welcome

A demonstrator makes an anti-G20 sign out of coins at Trafalgar Square in central London Photograph: Reuters

Here is the text of the G20 communique, in compressed form.

"We, the Leaders of the Group of Twenty, will use every cent we don't possess to rescue corporate capitalism from its contradictions and set the world economy back onto the path of unsustainable growth. We have already spent trillions of dollars of your money on bailing out the banks, so that they can be returned to their proper functions of fleecing the poor and wrecking the Earth's living systems. Now we're going to spend another $1.1 trillion. As an exemplary punishment for their long record of promoting crises, we will give the IMF and the World Bank even more of your money. These actions constitute the greatest mobilisation of resources to support global financial flows in modern times.

Oh - and we nearly forgot. We must do something about the environment. We don't have any definite plans as yet, but we'll think of something in due course."

The G20's strategy for solving the financial and economic crisis, in other words, is detailed, innovative, fully costed and of vast scale and ambition. Its plans for solving the environmental crisis are brief, vague and uncosted. The environmental clauses - which contradict almost everything that goes before - have been tacked onto the end of the communique as an afterthought. No new money has been set aside. No new ideas are proposed; just the usual wishful thinking: let's call the whole package green and hope for the best.

So much for the pledge, expressed in different forms by most of the governments present at the talks, to put the environment at the heart of decision-making. Though the economy is merely a measure of our engagement with the environment; though, as most of the leaders acknowledge, continued prosperity is impossible without sustainability, the communique shows that the environment still comes last. No expense is spared in saving the banks. Every expense is spared in saving the biosphere.

This suggests to me that our leaders have learnt nothing from the financial crisis. It was caused by allowing powerful agents (the banks) to exploit a common resource (the global economy) without proper control or regulation. Governments deployed a form of magical thinking: that the boom would go on forever, that a bunch of predatory psychopaths would regulate themselves, that profits, dividends and share prices could grow indefinitely even though they bore no relation to actual value.

They treat the environmental crisis the same way. Climate breakdown, peak oil and resource depletion will all dwarf the current financial crisis, in both financial and humanitarian terms. But, just as they did with the banks, the G20 leaders appear to have decided to deal with these problems only when they have to - in other words, when it's too late. They persuade themselves that getting the economy back to where it was - infinite growth on a finite planet - can somehow be reconciled with the pledge "to address the threat of irreversible climate change".

Next time this magical thinking fails, there'll be no chance of a bail-out.

www.monbiot

House Democrats opened the congressional debate on climate change Tuesday by unveiling an ambitious plan to boost renewable energy and simultaneously slash domestic greenhouse gas emissions 20 percent over the next decade. And California Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer is poised to lead the fight in the Senate.

But the new focus on climate change in the nation's capital has been accompanied by another kind of change: an explosion of lobbyists trying to influence the final shape of proposals by Boxer and Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, and Ed Markey, D-Mass.

The number of climate change lobbyists has more than tripled in the past five years to roughly 2,340 in 2008, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of Senate lobbying disclosure forms. Climate change lobbyists now outnumber members of Congress by more than a 4 to 1 margin. The explosion comes at a time when the overall number of Washington lobbyists has declined from 15,397 to 15,139 over the past year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

'Huge, huge deal'

"The bottom line is, this is a huge, huge deal," said Jeffrey Holmstead a lobbyist with Bracewell & Giuliani, a top climate lobbying firm. "In terms of its importance to the U.S. economy and the energy sector, (climate change) is really a much bigger deal than anything that has come before Congress. The stakes are very, very high."

The climate change cadre spans the political spectrum, from environmental activists and Hollywood stars on the left to conservatives who argue global warming is a hoax. But at the center of the debate are California environmentalists.

Environmental groups have stepped up their lobbying efforts and have about 180 lobbyists on Capitol Hill, as opposed to less than 50 five years ago.

San Francisco's green giant, the Sierra Club, spent more than seven times as much money on environmental lobbying in last year than it did five years ago, up from $100,000 in 2003 to $730,000 in 2008.

The Environmental Defense Fund, which has regional offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Sacramento, filed 21 lobbying reports under the issue "environment and superfund." It filed only four in 2007.

Even so, business and energy lobbyists outnumber environmental lobbyists and alternative energy lobbyists by a margin of 8 to 1, says Marianne Lavelle, a staff writer for the Center for Public Integrity.

The increase in corporate lobbying is "alarming," says Frank O'Donnell, president of the environmental watchdog group Clean Air Watch. Because it will be too difficult to satisfy the demands of large numbers of lobbyists and their clients, it will be more difficult for Congress to pass legislation, he said.

"Blocking controversial legislation is always easier than passing it," he said.

Tony Kreindler, an Environmental Defense Fund spokesman, says his organization is well aware of the challenge.

A bit of David and Goliath

"It is a bit of a David and Goliath situation," he said. "We may be outnumbered compared to industry muscle, however we do have quite a bit of forward-looking companies who are pushing for action."

The bill introduced Tuesday by Waxman and Markey would tie the reductions to a mandatory cap-and-trade system, under which oil refineries, manufacturers and other industrial operations could comply with escalating new nationwide limits on carbon dioxide by buying and selling allowances to release the heat-trapping pollutant

Boxer, chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, says she'll do her best to work with anyone who seeks to move legislation quickly.

