Telecommuting is on the rise

A growth in telecommuting came despite panic during mass layoffs, which led many people who teleworked to head back to the office for face time.

By CINDY KRISCHER GOODMAN
cgoodman@MiamiHerald.com

When you can read your e-mail at the beach, hold a video conference in your dining room and chat with a co-worker from a doctor's waiting room, is there finally a new definition of ``the office''?

The numbers say yes.

Teleworking -- working remotely at least one day a week -- is on the rise, driven by businesses desperate to cut costs, a new emphasis on the green movement and the increasing availability of a high-speed Internet connection. Today, more than 34 million U.S. adults telecommute at least occasionally and that number is expected to swell to 63 million -- or 43 percent of U.S. workers -- by 2016.

``The recession just may have moved teleworking from being a cushy perk to becoming a business necessity,'' Miami employment attorney Richard Tuschman of Epstein Becker Green, recently told a group of employers considering teleworking arrangements.

Managers typically resist out of fear of losing control of employees. But now, businesses desperate to save money on office space or reluctant to pay a new hire to relocate are allowing workers, sometimes even forcing workers, to set up a home or virtual office -- either on a part-time or a full-time basis.

When the recession hit, some telecommuters panicked and retreated back to the office for face time. Yet, a good number of workers -- about 70 percent of people in service businesses say they still work remotely at some time, according to Kate Lister, author and telework expert. In the future, more companies will be agreeing to creative telework or virtual arrangements on a trial basis, she says.

If telework is the future, here's a blueprint for success:

BE CREATIVE

Needing more space, Western Union looked for options to expansion. It launched a pilot program in 2008 called iFlex to allow 15 percent of its South Florida workforce to telework up to three days a week. The company crunched the numbers and figured out it saves 3.2 million over five years in real estate costs and other expenses.

``We discovered telework is an excellent solution from a capital standpoint,'' said Sara Baker, human resources director for Western Union. ``We also found from an employee perspective that it not only saves the employee money, but they are more productive, more engaged, and use less sick leave.''

DEVELOP CRITERIA

Tuschman, the lawyer, recommends having a telework policy and making it clear who is eligible to work out of the office. Someone who needs a lot of prodding would not be a good candidate.

Ken Erdberg, a Western Union information technology director, supervises two teleworkers and believes specific management skills are necessary.

``You need to trust your employees and manage by results. A micro manager would not fit well,' he said.

TECHNOLOGY

Russell Correa, a human resources consultant, works remotely from South Florida for a New York firm. He previously worked at Corporate Counseling Associates' main office. Correa uses instant messaging and video chatting for spontaneous conversation with co-workers.

``Sometimes it's not just about work. I'll chat for 10 minutes about things like what mood the boss is in today or other workplace gossip that takes place in physical office that telecommuters lose out on,'' he said.

Correa also finds technology can help manage perceptions, allowing his manager to see him online and view him as being constantly contactable.

METRICS

How do you monitor employees who work from home and judge their performance?

Karen Korner, vice president of marketing at DAS Group in Hollywood, says her ad agency is looking to close two of its offices and make employees work from home, an alternative to layoffs. She wonders how she will ensure they put in their hours and get their work done.

``I am concerned about the guy who will play a nine-hole round of golf on my nickel,'' she said.

Ideally, companies with telework arrangements measure productivity rather than hours. Correa shows his productivity by creating a weekly ``What Russell Is Up To'' report and sending it not only to his manager but to his teammates, too. Correa says the report sent via e-mail on Fridays includes a detailed review of his activities for the week and sets up action steps for the upcoming week.

``It's a nice system of accountability,'' he said.

Nice enough, that his firm hired another teleworker and asked her to create the same type of weekly report.

COMMUNICATION

Once employees start working remotely, good communication becomes critical. There must be a discussion about how a boss and employee will communicate and how often. Correa says he addressed this with a frank conversation with his boss, asking: ``How can I remove the barriers that get in your way of thinking I'm available?''

Jodi Clausen, a teleworker at Western Union, says she communicated more during a management change, conveying her value to her new boss: ``My costs are less because I'm not there everyday and my productivity is just as good.''

Consider expenses and liability: Most companies continue to pay for the basic equipment and services employees need to work at home or on the road. For hourly workers, Epstein Becker attorney Kevin Vance says wage and hour laws apply and software exists to track time.

Cindy Krischer Goodman is CEO of BalanceGal LLC, a provider of news and advice on how to balance work and life. She can be reached at balancegal@gmail.com or read her columns and blogs at http://worklifebalancingact.com.

Comments (8)
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KittKatz wrote on 05/26/2010 11:48:02 AM:
Replying to east89 (05/26/2010 11:02:26 AM):

"They save on utility cost, mainly electricity, water, and paper usage.":You can also save by have people who telecommute share desk space when they are in the office rather than each person having an assigned desk that doesn't get used when they are not there.

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east89 wrote on 05/26/2010 11:06:16 AM:

I loved telecommuting, it was nice to not have to deal with the traffic and sleep in a bit later. It is hard to tune out all of the distractions of being at home while you are working.

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east89 wrote on 05/26/2010 11:02:26 AM:
Replying to avilla (05/26/2010 08:20:22 AM):
"Cindy,
Enjoyed your story and have shared it with others considering telecommuting. One question: How do companies save money by having people work from home just a few days a week?":They save on utility cost, mainly electricity, water, and paper usage.

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avilla wrote on 05/26/2010 08:20:22 AM:
Cindy,
Enjoyed your story and have shared it with others considering telecommuting. One question: How do companies save money by having people work from home just a few days a week
.

Read more: http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/05/26/v-fullstory/1647958/telecommuting-is-on-the-rise.html#ixzz0s43HJ1Gx

Comment

Telecommuting is a Green activity in that it saves resources. The people who don't have to drive to work, fight the traffic, parking, etc. are saving money, time, and aggravation, which should lead to happier employees. I know a Cisco employee who used to travel 200,000 miles a year all over South America doing business. Now he teleconferences from his Miami office and saves those monies that were previously spent on airfare, hotel rooms, cabs,food, and entertaining. In addition he is happier because he doesn't have to travel as much and can be home with his family. He still makes the rounds once or twice a year to have some face time with his customers to reinforce his relationships with them but the large majority of his travelling has been eliminated. It helps that Cisco is a leader in teleconferencing equipment.

My sister was a paralegal back in the 80's and as she had her two kids and were growing she wanted to be with them. She did real estate closings for an attorney and asked him if she could do the work from home so she could be there to raise her kids. It would have cost him $3000 to put the software on her computer, and let her telecommute. Between the downtown parking fees, the babysitter, and the nice clothes she had to wear every day it was expensive to work in that capacity for the money he was paying. She would work while the kids were napping or sleeping at night, and he would pay her for the completion of each closing, not by the hour. He refused to let her telecommute, and she quit.

Stimulus Bill Funds Still Not Reaching Cleantech

by Robert Lahey, Ardour Capital Investments
Published: June 17, 2010

Most of the $787b stimulus bill funds have been spent, but the impact on cleantech has fallen below expectations. The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (ARRA) allocated $36.7b to the Department of Energy (DOE), but as of 6/4/10 only $4.5b has been spent and most of it did not go to cleantech companies.

Nuclear waste cleanup projects and state governments received a majority of the DOE’s stimulus funds spent to date. The nuclear waste projects, which have received $2.1b, have nothing to do with renewable energy or energy efficiency. State governments, which have received $1.3b to date, are supposed to benefit cleantech through Energy Efficiency Conservation Block Grants, Weatherization Assistance, and State Energy programs. However, we are seeing the potential impact on cleantech diluted because of delays at the state level. Also, many states facing significant budget shortfalls are likely to spend a portion of the funds on programs unrelated to energy.

Programs that directly fund cleantech companies have announced significant awards, but the money has not been dispersed. Excluding state nuclear cleanup and state programs, $11.5b has been awarded but not spent. These programs are the most attractive for cleantech companies because there are no state intermediaries to delay or supplant funds. Smart grid companies will benefit significantly as utilities receive $3.9b in matching funds to be spent on smart meters and demand response.

The loan guarantee program remains the most well funded and elusive ARRA opportunity. It is sitting on $3.9b in funding (99% unawarded) which can be used to support $34b in loans to cleantech companies ranging from equipment manufacturers to project developers. This program is having serious trouble getting off the ground and we expect that a majority of the funds will remain unspent well into 2011.

Progress in the loan guarantee program has been greatly exaggerated. Only one cleantech company has ever received a loan (Solyndra), and the 7 companies that have been conditionally approved are applicants from 2008. Conditional approval is a positive step forward in the process, but it does not mean the loan is certain to occur. The absence of real loans is remarkable considering that the program was established in 2005 and has been accepting applications since 2007.

Delays are attributable to personnel deficiencies in terms of quantity and quality (limited finance and private sector experience), new restrictions on lobbyists, stringent credit requirements, and mandatory environmental studies that move at a snail’s pace.

The Treasury Department grant program is a brightspot for cleantech. Renewable electricity project developers applying for these subsidies are exempt from many of the DOE’s most burdensome requirements. Since this program was launched in August 2009, it has given out $3.6b to 671 projects.

