Daniel Chapter 2 - Mark McMillion
Thursday, June 4, 2015
Here's why the USA FREEDOM Act is possibly even worse than the PATRIOT Act!
The Sovereign Man - Notes from the Field
June 3, 2015
Buenos Aires, Argentina
My general rule of thumb when it comes to legislation is that the more high-sounding the name, the more insidious the law.
Exhibit A: the just-passed USA FREEDOM Act.
"Freedom". It sounds great.
So great, in fact, that they stuck it in the title and built an absurd acronym around it-- the real name of the law is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015".
U-S-A-F-R-E-E-D-O-M. Hooray!
And without fail, the media has bought in to the myth, praising the government for heralding in a new era of liberty with headlines like "Congress Reins In NSA’s Spying Powers" and "NSA phone program doomed as Senate passes USA Freedom Act".
Unfortunately this is simply not the case. And shame on the mainstream media for making such thinly-researched, fallacious assertions.
If anyone had actually taken the time to read the legislation, they'd see that most of the 'concessions' made by the government are entirely hollow.
Secret FISA courts still exist. Lone wolf surveillance authority and roving wiretaps still exist. They can still grab oodles of other data like medical and business records.
And the US Attorney General has even been awarded new 'emergency powers' to use in his/her sole discretion... just in case the secret courts might be uncooperative.
The big victory being cheered by the media pertains to the collection of phone records. This one is actually hilarious.
The USA FREEDOM Act prevents the government from seizing and storing 'call detail records', the so-called meta-data information like your phone number, the other caller's phone number, the length of the call, etc.
But section 107(k)(3)(B) of the new law specifically states that 'call detail records' do NOT include the *actual content* of the call itself. Or your name. Address. Financial data. Cell-site location. Etc.
So basically they can't archive your phone number. But everything else is fair game. Congratulations on your freedom.
Lawmakers also managed to sprinkle all sorts of other worthless provisions into the USA FREEDOM Act.
For example, the Inspector General (IG) of the United States is required to issue a report discussing what civil liberty violations may have occurred over the last few years.
Great. Except that IG reports are just that-- reports. They have no teeth. And Congress can do with this one precisely what they do with every other IG report that gets issued: nothing.
(Seriously, when was the last time you heard any ruckus about an IG report? Probably never.)
They also stated that a panel of 'advocates' (whoever they may be) would attend and observe any secret FISA court hearing in which profound legal issues might be at stake.
Again, sounds great. Except that, like the IG report, a panel of advocates has no teeth... no power to stop the court or spy agencies.
Bottom line, these concessions may look good on paper, but they don't amount to any real concession.
This is a classic negotiation tactic. When working out a contentious deal, the stronger side will invariably offer some irrelevant concession that has no material impact on what they want.
We did this several months ago for our Chilean agriculture fund, pushing through a substantial price reduction on a 2,000 acre property by 'conceding' to let the seller stay in the farm house for a few months.
He felt like he got something, but for us the concession was pointless and ceremonial.
The same thing happened here. And the American people just got played.
The government has spent the last 14 years turning up the heat on the boiling frog. They increased the temperature by 100 degrees over that time... and have now turned it down 1 degree.
Yet people are treating this like it's some sort of victory.
It's not. And this is a sad reflection of how low people's expectations have become of their own government and liberty.
It's a mistake to rely on a government to solve the problems that they themselves created.
It's a mistake to expect bureaucrats to voluntarily give up the power that they have awarded themselves... and have spent years abusing.
It's a mistake to wait for politicians to give you back the freedom that they've taken away.
They don't give a damn about your freedom. And they're certainly not going to give it to you.
But it still exists. It's out there for anyone who cares enough to do something about it.
When I was in the military everyone used to say 'freedom isn't free'. And this is totally true.
Freedom starts with the individual. No one is going to give it to you. Becoming free means you have to put forth just a little bit of effort to take some common sense baby steps.
Let's discuss some of these tomorrow.
Until then,
Simon Black
June 3, 2015
Buenos Aires, Argentina
My general rule of thumb when it comes to legislation is that the more high-sounding the name, the more insidious the law.
Exhibit A: the just-passed USA FREEDOM Act.
"Freedom". It sounds great.
So great, in fact, that they stuck it in the title and built an absurd acronym around it-- the real name of the law is "Uniting and Strengthening America by Fulfilling Rights and Ensuring Effective Discipline Over Monitoring Act of 2015".
U-S-A-F-R-E-E-D-O-M. Hooray!
And without fail, the media has bought in to the myth, praising the government for heralding in a new era of liberty with headlines like "Congress Reins In NSA’s Spying Powers" and "NSA phone program doomed as Senate passes USA Freedom Act".
Unfortunately this is simply not the case. And shame on the mainstream media for making such thinly-researched, fallacious assertions.
