Speed Blogging
Submitted by Aguanomics Blog
- “A research team at North Carolina State University is reporting that it has realized up to six times the average corn starch yield by growing duckweed, a microscopic aquatic plant, on hog farm wastewate. The researchers concluded that the process cleans up waste water and produces a high-yield biofuel, and the duckweed starch can be converted to ethanol at existing corn ethanol processors.”
- “What will global warming look like? Scientists point to Australia: Drought, fires, killer heat waves, wildlife extinction and mosquito-borne illness — the things that climate change models are predicting have already arrived there.”
- “A large server farm can use up to 360,000 gallons of water a day in its cooling systems, a trend that has data center operators looking at ways to reduce their water use and impact on local water utilities. Google says two of its data centers now are ‘water self-sufficient.’”
- Read this paper [PDf] on auctions for water in central Oregon. The auctions were inferior in their single-round design (no chance for participants to learn where the market clearing price was), the use of discriminatory bids (which appears unfair ex-post), and their strategic nature (the buyer — an environmental account of the state — tried to trick farmers-as-sellers to place lower bids). All-in-auctions are better, in many ways.
- “The political relations between India and Pakistan remain consistently adversarial in the Indian Ocean region. Yet the Indus Treaty signed in 1960 between India and Pakistan has endured despite the unabashedly hostile nature of the political relationship between the two states. There are other paradoxes concerning the role of the World Bank and scientific and developmental principles on water resources development. This article examines the paradoxes in the workings of the Indus Treaty.”
- How to calculate water budgets: “A $380,000 program developed by the San Diego County Water Authority and U.S. Bureau of Reclamation tells Barnes how much landscaping the restaurant and every other parcel in the Helix district have, down to the square foot. The program uses an equation to account for the climate zone each parcel sits in and how much water its landscaping demands annually. It then provides an estimate of much water a given property needs to keep its grass green in every two-month billing period — even accounting for seasonal variations.” Districts that set prices based on humans — not grass — don’t need such fancy software, of course…
- Some groups are suing DWR to stop water transfers because some sellers may be replacing sold surface water with increased groundwater pumping — harming others in the community. I agree with them. Can we get some groundwater monitoring please?
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