"The lobbying activity is divided into two: those who understand the need to act to avert catastrophe, and those who are pushing for no action," she said. "What guides me is the science, and therefore I am doing everything I can to move forward on an action plan."

The boom in climate change lobbying, some experts say, can be traced to the passage of an energy bill in late 2007 when members of Congress wrangled over whether to require utilities to use renewable energy sources. The provision was eventually dropped from the bill, but it pointed the way the green debate was going. During the presidential campaign, both candidates Barack Obama and John McCain endorsed a significant shift in Bush-era climate policies, forcing companies to face a new political reality no matter which candidate prevailed.

Waxman and three other Democratic House leaders sent an open letter to President Obama Friday declaring "now is the time for Congress to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation," calling it "both economically and politically achievable."

The House bill introduced Tuesday could be the best shot at getting climate legislation passed, O'Donnell said. The Senate, including the Boxer's committee, "is lying low for now" and letting the House move first, he added.

Cap-and-trade is costly

The approach to climate change favored by the Obama administration and top congressional Democrats, called cap-and-trade, would significantly increase the costs of doing business for energy companies. Businesses that are heavy energy consumers also would be forced to pay higher taxes.

With so much at stake, energy companies are bulking up by hiring the top lobbying talent available. Chevron, for example, hired Drew Maloney, who served as legislative director for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas. Dynegy Inc., a Houston-based natural gas and coal giant, paid Bracewell & Giuliani $200,000 for "strategic advice on energy and environmental issues" and other lobbying, according to reports from the Senate Office of Public Records.

But while just about every energy company has a stake in the game, they're not all on the same side.

ConocoPhillips and Shell Oil, for instance, are working with the Environmental Defense Fund in a coalition called the U.S. Climate Action Partnership. It is pushing for Congress on greenhouse gas reduction.

"There are more people saying 'Yes, we've got to do something' than there are saying 'no,' " EDF's Kreindler said.

With the battle about to begin, Boxer also is optimistic.

"At the end of the day, when we act, we will not only avert the catastrophe of global warming, we will also create millions of green jobs," she said, "and so we are pushing harder than ever to address this issue."

E-mail Hailey Branson at hailey.branson@chron.com.

It has often been said that water is "blue gold" and the next resource wars will be fought, not over oil, but over water. Maude Barlow, senior advisor to the United Nations on water issues, wrote that the way in which we view water "will in large part determine whether our future is peaceful or perilous."

The British nonprofit International Alert released a report identifying forty-six countries where water and climate stresses could ignite violent conflict by 2025, prompting the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to affirm, "The consequences for humanity are grave. Water scarcity threatens economic and social gains and is a potent fuel for wars and conflict."

There is no doubt that the world's supply of drinkable fresh water is threatened. An astounding one billion people do not have access to safe drinking water today and that number is likely to reach 2.8 billion in only two decades. Will these challenges result in an all-out "water war"? Likely not, experts say. But conflict is stirring and the battle for control over the world's dwindling freshwater resources has already begun with international giants like the US, Israel and China flexing their muscles.

China's Hands on Asia's Tap

Fifty years since the Dalai Lama fled Tibet and sixty years since the Chinese invaded, thousands have lent their support to the "Free Tibet" movement, but many would be surprised to know that much more than religious and political freedom hang in the balance. The Tibetan plateau is the faucet for much of Asia's drinking water. Major rivers drain from the icy mountains to help quench the farms, homes and factories of China, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. Incredibly, the countries affected contain 85 percent of the people in Asia and nearly half the population of the entire globe.

Not only does China hold incredible power with its hand on the tap for so many people, but increasingly the rivers originating in the plateau are threatened by record levels of water pollution from industrial activities including deforestation, mining and manufacturing. And that's not even the worst of the problem: as the Keith Schneider and C.T. Pope wrote for Circle of Blue, a warming climate is causing glaciers in the region to recede faster than anywhere else in the world.

"Water has emerged as a key issue that could determine whether Asia is headed toward mutually beneficial cooperation or deleterious interstate competition," wrote Brahma Chellaney for the Japan Times.

So whatever China does in Tibet ultimately affects everyone downstream. "There is very little public discussion about the international nature of those water resources," said Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute. "I don't know how to get the Chinese to play with everybody else, but there has got to be more international negotiation and diplomacy if we are going to avoid frictions and tensions and ultimately conflict over those water resources."

Future predictions about climate change are worrisome, and they're compounded by the fact that things are already bad in China. Industrialization has left water either too polluted to drink or hard to come by in many areas. To make matters worse, the country has been gripped by drought. In February, the Guardian reported that 3.7 million people and 1.85 million livestock were without water.

Many fear that Tibet's water will be the answer to China's woes as the country has plans for multiple dams and canal systems to siphon melt from Himalayan glaciers. "Having extensively contaminated its own major rivers through unbridled industrialization, China now threatens the ecological viability of river systems tied to South and Southeast Asia in its bid to meet its thirst for water and energy," wrote Chellaney. "If anything, China seems intent on aggressively pursuing projects and employing water as a weapon."