If anyone had actually taken the time to read the legislation, they'd see that most of the 'concessions' made by the government are entirely hollow.
Secret FISA courts still exist. Lone wolf surveillance authority and roving wiretaps still exist. They can still grab oodles of other data like medical and business records.
And the US Attorney General has even been awarded new 'emergency powers' to use in his/her sole discretion... just in case the secret courts might be uncooperative.
The big victory being cheered by the media pertains to the collection of phone records. This one is actually hilarious.
The USA FREEDOM Act prevents the government from seizing and storing 'call detail records', the so-called meta-data information like your phone number, the other caller's phone number, the length of the call, etc.
But section 107(k)(3)(B) of the new law specifically states that 'call detail records' do NOT include the *actual content* of the call itself. Or your name. Address. Financial data. Cell-site location. Etc.
So basically they can't archive your phone number. But everything else is fair game. Congratulations on your freedom.
Lawmakers also managed to sprinkle all sorts of other worthless provisions into the USA FREEDOM Act.
For example, the Inspector General (IG) of the United States is required to issue a report discussing what civil liberty violations may have occurred over the last few years.
Great. Except that IG reports are just that-- reports. They have no teeth. And Congress can do with this one precisely what they do with every other IG report that gets issued: nothing.
(Seriously, when was the last time you heard any ruckus about an IG report? Probably never.)
They also stated that a panel of 'advocates' (whoever they may be) would attend and observe any secret FISA court hearing in which profound legal issues might be at stake.
Again, sounds great. Except that, like the IG report, a panel of advocates has no teeth... no power to stop the court or spy agencies.
Bottom line, these concessions may look good on paper, but they don't amount to any real concession.
This is a classic negotiation tactic. When working out a contentious deal, the stronger side will invariably offer some irrelevant concession that has no material impact on what they want.
We did this several months ago for our Chilean agriculture fund, pushing through a substantial price reduction on a 2,000 acre property by 'conceding' to let the seller stay in the farm house for a few months.
He felt like he got something, but for us the concession was pointless and ceremonial.
The same thing happened here. And the American people just got played.
The government has spent the last 14 years turning up the heat on the boiling frog. They increased the temperature by 100 degrees over that time... and have now turned it down 1 degree.
Yet people are treating this like it's some sort of victory.
It's not. And this is a sad reflection of how low people's expectations have become of their own government and liberty.
It's a mistake to rely on a government to solve the problems that they themselves created.
It's a mistake to expect bureaucrats to voluntarily give up the power that they have awarded themselves... and have spent years abusing.
It's a mistake to wait for politicians to give you back the freedom that they've taken away.
They don't give a damn about your freedom. And they're certainly not going to give it to you.
But it still exists. It's out there for anyone who cares enough to do something about it.
When I was in the military everyone used to say 'freedom isn't free'. And this is totally true.
Freedom starts with the individual. No one is going to give it to you. Becoming free means you have to put forth just a little bit of effort to take some common sense baby steps.
Let's discuss some of these tomorrow.
Until then,
Simon Black
Tax Increase in Gaza Weighs on Palestinians Already Barely Scraping By
By Diaa Hadid and Majd Al Waheidi, NY Times, June 1, 2015
GAZA CITY–On a street here crammed with glittery clothing and electronic shops, Mahmoud Matar flipped through the receipt book for his appliance store, much of it blank: His lone sale that day was a $7 kettle. It was clear whom he blamed for his poor sales: Gaza’s Islamist Hamas government.
“They should close up shop and go home,” raged Mr. Matar, a chain-smoking 31-year-old with slicked-back hair. “They shouldn’t call themselves a government.”
Early optimism that global powers would intervene forcefully to rebuild the battered coastal enclave after the 50-day summer war between Gaza’s Hamas government and Israel has faded. Hamas’s claim that it won the war simply by surviving has been overwhelmed by a grinding struggle to keep the territory afloat, as living standards for its 1.8 million residents steadily worsen.
Most recently, Hamas quietly initiated new import fees in an effort to cover the salaries of about 40,000 employees who have not been paid for months, raising prices in already-depressed markets. A kilogram of meat, a little over two pounds, increased by 50 cents, black pepper by $1.50 a kilogram and shampoo by 25 cents. Incremental amounts for Western consumers, perhaps, but a blow to Palestinians already barely scraping by.
With the economy tanking, Gazans are growing increasingly frustrated with the standoff between Hamas and its rival Fatah party, led by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
“The citizen is in the middle,” said Omar Shaban, an economist. “Ramallah doesn’t care,” he said, referring to Mr. Abbas’s government in the West Bank. “They have an interest in leaving Gaza like this.”
