Surely there’s no connection.

The Three Gorges Dam, then, lies at the uncomfortable center of China’s energy conundrum: The nation’s roaring economy is addicted to dirty, coal-fired power plants that pollute the air and belch greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming.

I don’t know when the shift occurred, or why I didn’t notice, but it sure was nice to read a newspaper article that plainly said coal-based power production is a cause of global warming.

Let’s see: (a) environmentally speaking, corn ethanol is a pretty dodgy idea, (b) we’re subsidizing it anyway to the tune of $3 billion per year, (c) farmers, as you’d expect, are responding to the subsidies by reducing the amount of farmland used for food production, (d) this is driving up the price of staple food worldwide, and (e) we’re going to toss another $10 billion in ag welfare to already-rich corn farmers on top of all that.

A commentor at Kevin’s place also hits the nail on the head:

It doesn’t help that any politician who wants to be president has to either vote for this policy or lose the Iowa Caucus.

Welcome to US agriculture policy.

There’s a brash, risky new Amazonia out there. Pioneer entrepreneurs are making fortunes from activities long considered not feasible in this vast and challenging place, gouging ever deeper into the rainforest in pursuit of wealth. The deeper they slash into the forest and burn it, the more greenhouse gas is released into the atmosphere. The destruction of the Amazonian forest has become a leading cause of global warming, with profound climate implications and dangers within the region and far beyond it. Why all this matters so much, and what there is to be done about it, is the subject of this report.

Head on over and take a look.

Both maps come to us from the Southwest Coordination Center. You can find updated (looks like daily) versions of these maps at the Center’s Predictive Outlook page.

I wanted to highlight these maps, as they give a good overall sense of what’s happening in the region. Dry lightning is a huge concern right now for fire officials (right up there with fireworks) and the first map does a great job of showing how thunderstorms are behaving.

Checking the second map, you can see Silver City is just on the cusp of “Active” fire behavior, with the western third of Grant County firmly in the yellow. That second map shows what fire might do in a particular region. Wind conditions, temperature, fuel levels and other criteria determine a fire’s course and behavior, and that changes on a daily basis. Nonetheless, the overall picture is an important one to study.

Like I said, more in the Daily Press this evening.

Reading: I finished A Thousand Splendid Suns last night. Like Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini’s first novel, Suns is set in Afghanistan, and the author again does an incredible job of inserting the reader into the culture and setting. Indeed, I feel the descriptions of the countryside, villages and cities is rivaled only in his characterization.

Hosseini, time and again, brings his characters to life.

It took me about two days to finish, mostly, I think, because it’s so engaging.

I don’t want to say much more — my mother insisted on giving me the book with no recommendations, saying that she knew I would want to read it because it was the follow up to Kite Runner.

Listening: I’m jamming out to American Doll Posse, an album I picked up when it was released, but haven’t really given much time to. Like Hosseini, Tori Amos is one of those artist/writer/musician types that I’m pretty loyal too — I’ll keep buying her records, because I know there’s always something new and something good waiting for me.

What with all the other good music that’s been coming out lately, I’ve felt bad for Tori, and decided to dust her off in the iTunes library.

Doll Posse is another great Tori album. My favorite Amos album is Scarlet’s Walk, and this one reminds me of that more than The Beekeeper. There’s a great mix of songs here, from the quick “Big Wheel” to the mellow “Girl Disappearing.” Highly recommended.

Speaking of other music, here’s two other CDs I’ve been listening to recently:

Carnavas by Silversun Pickups
This is one of my sister’s recommendations, and I’m digging it. Silversun Pickups originated in Los Angleas, and Carnavas is the indie group’s first full-length album.

The rockers get off to a great start with “Melatonin,” and Nikki Monninger’s vocals heat up “Well Thought Out Twinkles,” the second track. The band then puts things on the back burner before really finishing strong.

“Lazy Eye” is the popular track right now, but I’m a fan of “Little Lover’s So Polite” and “Dream at Tempo 119,” some fast moving tracks with great riffs.