Scarcity Is a Relative Term in the Jordan Valley

China is not the only country threatened by drought. In the Middle East, one of the hottest and driest places on earth, water has been a source of contention as well as a point of negotiation. "The Arab-Israeli dispute is a conflict about land--and maybe just as crucially the water which flows through that land," wrote Martin Asser for BBC News.

Along the Jordan River, which is now 90 percent diverted by Israel, Syria and Jordan, the countries are indeed facing scarcity. But just what that means for different groups of people, especially the Israelis and Palestinians, is not always clear. "I think scarcity is a political framework in which people work," said Samer Alatout, an expert on Israeli/Palestinian water issues and a professor in the department of rural sociology at the University of Wisconsin. "If you have a general assumption about what scarcity is, for instance less than 500 cubic meters per year per person, that does not really mean anything because you are not asking the question of who gets how much water and when."

While consumption varies among Israelis, they have continuous access to water, much like the luxury we enjoy in the United States. Palestinians, on the other hand, are at the will of Israel. In the West Bank, Palestinians have access to only about 20 percent of the water in the aquifer beneath them because sinking wells is prohibited. Their per capita water use is around sixty liters per day, below even the 100-liters-per-day standard of the World Health Organization. For Israelis the number is closer to 300 liters.

In Gaza, the aquifer is so overpumped and polluted that it is virtually undrinkable. Of the 4,000 wells in Gaza, Alatout says, only about ten of them would meet the standards of the World Health Organization. About 40 percent of homes in Gaza do not have running water. And for those that do, Alatout says, water service is intermittent. "During the summer they might only have access one day per week for a few hours," he said. "They fill bathtubs and containers. And they buy water from freelancing tankers who cut into the water supply. So much of their effort and their hours in the day [are] spent thinking about trying to get water in their houses."

And as in China, things are likely to deteriorate even more in coming decades. "For the Palestinians, climate change will just make their conflict with Israel even worse," wrote investigative journalist Andy Rowell. "Access to water is already a major source of contention. As water becomes scarcer it will add to the conflict. Who controls access to the water resources will control the power."

Right now, that power rests firmly with Israel. For this reason, Alatout does not see a war over water in the future there. "The Israelis will not wage war because they are already dominant. The Palestinians cannot wage war really, or the Jordanians; it is not even feasible."

That does not mean, he says, that conflicts won't increase or get more heated. Water, after all, is a necessity of life. But water resolutions will also need to be part of a larger framework that addresses the political, cultural and sociological roots of conflict, Alatout says. For the Palestinians, this is an issue tied to their very sovereignty. "If Israel continues to deny Palestinians access to the basic human right of access to clean water, they will deny Palestine its right to be a nation," wrote Rowell. "It will mean there will be no peace."

The US Muscles Mexico

Most people in the United States have the luxury of not worrying about the right to water--it simply comes out of their tap, and it is clean and plentiful. The idea of a "water war" would likely conjure places like the Middle East or Africa. But in the last few years there has been some real tension between the United States and Mexico.

The source of strife is the long-arbitrated Colorado River, which flows 1,450 miles, and whose watershed spreads across seven US states before dipping into Mexico and exiting at the Gulf of California. Just about every drop of it is allocated (and overallocated). Its water serves over 30 million people and 2 million acres of farmland, and via canals and aqueducts, it helps to quench thirsty cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.

Under the Mexican Water Treaty of 1944 the United States agreed to ensure its southern neighbor 1.5 million acre-feet of water a year. However, for many decades those south of the border often got more than the treaty allotment if the flow on the river exceeded the water farmers could use. Mexico and the river ecosystem came to greatly appreciate that water, as well as groundwater that was replenished from water seepage draining from the All-American Canal--an eighty-two-mile ditch that runs just north of the border and diverts water from the Colorado River across the desert of Southern California to feed farms in the Imperial Valley.

But nearly a decade of drought in the Southwest has prompted Colorado River states to find ways to squeeze more water out of the river. They devised a plan to line twenty-three miles of the All-American Canal with concrete to prevent water seepage and also to build a reservoir just north of the border to catch those "excess" flows.

The lining of the All-American Canal is likely to yield an extra 67,000 acre-feet a year and the reservoir another 60,000 acre-feet a year. Water managers will proudly declare they've prevented "wasted water" and improved efficiency. But in the desert, water is never wasted. Instead that water seeped underground and flowed beneath the Mexicali Valley south of the border, feeding the fields of local farmers. The area has also provided crucial habitat for millions of migrating birds that use the Pacific Flyway each year.

The United States' action strained relations with Mexico. Talks originally initiated to smooth things over fell apart when Mexico sued to prevent the canal lining. Victor Hermosillo, former mayor of Mexicali, wrote:

Encasing a new canal in concrete would divert more water for San Diego's emerging suburbs and golf courses, but it would do so with devastating impacts. By drying up the groundwater, the concrete canal would deprive many thousands of Mexicans of their livelihood, forcing them to migrate north. One expert predicts more than 30,000 Mexican jobs could be lost if the canal is built.

Environmental groups also answered with litigation over concern for sensitive habitat. But a rider was put in a 2006 omnibus bill in Congress that waived state environmental reviews concerning the project, and it cleared the courts.