Pulverized buildings are still scattered along Gaza’s border areas from the last war. In the rubble of Shejaiya, an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City, near the border with Israel, a man swung his mallet to show how he pulverized concrete chunks into rubble that he sold to mix with black-market cement, earning him $15 a day.
Nearby, a woman walked into a badly damaged house, the windows bricked over. Some residents have returned to living in wrecked homes, despairing of having them repaired. Others have received small amounts of United Nations-donated cement to repair less-damaged homes. A few thousand homeless people still live in United Nations-run schools.
Many of the newly unemployed are former construction laborers. Desperate to find work, they turn to any sort of activity they can think of.
Abdul-Munim Omrani, 33, convinced a charity to give him a peddler’s cart. He now uses it to sell hot drinks near a beach at a cheaper price than the seaside cafes skirting the shore.
He can make around $12 a day, he said, but he was chased away by the municipal police. His rust-streaked cart, with a deflated wheel, was parked near his peeling pastel-painted home. “I felt defeated,” he said. “That man took away my livelihood.”
On a recent day at the Gaza port, men pushed children in toy cars decked with flowers and glitter, charging 50 cents a ride.
Boys work, too, making up for absent, sick or dead fathers. Mohammad al-Ahl, 13, sells polka-dot balloons for 25 cents each, cheaper than the Bugs Bunny-shaped balloons older men typically offer for a dollar. On this day, business was quiet. He sat silently by the port’s cheery blue, pink and green painted wall.
Israel places severe restrictions on the import of building materials, saying they have been used to build tunnels to conduct attacks on Israel. The Egyptian government, a bitter enemy of its homegrown Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, has taken extraordinary steps to shut down the tunnels that had been the lifeblood of the Gaza economy.
Egypt has opened its border only five times this year, part of a broader policy to punish Hamas, which aligned itself with the Brotherhood, Egypt’s former ruling party, a decision that backfired when the military seized power in mid-2013. The tunnels were Hamas’s chief source of revenue. It was their closing that set off the new import fees in May.
Visiting Gaza on Monday, the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called on Israel to ease restrictions on imports to Gaza. But he acknowledged that was unlikely to happen until Gaza was no longer “a launching pad for rockets.”
While Gaza’s unemployment rate has risen to 44 percent, the highest in the world, and many Gazan workers go unpaid, tens of thousands of employees who were hired by Mr. Abbas’s government when it controlled the territory are paid to stay home rather than work for Hamas.
“It’s not logical at all,” said Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman for Gaza’s Health Ministry. “The one sitting at home is paid, but if he has a problem, he goes to a hospital to be treated by a doctor who hasn’t taken a salary.”
The family of Mr. Omrani, the would-be hawker, still squeaks by. His wife sometimes finds casual work as a physiotherapist. They live rent-free with his mother, Fathiya, 63, who shares her $60 monthly widow’s pension. They occasionally get rice and sugar from the nearby mosque, and they do not eat much, Mr. Omrani said. Recently, the World Bank reported three-quarters of all residents rely on aid this way.
But there’s not enough for Mr. Omrani to pay a bribe for the right doctor to issue a certificate for his mother to obtain treatment in Egypt or Israel. She has several ailments and cancer, he said, presenting a sheaf of medical documents. Fathiya, too weak to stand, wept in the tiny living room, partly in panic, partly from pain.
In the postwar malaise, some young men appear zombielike. Some are addicted to powerful painkillers generically called “tramal,” that promise hours of hazy escape from a place they cannot flee.
“It’s the unemployment, the lack of security, the pressure, the blockade. Imagine waiting for months to leave Gaza,” said a 24-year-old former user. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified by government officials. “Imagine waiting and waiting.”
Many children, and adults, still carry the trauma inflicted during the conflict.
Hamada Zaim, 4, has already lived through two short wars, in 2012 and 2014. He wets his bed and wakes up screaming at night, said his mother, Reem. Between wars, he went bald and his head began swelling. Before Egypt tightened movement across the border, his mother took him there to see specialists. They couldn’t give her a diagnosis, and told her to return, but now it is nearly impossible.
GAZA CITY–On a street here crammed with glittery clothing and electronic shops, Mahmoud Matar flipped through the receipt book for his appliance store, much of it blank: His lone sale that day was a $7 kettle. It was clear whom he blamed for his poor sales: Gaza’s Islamist Hamas government.
“They should close up shop and go home,” raged Mr. Matar, a chain-smoking 31-year-old with slicked-back hair. “They shouldn’t call themselves a government.”
Early optimism that global powers would intervene forcefully to rebuild the battered coastal enclave after the 50-day summer war between Gaza’s Hamas government and Israel has faded. Hamas’s claim that it won the war simply by surviving has been overwhelmed by a grinding struggle to keep the territory afloat, as living standards for its 1.8 million residents steadily worsen.