Wincing the Night Away by The Shins
I liked The Shins without knowing who it was when I heard the Garden State Soundtrack, and their latest has been in my truck’s CD player for the last three weeks. The opening track, “Sleeping Lessons,” had me at hello.

The rest of the album is great as well. “Phantom Limb” is an incredibly fun song, “Black Wave” is haunting, and the way “Girl Sailor” and “A Comet Appears” fade out is incredible.

I might even have to buy some of their earlier stuff too.

Linking: to the National Wildlife Federation’s blog, which has been tracking debate and developments in the Senate Energy Bill:

Two contrasting liquid coal technology amendments will likely be voted on early today. The Bingaman-Testor amendment would subsidize production of liquid coal; liquid coal plants would have to capture and store 75% of the coal’s global warming pollution; and over its “life cycle” (ie. from ground to exhaust pipe), liquid coal would have to pollute 20 percent less than other fuels. The Domenici-Bunning amendment would require at least 6 billion gallons of liquid coal to be produced by 2022, and would have a “life cycle” requirement of 20 percent less carbon pollution than gasoline (a higher initial benchmark). he coal industry supports the Domenici-Bunning amendment. The environmental community is a bit split on the first. NWF supports the Bingaman-Testor amendment as a compromise, but liquid coal is still a carbon intense fuel and will not put us on the path needed to stop global warming.

Severe dryness across California and Arizona has spread into other Western states. On the Colorado River, the water supply for 30 million people in seven states and Mexico, the Lake Powell and Lake Mead reservoirs are only half-full and unlikely to recover for years. In Los Angeles County, on track for a record dry year with 21% of normal rain downtown since last summer, fire officials are threatening to cancel Fourth of July fireworks if conditions worsen. On Wednesday, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa urged residents to voluntarily cut water use 10%, the city’s first such call since the 1990s.

What does that have to do with Arizona, or, for that matter, New Mexico? According to the Arizona Republic:

After a long decline punctuated by mine closures and layoffs, Arizona’s copper industry is making an unprecedented comeback.

Soaring metals prices have companies scrambling to open mines and expand existing ones to take advantage of the boom.

But mines consume huge amounts of water and could put tremendous pressure on the state’s limited water supply.

Water regulators, county planners and environmentalists are increasingly worried about the effect on aquifers, already suffering from decades of overpumping.

At least seven new mining projects are being planned around the state, and that doesn’t count the ongoing expansion of existing mines. The new projects will require 40,000 acre-feet of water annually. That’s enough to support a city larger than Tempe.

That’s enough water for 200,000 people each year, and, in an area already plagued by water shortages, will be a tough pill to swallow.

But, we still haven’t answered the question of New Mexico’s involvement. Well, the answer is simple, really: the Gila River.

If you recall, at the end of the last legislative session Gov. Bill Richardson line-item-vetoed a provision to fund a study of the Gila and San Francisco rivers. The study was tied to the Arizona Water Settlements Act, which provides New Mexico with 14,000 acre-feet of water per year from the Gila River. Right now, that water goes to Arizona.

At Silver City’s Town Council meeting on Tuesday, Mayor James Marshall reiterated a desire to see the studies move forward.

“The only way to protect that river is to study it and argue with facts that are grounded in science,” Marshall said.

He also told the council that the Interstate Stream Commission is still working to develop support for the studies, and that the Sandia Modeling team is also making additional progress on that front.

14,000 acre-feet of water is 1/3 of what the seven Arizona mines will be using, and I imagine Arizonans would be happy to keep getting that water. That threat has always been present, but the thought that Arizona cities will now be 40,000 acre-feet drier than before makes the threat that much more real.

