Speed Blogging

• "H.R. 2187, The 21st Century Green High-Performing Public School Facilities Act would direct the Secretary of Education to make grants to State educational agencies for the modernization, renovation, or repair of public school facilities." Wow. I see some happy green lobbyists...
  
  
• "Traditionally in irrigated agriculture, farmers want to give crops all the water they can drink. Goldhamer's three decades of research has shown that knowing when to withhold water from tree crops and when to quench the crops' thirst are powerful tools for dealing with drought, plant disease and fruit quality. Goldhamer's focus on deficit irrigation continues uninterrupted even as California experiences ebbs and flows in annual rain and snow."
  
  
• "Beijing will raise its water prices in an attempt to conserve water supplies this year." Good idea. Perhaps it takes a dictatorship to raise prices? (It surely doesn't take a dictatorship to waste resources, but dictatorships are REALLY good at that!)
  
  
• The Earth Institute at Columbia has a water blog. I hope that Sachs doesn't read this post. (Well, actually, I do :)
  
  
• "Water-quality trading is a market-based approach that can complement water-quality regulation. In many industrialized countries, facilities are required to reduce the level of pollutants before discharging wastewater into waterways. A water-quality trading market allows the facilities to buy pollutant-reduction credits from other facilities in the same watershed, or from non-point sources such as agriculture. Since non-point source pollutant reductions are frequently less expensive than treatment-plant upgrades, trading programs can cost-effectively improve water quality."
  
  
• Mission to the Pacific Gyre: "With a crew of 30, the expedition, supported by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Brita, the water company, will use unmanned aircraft and robotic surface explorers to map the extent and depth of the plastic continent while collecting 40 tonnes of the refuse for trial recycling." That's the good news. The bad news? There's 100 million tons of plastic there!

hattips to JC, CF, KO and JWT