nah, not interested”?) Three years ago, that push to inform resulted in a book — co-written with Tam O’Shaughnessy, the woman we now know to be her partner. Titled Mission: Planet Earth, the book is an outline of how and why the climate is changing. The publisher provides an excerpt:

[From space,] I could see how fragile Earth is. When I looked toward the horizon, I could see a thin, fuzzy blue line outlining the planet. At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing. Then I realized it was Earth’s atmosphere. It looked so thin and so fragile, like a strong gust of interplanetary wind could blow it all away. And I realized that this air is our planet’s spacesuit — it’s all that separates every bird, fish, and person on Earth from the blackness of space. …

To a person standing on the ground, our air seems to go on forever. The sky looks so big, and people haven’t worried about what they put into the air. From space, though, it’s obvious how little air there really is. Nothing vanishes “into thin air.” The gases that we’re sending into the air are piling up in our atmosphere. And that’s changing Earth’s life-support system in ways that could change our planet forever.

In its obituary, the New York Times notes another time when Ride embraced truth and understanding — in the aftermath of the Challenger crash in 1986.

As a member of the panel appointed by President Ronald Reagan to investigate the accident, Ms. Ride gained a reputation for asking tough questions. The panel learned from testimony and other evidence that there had been signs of trouble on earlier Challenger flights, but that they had been dismissed as not critical. Dr. Ride told a colleague it was difficult not to be angered by the findings.

One witness was Roger Boisjoly, an engineer who had worked for the company that made the shuttle’s rocket boosters and who had been shunned by colleagues for revealing that he had warned his bosses and NASA that the boosters’ seals, called O-rings, could fail in cold weather. The Challenger had taken off on a cold morning.

After his testimony, Dr. Ride, who was known to be reserved and reticent, publicly hugged him. She was the only panelist to offer him support. Mr. Boisjoly, who died in February, said her gesture had helped sustain him during a troubled time.

That this embrace was included in the retelling of an exceptional woman’s life, this one, cosmically brief touch, makes its message impossible to ignore. Telling the truth even in the face of disaster, a willingness to stand up to power and argue for evidence and accuracy — these are the hallmarks of science and discovery.

For those of us watching at home, the imminent launch of the shuttle and then that shaky, squawking roar that came from the little speaker in our TV sets was the culmination of our excitement. For Ride and for other scientists, it was the impatient and too-long start to the real thing: the experiments and experience that informed the rest of humanity about the world in which we live.

Half of the water we use goes to power generation. Michael Webber, associate director of the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas, finds that worrisome, given our recent water-access difficulties. (Yes, we’re talking about the drought again. Get used to it.) He wrote an editorial for The New York Times titled, “Will Drought Cause the Next Blackout?“

During the 2008 drought in the Southeast, power plants were within days or weeks of shutting down because of limited water supplies. In Texas today, some cities are forbidding the use of municipal water for hydraulic fracturing. The multiyear drought in the West has lowered the snowpack and water levels behind dams, reducing their power output. The United States Energy Information Administration recently issued an alert that the drought was likely to exacerbate challenges to California’s electric power market this summer, with higher risks of reliability problems and scarcity-driven price increases.

Image courtesy of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

You may remember how power plants work. In a coal plant, as illustrated above, coal is burned to heat water, which becomes steam. The pressure of the steam is used to rotate a turbine, which spins a magnet that creates electricity. The steam is then cooled back into water and pumped back out to the source. Without water, there’s no steam. With no steam, there’s no power.

Webber’s article isn’t the first time the link between drought and power generation has been raised. A survey of electricity providers earlier this year suggested that water availability was a primary concern. But the nexus is worrisome: Increased drought means less water. Increased drought also means higher temperatures. Higher temperatures mean increased power usage.

Webber suggests ways in which we can soften the impact. Conservation; reduced water use for extraction, as in fracking; increased use of reclaimed water. And, of course, increased use of renewables:

A plan proposed by the Obama administration (requiring new power plants to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour generated) would encourage utilities to choose less carbon- and water-intensive fuels. Conventional coal plants, which are very thirsty, exceed the standards proposed by the president. But relatively clean, and water-lean, power plants that use wind, solar panels and natural gas combined cycle, would meet them. Thus, by enforcing CO2 limits, a lot of water use can be avoided.

Wind turbines, for example, use very little water. By which we mean no water. More wind turbines, less water. Done and done.

None of this should come as a surprise. Back in 1999, Yasiin Bey (then known as Mos Def) wrote a song, “New World Water.” (Seriously!) An excerpt below.

You can laugh and take it as a joke if you wanna
But it don’t rain for four weeks some summers
And it’s about to get real wild in the half
You be buying Evian just to take a fuckin bath …
See I ain’t got time try to be Big Hank,
Fuck a bank; I need a twenty-year water tank
Cause while these knuckleheads is out here sweatin they goods
The sun is sitting in the treetops burnin the woods
And as the flames from the blaze get higher and higher
They say, “Don’t drink the water! We need it for the fire!”

The hip-hop community and academics agree: The time to address our water problem has arrived. Without power, after all, how are we going to listen to music?

Weird things are happening to lobsters.

In June, we brought you the story of a blue lobster, Old Blue (a name I gave him just now), found by a fisherman in Nova Scotia who’d never before seen a blue lobster in his many years of lobster-hunting.

The odds he finds another one are getting better every day.