While slow progress of ARRA spending is a near-term negative for the sector, we remain optimistic for the long-term impact. The size of these spending programs is unprecedented for cleantech space, and we look for them to have a potentially game-changing affect on the US market.

Robert Lahey is the Senior Legislative Analyst at Ardour Capital Investments, LLC, and can be reached at rlahey@ardourcapital.com. Founded in 2002, Ardour Capital is the leading research and investment-banking firm exclusively focused on energy technology, alternative energy and power, and clean & renewable technologies. Ardour Capital publishes in-depth company coverage and industry specific research. Ardour Capital offers private and public companies a full range of corporate finance, investment banking and capital market services. Ardour Global Indexes is a family of pure play alternative energy indexes that is the primary measure of cleantech equity performance.

The information and views expressed in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of RenewableEnergyWorld.com or the companies that advertise on its Web site and other publications.

Parsing fact from fiction with the Bloom Energy box

March 1, 2010 11:11 AM PST
by Martin LaMonica

Boy, did I pick a lousy week to leave the country for a family vacation.

What did I miss? Well, a company seems to have come out of nowhere, raised loads of money, has retired Gen. Colin Powell on its board, and made some audacious claims about reinventing the energy business. As I dug through last week's news, I asked myself: Is Bloom Energy's public relations blitz to be believed?

The short answer, it appears, is "yes." But don't expect miracles.

For people in the green-tech industry, digging up information on Bloom Energy has been like the fruitless quest for El Dorado. Finally, last week, Bloom Energy orchestrated a grand introduction to the world, revealing its fuel cell technology and naming a number of companies already using the Bloom Energy Server.

Many viewers of the 60 Minutes segement may have simply been surprised that Silicon Valley's movers and shakers are working so seriously on clean energy. Even for those in the know, though, Bloom Energy's technology is intriguing and brings fuel cells, which many people have dismissed as technically challenged, back into the discussion over the future of energy.

So how do their claims stack up? Based on company-provided materials, they look pretty good. But keep in mind, solid oxide fuel cells are a well known technology with understood benefits and limitations.

Meet the Bloom box (images)

Fuel cell apps in action. Fuel cell technology was most recently on the tech media's radar last year when the Department of Energy proposed cutting research for fuel-cell vehicles, which have been touted for many years as the ultimate green car solution. Mobile fuel cells have formidable technical challenges, notably storing enough hydrogen for a long driving range, and the lack of a hydrogen distribution infrastructure. Bloom Energy CEO KR Sridar told reporters at least twice during last week's press conference that the technology was not developed for cars, an indication of how much people associate fuel cells with vehicles.

Bloom Energy is using fuel cells for stationary power, which is arguably a better application for the technology. For starters, stationary fuel cells can use the natural gas lines already in place for fuel. The Bloom Energy Server can run on different fuel sources, including biogas, a gas made from organic materials. And they can be strung together, much the way servers are clustered to boost processing muscle. An initial customer, eBay, for example, is using a five 100 kilowatt boxes--each about the size of a parking space, to power 15 percent of its headquarters in San Jose, California.

For companies that need on-site power, fuel cells are already in use because they are very reliable. Fuel cells could power data centers, for example, because of their reliability and the potential to supply DC power directly to electronic equipment. Since they are relatively clean sources of power, fuel cells can receive state subsidies, as they do in California.

Bloom is not alone. In getting so much media attention, Bloom Energy certainly benefited from its connections to high-profile investors, such as John Doerr of famed venture capital company Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfied & Byers. Kleiner's connections probably helped line up initial customers for Bloom, including Google, Walmart, Staples, FedEx--all companies which have invested in alternative energy sources for financial and environmental reasons. But Bloom Energy is not the only company making fuel cells for stationary power.

FuelCell Energy, which is based in Danbury, Connecticut, is already selling fuel cell power systems for commercial customers, which fuel cells that can run range from 300 kilowatts to 2.8 megawatts. Another is start-up ClearEdge Power, which recently introduced a smaller fuel cell for homes or small businesses to make electricity and heat. Panasonic is developing fuel cells for homes, which also use natural gas to make both electricity and hot water.

Where Bloom Energy stands out is the design and materials it's using in its fuel cells, which offers the potential to lower costs with higher manufacturing volume. The core of Bloom Energy's technology is a solid oxide fuel cell, which takes fuels and oxygen from the air to make an electrical current.

One technical challenge with this type of fuel cell is that they operate at very high temperatures. That allows for greater efficiency in energy conversion but also requires engineers to deal with high heat. Bloom has designed the system to recycle the heat generated from the energy conversion in the process of mixing incoming natural gas with steam, which is needed with this type of fuel cell. So instead of using the heat to make hot water, for example, the heat is fed back into make electricity, according to the company.

Another significant technical achievement is that Bloom Energy's system doesn't use expensive materials, notably platinum which is used as a catalyst in many types of fuel cells. Bloom Energy is cagey on exactly what it uses but says that the fuel cells use a ceramic made from sand and inks. Researchers have been trying to make fuel cells without platinum for years. Another company trying to make a low-cost fuel cell catalyst is SunCatalytix, a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, although it's a very different technical approach.

Cost. So why all the fuss over a well understood technology? Because Bloom Energy has said that it can deliver its electricity at between 8 cents and 10 cents per kilowatt-hour, including the cost of ongoing maintenance. In many parts of the country, that's cheaper that the grid rate. Because fuel cells are their own source of juice, they also offer back up power in the case that there is a grid outage.

According to Bloom Energy's data, companies which purchase this sort of system can earn back the initial outlay of between $700,000 and $800,000 for a 100 kilowatt system in three to five years. A 100-kilowatt system could be enough to power 10 U.S. homes or a small business, such as a Starbucks, according to the company. But keep in mind, that its stated cost per kilowatt assumes subsidies as high as 50 percent of the initial cost and natural gas prices of $7 per million BTUs, according to an interview. Still, Sridhar claims it can drive down the cost steadily and that it can compete without subsidies in the future.

Given that these fuel cell boxes require a hefty upfront cost, the most obvious customers for these mini-power stations are businesses and utilities, not consumers. Companies can afford to make relatively long-term energy purchasing decisions, particularly if there are economic incentives to buy cleaner sources of energy. Unless a company fixes into a long-term contract for gas, the cost of power from a Bloom Energy Server will vary with the cost of natural gas, which has been volatile in recent years, so fuel cells don't have the same predictability that a solar array would have. On the other hand, on-site solar panels cannot deliver electricity at all times of the day as a fuel cell can.

Bloom Energy executives said that utilities could be interested in purchasing relatively large-scale units to, perhaps, power a neighborhood. One advantage is that a utility would not need to build more transmission lines to meet the growing demand in a specific region. On the other hand, utilities are typically very conservative in adopting different technology. And although Bloom Energy has raised some $400 million, it's still a start-up in the eyes of risk-averse commercial customers.

Sridar told 60 Minutes that he would like Bloom to bring down the cost of a 10-kilowatt fuel cell to less than $3,000 in five years, which brings it into the buying range of homeowners. For somebody who needs reliable back up power or wants to promote cleaner energy technologies, that could be interesting, although that price has not been reached. Another open question for all customers is how reliable these systems will be over ten years of use.

How clean is it? Bloom Energy says that its fuel cells convert about 50 percent of the energy in incoming fuel into usable power, which is the equivalent of a 40 percent to 100 percent cut in carbon dioxide emissions compared to centralized power generation. Fuel cells, which operate without combustion, greatly reduce or eliminate smog-producing and other air pollutants as well. But IDC Energy Insights analyst Sam Jaffe points out natural gas power plants can operate near 60 percent efficiency, making the overall efficiency about the same as a Bloom box even after losses of energy in transmission lines are figured in.

That's not to say that Bloom Energy's claims over "clean energy" are bogus. About half of the U.S. gets is electricity from burning coal which produces more carbon emissions and has other environmental problems.

Bloom Energy has also indicated that it can make power using solar energy, which would make it a very clean source of power. During the press conference, Sridar said that the company has technology to convert solar-generated power into hydrogen, which could be used to run its fuel cells to make electricity. In this scenario, the Bloom Energy Server is not only a source of power but also an energy storage device. However, given the cost of the system, he expects the technology won't be commercially viable for eight to 10 years.

Given the technology and the fact that Bloom already has brand-name customers, you can see why it's been so hyped. Having raised hundreds of millions of dollars and not saying a word for eight years also helped build the mystique around what they are doing.

Although company executives say that the Bloom box won't need subsidies forever, the fact is that it does right now. That means its commercial success will rely on those incentives in the short term and companies willing to buy fuel cells because they are relatively clean and reliable sources of on-site power. Also, the company will need sales to scale up from serving a handful of customers to produce higher volumes.

At the very least, Bloom brings fuel cells back into the picture for powering buildings. Given the cost and my needs, I don't expect on installing one in my backyard any time soon. But then again, many people didn't think they'd need PCs at home 25 years ago either

Smart-grid companies feel growing pains

June 2, 2010 4:00 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

If you think utilities will swiftly adopt smart-grid technologies, consider the story of GridPoint.