Most recently, Hamas quietly initiated new import fees in an effort to cover the salaries of about 40,000 employees who have not been paid for months, raising prices in already-depressed markets. A kilogram of meat, a little over two pounds, increased by 50 cents, black pepper by $1.50 a kilogram and shampoo by 25 cents. Incremental amounts for Western consumers, perhaps, but a blow to Palestinians already barely scraping by.
With the economy tanking, Gazans are growing increasingly frustrated with the standoff between Hamas and its rival Fatah party, led by the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas.
“The citizen is in the middle,” said Omar Shaban, an economist. “Ramallah doesn’t care,” he said, referring to Mr. Abbas’s government in the West Bank. “They have an interest in leaving Gaza like this.”
Pulverized buildings are still scattered along Gaza’s border areas from the last war. In the rubble of Shejaiya, an eastern neighborhood of Gaza City, near the border with Israel, a man swung his mallet to show how he pulverized concrete chunks into rubble that he sold to mix with black-market cement, earning him $15 a day.
Nearby, a woman walked into a badly damaged house, the windows bricked over. Some residents have returned to living in wrecked homes, despairing of having them repaired. Others have received small amounts of United Nations-donated cement to repair less-damaged homes. A few thousand homeless people still live in United Nations-run schools.
Many of the newly unemployed are former construction laborers. Desperate to find work, they turn to any sort of activity they can think of.
Abdul-Munim Omrani, 33, convinced a charity to give him a peddler’s cart. He now uses it to sell hot drinks near a beach at a cheaper price than the seaside cafes skirting the shore.
He can make around $12 a day, he said, but he was chased away by the municipal police. His rust-streaked cart, with a deflated wheel, was parked near his peeling pastel-painted home. “I felt defeated,” he said. “That man took away my livelihood.”
On a recent day at the Gaza port, men pushed children in toy cars decked with flowers and glitter, charging 50 cents a ride.
Boys work, too, making up for absent, sick or dead fathers. Mohammad al-Ahl, 13, sells polka-dot balloons for 25 cents each, cheaper than the Bugs Bunny-shaped balloons older men typically offer for a dollar. On this day, business was quiet. He sat silently by the port’s cheery blue, pink and green painted wall.
Israel places severe restrictions on the import of building materials, saying they have been used to build tunnels to conduct attacks on Israel. The Egyptian government, a bitter enemy of its homegrown Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, has taken extraordinary steps to shut down the tunnels that had been the lifeblood of the Gaza economy.
Egypt has opened its border only five times this year, part of a broader policy to punish Hamas, which aligned itself with the Brotherhood, Egypt’s former ruling party, a decision that backfired when the military seized power in mid-2013. The tunnels were Hamas’s chief source of revenue. It was their closing that set off the new import fees in May.
Visiting Gaza on Monday, the German foreign minister, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, called on Israel to ease restrictions on imports to Gaza. But he acknowledged that was unlikely to happen until Gaza was no longer “a launching pad for rockets.”
While Gaza’s unemployment rate has risen to 44 percent, the highest in the world, and many Gazan workers go unpaid, tens of thousands of employees who were hired by Mr. Abbas’s government when it controlled the territory are paid to stay home rather than work for Hamas.
“It’s not logical at all,” said Ashraf al-Qedra, spokesman for Gaza’s Health Ministry. “The one sitting at home is paid, but if he has a problem, he goes to a hospital to be treated by a doctor who hasn’t taken a salary.”
The family of Mr. Omrani, the would-be hawker, still squeaks by. His wife sometimes finds casual work as a physiotherapist. They live rent-free with his mother, Fathiya, 63, who shares her $60 monthly widow’s pension. They occasionally get rice and sugar from the nearby mosque, and they do not eat much, Mr. Omrani said. Recently, the World Bank reported three-quarters of all residents rely on aid this way.
But there’s not enough for Mr. Omrani to pay a bribe for the right doctor to issue a certificate for his mother to obtain treatment in Egypt or Israel. She has several ailments and cancer, he said, presenting a sheaf of medical documents. Fathiya, too weak to stand, wept in the tiny living room, partly in panic, partly from pain.
In the postwar malaise, some young men appear zombielike. Some are addicted to powerful painkillers generically called “tramal,” that promise hours of hazy escape from a place they cannot flee.
“It’s the unemployment, the lack of security, the pressure, the blockade. Imagine waiting for months to leave Gaza,” said a 24-year-old former user. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he did not want to be identified by government officials. “Imagine waiting and waiting.”
Many children, and adults, still carry the trauma inflicted during the conflict.
Hamada Zaim, 4, has already lived through two short wars, in 2012 and 2014. He wets his bed and wakes up screaming at night, said his mother, Reem. Between wars, he went bald and his head began swelling. Before Egypt tightened movement across the border, his mother took him there to see specialists. They couldn’t give her a diagnosis, and told her to return, but now it is nearly impossible.
