water crisis
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Where Westlands water flows, California’s agriculture follows
What's happening in California's Westlands Water District provides a sneak peek at the problems that farmers all over the world will soon confront.
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Beware the water cowboys
The water wars are usually about supply and demand. But across the country, financially challenged communities are being aggressively courted -- including by Goldman Sachs! -- to sell or lease their drinking water and wastewater utilities to private companies.
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Memo to Hu and Obama: water and energy choke points merit time at the China-U.S. summit
Washington’s foreign policy community is all aflutter anticipating the meaning and outcome of Chinese President Hu Jintao’s three-day summit with U.S. President Barack Obama. But while the two heads of state focus on resolving what pries them apart, both nations share a dangerous confrontation within their borders over energy demand and water supply -- offering a matchless opportunity for new kinds of cooperation on policy, technology, business, and trade.
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The ‘food bubble’ is bursting, says Lester Brown, and biotech won’t save us
As food prices spike anew, the pioneering environmentalist has a chilling report about the global "food bubble." I asked him whether policymakers and biotech execs are right that genetically modified seeds are the answer to "feeding the world." His answer? No.
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When I learned that water isn't supposed to have a taste
Turning on your faucet shouldn't be a high-risk venture. Cities and towns shouldn't have to worry that the water lost in leaky pipes will mean ongoing shortages or usage restrictions. But these concerns are already cropping up in communities throughout the country -- and they will only become more common as decades of neglect to our water infrastructure begin to catch up with us.
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Redesigning our cities for the dawning age of global freshwater scarcity
The next urban evolution cannot occur unless we reinvent urban water supply and management to meet the demands of the age of freshwater scarcity.
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In Era of Turmoil, The Top Of The World Is Melting
By Keith Schneider In January, when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change acknowledged that it was wrong in predicting that the glaciers of the Himalayas could be gone by 2035, skeptics of global warming used the error to assert that much of climate science was a fraud. Next month, though, the Asia Society […]
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Taxpayer dollars subsidizing destruction
One way to correct market failures is tax shifting — raising taxes on activities that harm the environment so that their prices begin to reflect their true cost and offsetting this with a reduction in income taxes. A complementary way to achieve this goal is subsidy shifting. Each year the world’s taxpayers provide at least […]
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Water and the War on Terror
While leaders in Washington have been war-gaming the national security risks of climate change, they’ve only started to connect the dots to the closely related threats emanating from the growing crisis of global freshwater scarcity. At first blush, water and national security may not seem to be interlinked. But the reality, as narrated in my […]