Despite being only seven years old, the high-profile energy start-up has adjusted its strategy a few times and made a string of acquisitions. At first, it planned on selling home energy management systems and batteries to consumers, then shifted its focus to selling smart-grid equipment to utilities, such as software to manage home energy or charge electric cars.

Last week, GridPoint announced that it has signed a deal to supply energy management software and hardware to the United States Postal Service, which has set a goal of lowering energy use by 30 percent by 2015. It could bring in as much as $28.7 million over three years to GridPoint.

The deal is significant because GridPoint sees commercial and industrial energy management, which it entered through its acquisition of ADMMicro last November, as a business with better near-term potential than smart-grid gear, according to the company. Utilities are slow at buying IT-related technology, whereas businesses make quicker decisions based on a return on investment, the company has found.

"The fact of the matter is that the (smart-grid) marketplace is taking time to evolve from pilots to significant rollouts. As a business, we need to make sure we have an opportunity to generate business from multiple sources," said GridPoint Executive Vice President John Clark, who joined the company after it acquired V2Green, which made utility software for managing electric vehicle charging.

GridPoint isn't alone in noticing how slowly things are moving in certain areas of the smart grid.

Between the federal government and utilities, about $8 billion will be spent on modernizing the grid with two-way meters and other digital technologies. But for companies that aren't directly linked to smart metering, that money, which has been slow in coming, may not be all that meaningful.

"There is some disappointment, or disillusionment, that the market did not materialize as fast as people thought, particularly for the tech start-ups and investors that targeted it," said Rick Nicholson, an analyst at IDC's Energy Insights service, which recently adjusted its forecasts for spending in North America. "It's still going to materialize into a multibillion-dollar market, it's just going to take longer."

Finding a niche
Smart-grid technologies are designed to make the grid more reliable and efficient for utilities and give consumers more control over how they use energy. But the nature of doing business at a utility means the technology upgrade process is slow.

Utilities typically negotiate with public utility commissions on how they will recoup the costs of capital investment, such as smart meters, batteries, or in-home energy displays for consumers. That investment cycle, coupled with utilities focus on reliability, means they don't have big incentives to move quickly, said Rob Day, an investor at Black Coral Capital.

Images: The many faces of the smart grid

The decision to buy IT to use energy more efficiently at commercial or municipal organization is more straight-forward. At the U.S. Postal Service, GridPoint will be installing submetering hardware, which can report energy usage of big energy consumers in a building, such as heating and air conditioning units. Data from hundreds or thousands of locations is collected with an on-board computer and can then be viewed by energy managers through a portal. With that level of detail and alerts, organizations can find ways to lower energy use and troubleshoot equipment problems, Clark explained.

GridPoint hopes to parlay its energy-management services into revenue from installing solar arrays or performing energy audits, a line of business it gained in February when it acquired Standard Renewable Energy, which also caters to residential customers. GridPoint can also work with utilities on demand-response programs where customers are paid to dial down electricity use during peak times, Clark said.

There's ample opportunity to make money by lowering energy use at businesses, but it's a crowded market, said Day. Established building-automation companies, such as Siemens and Johnson Controls, have broad product lines and the demand-response field also has a number of suppliers. "I've seen a lot of start-ups and established companies targeting that sector," Day said.

The consumer end of the smart grid is also taking time to take shape. There are a number of companies that have developed home energy management systems to give consumers more detailed electricity consumption data and recommendations on how to be more efficient. GridPoint's customer-facing software is being used at smart-grid programs in Boulder, Colo.

But there are some doubts about how large that business can become and questions over whether utilities can effectively market these products. A recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group found that many consumers were eager to reduce energy use, but few understood the benefits of smart meters or utilities' smart-grid programs.

There are certainly still a number of companies earning money by supplying utilities. Smart meter makers or industrial conglomerates, such as Siemens, ABB, and General Electric, have many utility-related products while metering related companies, such as SilverSpring Networks, are doing well, said IDC's Nicholson.

GridPoint, which has raised more than $220 million in equity financing, is considered visionary in the smart-grid field and continues to pursue business with utilities. In the past several months, it has announced that its products will be used in stimulus-funded smart-grid programs and an electric vehicle charging trial with utility Baltimore Gas and Electric Company. But given the pace of technology change in the power industry, companies like GridPoint need to find a lucrative corner of the market while the smart grid matures.

"Would our investors have liked for the smart-grid space to take off and be the billions and billions of dollars people thought it would be two or three years ago? Absolutely," said GridPoint's Clark. "We believe it will, and part of being a successful early-stage company is making sure you're there to participate."

IEA: To promote efficiency, cut fossil fuel subsidies

June 8, 2010 7:56 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

The International Energy Agency on Monday published an analysis that found subsidies for fossil fuels are higher than previously thought. Cutting subsidies would encourage energy efficiency and low-carbon fuels, it said.

The amount of money paid to subsidize fossil fuels around the world was $557 billion in 2008, which is up from $342 billion in the previous year. The key findings on fossil fuel subsidies (click for PDF) were published in advance of the IEA's annual World Energy Outlook report, which is due in November.

The IEA, which gathers energy industry data, recommended that governments set up programs to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, which would create incentives to use energy more efficiently and use fuels that emit fewer greenhouse gases.

Phasing out subsidies for fossil fuels between 2011 and 2020 would cut global oil demand by 6.5 million barrels per day in 2020, or about one-third of current U.S. demand. It would also cut global energy demand by 5.8 percent by 2020, the equivalent of the energy consumption of Japan, New Zealand, Korea, and Australia combined. Greenhouse gas emissions would be the equivalent of current emission of France, Spain, Germany, the U.K., and Italy combined.

In its initial report, the IEA warned that fossil fuels directly related to electricity generation and other "essential energy services."

The IEA said that the upcoming Outlook report will focus on making information on energy subsidies available and transparent, which it said is "an essential step in building momentum for global fossil fuel subsidy reform."

"I see fossil fuel subsidies as the appendicitis of the global energy system, which needs to be removed for a healthy, sustainable development future," Fatih Birol, the chief economist with the IEA, told the Financial Times."

Shell, Cargill invest more in Virent for biogasoline

June 8, 2010 9:02 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

Although electric vehicles are often the highlight of auto shows these days, work on advanced biofuels continues with at least some companies making progress on industry goals.

Madison, Wis.-based Virent Energy Systems said on Tuesday that it raised $46.4 million in a third round of funding, which included follow-on investments from Shell and Cargill.

An employee at Virent holds sugar bagasse, the residue from sugar cane harvesting, which can be turned into a gasoline equivalent liquid fuel.

The money will be used to expand the company's existing demonstration plant, which makes a gasoline equivalent, called biogasoline, from plants at a rate of 10,000 gallons per year. The investment agreement also calls for research on making diesel fuel with the company's technology.

Virent's technology is unlike most alternative-fuel companies in that it uses a catalyst to convert the sugar in plants into a fuel that can be used to replace gasoline. Many advanced biofuels companies are developing techniques to turn the cellulose in plants into ethanol or to make biodiesel from algae.

By making hydrocarbon replacements, Virent expects that its fuels can be easily sold and distributed through the existing fuels pipelines.

In a statement, Cargill Vice President Scott Portnoy said that Virent's technology has the potential to work with different feedstocks, including sugars derived from nonfood sources.

In addition to agricultural giant Cargill and oil and gas company Shell, Honda is also an investor in the company.

Subsea oil plumes found 142 miles from rig

Crude is moving through Gulf like ash from a volcano, official says

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Clouds of oil have been found drifting underwater in the Gulf of Mexico as far as 142 miles from the wrecked Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, government officials said Tuesday.

At a briefing, Jane Lubchenko, of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), said that tests conducted at three sites by a University of South Florida research vessel confirmed oil as far as 3,300 feet below the surface.

The oil was found 42 miles northeast of the well site and also 142 miles to the southeast.

Lubchenko said the tests "indicate there is definitely oil sub surface. It's in very low concentrations" of 0.5 parts per million.

There have been reports of such underwater "plumes" previously, but BP had questioned whether oil was actually forming below water.

On May 30, BP's CEO Tony Hayward denied the existence of oil plumes. "The oil is on the surface. It's very difficult for oil to stay in a column," he said. "It wants to go to the surface because of the difference in specific gravity."

This is the first time the presence of oil plumes has been confirmed by a government agency.

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Coast Guard Admiral Thad Allen said while the term plume had been used widely for several weeks, it was technically incorrect. "Cloud is a better term," he said Tuesday.

Allen added that one of the four vents on the containment cap was now closed.

Lubchenco said the oil could be compared to ash from a volcano, with the liquid rising in a plume and then forming an underwater cloud that drifts about the currents, NBC reported.

Scientists were using samples from three different sites to create an MRI-like 3-D picture to see where the subsurface oil is and where it is drifting, NBC said.

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Full coverage of oil spill

"Additional work is needed to better understand the fate and transport of hydrocarbons within the deeper waters of the Northern Gulf of Mexico," NOAA said in a document which detailed the findings.

The document said "a more complete and robust understanding" of the movement of the oil under the sea's surface was "critical," pointing out that there were varying sources, including natural ones, of oil in the sea.

