Once Again, Something Completely Different

I try to keep this blog limited to water related postings. I did call it "The Water Law" after all. But every once in a while something comes along that is important enough to go "off message." This is one of those things.

I have just finished reading an article in Wired Magazine that explores the "controversy" over child vaccination. As a new parent myself, it is an article that I think every parent should read.

This article also embodies something I have written about here before - the importance of making good science comprehensible to the public. Because, as Ms. Wade, the author of the article points out, it is when science becomes incomprehensible that pseudo-science and fearmongers creep in to fill the void.

And The Hammer Comes Down

No...it's not a gavel reference, but rather a reference to a New York Times article that I just came across (thanks to WaterSISWEB). The head of the EPA, Lisa P. Jackson, was recently before Congress's Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. What she had to say was very interesting.

Ms. Jackson essentially admitted what everyone has long known - that the EPA has done very little to enforce clean water regulations over the last decade. Moreover, she has promised that the EPA's laxity is now at an end. This signals the enforcement sea change that many have expected ever since the Obama administration came into office.

Of course the proof is in the pudding as they say. We will have to wait and see whether the EPA will really carry through on the rhetoric. But for an administration eager to take a strong line on environmental issues - an ambition that is being thwarted in Congress - the EPA provides a convenient executive tool for unilateral action.

Clean Air = Dirty Water?

There is an interesting article over at the New York Times regarding an unintended side-effect of stricter air pollution regulations on coal fired power plants.

The gist of the article is that tougher clean air laws have forced power plants to scrub their air emissions. Unfortunately, the plants apparently dump much of the scrubbed material into local rivers and water supplies. And while the material they are dumping is supposedly "treated," the treatment doesn't remove everything - including a number of heavy metals that have been shown to be carcinogenic.

The EPA is currently considering tougher regulations on power plant discharges, and has attempted to enact them in the past. But the lobbyists are out in force opposing any heavier regulation.

I take away from this article the importance of regarding environmental regulation in a holistic sense. This problem was created with the best of intentions - the desire to clean up air pollution. But an inability or unwillingness to look at the situation as a whole - i.e. "where are the plants' by-products going to go if not into the air?" - has simply shifted the environmental impact rather than ameliorated or eliminated it.

I also believe that regardless of the lobbying efforts to the contrary, greater regulation of power plant emissions will happen. I believe that is simply the political reality of the 21st century. And it would behoove the industry to get ahead of the problem.

Peter Gleick and “The New McCarthyism”

There is a wonderful post by Dr. Peter Gleick in his blog City Lights which I highly recommend. The subject, generally, is the use of fear mongering to destroy civil and rational discourse.

But.

Dr. Gleick suggests that we need to filter out the fear mongers. I believe that the challenge posed by individuals like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and the other pundits who spew vitriol into our public discourse is not in how we shut them down, but rather how we make them irrelevant.

We live in a country that treasures free speech. But when we have a right to a thing, it means someone else has the obligation to provide it to us. Your right to free speech is my obligation to let you speak, no matter how much I disagree with what you have to say. And that is a good thing. Both history and the modern world are replete with examples of countries and societies that don’t have a right to free speech. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to live in such a country.

So, given that we can’t – and shouldn’t – shut them up, how do we combat fear mongers? The answer is, of course, education. It is a truism that fear is bred from ignorance. The current healthcare debate provides the easiest example – death panels. Former Governor Palin stated publically that the healthcare reform plan being considered by Congress contained a provision wherein people would be denied healthcare by a panel of bureaucrats based on their “level of productivity in society.” Palin famously labeled these panels “death panels” causing an enormous public uproar. Because, let’s face it, few congressman much less their constituents had actually read the various reform proposals floating around Congress. Anyone who has knows that there was no actual basis in fact for her statement. (For an analysis of the issue see here.)

Ignorance creates the opening for the less scrupulous, and those who are less concerned with accuracy, to stir the pot. Science is particularly vulnerable to fear mongering because many scientific disciplines are complex and beyond the experience of the average person. This makes people vulnerable to fear mongers. And it is a vulnerability that is exploited ruthlessly by politicians and pundits of every stripe.

Thus it is critically important that the scientific community not only expand the boundaries of human knowledge and understanding, but also that they bring the rest of us along on the journey. Scientists, particularly in America, must become better at making their knowledge and discoveries accessible to the public.

Let the fear and hate mongers rant. And an educated public will meet their fear and hate with the only response it deserves – laughter (I happen to think Glenn Beck is hilarious).

A “Complete Solution” to California’s Water Problem?

A group of Republican state Senators from California held a new conference wherein they stressed the importance of water to California’s economy and the need for “a complete solution to this complex problem.” (Thanks to Aquafornia for catching this.)

I applaud the sentiment. But I question whether their conviction is actually strong enough to take the kinds of steps necessary to create a “complete” long term solution.