Bonus: check out this Alibi story on Albuquerque’s shift away from aquifer water for drinking and other household use to San Juan/Chama River water. The story is especially interesting in the context of last year’s news that the Mangas aquifer, which supplies the drinking water for much of Grant County, has a huge amount of water in it, and is continuously replenished by the Gila River. Turns out people used to say the same thing about Albuquerque’s aquifer:

This boundless body of water was going to support our city for generations to come. And it would be another decade before the dream was proven false.

The catalyst for our shift in understanding came in 1992 with a study published by hydrologists J.W. Hawley and C.S. Haase entitled A Hydrological Framework of the Northern Albuquerque Basin . The study showed that the reservoir beneath Albuquerque was not, after all, one giant pod filled with water, but a fractured network of water-filled vessels, some easier to reach than others, some with impure water.

Additionally, prior to the study the Rio Grande and the aquifer were thought to be directly linked. The city purchased San Juan-Chama water in 1963 with the intention of using the river water as an offset to Albuquerque’s groundwater pumping. The San Juan-Chama water was diverted to the Rio Grande, and the theory went that the extra water from the river would seep back into the aquifer, replenishing much of what the city pumped out every year. The Hawley and Haase study, however, showed the aquifer-river connection was somewhat weak. Although the river still replenished the aquifer, it did so at a much slower rate than previously thought.

I particularly liked his insistence on the idea that most people underplay the role of transportation and land use policy in the energy puzzle. This was appealing because it’s what I already thought, but Richardson said it totally unprompted, and it’s true. More fuel efficiency is good, and more renewable energy is also good, but we’re also going to need people to drive less. And that’s going to mean that we’ll need policies that make it realistic for people to do so — mass-transit, but also transit-friendly, high-density constructions.

Via Atrios, who added this:

This is basically the deal. We need to increase the proportion of the population who live in areas where one car per driving age household member isn’t a necessity. Well-designed mass transit and pedestrian transit-oriented development is a requirement for that. I think it’s wrong to see it simply as encouraging “high-density constructions,” as there are plenty of places which are actually quite dense, but are dense in stupid ways and lack adequate transit. The flip side is there are places with adequate transit (certain suburban rail lines) which lack density in the appropriate places (Nimbyism, sometimes understandable, is often the cause).

This is mind-numbingly simple that it should be common sense. People complaining about traffic and gas prices and pollution need look no further than the number of cars on our streets.

While global warming and human expansion have us focused on dropping the carbon pounds—switching light bulbs, reducing gas mileage and buying carbon offsets—vast numbers of species continue to lose their native habitats and food supplies. Globally, 23 percent of mammals, 12 percent of birds and 32 percent of amphibians, alongside nearly 8,400 plant species, are on the World Conservation Union’s 2006 Red List of species threatened with extinction. Here in the U.S., indigenous plants and animals once protected by the Endangered Species Act must fend for themselves.

Head on over and see what you can do this Earth Day to help protect dying species.

Global warming is turning the Southwest into a permanent Dust Bowl, where the dry conditions of our worst 20th century droughts — the 1930s and 1950s — become the norm over the next century, according to new research.

Global warming will push our winter storm track, which brings the region much of its moisture, to the north, according to Richard Seager at Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory.

Seager’s results, published on line today by the journal Science, sent ripples through the western water community as they began circulating this week.

They suggest a fundamentally new kind of drought here — not the occasional unusually dry stretches of the type the region saw in the 1930s and 1950s, but a climate that is that dry all the time.

John also has more at his blog:

It’s reasonable to think that most of the folks in sub-Saharan Africa didn’t celebrate the release of the latest grim Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report by heading out to the ballpark last night. But that’s what Lissa and I did, the beneficiary of a pair of free tickets to see our Isotopes play Omaha out at the lab.

Given the stark headlines in the morning paper – Global Warming Heralds Slow Impending Doom, or words to that effect – it was fitting that L suggested extra layers, and brought a blanket. It was 44 degrees at game time, with a howling east wind blowing in from right that kept more than a few fly balls in the ballpark and more than a few fans up in the clubhouse drinking their beers rather than in their seats watching baseball.