Comment

Saw something on Hannity last night where some company has suggested hay be used to sop up the oil, as it is apparently 80% effective. A demonstration was performed and the water, afterward, looked pretty good. There was also some kind of cloth that did pretty well sopping it up too. They say nobody at BP wanted to talk to them when they called.

Our lack of attention is killing the oceans

By Chevy Chase and Jayni Chase, Special to CNN
June 8, 2010 9:46 a.m. EDT
STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Gulf oil disaaster has drawn attention to the oceans for 6 weeks
Chevy and Jayni Chase say we don't pay much attention to oceans, 71 percent of planet
In U.S., we spend less on ocean exploration than on space, they say
Chases: "Glorious ocean habitats are dying"

Editor's note: June 8 is World Oceans Day. Chevy Chase is a comedian and actor. A lifelong environmentalist and activist, he's been seen lately in the film "Hot Tub Time Machine" and on the NBC sitcom "Community." Jayni Chase is the founder of the Center for Environmental Education, which provides K-12 teachers and students with environmental education materials and support. She's the author of "Blueprint for a Green School" (2005). TED, a nonprofit organization devoted to "Ideas Worth Spreading," hosts talks on many subjects and makes them available through its website.

(CNN) -- These past six weeks, we've been thinking a lot about the ocean.

But there's a deeper story than this one oil spill. Unfortunately the Deepwater Horizon disaster is a pretty typical example of the way we think about the ocean: We just don't worry about stuff that happens out there.

The ocean covers 71 percent of the Earth's surface, and we hardly know anything about it. We humans are creating big problems because of what we don't know.

We take fish from the ocean to eat without really knowing where they came from, or what they eat, or how many of them there are, or if we're maybe taking the last one. We dump whatever we like in the ocean and watch it float away -- to where? Who cares?

The ocean is a massive, unexplored area of our planet, and in the U.S., we spend less on getting to know it than we spend on getting to know outer space.

Video: The ocean's glory and horror revealed

Video: Why I'm rowing across the Pacific

Video: Filmmaker hooked by an octopus

Gallery: Mission Blue Voyage
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Oceanography
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
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Galapagos Islands

And our lack of attention is showing. Ocean fish are shrinking in size from year to year; coral reefs are being scraped away, and glorious ocean habitats are dying. But because it happens in the blank blue part of the globe, we don't hear about it or if we do, we don't pay attention.

Watch the story of a woman who rowed the Pacific

So how can we get your attention on the ocean -- so we can start solving these problems we're creating?

In April, we went on a trip to the Galápagos with 100 ocean scientists, activists and artists, filmmakers and musicians, to talk about what's going on in the ocean and what we can do to help. On the Mission Blue Voyage, we heard things and saw things that shocked us -- like Brian Skerry's picture of shrimp bycatch, the 8 pounds of dead sea creatures that are thrown away as garbage in order to catch 10 ounces of shrimp.

Watch Skerry's talk about the glory and shame of the oceans

And we saw Jeremy Jackson describe a nearly lifeless ocean taken over by jellyfish. We also saw amazing things, thing that blew our minds -- like watching a bioluminescent jellyfish light up its mating display in the pitch-black deep ocean. We talked with some of the smartest people we've ever met, and we came up with some big plans for saving the ocean.

But we came home from the trip still wondering -- will it make a difference?

We're not scientists, but we know something we can do: encourage you to talk and think about the ocean, with hope that you will be more involved in the things that will make a difference. It's hard to think about having a role in saving something so overwhelmingly immense. But you can be a part of making things better. In fact, all of us have to.

Here are some great places to start:

• Write a letter to your elected representative. Handwrite it; it makes a difference if you do. Let them know you support increased funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The more we learn about the ocean, the better we can protect it. If you live in Hawaii, thank your legislator for being part of the ban on sharkfin soup; if you live outside Hawaii, ask your state or county representatives why it hasn't been banned yet where you live.

• If you're on Facebook, join the Mission Blue page or if you're on Twitter, follow @MissionBlue to keep up with ocean news.

• Get one of those little responsible seafood guides, and use it. If you eat fish, tell your fish guy that sustainable fish is important to you, and not to sell you any more shrimp from overseas. And don't eat any more bluefin tuna or sharkfin soup. Did you know we killed 10 million sharks last year just for their fins?

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Chevy and Jayni Chase.

Gulf damage will last 'for years if not decades'

Oil spill will have ripple effects far into the future, scientists warn

Oil spill disaster in the Gulf
Following a deadly oil rig explosion, crews attempt to contain an underwater oil well gushing thousands of gallons a day, fouling the water and coastline.

Florida beaches open amid cleanup
June 5: Along the beaches of the Florida Panhandle, workers and angry residents are picking up tar balls and cleaning up oil. NBC’s Mark Potter reports.

Obama meets with business owners affected by spill
June 5: On his third trip to Louisiana since the oil spill began, President Obama kept the heat on BP, while at the same time trying to cool the anger of Gulf residents.

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By Joel Achenbach and David Brown

updated 4:57 a.m. ET, Sun., June 6, 2010
Snorkeling along a coral reef near Veracruz, Mexico, in 2002, Texas biologist Wes Tunnell spotted what looked like a ledge of rock covered in sand, shells, algae and hermit crabs. He knew, from years of research at the reef, that it probably wasn't a rock at all. He stabbed it with his diving knife. His blade pulled up gunk.

"Sure enough, it was tar from the Ixtoc spill," Tunnell said.

Twenty-three years earlier, in 1979, an oil well named Ixtoc I had a blowout in 150 feet of water in the southern Gulf of Mexico. The Mexican national oil company Pemex tried to kill the well with drilling mud, and then with steel and lead balls dropped into the wellbore. It tried to contain the oil with a cap nicknamed The Sombrero. Finally, after 290 days, a relief well plugged the hole with cement and the spill came to an end — but only after polluting the gulf with 138 million gallons of crude.

That remains the worst accidental oil spill in history — but the Deepwater Horizon blowout off the Louisiana coast is rapidly gaining on it.

The spill has now been partially contained with the cap that BP engineers lowered onto the mile-deep geyser Thursday night. That means roughly a quarter to half of the flow is being piped to a surface ship, the national incident commander, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen, said Saturday. BP hopes to improve the rate captured in coming days. If official government estimates are correct, 23 million to 47 million gallons of oil have spewed so far.

Ripple effects

Ecosystems can survive and eventually recover from very large oil spills, even ones that are Ixtoc-sized. In most spills, the volatile compounds evaporate. The sun breaks down others. Some compounds are dissolved in water. Microbes consume the simpler, "straight chain" hydrocarbons — and the warmer it is, the more they eat. The gulf spill has climate in its favor. Scientists agree: Horrible as the spill may be, it's not going to turn the Gulf of Mexico into another Dead Sea.

But neither is this ecological crisis going to be over anytime soon. The spill will have ripple effects far into the future, scientists warn.

"This spill will be lasting for years if not decades," said Doug Inkley, senior scientist at the National Wildlife Federation.

Some of the immediate effects of a spill are obvious — witness the gut-wrenching images of soaked and suffocating seabirds in the gulf. But some types of ecological damage are hard to measure and can take years to document. Many of the creatures that die will sink to the bottom, making mortality estimates difficult. Damage to the reproduction rate of sea turtles may take years to play out.

Containment cap appears to cut flow of oil
June 5: BP’s latest efforts to contain the Gulf Oil spill appear to be working: Oil is still leaking, but the cap seems to be minimizing the flow of oil.

The Exxon Valdez spill of 11 million gallons killed as many as 700,000 sea birds and 5,000 sea otters initially, but even 21 years later, populations of sea otters in areas of Prince William Sound haven't recovered. The Pacific herring population collapsed after the spill for reasons that remain in dispute among scientists. Two intensely studied pods of killer whales in the sound suffered heavy losses in the spill and have struggled since. One of the two pods has no more reproductive females. It is doomed to extinction.

And the oil?

"It's still sitting there," said Stan Rice, program manager for habitat studies at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's Auke Bay Fisheries Lab. "It's still liquid, you can still smell it and touch it."

The degradation of oil slows over the years. The microbes move on, as the large and complex compounds that remain, known as the asphaltenes, are too hard to digest. What's left tends to be dense, tar-like, largely inert and attractive only to people who like to pave roads.

By 2003, there were still 21,000 gallons of oil in Prince William Sound, Rice reports in a recently published study on the lingering effects of the Exxon Valdez spill. The oil can be found by someone scraping three to six inches below the surface of the beach. Rice writes that an oil spill will be "over" when the oil itself is gone, the litigation has been settled and there are no continued negative effects in the environment.

"The Exxon Valdez spill does not meet any of these three criteria," he wrote.


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The oil drifting north from the Ixtoc spill not only wiped out hundreds of million of crabs on Mexican beaches but, also far to the north, managed to killed 80 percent of the segmented worms and shrimp-like crustaceans that live in the sand of Texas beaches, according to Tunnell, a biologist at Texas A&M University at Corpus Christi. But the tiny animals have rapid reproductive cycles, and in about two and a half years they had recovered, he said. Poor government funding limited research on the broader ecological impact of the spill, however: "We don't have any comprehensive, good scientific studies of what happened."