"The lining of the canal was a major problem," said Michael Cohen, senior researcher with the Pacific Institute. "The Mexican embassy filed a diplomatic note, which apparently in diplomatic circles is a pretty serious affair, expressing their concern with the US's unilateral action. The US State Department maintained that it was US water and they could do whatever they wanted even though the treaty specifically said that the countries should consult if they take action that would affect the other's water. But the US refused to do that. That really chilled relations between the two countries."

The United States' strong-arming of Mexico echoes China's position in Asia as well as Israel's relationship to Palestine, where the country with the resources clearly has the political might and there is little chance of recourse for those who are water-shorted. Recently Interior officials and Mexican diplomats posed for a photo-op in DC and vowed to cooperate on the Colorado, but more hurdles lie ahead when it comes to water in the region.

One can only hope, says Cohen, that the United States and Mexico can resolve things more equitably in the future, but across the world things may turn out differently as water becomes more scarce. "What's more than likely is the water crisis will continue to get worse," said Aaron Wolf, a professor of geography at Oregon State University and a specialist in transnational water disputes. "The major drivers are population and poverty--nothing new here. Exacerbating that are new demands as countries develop, new awareness of the importance of water for ecosystems and, lastly, climate change. The result will be more people suffering and dying and greater and greater ecosystem loss." Those in rich countries will be able to adapt, he says; those in poorer countries won't be so lucky.

But are we necessarily doomed? Not really. Wolf developed and coordinated the Transboundary Freshwater Dispute Database at OSU and has also seen the more hopeful side of things, which is that there are a far greater number of instances where water shortages result in cooperation instead of conflict. But there is no guarantee that the future will look like the past. We live in changing times. In a post-9/11 world even what we consider "war" looks vastly different. And global economic pressures may collide with widespread environmental collapse. The jockeying for position regarding freshwater resources has begun and will continue unless the international community demands equitable resolutions.

"The real problem is the crisis, not the danger of conflict," though, says Wolf; "2.5 to 5 million people die every year now because of a lack of access to basic sanitation and a safe, stable water supply. Possible wars in light of this current crisis is a dangerous diversion." The real threat, he warns, is not taking action now to address the water crisis already in our lap.

Twenty countries have officially challenged the Ministerial Declaration released Sunday at the close of the week-long World Water Forum because it defines water as a human need rather than as a human right.

Latin American states played a key role in gathering signatures on a counter-declaration that recognizes access to water and sanitation as a human right and commits to all necessary action for the progressive implementation of this right.

Countries that signed the counter-declaration are: Bangladesh, Benin, Bolivia, Chad, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras, Morocco, Namibia, Niger, Panama, Paraguay, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Uruguay and Venezuela. Switzerland has declared its support although a formal signature is expected to take months to finalize.

The U.S. delegation, led by Daniel Reifsnyder, deputy assistant secretary of state for environment and sustainable development, took the position that "there is at present no internationally agreed right to water or human right to water, and there is no consensus on what such a right would encompass," according to State Department spokesman Andy Laine.

Dan Reifsnyder has served in the State Department under both Bush administrations. (Photo courtesy ENB)

The Ministerial Declaration was not open to negotiation at the World Water Forum as negotiations on the statement were concluded at a preparatory meeting held in Paris on March 3 and 4.

Laine told ENS that during the preparatory process the United States did oppose language that would have recognized water as a human right.

"The United States does not oppose any government adopting a national right to water or sanitation as part of its own domestic policy. We do, however, have concerns with a statement that would require all countries to adopt a national right to water or sanitation or would establish an international right to water or sanitation," Laine said.

"Establishing an international right to anything raises a number of complicated issues regarding the nature of that right, how that right would be enforced, and which parties would bear responsibility for ensuring these rights are met," said Laine. "To date, there have been no formal intergovernmental discussions on these issues. It would therefore be premature to agree to such a right."

Other governments supporting the principle of water as a human need, rather than are human right, are Brazil, Canada, Egypt and the European Union.

Nongovernmental organizations and the United Nations have mounted a campaign to lobby governments to recognize water as a human right.

In Istanbul last Friday, Philipp Terhorst of Transnational Institute, speaking for the European Water Network, criticized the recent EU Parliament’s resolution that fails to recognize the human right to water.

The Washington, DC-based NGO Food and Water Watch asked its members to send emails to their Congressional representatives urging them to support water as a human right. Their appeal counters the State Department position, saying, "While it has been argued that there is no international consensus on the existence of a right to water and sanitation, such rights have been enshrined in two ministerial-level declarations of the United Nations."

Maude Barlow (Photo credit unknown)

Maude Barlow, a Canadian national who serves as senior advisor on water to UN General Assembly President Miguel D’Escoto, delivered a statement from him in Istanbul. D’Escoto was clear, “Water is a public trust, a common heritage of people and nature, and a fundamental human right. ... We must challenge the notion that water is a commodity to be bought and sold on the open market. Those who are committed to the privatization of water ... are denying people a human right as basic as the air we breathe.”

"We must work quickly to guarantee that access to drinking water constitutes a fundamental right of all peoples," said D'Escoto.