Reports of odd-colored lobsters used to be rare in the lobster fishing grounds of New England and Atlantic Canada. Normal lobsters are a mottled greenish-brown.

But in recent years, accounts of bright blue, orange, yellow, calico, white and even split lobsters — one color on one side, another on the other — have jumped. It’s now common to hear several stories a month of a lobsterman bringing one of the quirky crustaceans to shore.

It’s not clear why there are more reports of colored lobster. It could be that more people have cameras to back up their tall tales. But it’s also possible that overfishing is to blame.

The off-colored lobsters are more susceptible to predators because they stick out more on the ocean bottom, rather than blending in like normal ones, said Diane Cowan, executive director of The Lobster Conservancy in Friendship, Maine.

“But with the predator population down, notably cod, there might be greater survival rates among these color morphs that are visually easier to pick out,” she said.

Lobster used to be so abundant that eating it was a mark of poverty; its meat was used to feed servants and as fertilizer. Even now, lobster catches in Maine are so big that it sells at lower prices than deli meat in the state.

Lobster-gatherers in Connecticut aren’t so lucky. Their stocks have been dramatically depleted since the late ’90s, dropping from 3.7 million pounds in 1998 to 142,000 in 2011 — the lowest haul ever.

As the number of lobsters hauled into this and other port towns from the Long Island Sound has dwindled, the fishing industry has largely blamed a single culprit: mosquito pesticides.

The industry’s claims hadn’t been supported until a state study this month found traces of pesticides in Long Island Sound lobsters for the first time. The report isn’t definitive, and its authors at the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection said more studies are needed. …

Besides mosquito spraying, other culprits could include an increase in predators like striped bass and black sea bass, Mr. Simpson said. The Long Island Sound’s temperature been rising, frequently exceeding the 68 degree threshold that is healthy for lobsters. Bacterial or parasitic infection is another possibility.

Lobster is a unique- and valuable-enough animal that shifts in abundance from overfishing, pollution, and changing water temperatures are tracked and identifiable. The remaining questions, then, are the extent to which those factors influence supply — and, of course, how the economics of lobster evolve in the future.

Houses certified under various environmental standards are worth 9 percent more than the state average in California, according to new work by two economists.

Out of the 1.6-million-home-transaction sample, [the study's authors] identified 4,321 dwellings that sold with Energy Star, LEED or GreenPoint Rated labels. They then ran statistical analyses to determine how much green labeling contributed to the selling price — eliminating all other factors contained in the real estate records, such as locational effects, school districts, crime rates, time period of sale, swimming pools and views. …

The 9% average price premium from green-rated homes is roughly in line with studies conducted in Europe, where energy-efficiency labeling on houses is far more commonplace. Homes rated “A” under the European Union‘s system commanded a 10% average premium in one study, while dwellings with poor ratings sold for substantial discounts.

In June, the median home price in California was $274,000, meaning that green certification increased the value of a house by almost $25,000.

And green investment isn’t only good for homeowners. It’s also good for the federal government [PDF].

[O]ver the life of solar assets, lease and PPA financing structures can deliver a nominal 10% internal rate of return (IRR) to the federal government on the federal investment tax credit (ITC) for residential and commercial solar projects.

Based on this analysis, a $10,500 residential solar credit can deliver a $22,882 nominal benefit to the government and a $300,000 commercial solar credit can create a $677,627 nominal benefit in lease and PPA scenarios over a 30-year period (the minimum expected life of the assets).

Translated into English: The government’s tax credit for the generation of solar power ends up making it around 10 percent on its investment. That return varies by state; it’s about twice as high in New York as in Arizona, for example. But the benefit is real, seen in the form of taxes on generated electricity.

Investing in green. Good for you; good for the government; bad for coal-fired power plants. Win. Win. Win.

We are not huge fans of digging in the ground to pull out oil that is then burned. But we are sometimes fans of digging in the ground to pull out water so people can drink.

Namibia is dominated by the Namib desert, which runs 2,000 miles along the western coast of the continent from Angola into South Africa. The country is the most arid African nation south of the Sahara. Residents in the northern region rely on a 40-year-old canal to bring water in from neighboring Angola.

But that may change. The BBC reports:

A newly discovered water source in Namibia could have a major impact on development in the driest country in sub-Saharan Africa.

Estimates suggest the aquifer could supply the north of the country for 400 years at current rates of consumption.

Scientists say the water is up to 10,000 years old but is cleaner to drink than many modern sources.

The general region appears on the map above.

Mean annual rainfall in Namibia. Click to embiggen. (Image courtesy of IIASA.)

The aquifer flows across the Angolan border, covering an area of a little over 1,000 square miles. While efforts to extract from it are underway, it does carry some risk:

The natural pressure that the water is under means that it is easy and cheap to extract. But because a smaller salty aquifer sits on top of the new find it raises the possibility that unauthorised drilling could threaten the quality of the water.

Martin Quinger says that random drilling into the aquifer could be dangerous.

“If people don’t comply with our technical recommendations they might create a hydraulic shortcut between the two aquifers which might lead to the salty water from the upper one contaminating the deep one or vice versa.”

And there’s one more caveat: The already dry country will likely become drier as the effects of climate change take hold. Researchers “estimate that it could act as a natural buffer for up to 15 years of drought.”

Only knocking some 385 years off the best-case scenario.