There are on record since 1970 about 1,700 spills from tankers in which at least 2,100 gallons of oil were discharged into water. Scientists have been monitoring the effects of some of them for decades, including a 189,000-gallon spill that occurred off Cape Cod in September 1969.

Five years after that spill, fiddler crabs in the oiled marsh were sluggish and reproduced poorly. In many cases they dug burrows too shallow to protect themselves over the winter.

Astonishingly, many of those problems remained 35 years later, when a graduate student, Jennifer Culbertson, surveyed the marsh. She found that the fiddler crabs reacted slowly to startling motions, apparently the result of a narcotic effect of oil that still formed a visible layer four inches below the marsh surface. (A similar clumsiness has been seen in juvenile spot fish when they chew on sediments contaminated with compounds from oil.) When the crabs burrowed down and hit the layer of 40-year-old oil, they veered horizontally.

"The marsh is still waging chemical warfare several inches below the surface," said Christopher M. Reddy, a chemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts who helped supervise Culbertson's research.

New York mulls Great Lakes wind farm

June 7, 2010 7:54 AM PDT

by Martin LaMonica

The New York Power Authority on Friday kicked off a multiyear review process for an offshore wind farm in Lake Erie or Lake Ontario.

The state has received five applications to build a wind farm, in a planning process that began in April 2009. The earliest that a functioning offshore facility could be operating is by 2015, according to the New York Power Authority.


A pilot offshore farm in Europe

(Credit: GE) The outlined review process underscores the difficulty of siting energy facilities in the U.S. Even with growing support for renewable energy, large projects face a tangle of environmental and regulatory reviews as well as the possibilities of financial shortfalls and public opposition.

Having received proposals for the wind farms this month, state power authorities and specialist consultants will spend the next six or seven months picking a developer.

The project developer will then spend about two years undergoing environmental and regulatory reviews and seeking community input, a process that is estimated to go until about 2013. In that same period, the project developer will need to try to secure a power purchase agreement with a utility to buy the power generated by the turbines.

Project construction, estimated to start in 2013, would take two to three years with operations beginning in 2015 or 2016, according to the New York Power Authority.

If successful, this timeline would be significantly faster than that of the Cape Wind project off the coast of Cape Cod in Massachusetts, a planned project dating back to 2001 and, despite federal approval, still facing legal and regulatory challenges.

In addition to challenges based on environmental laws, Cape Wind needs to get the approval of state regulators for its power purchase agreements. In Rhode Island, a pilot offshore wind farm, which would have been in deeper waters than Cape Wind, was blocked by regulators because of the high cost of electricity.

There is another Great Lakes offshore wind farm project also going through the reviews process. Last month, General Electric and an Ohio-based developer said they hope to have a project built in Lake Erie by 2012.

Making farmers matter

And monitor, budget, manage—and prosper

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

OF ALL the activities that need water, far and away the thirstiest is farming. Cut the use of irrigation water by 10%, it is said, and you would save more than is lost in evaporation by all other consumers. Yet farming is crucial. Not only does it provide the food that all mankind requires, but it is also a great engine of economic growth for the three-quarters of the world’s poor who live in the countryside. Without water they may return to pastoralism—as some people already have in parts of the Sahel in Africa—or migrate, or starve. With water, they may fight their way out of poverty.

Surface water, though, is not enough to meet farmers’ needs. In the United States total withdrawals of water remained steady between 1985 and 2000 but groundwater withdrawals rose by 14%, mainly for agriculture, and in the period 1950-2000 they more than doubled. This was not all for the arid West. Midwestern Nebraska now ranks above California and Texas as America’s most irrigated state. Europe, too, increasingly relies on groundwater, as does the Middle East. In a network of pipes that Colonel Muammar Qaddafi has called the eighth wonder of the world, Libya is drawing fossil water that has lain undisturbed for centuries. Many hydrologists think it will be all but exhausted in 40 years.

It is India, though, that draws more groundwater than any other country. The 230 cubic kilometres that it pumps each year account for over a quarter of the world total. The tripling of Indian groundwater use since 1965 has been stimulated not just by growing demand for food but also by the lamentable public service provided by state governments and the relative cheapness and convenience of a private tubewell. By 2001 India had about 17m of these (and Pakistan 930,000 and Bangladesh 1.2m). The pumps for the wells are usually cheap to run because electricity is subsidised in most places, and in some it is free, though at times it is not provided at all; that is how water is rationed.

The proliferation has brought prosperity and an almost lush landscape to places like Punjab, which grows over half of India’s rice and wheat. But out of sight, underground, there is trouble. Water is being extracted faster than it is replaced and levels are falling, often by two or three times the officially reported rate, according to Upmanu Lall, of Columbia University. The World Bank says the groundwater in 75% of the blocks into which Punjab is divided is overdrawn. Over half the blocks of five other states—Gujarat, Haryana, Maharashtra, Rajasthan and Tamil Nadu—are judged to be in a critical or semi-critical condition, or are similarly over-exploited.

Up comes the poison

One consequence is that the water now being pumped is often salty and sometimes high in concentrations of naturally occurring poisons like arsenic, fluorides and uranium. In the village of Bhutal Kalan in Sangrur district, for instance, the farmers complain not just of water levels dropping by two metres after each of the two harvests a year but also of fluorosis, which may cause mottling of the teeth and skin, or, in its skeletal form, arthritic pain and bone deformities. Cancer is also rising, which the farmers blame on the natural poisons and on pesticides, which they apply specially heavily if they grow cotton.

The farmers’ woes do not end there. Though part of the Sangrur district suffers from a falling water table, the other part suffers from waterlogging. This is a common problem when poorly drained soil is over-irrigated, which results in plants’ roots being starved of oxygen, knocking perhaps 20% off a field’s productivity. Sometimes standing water will evaporate, leaving the soil salty as well as saturated.

Tushaar Shah, in “Taming the Anarchy”, his book on water in South Asia, says the groundwater irrigation boom in India is “silently reconfiguring” entire river basins. But of more immediate concern to the farmers are the economic and social consequences of overdrawing groundwater: falling yields, higher electricity costs, ever greater debts, even rising crime among the unemployed. Increasingly, say the farmers, they must look to other, part-time jobs, like driving a taxi. Or they must sell their land. Usually it will go to a village bigwig, perhaps with a little help from local officials.

The main winners, though, are the arhtiyas, the commission agents who act as middlemen between farmers and wholesale buyers and at the same time moonlight, sometimes extortionately, as moneylenders. Few farmers, big or small, are free of debt, and worries about interest payments have driven thousands of Indian farmers to suicide in recent years, many more than the official figures suggest, says Chander Parkash, an academic who helps to run a local NGO for farmers.

Back in Delhi, Himanshu Thakkar, of the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, casts a more dispassionate eye over the Indian water scene. In Punjab he discerns a state hooked on irrigation. Reluctant to share its river waters with other states, it has passed laws to cancel earlier inter-state agreements. Its depletion of the aquifer also robs its neighbours in the Indus basin. Yet Punjab’s farmers benefit from (state or central) government spending on dams and canals; on help with inputs such as new seeds and fertilisers; on the security of a guaranteed support price for their produce; and on subsidies for electricity (which is in effect free). Lastly, in Punjab at least, the water pumped is not even metered, let alone paid for.

Down in the south-east, Andhra Pradesh also sees its groundwater disappearing. But unlike Punjab, whose alluvial aquifers in equilibrium are recharged by monsoonal rain and leakage from irrigation canals, Andhra Pradesh relies entirely on the monsoon for its groundwater replenishment. Moreover, since it sits on hard rock, only about 12% of the annual rainfall goes to recharge the aquifers, compared with perhaps 30% in Punjab, and subterranean water tends to run away into rivers after a month or two, so underground storage is limited.

Out in the arid west of the state, drought is almost the normal condition and, for the first time in India, a large number of farmers are starting to deal with it by reducing their demand rather than by pumping more and more from deeper and deeper. The idea behind a project that now involves nearly 1m people in 650 villages is to monitor, demystify and thus manage groundwater. The nine NGOs that run the scheme offer no subsidies, just knowledge.

At Mutyalapadu and round about, this comes from the Rev V. Paul Raja Rao’s Bharati Integrated Rural Development Society, which also runs a clinic, an orphanage and a microcredit organisation. One of the first water-management tasks for an organisation such as this is to map the locality and define its hydrological units, each of which is an area drained by a single stream with one inlet and one outlet. The region encompasses 11 hydrological units, one containing 41 villages. Some are much smaller.

The farmers taking part in the project measure and record rainfall, the water table, withdrawals and other data for their land. They calculate how much water will be available if the table is not to fall, decide which crops to grow and estimate how much water they will use, bearing in mind that about half will go in evapotranspiration. They then sit down together in a group—there are several of these for each hydrological unit—and draw up a water budget. Details of the eventual agreement, showing who should grow what and how, are displayed on a wall in the village and updated over the year with information about rain, harvests and even revenues.