The UN president also questioned the legitimacy of the forum itself. His speech stated, "The forum's orientation is profoundly influenced by private water companies. This is evident by the fact that both the president of the World Water Council and the alternate president are deeply involved with provision of private, for-profit, water services."

He added that future forums should, "conduct their deliberations under the auspices of the United Nations."

The Forum is staged by the World Water Council, a French-based organization whose funding comes in part from the water industry.

Barlow, who is also the national chairperson of the Council of Canadians, delivered the president's message to the People's Water Forum, a counter-forum held by hundreds of civil society members from nearly 70 countries whose voices have not been at the formal World Water Forum. The speech was later released to the World Water Forum, which was attended by 25,000 delegates from 150 countries.

At Jiftlik on the West Bank, Oxfam plans to build a reservoir connected to this four inch-pipe to increase the amount of water reaching the village's 800 households. (Photo by Sarah-Eve Hammond courtesy Oxfam)

"This is a victory for all our groups who have been working for over 15 years for water to be recognized as a human right," said Barlow.

Pope Benedict XVI last July called for recognition of the right to water. In his message to the international exposition on Water and Sustainable Development Spain, the pontiff said, "The use of water, which is regarded as a universal and inalienable right, is related to the growing and urgent needs of people who live in destitution, taking into account the fact that limited access to potable water has repercussions on the wellbeing of an enormous number of people and is often the cause of illnesses, sufferings, conflicts, poverty and even death."

Some 880 million people do not have access to clean drinking water, while 2.5 billion people do not have access to sanitation, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development said in a report last week.

The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, which represented major corporations in Istanbul, said Thursday that the linkages between water, energy and climate change, as well as their connections with food were important topics of discussion at the Forum and they must be addressed immediately.

"There was much more business representation, participation and collaboration in Istanbul than at the previous World Water Forum in Mexico in 2006, which is encouraging," said ITT Corporation's Björn von Euler, WBCSD Water Project co-chair. "Now the time has come to translate all this interest into action."

While avoiding the subject of water as a human right, business spokespeople advised policymakers to integrate water, energy food and climate change policies.

James Griffiths, managing director of water, forests and ecosystems at the WBCSD, said, "It is time to link water, energy, food and climate change in global climate negotiations, for governments and other groups to engage with business and tap into its expertise; and for public-private partnerships to be set up to solve some of the world's most pressing water problems."

The Ministerial Declaration listed a set of non-binding recommendations, including greater cooperation to ease disputes over water, measures to address floods and water scarcity, better management of resources and curbing pollution of rivers, lakes and aquifers.

The World Water Forum is held every three years - the next meeting is scheduled for 2012.

By REBECCA SMITH

(See Correction & Amplification below.)

Last month, Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a utility that provides power to mostly rural areas, agreed to conduct a major study to see if it might meet growing energy needs through energy efficiency and not a big, new coal-fired power plant, as it had proposed for southeast Colorado.

One reason for the move was a challenge by Environment Colorado, an advocacy organization, about the amount of water a new plant would require.

Changes like these are happening with increasing frequency, particularly in the arid West, as mounting concerns about water begin to shape local energy decisions.

In some cases, power companies are pulling back from plans to build traditional power plants that require steady streams of water to operate. In others, renewable-energy projects such as wind farms or solar arrays are gaining momentum because their water needs are minimal.

Tri-State no longer is sure what it might build in southeast Colorado but it is going ahead with plans to build a 500,000-solar-panel project in northeast New Mexico in partnership with First Solar Inc. "There's no water requirement with solar," said Mac McLennan, senior vice president for Tri-State, based in Westminster, Colo.

Advocates for alternative energy are discovering that water issues may prove to be as important a selling point for the industry as reducing carbon-dioxide emissions.

"The more we wean energy companies off consumptive use of water, the better for everyone," said Craig Cox, executive director of the Interwest Energy Alliance, a Colorado trade group that represents power-project developers.

The electric-power industry accounts for nearly half of all water withdrawals in the U.S., with agricultural irrigation coming in a distant second at about 35%. Even though most of the water used by the power sector eventually is returned to waterways or the ground, 2% to 3% is lost through evaporation, amounting to 1.6 trillion to 1.7 trillion gallons a year that might otherwise enhance fisheries or recharge aquifers, according to a Department of Energy study.

The study concluded that a megawatt hour of electricity produced by a wind turbine can save 200 to 600 gallons of water compared with the amount required by a modern gas-fired power plant to make that same amount.

Earlier this month, Jeff Bingaman (D., N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, noted during a hearing that the "nexus" of water and energy is becoming an issue "in [power plant] permitting decisions across the country."

Landowners in the far northeast corner of California were riled recently by Sempra Energy's proposal to build a coal-fired power plant just across the state line in Nevada.

One reason residents objected was that the plant would have required vast amounts of water for cooling. "Use of groundwater is always a sensitive issue up here because we don't have much," said Jack Hanson, a member of the Lassen County Board of Supervisors.

Sempra pulled the plug on the project in late 2006, citing, among other things, water use. Since then, another big energy proposal has surfaced, but it hasn't kicked up much opposition: A dozen companies are considering building hundreds of wind turbines along Lassen County ridgelines. So far, 17 meteorological towers have been erected to verify wind speeds.