Implants to aid payment with a wave of the hand
The Australian, May 26, 2015
Is it retail therapy gone mad? The dawn of a new cyborg age? Or a new meaning to going down under?
Whatever the case, a fair proportion of Australians are receptive to technology mixing with their precious human organic flesh, if it means making payments at retail stores is easier. A survey, commissioned by global payments firm Visa, found 25 per cent of Australians were “slightly interested” in having a commerce-oriented chip implanted in their skin.
Research firm UMR conducted the survey for Visa, interviewing 1000 local consumers.
A subcutaneous chip would let consumers pay at a retail terminal without a wallet, credit card, smartphone or smartwatch. They would simply wave their bare hand over a terminal. The finding was revealed as Visa and University of Technology Sydney announced a partnership to explore the future of wearable technology. Visa’s research looked at the wearable technology Australian consumers were interested in using for payments.
Thirty-two per cent would be interested in paying with a smartwatch; 29 per cent with a smart ring, and 26 per cent with smart glasses. It is little wonder Visa regards Australians as adventurous with tech. “Australians are among the world’s earliest adopters of new technology,” said George Lawson, Head of Emerging Products and Innovation for Visa in ANZSP.
There’s nothing new about implanting tags under the skin. The US firm VeriChip obtained approval to do just that more than a decade ago. Their chip consisted of a tiny antenna and an identification number. It was designed to be implanted in the soft tissue between the thumb and index finger and detected by a radiofrequency identification (RFID) scanner.
Before you see the human species morphing towards a cyborg future, there is a cautious note. esearch in the past has linked subcutaneous chips to cancers in laboratory animals at the implant site.
Facts that could change the way you think about water
Dave Mosher, Business Insider, Jun. 1, 2015
Water, water everywhere–but less than half of a percent of Earth’s reserves are drinkable.
That’s just one shocking fact Neil deGrasse Tyson and five experts dropped at this year’s Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History–all about the surprising origins, scarcity, and value of water.
Before the event, we joined a closed-door meeting with Tyson and the five experts.
Below are just a handful of facts they shared that help put water shortages like California’s crippling four-year drought into stark perspective.
$0.002 per gallon is the average cost of US municipal tap water. That’s cheap but not free, as Jay-Z might have you believe. Yet the panel said we pay hundreds or thousands of times more for bottled water–even though there’s no real difference compared to what comes out of a hose. To boot, the panel referenced this classic episode of Penn and Teller filling up bottles with a garden hose and serving the water in a fancy restaurant. (No unsuspecting patron was the wiser.)
A “glacial taste” much better than tap water. What’s more, bottled water requires 5 to 11 times more water to produce than the bottle holds. Panelist Kathryn Sullivan, the administrator of NOAA, the government agency which studies Earth’s water stores from space, says most of that water waste comes from filtering. The process can rack up waste water in shocking amounts–up to 9 times more water is wasted than actually gets bottled.
Then there’s the plastic bottle itself. Making the plastic demands twice as much water as the bottle’s volume. Add in the fuel to make the plastic and truck the filled-up bottles around, and you’re staring at a significant environmental conundrum. “Our world is topsy-turvy,” Sullivan says. “We pay more for bottled water than we pay for oil or gas or Coca-Cola.”
Agriculture uses about 80% of all US freshwater. Despite this, says panelist Tess Russo, a hydrologist who estimates water availability around the globe, only 10% of farmers monitor how much water their soils actually need. And that leads to a lot of waste.
And that’s just the average; during a dry year, farmers in California can use up to 90% of the state’s water. But drought in California isn’t just a “California thing,” says panelist and planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who’s scoured the Solar System for water. That’s because the state is a veritable cornucopia–more than half of U.S. vegetables, fruits, and nuts come from the Golden State. In fact, almost all almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, kiwis, olives, pistachios, pomegranates, walnuts, garlic, plums, broccoli, nectarines, canned tomatoes, celery, apricots, wine grapes, strawberries, avocados, lemons, carrots, and other U.S. foods are grown there. (Did we mention California also produces a huge percentage of feed for red meat and dairy?)
You might be drinking aquifer water from the last Ice Age. We’re pumping so much groundwater in some locations, says Russo, that they don’t have time to recharge naturally via rain, melting snow, and other sources. Some aquifers only have left the glacial meltwater deposited there about 10,000 years ago.
Pumping water is causing earthquakes, landslides, sinkholes, and more. Russo noted part of northern California as an example. She says parts of the region are actually rising because the state is pumping out so much water–i.e. it’s making the Earth’s crust there lighter and more buoyant. “That crust material [is] floating … and releasing parts of the pressure on the San Andreas [Fault]” and triggering earthquakes, she says.