No one is compelled to take part; the enterprise is voluntary and collaborative. But so far most farmers, and their families, seem pleased. The local diet has become more varied, since 13 crops are now grown in the area, compared with eight in the past. Those that need most water— bananas, rice and cotton—have yielded to others that need less, such as peanuts and a locally bred variety of green lentils. Chemical fertilisers have been replaced by compost, a change welcomed for both health and financial reasons. Mulch, manure and organic weedkillers are also used. The upshot is that although incomes have not risen—most of the crop is eaten, not sold for cash—the cost of inputs has fallen and those involved feel they are engaged in a sustainable activity.

That is because the scheme puts the people who invest the money, grow the crops and live or die by their efforts in charge of their most crucial resource; they are all barefoot hydrogeologists. The relentless drilling of wells has abated: in two units near Mutyalapadu no new wells were bored over two recent seasons, and in the wider region only eight out of 58 units showed no reduction in pumping. Overdrawing is judged to be under control, partly because everyone knows what is happening. And the idea is catching on. The entire water department of Andhra Pradesh has been trained in the basic principles; Maharashtra has three similar projects under way; and Gujarat, Orissa and Tamil Nadu are keen to follow suit.

Trade and conserve water

How to make tight supplies go further

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

The price is not right

IF MOST governments are bad at making wise investment decisions about water, that is largely because they are bad at evaluating the costs and benefits, and that in turn is at least partly because they find it hard to price water. Many find it hard even to measure. Yet you cannot manage what you cannot measure.

No country uses water pricing to achieve a balance between supply and demand, but countries with sustainable systems all use water rights of some kind that involve the allocation of supply by volume. In a country such as India, which has over 20m well-users, even the registration of wells would be a long and difficult task, as the World Bank points out, never mind measuring the water drawn from each of them. Moreover, introducing a system in which price reflected some sort of cost would often be politically impossible except over time.

Dr Perry, the irrigation economist, says water is typically priced at 10-50% of the costs of operating and maintaining the system, and that in turn is only 10-50% of what water is worth in terms of agricultural productivity. So to bring supply and demand into equilibrium the price would have to rise by 4-100 times. In most countries that would spell electoral suicide, or revolution. That is why community management of the Andhra Pradesh or Chinese kind, which may involve a mix of instruments including regulation, property rights and pricing, offers the best hope.

In the long run it is hard to see sustainable arrangements that do not involve property rights. These can be traded between willing buyers and willing sellers to reallocate water from low-value to high-value uses, and they have proved their worth in the American West, Chile and South Africa. Their most fashionable exemplar is the Murray-Darling basin in Australia, where they have enabled farmers to withstand a fearsome drought without much impact on agricultural production.

Yet water rights do not provide an easy or quick fix to water shortages. For a start, they usually require tested institutions and the ability to ensure fair trading that may take years to establish. Then the scheme, and particularly the assignment of rights, must be carefully designed. Experience in Australia and Chile shows this can be difficult; indeed, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says there is now widespread recognition that the Murray-Darling system is over- allocated. Spain, which after 20 years has registered less than a quarter of its groundwater structures, shows that this can take a long time. And Yemen shows that trading in the absence of proper regulation can actually add to groundwater depletion, as has happened around the city of Ta’iz. Lastly, farmers may be resistant to tradable rights. Even Israel, hyper-conservation-conscious in water matters, still allocates water centrally among different sectors, and controls use within sectors by permits and pricing. Rights provide quotas, but Israeli farmers do not want to see them traded—and the water table drops.

Above all, it is difficult to include small groundwater-users in a tradable-rights scheme. Nebraska neglects small users, as does Australia. But to do so in India would exclude 95% of the people pumping water. This reinforces the argument for collaborative self-policing of withdrawals by farmers themselves.

Comparative advantage

Plainly, however, that is not going to happen fast, so other solutions are needed. One would be trade. Just as an efficient local trading system should direct water to high-value uses, so an efficient international one should encourage the manufacture of water-heavy products in wet countries and their export to drier ones.

It is not, of course, instantly obvious that some products are lighter or heavier than others in terms of the water embedded in them, yet the amount of this “virtual” water can be calculated and a water “footprint” sketched for almost any product, person, industry or country.

On the back of the business card handed out by Tony Allan, the father of the concept, are the virtual-water values of various products: 70 litres for an apple, 1,000 for a litre of milk, 11,000 for a kilo of cotton, and so on. The value for a copy of The Economist is not included, but it has been calculated by the Green Press Initiative at about 11½ litres. That is little more than the 10 litres Mr Allan has for a single sheet of A4 paper, which suggests the exercise is inexact.

It can also be misleading. The oft-quoted figures of 2,400 litres for a hamburger and 15,500 for a kilo of beef lead to the conclusion that eating cows must be unconscionable. Yet some cows valued primarily for their milk may still end up on a plate, and others may be well suited to graze on grassland that would be useless for growing cash crops. In Africa a kilo of beef can be produced with as little as 146 litres of water. Moreover, virtual-water content will vary according to climate and agricultural practice. SABMiller uses 45 litres of water to make a litre of beer in the Czech Republic, but 155 litres in South Africa. In other words, the merit of virtual water is not to give precise figures but to alert people that they might be better off growing different crops, or moving their manufacturing to another country.

Or trading. If the virtual water in traded goods were properly valued and priced, exporters would be fully compensated and importers would pay a price that reflected all the costs. But water is everywhere hugely subsidised, and protectionism often stops an efficient allocation of resources. State laws in America, for instance, usually restrict foreign investment in agricultural land. The upshot, at its most absurd, has been Saudi Arabia’s decision to use its finite fossil fuel and fossil water to irrigate the desert for wheat that could be grown with less energy and less evapotranspiration in the American Midwest and then exported to the Middle East.

Unfortunately, Henry Kissinger once raised the thought that America might use its food aid as a weapon. More recently, when food prices shot up in 2008, some countries started to impose export bans or taxes, leading importers to hanker for self-sufficiency. Virtual water seems destined to remain an indicator of distorted allocation for some time to come.

China's peasants look to the skies

But the science of yields is unyielding

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Another mineshaft

IF THE Andhra Pradesh principles point the way to a reasonably equable future, they will have to be adopted not only throughout South Asia but also in China, where the water available to each person is only a quarter of the world average. In the rain-starved north, the availability per person is only a quarter of that in the south. Yet this is where almost half China’s population lives, and where most of its maize, wheat and vegetables are grown.

Water scarcity is hardly new in China, whose irrigation records go back 4,000 years, but the use of groundwater is. In the 1950s this was virtually unknown in the north. Today there are more wells there than anywhere else in the world, and they are relentlessly pumped, with alarming results. For instance, in the Hai river basin, in which both Beijing and Tianjin lie, shallow water tables have dropped by up to 50 metres, deep ones by up to 90. These will not quickly be put right.

Chinese governments have usually responded to shortages with canals, dykes, storage ponds and so on. The 1,800km Grand Canal, started in 486BC, was built chiefly to move grain to the capital, but will now become part of the great South-North Water-Transfer Project, intended to slake the thirst of China’s arid regions. Dams and canals appeal to the engineers who are disproportionately represented in China’s government. And the country’s engineers are still taught that the way to “save” water is to improve the way it is delivered—by lining irrigation canals, for instance, or laying pipes—to reduce the water that is “lost” by seeping into the soil.

In truth, though, such water is not all lost: much of it returns to the aquifers below, from where it can be pumped up again. There is a cost to this, in energy and therefore cash, but not in water. The only water truly lost in a hydrologic system is through evapotranspiration, since no one can make further use of it once it is in the atmosphere. If genuine savings are to be made, either evaporation must be cut (for example, by storing water underground, or by delivering it to plants’ roots under the surface of the soil); or food must be produced with less transpiration.

The trouble with efficiency savings
Almost all China’s (and others’) attempts at using groundwater more efficiently so far have foundered on a failure to grasp these facts. The water “saved” by sprinklers, lined canals and other forms of seepage control has simply been used to expand the area under irrigation. Over the past 30 years this has gone up by 8m hectares, allowing food production to increase even though the amount of pumped water has remained much the same. But ET has risen, so aquifer depletion has continued.

Sometimes, say Frank Ward, of New Mexico State University, and Manuel Pulido-Velázquez, of the Technical University of Valencia, policies aimed at reducing water use can actually increase groundwater depletion. This has happened in the Upper Rio Grande basin shared by the United States and Mexico, where measures designed to achieve more efficient irrigation have led to an increase in yields upstream; this in turn has increased ET, leaving less water available for aquifer recharge.

Such discoveries increase the attractiveness of demand management, and that is being tried in China as well as in Andhra Pradesh. In a project that covers several parts of arid and semi-arid China—Beijing, Hebei, Qingdao and Shenyang, as well as the Hai basin and the smaller Turpan basin—the World Bank has been promoting water conservation. Elements of the approach are similar to that in Andhra Pradesh: farmers gather in water-users’ associations to plan and operate irrigation services, for example. But the aim here is specifically to reduce ET, at the same time increasing farmers’ incomes without depleting the groundwater.

This is high-tech stuff that involves not just drip irrigation and condensation-trapping greenhouses, but remote sensing by satellites which provide ET readings for areas of 30 by 30 metres. This tells farmers how much water they can consume without adversely affecting the ecosystems in their river basin. If the project is successful, as a pilot has been, it will also establish the use of an internet-based management system, mitigate losses from flooding and increase the supply of water to industry.