In turn, conventional power plants are turning to technology that aggressively cuts water use as they weigh the costs of installing more complicated cooling systems versus leaning on scarce resources.

A power plant recently put into service by Pacific Gas & Electric Co., a unit of PG&E Corp., in the Northern California town of Antioch has a cooling system to cut its water intake from 40,000 gallons a minute to 1.6 gallons. In the past, power plants commonly were built with "once-through cooling," in which water was drawn from waterways, used once, and then put back. But the Antioch plant uses a "dry" cooling technique that recirculates water in a closed system, reducing evaporation.

Environmental groups that oppose coal and nuclear power plants are discovering that water can be a powerful tool to challenge power companies.

In 2004, Riverkeeper Inc., an environmental organization in Tarrytown, N.Y., along with six states, sued the Environmental Protection Agency over the use of once-through cooling by as many as 500 older power plants in the U.S. The suit charges that the practice violates the Clean Water Act because it harms aquatic life and fails to utilize the best technology available, a requirement of the federal act.

The case, now before the U.S. Supreme Court, stands to test how water-use issues will determine which power plants continue to operate as well as what kind of plants are built.

Nuclear plants face particular scrutiny, since they require more water than any other form of steam generation. Virginia Power, a unit of Dominion Resources, is facing a legal challenge over its right to draw one million gallons of water a minute per reactor from a man-made lake it uses to cool its North Anna nuclear power plant and into which it discharges heated water. The utility built the lake in 1978 exclusively for the plant's cooling purposes.

A group called the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League Inc. argued that heat is a form of pollution and said the state water board shouldn't have renewed the plant's water permit. Last month, a state court upheld much of the environmental group's case; the utility plans an appeal. Dominion says the man-made lake is a private body of water and therefore shouldn't fall under the federal Clean Water Act.

Water is also emerging as an important point for analysts in the investment community. "We definitely have noticed more companies having water issues," said Swaminathan Venkataraman, an analyst at Standard & Poor's credit-rating agency. "If it continues, it will give renewables another important advantage."

Write to Rebecca Smith at rebecca.smith@wsj.com

Corrections & Amplifications
This article said Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, a utility based in Colorado, had dropped plans to build a coal-fired power plant. Tri-State said it is reviewing its options but has made no final decision.

DENVER -- Every raincloud that passes over her eastern Colorado ranch tempts state Rep. Marsha Looper to break the law.

A long, hard drought has settled across the land, and on those rare occasions when the sky opens, Ms. Looper longs to set out some rain barrels to collect the bounty for future use. She'd like to use the rain to grow hothouse tomatoes. But she refrains.

"I don't want to get thrown in jail," she explains.

It is, in fact, illegal in Colorado to collect rainwater. State law is vague about the penalties, except to say that violators can be taken to court and ordered to pay damages. The state lacks the resources for vigorous enforcement and fines are extremely rare, officials say. Still, the law is the law -- and so Ms. Looper has set out to change it. This might just be her year.

Colorado, like most Western states, lives by a rigid and byzantine knot of water laws. Vast quantities of river water are made available, free of charge, to a variety of public and private interests, including oil companies, ski resorts, fire districts and breweries. The international food conglomerate Nestlé has applied for a permit to draw water from a Colorado aquifer and sell it in plastic bottles under its Arrowhead brand.

Those appropriations are made under a seniority system based on first-come first-serve claims staked out as far back as the 1850s. Colorado law explicitly states that every drop of moisture suspended in the atmosphere must be divvied up according to those claims. That means each drop must be allowed to hit the ground and seep through the watershed into distant rivers, where it can be doled out to claimants ranging from alfalfa farmers to ExxonMobil.

Ms. Looper, a Republican, thinks that's nuts. "They own every raindrop that falls out of the sky? Just ridiculous," she says.

With drought widespread across the West, many cities outside Colorado are encouraging rain harvesting through tax credits, rain-barrel subsidies, even building codes that require rain-catching cisterns in new developments. The membership of the American Rainwater Catchment Systems Association -- a trade group that represents any company or individual interested in the practice -- has jumped from less than 100 to nearly 600 in just two years.

But in Colorado and Utah, the only other state with a blanket ban on rain harvest, powerful forces are determined to continue limiting access to precipitation.

Setting a barrel on the lawn to recycle rain "sounds nice and efficient, but in my opinion, under Colorado law, that is theft," says Glenn Porzak, a lawyer who specializes in water-rights claims. "That rainwater is spoken for."

True, most people who store rain water will eventually dump it on lawns and gardens -- exactly where it would have fallen in the first place. But they are likely to do that during dry seasons when thirsty plants suck up most of the water, and very little is left to work its way through the water basin and into rivers.

A hydrology study commissioned in 2007 by several Colorado water districts found that just 3% of the rain falling on undeveloped land makes it back into the stream system in a dry year, compared with 15% in a wet year. (In developed areas, those percentages are typically much higher, because the rain washes into storm drains, which often dump into streams.)

A ban on rainwater harvesting "makes no sense to people, because rain seems ubiquitous," says Mo McBroom, policy director of the Washington Environmental Council. "They're like, 'Do I have to have an air right to breathe?' " Ms. McBroom responds that one rain barrel won't hurt anyone -- but hundreds of thousands of 5,000-gallon cisterns could threaten the livelihoods of all who depend on the West's mighty rivers.

