- GM wants your comments on "Electricity Prices, River Temperatures and Cooling Water Scarcity", in which "we find empirical evidence for an increase in electricity prices when a) river levels fall and/or b) river temperatures rise above a critical threshold (defined here as 25°C)."
- Is the Carlsbad desalination plant going to cost $950 million?
- "Imagine H2O's 2011 Wastewater Prize - November 15 Deadline... is open to innovations related to reuse, treatment, resource recovery, energy production, smart management, and other methods to generate revenue from wastewater opportunities. Water startups, entrepreneurs, and university ventures from around the world are encouraged to apply."
- This looks good: Agricultural water pricing in the EU and Mexico [PDF].
- Someone got
their PhD* for contributing to "Deep words, shallow words: An initial analysis of water discourse in 40 years of UN declarations." I glanced at this summary of babble, but it was painful. If you're more interested in critical analysis or reading bureaucratic tea leaves, then plunge in!
* "The project was done as part of a graduate diploma program"
5 comments:
I saw your comments on our report. I would certainly be interested to know why you found it painful? Were you referring to our writing as babble or the content we were analysing?
@AB -- I am generally disappointed with the lack of IMPACT from all of these press releases. I was at UN water's presentation last week in Bonn, and found it to be totally vague. This may be the result of a document negotiated by 20+ bureaucracies, but that's not what we need from the international water bureaucracy. We need swift, simple and accurate solutions to problems.
@DZ -- Fair enough. So are we and the point of our paper is exactly that. That there needs to be progress and we make some concrete suggestions for how language should be used.
From what you say you don’t actually appear to have an issue with our report, rather with the Declarations and lack of clarity/action. If that is the case your post “shoots the messenger” and is perhaps worthy of further clarification.
@Ab -- Agreed! Perhaps you can issue grades (A-F) in terms of the impact of each statement on subsequent actions AND perhaps issue an "alternative communique" that (1) suggests what needed to be said and (2) rephrases (honestly and clearly) what was (NOT) promised in each communique. I'd be a BIG fan of THAT kind of messenger.
As we say in the report, we were just looking at the language, not the impacts. Others (cited in the report) have attempted to look at the latter.
Post a Comment