If such practices were extended across Asia, groundwater depletions might well be arrested. With luck, farmers too would be better off. But would they produce enough food for the extra 2.5 billion people expected by 2050 in today’s developing countries? The constraints seem to be set by science, and they are tight.

Growing more crops over a wider area leads to more ET. The yield of a crop can be increased a bit by giving plants only as much water as they need and no more; but, says Dr Perry, the water accountant, the productivity gains are unlikely to exceed 10%. Increases in biomass—total vegetative matter—are matched almost proportionately by increases in transpiration, unless humidity or nutrients are changed or the plant is modified genetically. But so far, he notes, “the fundamental relationship between biomass and transpiration has not been changed.”

Every drop counts

And in Singapore every drop is counted
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

NO COUNTRY manages its water as well as Singapore. Admittedly, it has high rainfall and it is a tiny country, but that is exactly the trouble. As an island-city-state, it has little land on which to collect enough water for its 4.8m people, and not much room to store it. To supplement its bounty from above, it takes the salt out of sea water and imports supplies from Malaysia. But relations with its big neighbour are often strained; the two treaties under which the water is provided, both about 50 years old, will expire in 2011 and 2061 respectively; and Lee Kuan Yew, the father of the nation, has never forgotten that the invading Japanese blew up the water pipeline when they seized Singapore in 1942.

The first measure taken to escape foreign dependency in the years after independence in 1965 was a general tidy-up. Industry and commerce were shifted into estates and messy pig and duck farms closed down. That made it easier to purify the rainwater that in Singapore is fastidiously collected wherever it can be—in streets and ponds, even on tall buildings and bridges—before being taken by drains to reservoirs, and thence to treatment plants where it is cleaned to drinking-water standards. The catchment area is being increased by the creation of a pair of reservoirs, the first of which, due to be finished next year, will mean the rainfall-catchment acreage will extend to two-thirds of the island’s total land area.

Little is wasted in Singapore. Used water is treated and then either safely disposed of, reused for industrial purposes or air-conditioning, or mixed with reservoir water for drinking. Together, recycled waste and desalinated water are expected soon to meet 25-30% of demand, and local industries, many of them with a need for the cleanest supplies, are more than happy to use it. Most of the discarded sewage, once treated, is carried 5km out to sea.

Demand is also being contained. Subjected to constant water-consciousness campaigns, Singaporeans are obliged to install low-use taps and loos, and expected to be equally thrifty with their showers and washing-machines. As a result, domestic water use per person has fallen from 165 litres a day in 2003 to 155 today. The pricing system also encourages virtue. Both the tariff and the water-conservation tax rise for domestic users after the first 40 cubic metres a month, and there is a fee for various sanitary appliances. Industry faces much higher charges.

How is all this achieved? The most important ingredient is a sense of seriousness about water at the highest levels of government and a society that is generally regarded as pretty free of corruption. Then comes an autonomous water authority, professionally run by excellent, highly paid professionals (the boss is said to receive $700,000 a year). They are not afraid to bring in private-sector partners, and do what they believe needs doing, not what politicians want done. So money is invested in everything from dams and drains to membranes and bioreactors.

Singapore’s water industry—over 50 companies, both local and foreign—is now thriving. Nanyang Technological University has three water-related units, and Singaporean companies are winning contracts in such countries as Qatar and Algeria. Singaporeans still import 40% of their needs. Even so, they have a supply of water that is clean, predictably delivered and reasonably secure. Sixty years ago they had floods, pollution and rationing.

A special report on water- To the last drop

How to avoid water wars
May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

SINCE men fight over land and oil and plenty of other things, it would be odd if they did not also fight over a commodity as precious and scarce as water. And they do. The Pacific Institute in California has drawn up a list of conflicts in which water has played a part. It starts with a legendary, Noah-and-the-flood-like episode about 3000BC in which the Sumerian god Ea punished the Earth with a storm, and ends, 202 incidents later, with clashes in Mumbai prompted by water rationing last year. Pundits delight in predicting the outbreak of water wars, and certainly water has sometimes been involved in military rows. But so far there have been no true water wars.

Could that change as populations grow, climates change and water becomes ever scarcer? Since 61 of the 203 incidents have taken place in the past ten years, a trend might seem to be in the making—especially as some recent water disputes fail to make the list even though their results look grave. One example is the competition for water in Bharatpur, a district of the Indian state of Rajasthan, which has led local farmers to cut off water supplies to the Keoladeo national park. This was, until a few years ago, a wonderful wetland, teeming with waders and wildfowl. Thousands of rare birds would winter there, endangered Siberian cranes among them. Now it is a cattle pasture.

China abounds with instances of water-induced disputation. The people of Hebei province, which surrounds Beijing, are far from happy that their water is now taken to supply the capital in a canal that will eventually form part of the South-North Water-Transfer Project. So are others affected by that grandiose scheme. Dai Qing, an investigative journalist who is an outspoken critic of the Three Gorges dam and other Chinese water projects, draws attention, for example, to the complaints of those living along the Han river, who will lose water to the huge reservoir formed by the Danjiangkou dam.

Similar disgruntlement can be seen in India, where over 40 tribunals and other panels have been set up to deal with disputes, mostly without success. The bone of contention is often a river, such as the Cauvery, whose waters must be shared by several states. Strikes and violent protests are common. Indians, however, have yet to reach the levels of outrage that led Arizona to call out its National Guard in 1935 and station militia units on its border with California in protest at diversions from the Colorado river. To this day, American states regard each other with suspicion where water is concerned. Indian states are equally mistrustful, often refusing to share such water information as they have lest it be used to their disadvantage.

Violent incidents over wells and springs take place periodically in Yemen, and the long-running civil war in Darfur is at least partly attributable to the chronic scarcity of water in western Sudan. That is probably the nearest thing to a real water war being fought today, and may perhaps be a portent of others to come. If so, they will be dangerous, because so many water disagreements are not internal but international affairs.

Arid disputes

The world has already had a taste of some. The six-day war in the Middle East in 1967, for example, was partly prompted by Jordan’s proposal to divert the Jordan river, and water remains a divisive issue between Israel and its neighbours to this day. Israel extracts about 65% of the upper Jordan, leaving the occupied West Bank dependent on a brackish trickle and a mountain aquifer, access to which Israel also controls. In 2004 the average Israeli had a daily allowance of 290 litres of domestic water, the average Palestinian 70.

Turkey’s South-Eastern Anatolia Project, intended to double the country’s irrigated farmland, involves the building of a series of dams on the Tigris and Euphrates rivers; one of them, the Ataturk dam, finished in 1990, ranks among the biggest in the world. Iraq and Syria downstream are dismayed. Similarly, Uzbekistan views with alarm Tajikistan’s plan to go ahead with an old Soviet project to build a huge barrage across the River Vakhsh. This, the Rogun dam, will be the highest in the world, at least for a while, and was expected in 2008 to cost about $2.2 billion, or 43% of the country’s national income. The dam will, it is hoped, generate enough power for all Tajikistan’s needs and have plenty over to export as far afield as Afghanistan and Pakistan. But since it may take 18 years to fill the dam (compared with 18 days, in principle, for China’s Three Gorges), there may be no water left over, or at any rate not enough for Uzbekistan’s cotton-growers.

International river basins extend across the borders of 145 countries, and some rivers flow through several countries. The Congo, Niger, Nile, Rhine and Zambezi are each shared among 9-11 countries, the Danube among 19. Adding to the complications is the fact that some countries, especially in Africa, rely on several rivers; 22, for instance, rise in Guinea. And about 280 aquifers also cross borders. Yet a multiplicity of countries, though it makes river management complicated, does not necessarily add to the intractability of a dispute.

One arrangement now under strain is the 1960 Indus Waters Treaty between India and Pakistan. This agreement was the basis for the division of rivers after India’s partition in 1947. Having withstood Indo-Pakistani wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999, it is usually cited as a notable example of durability in adversity, but it is now threatened by three developments.

First, India proposes to build a water-diversion scheme in Indian Kashmir that would take water from the Kishanganga river to the Jhelum river before it could reach Pakistani Kashmir. Second, India, which already has more than 20 hydro projects on the three western rivers allocated to Pakistan in its part of Kashmir, is now building at least another ten and has more planned. Each of these conforms to the letter of the treaty, since it does not involve storage but merely run-of-the-river dams, in which water is returned downstream after it has been used to generate power. However, Pakistan is worried about the cumulative effects. When, in 2005, it complained about another Indian hydro project, the dispute went to arbitration. That resulted in a ruling broadly favourable to India which left Pakistan unhappy. It feels that the spirit of the agreement has been breached and the treaty needs revision, partly because advances in technology make it possible to build dams that were not foreseen when the deal was signed.

Third, Pakistan badly needs more reservoirs. Storage is essential to provide supplies in winter (two-fifths of the Indus’s flow comes from the summer melting of glaciers) but Pakistan’s two big dams are silting up. It would like to build a new one in Pakistani Kashmir, but India has objected, and the money is not forthcoming.