The average Las Vegan uses twice as much water as a New Yorker–but it rains 10 times more in the Big Apple.
“Those sorts of asymmetries are just crazy,” says Sullivan. And with climate change mixing up weather patterns we’ve grown accustomed to, Hammel says we can expect more of these disparities.
Nevada agriculture uses 90% of the state’s water but only employs about 6,000 people. “The Mirage Hotel–singular–in [Las] Vegas employs more people than that,” says Ellen Stofran, NASA’s chief scientist and another of Tyson’s panelists. She cited it as just another example of water use not jibing with reality. “We have to start valuing water as a precious, finite commodity,” Sullivan added.
Right now, 35 US states are fighting legal battles over water. Take Des Moines, Iowa’s municipal utility, for example, says Stofran. The city is in the process of suing three upstream counties for dumping too much nitrate into the Raccoon River, which feeds the city freshwater.
In the 1970s, a Saudi Arabian prince started an iceberg-towing company. Icebergs are valuable sources of freshwater. If you can afford to tow them to land.
Mohammed al Faisal once established “Iceberg Transport International” (ITI) to tow Antarctic ‘bergs to Mecca and melt them into freshwater, says panelist and retired U.S. Air Force General Charles Wald, who’s seen water’s importance in armed conflict.
ITI estimated it’d cost $100 million to tow 100 million tons of ice, and that the trip would take eight months, writes The Atlantic. But after debating the scheme in an international conference in Iowa and doing a test in the San Francisco Bay with a giant block of ice, the company determined the plan wouldn’t work. That was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even today, towing icebergs remains uneconomical.
85% of the water on the International Space Station is recycled. If you’re hip to space operations lingo, using what you’ve got wherever you’re at is called “in situ resource utilization,” or ISRU. Most ISRU water comes from condensed astronaut breath, sweat, and urine. Yes, NASA installed a fancy pee-recycling machine in 2008 to save launching 2,800 liters per year into low-Earth orbit. (And the water tastes great!)
The US will never run out of water. All of the experts agreed on this point, since there are replenishable supplies of freshwater available across the country (unlike some very dry, land-locked nations). But they noted this liquid abundance creates a huge problem: It means people living in the US, one of the wealthiest nations in the world–and perhaps the most capable of solving water crises–rarely feel the strain that others do on their water sources.
General Wald said in Ethiopia, for example, he’s met people who walk 6 hours to fill up water containers and bring them back to their village. And during conflict in the Middle East, he adds, attackers often target armored convoys in part to steal their potable water.
This will likely get worse, since in about 2 years, the Gaza Strip in the Middle East could run dry. That’s because water use there is outstripping the region’s ability to supply freshwater, says General Wald. Gaza is about the size of Washington D.C. and borders the Mediterranean Sea, but it has no desalinization plants that would convert that salty seawater into something drinkable. And not to rag on soft drink manufacturers, but General Wald noted one company is building a plant in Gaza–even though making soft drinks consumes an incredible amount of water.
In fact, it might take between 168-309 liters of water to make a single 0.5 liter bottle of cola. One study from 2010 estimated the “grey water footprint” (i.e. the water dirtied during manufacturing) to be roughly 20 to 40 times as much water as there is in a half-liter bottle–that’s not including the water required to grow the beverage’s source of sugar–usually corn. Add that and other water use during manufacturing and transport, and the water used per bottle skyrockets.
Around 2030, there could be a “very serious” worldwide water crisis. Naturally the military is worried about it, General Wald said. “Water wars are not new,” he said. “If anything they’re being exacerbated [by water].” He cited Egypt’s constant threat of war with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam–a $5 billion hydroelectric plant on the Blue Nile, a major southern tributary of the Nile River (you’ll recall the Nile flows North). Completing that project would mean holding back the tributary’s waters for a year while the dam fills up, threatening Egypt’s water supplies and the capacity of its hydroelectric dam on Lake Nasser.
“We’re going to have to hit bottom,” says Tyson, before we wake up and realize just how bad things are–and a full innovative engine to solve water shortages kicks into gear.
Until then, now is a good time to savor a closing era of cheap, reliable, and free-flowing freshwater.
Water, water everywhere–but less than half of a percent of Earth’s reserves are drinkable.
That’s just one shocking fact Neil deGrasse Tyson and five experts dropped at this year’s Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate at the American Museum of Natural History–all about the surprising origins, scarcity, and value of water.
Before the event, we joined a closed-door meeting with Tyson and the five experts.
Below are just a handful of facts they shared that help put water shortages like California’s crippling four-year drought into stark perspective.