Farmers rely on rain-fed river water to grow food; utilities need it to produce electricity; industries need it to run factories -- and cities need it to provide drinking water to residents. Fish need healthy rivers, too, of course. Some environmentalists fear that diverting downpours to cisterns would threaten aquatic habitats.

Washington allows rainwater harvesting only in a few areas, including Seattle and the San Juan Islands, where some residents have spent $50,000 or more on 10,000-gallon rain storage tanks and filtration systems. Efforts to expand the practice statewide have failed several years in a row because the varied interests can't agree on how much precipitation individuals should be allowed to store. A bid to lift the ban in Utah died in the legislature this month. In Colorado, however, Ms. Looper and a fellow rain rebel, Democratic state Sen. Chris Romer, have crafted bills so modest in scope that they have gained widespread support.

One bill would let rural residents not served by a municipal water system store rain for fire protection, livestock feed and household uses. A second bill authorizes several new developments to capture and reuse rain, so long as the builders track how much water they divert from the state's natural waterways.

Ms. Looper acknowledges that her bills still keep rain harvesting off limits to the majority of Colorado residents. But she says it's the best she can hope for in a state that adheres faithfully to the old adage of Western life: "Whiskey is for drinking. Water is for fighting."

Write to Stephanie Simon at stephanie.simon@wsj.com

Cooperation on International Standards to promote energy efficiency and reduce carbon emissions was given a major boost by a workshop in Paris, France, on 16-17 March 2009, which brought together 290 experts from the public and private sector.

The workshop was jointly organized by the International Energy Agency (IEA), the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).

The workshop confirmed that key players in the energy sector consider International Standards essential instruments to support the implementation of energy efficiency practices. The experts underlined their commitment to contribute to and collaborate in the development of these standards.

The workshop provided an opportunity to develop an overview of work that has to be done on energy efficiency and for technical experts and public sector decision makers to exchange information and map out the path forward. In particular, the importance of energy efficiency standardization was emphasized and how it can support carbon emissions reduction by providing internationally agreed metrics.

Presentations and discussion panels provided insights on the requirements and challenges related to energy efficiency and related standardization work in a variety of fields: industrial systems, power generation, buildings, electrical and electronic appliances, networks and data centres, transport and energy management.

The IEA and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) predict that the world energy demand will increase by 45 % between now and 2030 without remedial action. Pieter Boot, Director of the IEA's Directorate of Sustainable Energy Policy and Technology said: "Energy efficiency is here, but not easily seen. However, once metrics are developed, it becomes possible to give visibility to energy efficiency. Making energy efficiency visible is the first task to giving it commercial value, but this is only partly complete. Technical standards allow efficiency to be defined, measured and evaluated. They are the foundation of all policy and private sector actions to reduce energy intensity."

ISO Secretary-General Rob Steele emphasized the importance of standardization for energy efficiency: "Today's trends in world energy demand give the sense of urgency. We need to act now with available solutions, which need to be applied and International Standards are part of the solution. ISO, IEC and the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) provide standards that offer performance definitions, measurement and test methods, codification of best practices and management systems, design checklists and guides, interoperability, state-of-the-art knowledge formalized by recognized experts through double levels of consensus, amongst stakeholders and across countries."

Commenting on the event, IEC General Secretary & CEO Aharon Amit said: "IEC has a long experience of working on electrical efficiency standards. We need to be able to generate, transmit, and distribute more electricity with reduced impact. And we need to use electricity more intelligently. While the IEC continues to issue the standards for existing technologies, including energy efficiency for industrial and domestic uses, it is also working on new areas including ultra high voltage transmission and integrated smart grids, while continuing to maximize the potential from renewable energies."

Among the main recommendations of the workshop were the following:

• Highlight and promote the complementary relationship between public policies and technical standards, communicating clearly that standards provide technical solutions
• Encourage participation from the earliest stages in the standards development process of all stakeholders (particularly representatives of public authorities and consumers) having relevant interests in promoting energy efficiency and reducing carbon emissions.
• Improve coordination and optimize involvement of experts in on-going standardization work at the sectoral, national, regional and international levels, ensuring exchange of information and promoting the use of already existing standards.
• Adjust standardization processes and deliverables to be more adaptive in addressing fast-moving technologies and evolving usage contexts of products and services.

SOURCE: International Energy Agency

Around the world, over-fishing is leading to severe depletion of valuable fisheries.  This is as true in U.S. coastal waters as it is in many other parts of the world.  In New England waters, for example, after two decades of ever more intensive fishing, the groundfish fishery has essentially collapsed.  But, we are not alone.  According to the United Nations Environment Program, fully 25 percent of fisheries worldwide are in jeopardy of collapse due to over-fishing.  Clearly, something needs to be done.  Yet, what has long been considered the obvious answer - restrictions on fishing - has been shown time and time again to be the wrong answer.  The right answer is enlightened use of markets.