There is less water today, and will likely be less water tomorrow, than the people of California have enjoyed in the past. But the problem is not really the “people” in the sense that we have a growing population. Rather the problem is agriculture. Both the types of livestock and crops we raise, and where we raise them. The Economist has an excellent article that discusses this issue which you can find here.

So…what does a “complete” long term solution look like for California? I see two roads we can go down.

In the first instance, we can look to government regulations to increase efficiencies in how we use water. But we’re not talking about low flow toilets or waterless urinals here. Long term water stability would require some serious regulations, particularly of the agricultural sector. This basically amounts to an end to agriculture as we know it. One can already imagine the howls from Republicans and other small government advocates – and they would have a point.

On the other hand we can commoditize water. Some economists, and the Economist, have suggested exactly that. Price water at its actual value and you will encourage farmers to grow crops appropriate to the local climate and water supply. But many people oppose commoditizing water for fear that the price increases will fall on personal water use and create enormous hardship for the poor. They have a point as well, though I think the greater danger of commoditizing water is the risk of speculation. Look here for an example of how commodity markets can be manipulated. And this too means an end to agriculture as we know it.

Neither solution is going to be popular with farmers.

In the end it comes down to a simple reality – less water. We can drain natural reserves like the Sacramento Delta. We can pump our underground aquifers dry. But while these activities may let us carry on, business as usual, for a few more years or even decades, they are ultimately self-defeating. We need those natural reserves and aquifers to keep the water cycle moving. Destroying them now for relatively short term gain only makes the ultimate accounting that much worse. An ultimate accounting that also means an end to agriculture as we know it.

So, do California’s politicians have the fortitude to really put together a “complete solution to this complex problem”? I sure hope so.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Pharmaceuticals In Our Water

There is an interesting article over at Greenbiz.com about the Green Pharma Summit, a meeting of pharmaceutical industry personnel involved with sustainability issues. One of the issues discussed at the meeting was the problem of pharmaceutical residues found in the water supply. This is an issue I have written about before. I agree with Mr. McGrath, the author of the article, that it is only a matter of time before this issue gains traction with legislators and regulators.

Check it out.

And Now For Something Completely Different....

As a warning to the reader, the following has absolutely nothing to do with water. But it is a sufficiently important legal development that I felt compelled to draw attention to it.


Yesterday an 11 member en banc panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed down a decision in the case United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, Inc.. The decision involves an appeal of three orders, from three different District Courts, which variously struck down certain subpoenas and ordered the return of certain property seized by the government.

The facts are very clearly laid out in the decision and I won't rehash them here - suffice to say the majority of the panel felt the government acted improperly. The upshot of the decision is that the Ninth Circuit has issued an unprecedented set of rules regarding warrants and subpoenas for the search and seizure of electronic information. Perhaps the most significant of these rules is that Magistrate Judges must now insist that the government waive the "in plain view" doctrine in digital evidence cases before issuing any warrant or subpoena.

Generally, the "in plain view" doctrine states that the government (i.e. the police, FBI etc.) may seize evidence of a crime that is in plain view. A simple example of the operation of the doctrine is as follows: The police obtain a valid warrant to search the house of a suspect for a gun used in a murder. During the lawful search of the house, they discover illegal drugs. Though the drugs are not included in the warrant, they were in plain view of the officers conducting the search of the house and thus can be seized and used as evidence against the suspect.

This doctrine poses practical problems with respect to the search of commingled electronic data. The Ninth Circuit noted this problem succinctly:

The problem can be stated very simply: There is no way to be sure exactly what an electronic file contains without somehow examining its contents—either by opening it and looking, using specialized forensic software, keyword searching or some other such technique. But electronic files are generally found on media that also contain thousands or millions of other files among which the sought-after data may be stored or concealed. By necessity, government efforts to locate particular files will require examining a great many other files to exclude the possibility that the sought-after data are concealed there.

Once a file is examined, however, the government may claim (as it did in this case) that its contents are in plain view and, if incriminating, the government can keep it. Authorization to search some computer files therefore automatically becomes authorization to search all files in the same subdirectory, and all files in an enveloping directory, a neighboring hard drive, a nearby computer or nearby storage media. Where computers are not near each other, but are connected electronically, the original search might justify examining files in computers many miles away, on a theory that incriminating electronic data could have been shuttled and concealed there.

The Ninth Circuit's response to this problem, as noted by the dissent, effectively tosses the doctrine out the window when the search involves electronic data. This is a sweeping decision that will have enormous ramifications to the issuance of warrants and subpoenas within the Ninth Circuit, and possibly elswhere if other courts follow suit.

As we move further into the 21st Century ever more of our lives reside as electronic data. The extent to which the government has access to that data may well define civil liberty in the 21st Century. Thus, though it is certainly way off topic for this blog, I recommend you read the decision (and dissents). The decision in particular is written very clearly with a minimum of legalese.

The government is apparently considering appealing the decision to the Supreme Court.