$0.002 per gallon is the average cost of US municipal tap water. That’s cheap but not free, as Jay-Z might have you believe. Yet the panel said we pay hundreds or thousands of times more for bottled water–even though there’s no real difference compared to what comes out of a hose. To boot, the panel referenced this classic episode of Penn and Teller filling up bottles with a garden hose and serving the water in a fancy restaurant. (No unsuspecting patron was the wiser.)
A “glacial taste” much better than tap water. What’s more, bottled water requires 5 to 11 times more water to produce than the bottle holds. Panelist Kathryn Sullivan, the administrator of NOAA, the government agency which studies Earth’s water stores from space, says most of that water waste comes from filtering. The process can rack up waste water in shocking amounts–up to 9 times more water is wasted than actually gets bottled.
Then there’s the plastic bottle itself. Making the plastic demands twice as much water as the bottle’s volume. Add in the fuel to make the plastic and truck the filled-up bottles around, and you’re staring at a significant environmental conundrum. “Our world is topsy-turvy,” Sullivan says. “We pay more for bottled water than we pay for oil or gas or Coca-Cola.”
Agriculture uses about 80% of all US freshwater. Despite this, says panelist Tess Russo, a hydrologist who estimates water availability around the globe, only 10% of farmers monitor how much water their soils actually need. And that leads to a lot of waste.
And that’s just the average; during a dry year, farmers in California can use up to 90% of the state’s water. But drought in California isn’t just a “California thing,” says panelist and planetary astronomer Heidi Hammel, who’s scoured the Solar System for water. That’s because the state is a veritable cornucopia–more than half of U.S. vegetables, fruits, and nuts come from the Golden State. In fact, almost all almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, kiwis, olives, pistachios, pomegranates, walnuts, garlic, plums, broccoli, nectarines, canned tomatoes, celery, apricots, wine grapes, strawberries, avocados, lemons, carrots, and other U.S. foods are grown there. (Did we mention California also produces a huge percentage of feed for red meat and dairy?)
You might be drinking aquifer water from the last Ice Age. We’re pumping so much groundwater in some locations, says Russo, that they don’t have time to recharge naturally via rain, melting snow, and other sources. Some aquifers only have left the glacial meltwater deposited there about 10,000 years ago.
Pumping water is causing earthquakes, landslides, sinkholes, and more. Russo noted part of northern California as an example. She says parts of the region are actually rising because the state is pumping out so much water–i.e. it’s making the Earth’s crust there lighter and more buoyant. “That crust material [is] floating … and releasing parts of the pressure on the San Andreas [Fault]” and triggering earthquakes, she says.
The average Las Vegan uses twice as much water as a New Yorker–but it rains 10 times more in the Big Apple.
“Those sorts of asymmetries are just crazy,” says Sullivan. And with climate change mixing up weather patterns we’ve grown accustomed to, Hammel says we can expect more of these disparities.
Nevada agriculture uses 90% of the state’s water but only employs about 6,000 people. “The Mirage Hotel–singular–in [Las] Vegas employs more people than that,” says Ellen Stofran, NASA’s chief scientist and another of Tyson’s panelists. She cited it as just another example of water use not jibing with reality. “We have to start valuing water as a precious, finite commodity,” Sullivan added.
Right now, 35 US states are fighting legal battles over water. Take Des Moines, Iowa’s municipal utility, for example, says Stofran. The city is in the process of suing three upstream counties for dumping too much nitrate into the Raccoon River, which feeds the city freshwater.
In the 1970s, a Saudi Arabian prince started an iceberg-towing company. Icebergs are valuable sources of freshwater. If you can afford to tow them to land.
Mohammed al Faisal once established “Iceberg Transport International” (ITI) to tow Antarctic ‘bergs to Mecca and melt them into freshwater, says panelist and retired U.S. Air Force General Charles Wald, who’s seen water’s importance in armed conflict.
ITI estimated it’d cost $100 million to tow 100 million tons of ice, and that the trip would take eight months, writes The Atlantic. But after debating the scheme in an international conference in Iowa and doing a test in the San Francisco Bay with a giant block of ice, the company determined the plan wouldn’t work. That was in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Even today, towing icebergs remains uneconomical.
85% of the water on the International Space Station is recycled. If you’re hip to space operations lingo, using what you’ve got wherever you’re at is called “in situ resource utilization,” or ISRU. Most ISRU water comes from condensed astronaut breath, sweat, and urine. Yes, NASA installed a fancy pee-recycling machine in 2008 to save launching 2,800 liters per year into low-Earth orbit. (And the water tastes great!)
The US will never run out of water. All of the experts agreed on this point, since there are replenishable supplies of freshwater available across the country (unlike some very dry, land-locked nations). But they noted this liquid abundance creates a huge problem: It means people living in the US, one of the wealthiest nations in the world–and perhaps the most capable of solving water crises–rarely feel the strain that others do on their water sources.