The fundamental cause of the depletion of fish stocks is well known to economists:  virtually all ocean fisheries are “open-access,” that is, fishermen - small operations or large corporations - can fish all they want.  These individuals and companies are no more greedy than the rest of us, but because no one holds title to fish stocks in the open ocean, everyone races to catch as much as possible.  Each fisherman receives the full benefit of aggressive fishing (that is, a larger catch), but none pay the full cost (an imperiled fishery for everyone).  One fisherman’s choices have an effect on other fishermen (of this generation and the next), but in an open-access fishery - unlike a privately-held copper mine, for example - these impacts are not taken into account.  What is individually rational adds up to collective foolishness, as the shared resource is over-exploited.  This is the “tragedy of the commons.”  What to do?

Government intervention is, alas, required.  Fishermen don’t welcome such regulation in their economic sphere any more than anyone else does.  And they have a point.  Conventional regulatory approaches have driven up costs, but not solved the problem.  And we know why.  If the government limits the season, fishermen put out more boats.  If the government limits net size, fishermen use more labor or buy more costly sonar.  Economists call this over-capitalization.  Costs go up for fishermen (as resources are squandered), but pressure on fish stocks is not relieved.

The answer is to adopt in fisheries management the same type of innovative policy that has been used for decades in the realm of pollution  control - tradeable permits, called “Individual Transferable Quotas” ( ITQs) in the fisheries realm.  Sixteen countries - some with economies much more dependent than ours on fishing - have adopted such systems with great success.  New Zealand regulates virtually its entire commercial fishery this way.  It’s had the system in place since 1986, and it’s been a great success, putting a brake on over-fishing and restoring stocks to sustainable levels ­- while increasing fishermen’s profitability!

There are several ITQ systems already in operation in the United States, including for Alaska’s pacific halibut and Virginia’s striped-bass fisheries.  More important, the time is ripe for broader adoption of this innovative approach, because a short-sighted ban imposed by the U.S. Congress on the establishment of new ITQ systems has expired.

The first step in establishing an ITQ system is to establish the “total allowable catch.”  The next step - and a crucial one - is to allocate shares of that total limit to fishermen in individual quotas that are theirs and theirs alone (read:  well-defined property rights).  Setting the individual quotas will not be easy.  The guiding principle should be simple pragmatism - using the allocations to build political support for the system.  Making the quotas transferable eliminates the problem of overcapitalization and increases efficiency, because the least efficient fishing operations find it more profitable to sell their quotas than to exploit them through continued fishing.  If you can’t catch your whole share, you can sell part of your quota to someone else, instead of buying a bigger boat.

In addition, these systems improve safety by reducing incentives for fishermen to go out (or stay out) when weather conditions are dangerous.  And it was just such perverse incentives of conventional fisheries regulation that were blamed for the tragic loss of life when a fishing boat was lost in a storm off the New England coast just a few winters ago.

Further, because ITQ systems eliminate the motivation for government to limit the duration of the fishing season, supplies available to consumers improve in quality.  Prior to the establishment of an ITQ system for Alaskan halibut, for example, the government had reduced the fishing season to just two days, but subsequent to the introduction of the system, the season length grew to more than 200 days.

A decade ago, environmental advocates - led by the Environmental Defense Fund - played a central role in the adoption of the sulfur dioxide allowance trading program that’s cut acid rain by half and saved electricity generators and rate-payers nearly $1 billion annually, compared with conventional approaches.  The time has come for environmentalists to join forces with progressive voices in the fishing industry and in government to set up ITQ systems that can keep fishermen in business while moving fisheries onto sustainable paths.

Researchers who have trained a tiny virus to do their bidding say they made it build a more efficient and powerful lithium battery.

They changed two genes in the virus, called M13, and got it to do two things: build a shell made out of a compound called iron phosphate, and then attach to a carbon nanotube to make a powerful and tiny electrode.

Such an electrode could conceivably make more powerful memory devices such as MP3 players or cellular telephones, and are far more environmentally friendly than current battery technologies, said Angela Belcher, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology materials scientist who led the research.

"It has some of the same capacity and energy power performance as the best commercially available state-of-the-art batteries," Belcher said in a telephone interview.

"We could run an iPod on it for about three times as long as current iPod batteries. If we really scale it, it would be used in a car," she added. Such scaling is not even close, Belcher cautioned.

The technology is inherently green because it involves a live virus. "We are having organisms make the materials for us," Belcher said. "We are confined to temperatures and solvents – water – that organisms can live in. It's a clean technology. We can't do anything that kills our organisms."

Reporting in the journal Science, Belcher's team said their genetically engineered viruses were designed to grow shells of amorphous iron phosphate.

The material is generally not a good conductor, but makes a useful battery material when patterned at the nanoscale – a microscopic molecular scale.

Lithium batteries are powerful and light, but they do not release their electrons very quickly. The virus-made material did, however. This translates into more battery power.

"My students hate it when I say we sit back and let them (the viruses) do the work. We put a lot of work in too," Belcher said.

"But once you have the right genetic sequence and have the right proteins then you just put them in solution with water and ions and they template the battery in the same way an abalone templates a shell. They build little shells around themselves."

The team is already working on a second-generation battery using materials with higher voltage and electrical capacity, such as manganese phosphate and nickel phosphate, said Belcher. This new technology could go into commercial production, she said.