General Wald said in Ethiopia, for example, he’s met people who walk 6 hours to fill up water containers and bring them back to their village. And during conflict in the Middle East, he adds, attackers often target armored convoys in part to steal their potable water.
This will likely get worse, since in about 2 years, the Gaza Strip in the Middle East could run dry. That’s because water use there is outstripping the region’s ability to supply freshwater, says General Wald. Gaza is about the size of Washington D.C. and borders the Mediterranean Sea, but it has no desalinization plants that would convert that salty seawater into something drinkable. And not to rag on soft drink manufacturers, but General Wald noted one company is building a plant in Gaza–even though making soft drinks consumes an incredible amount of water.
In fact, it might take between 168-309 liters of water to make a single 0.5 liter bottle of cola. One study from 2010 estimated the “grey water footprint” (i.e. the water dirtied during manufacturing) to be roughly 20 to 40 times as much water as there is in a half-liter bottle–that’s not including the water required to grow the beverage’s source of sugar–usually corn. Add that and other water use during manufacturing and transport, and the water used per bottle skyrockets.
Around 2030, there could be a “very serious” worldwide water crisis. Naturally the military is worried about it, General Wald said. “Water wars are not new,” he said. “If anything they’re being exacerbated [by water].” He cited Egypt’s constant threat of war with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam–a $5 billion hydroelectric plant on the Blue Nile, a major southern tributary of the Nile River (you’ll recall the Nile flows North). Completing that project would mean holding back the tributary’s waters for a year while the dam fills up, threatening Egypt’s water supplies and the capacity of its hydroelectric dam on Lake Nasser.
“We’re going to have to hit bottom,” says Tyson, before we wake up and realize just how bad things are–and a full innovative engine to solve water shortages kicks into gear.
Until then, now is a good time to savor a closing era of cheap, reliable, and free-flowing freshwater.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Prices Are Down, but Saudis Keep Oil Flowing
By Clifford Krauss And Stanley Reed, NY Times, May 31, 2015
HOUSTON–The international cartel of oil producers has long followed the same basic strategy. When the market was soft, the group slashed production to raise prices.
But Saudi Arabia, the heavyweight of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, has a new agenda. It is now less concerned about the price of crude oil in the global markets and more concerned about delivering fuel to its growing economy.
The shift is upending the traditional market dynamics that have influenced the direction of oil prices for decades.
While American producers are pulling back in the face of the current weak prices, Saudi Arabia, the largest OPEC producer by far, has been pumping more and more barrels. Saudi Arabia’s daily production in March and April nearly equaled its record output in 1980 when prices were soaring.
The country’s allies, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, are also drilling at record rates, while Iraq is shrugging off widespread civil conflict to increase production. Even Iran is preparing plans to develop more oil fields.
The surging output has taken much of the mystery out of what the delegates of the 12 OPEC countries will do when they assemble in Vienna this week to set production levels for the next six months. They have already pushed the cartel’s output 3 percent above the current target, and production appears to be heading even higher.
The acute pressure to cut production is also off. Oil prices, after a sharp drop over the last year, have stabilized somewhat at more than $60 a barrel.
“No cut is coming,” said René G. Ortiz of Ecuador, a former secretary general of OPEC. “Each and every country, and particularly the Saudis and the other monarchies of the gulf, will protect their market share and increase their market share as much as possible.”
HOUSTON–The international cartel of oil producers has long followed the same basic strategy. When the market was soft, the group slashed production to raise prices.
But Saudi Arabia, the heavyweight of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, has a new agenda. It is now less concerned about the price of crude oil in the global markets and more concerned about delivering fuel to its growing economy.
The shift is upending the traditional market dynamics that have influenced the direction of oil prices for decades.
While American producers are pulling back in the face of the current weak prices, Saudi Arabia, the largest OPEC producer by far, has been pumping more and more barrels. Saudi Arabia’s daily production in March and April nearly equaled its record output in 1980 when prices were soaring.
The country’s allies, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates, are also drilling at record rates, while Iraq is shrugging off widespread civil conflict to increase production. Even Iran is preparing plans to develop more oil fields.
The surging output has taken much of the mystery out of what the delegates of the 12 OPEC countries will do when they assemble in Vienna this week to set production levels for the next six months. They have already pushed the cartel’s output 3 percent above the current target, and production appears to be heading even higher.
The acute pressure to cut production is also off. Oil prices, after a sharp drop over the last year, have stabilized somewhat at more than $60 a barrel.
“No cut is coming,” said René G. Ortiz of Ecuador, a former secretary general of OPEC. “Each and every country, and particularly the Saudis and the other monarchies of the gulf, will protect their market share and increase their market share as much as possible.”