Another example, the Nile, looks more worrying but is perhaps more hopeful. The Blue Nile rises in Lake Tana in the Ethiopian highlands, the White Nile in Lake Victoria in Uganda (into which flow rivers from Rwanda and Tanzania). The two Niles meet in Sudan and flow through Egypt, which gets almost no water from anywhere else. For years most of the territories that now form the riparian countries were under the direct or indirect control of Britain, which was fixated on Egypt. Britain stopped any development upstream that would reduce the flow of water to Egypt and, in 1929, allotted 96% of the water flowing north from Sudan to the Egyptians and only 4% to the Sudanese.

Thirty years later Gamal Abdel Nasser had to make a new treaty with Sudan in order to build the Aswan high dam. It would have made more sense to build a dam in the Ethiopian mountains: not only would the flow have then been easier to control but it would also have been cheaper and environmentally less damaging—and with less evaporation. But demagogues like their own dams. The waters were split 75% to Egypt and 25% to Sudan.

The other riparian states have been unhappy ever since, Kenya and Ethiopia particularly so, and all efforts to draw up a new treaty, fairer to all, have failed. They have not, however, failed to achieve anything. On the contrary, for the past 11 years the ten riparians have been amicably meeting in an organisation called the Nile Basin Initiative, and since 2001 have had a secretariat that deals with technical matters and holds ministerial gatherings.

In this group, irrigation and other projects are agreed on, many with World Bank support. Ethiopia is building three dams, two of them large and one controversial, for environmental reasons; and Egypt will take some of the electricity generated, via Sudan. In this way will two old antagonists yoke themselves together with water, the very commodity that has so long driven them apart. No one would say that a new agreement among all the interested parties is imminent, but, after more than 100 trips to Egypt and Ethiopia to help promote harmony, Mr Grey, World Banker turned Oxford professor, is hopeful. He believes that, in time, Ethiopia could be an exporter of electricity to Europe.

A third neuralgic dispute concerns the Mekong, one of at least eight rivers that rise on the Tibetan plateau, fed partly by melting glaciers in Tibet. The Mekong then runs through China’s Yunnan province, Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam. Recently, though, it has been running thinly. Sandbanks have appeared, navigation has slowed, fishermen complain of derisory catches, and the 60m people whose livelihoods directly or indirectly depend on the river are worried. The worst drought in southern China for 50 years is partly, perhaps mainly, to blame, but the downstream users also blame the Chinese government, and in particular the three dams it has built and its blasting of rapids to ease navigation.

China has plans for more dams. It is hyperactive in the world of water, not only at home but abroad—building dams in Africa and Pakistan, looking for land in Mozambique and the Philippines, diverting rivers for its own purposes. Neighbouring states, notably India, are uneasy. Yet the row over the drop in the Mekong seems under control. At a meeting of the Mekong River Commission last month—all the riparian states except China and Myanmar are members—China sent a vice-minister of foreign affairs, who was fairly forthcoming about hydrological data. This was something of a breakthrough, even if he did not offer compensation to fishermen. The neighbours’ resentment has not disappeared, and China will not stop building dams. But a water war seems unlikely.

The most hopeful development is the success of other river-basin organisations like the Nile and the Mekong groups. Such outfits now exist for various rivers, including the Danube, the Niger, the Okavango, the Red, the Sava and so on. In the Senegal river group, Mali, Senegal, Guinea and Mauritania have agreed to disagree about who is entitled to how much water, and instead concentrate on sharing out various projects, so that a dam may go to one but the electricity generated, or a part of it, to another. This has worked so well that the president of the group has established considerable authority, enough to enable him to broker unrelated agreements among squabbling tribesmen.

The co-operative approach has also been successful elsewhere. Thailand, for instance, has helped pay for a hydro scheme in Laos in return for power; South Africa has done the same with Lesotho, in return for drinking water in its industrial province of Gauteng; and, in the Syr Darya grouping, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan compensate Kyrgyzstan in return for supplies of excess power.

The way such organisations work, when they work, is to look for the benefits that can be gained from organising water better, and then to share them. An arrangement can usually, though not always, be found that benefits each state. It may be hard to achieve in a group that includes a dominant member, such as Egypt. And it will also be more difficult in groups that bring together officials appointed politically rather than competitively, on their technical qualifications. In the case of the Indus the two sides’ representatives get along well. The reason the treaty is under strain is that it starts with the water and then tries to divide it equitably. The secret is to look for benefits and then try to share them. If that is done, water can bring competitors together.

Enough water is not enough

It must also be clean

May 20th 2010 | From The Economist print edition

Not the place for a chat, though
IF WATER has the capacity to enhance life, its absence has the capacity to make it miserable. David Gray, a water practitioner who has served the World Bank in almost every river basin on the globe and is now a professor at Oxford, has a technique that makes the point. Every day he receives e-mails with water stories from newspapers round the world. By briefly displaying to an audience just one day’s crop—including, say, drought in Australia, floods in Kenya, an empty dam in Pakistan, a toxic spill in the Yellow river and saltwater contamination in Haiti—he can soon show how water may dominate if not destroy lives, especially in poor countries.

Some of its most pernicious influences, though, never make the headlines. This is how they might read: “Over 1.2 billion people have to defecate in the open.” “The biggest single cause of child deaths is diarrhoea or diseases related to it.” “Nearly 1 billion people have no access to piped drinking water or safe taps or wells.” Each of these statements is linked to water.

Surprisingly, some of those who have to defecate in the open do not mind. Some rural men, and even women, quite enjoy a social squat in the bushes. But for many, and certainly for those who must live with its consequences, it is a disagreeable practice. Women and, especially, girls often find it embarrassing. Many women in South Asia contain themselves by day and wait till nightfall before venturing into the shadows. Girls at African schools without latrines often drop out rather than risk the jeers of their male contemporaries. Slum-dwellers in Nairobi have to pick their way through streams of sewage and take care to avoid “flying toilets”, plastic bags filled with excrement that are flung with desperate abandon into the night.

Without piped water to wash their hands with, let alone to drink, the open-air defecators and another 800m people with access only to primitive latrines are inevitably carriers of disease. If they could wash their hands with soap and water, they could block one of the main transmission routes for the spread of both diarrhoeal diseases and respiratory infections. As it is, patients with water-related diseases fill half the hospital beds in the poorest countries, and dirty water and poor sanitation kill 5,000 children a day.

Clean water is crucial for children with diarrhoea; they need rehydration and electrolytes to survive. Even then, they may still be at risk of malnutrition if they continue to suffer from diarrhoea, which will prevent them from absorbing their food properly. This usually has long-term consequences. Malnutrition in the womb and during the first two years of life is now seen as causing irreversible changes that lead to lifelong poor health.

Poor health, bad in itself, translates into poor economic output. A study in Guatemala followed the lives of children in four villages from their earliest years to ages between 25 and 42. In two villages the children were given a nutritious supplement for their first seven years, and in the other pair a less nutritious one. The boys who had had the more nutritious diet in their first two years were found to have larger bodies, a greater capacity for physical work, more schooling and better cognitive skills. They also grew up to earn average wages 46% higher than the other groups.

The cost to health and wealth
Studies in Ghana and Pakistan suggest that the long-term impact of malnutrition associated with diarrhoeal infections costs each country 4-5% of GDP. This can be added to a similar burden for “environmental risk”, which includes malaria and poor access to water and sanitation, both water- related, as well as indoor air pollution. All in all, the World Health Organisation thinks that half the consequences of malnutrition are caused by inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene. In Ghana and Pakistan the total cost of these shortcomings may amount to 9% of GDP, and these two countries are not unique.

The problem is not strictly a matter of water scarcity. Indeed, expanding the availability of water may actually increase disease, since it may lead to stagnant pools in which mosquitoes breed, and then spread malaria or dengue fever; or perhaps excess water will run through human or toxic waste and thus contaminate the ground or a nearby stream. So hygiene and protected storage are essential.

Yet there is a shortage of safe water for drinking and sanitation in many places, not least in the cities to which so many people are now flocking. Africa is urbanising faster than any other continent, and most migrants to the towns there find themselves living in slums. In cities like Addis Ababa and Lagos a quarter to a half of the population have no access to decent sanitation, and not many more will have access to piped water. No Indian city has a 24-hour domestic water supply, though efforts are under way to provide it in Mysore and a few other places.

Delhi’s story is typical. Demand for water there has been rising for years. The local utility cannot meet it. The city’s pipes and other equipment have been so poorly maintained that 40% of the supply fails to reach the customers. So the utility rations it by providing water for a limited number of hours a day and, in some places, by restricting the quantity. Householders and landlords build tanks, if they can, and fill them when the water is available. Residents, or their weary employees, set their alarm clocks to turn on the tap before the flow dribbles away to nothing. Property developers, anxious to take advantage of a booming economy and a growing middle class, drill boreholes, but these now have to go deeper and deeper to reach water.

As for the Yamuna river, long the main source of the city’s drinking water, it is clinically dead. Quantities of sewage are poured into it daily, 95% of which is untreated, and it is also a depository for industrial effluents, chemicals from farm runoffs and arsenic and fluoride contamination. The city’s master plan proposes three new dams, but they will not be finished for several years.

Many other cities have problems like Delhi’s, though mostly in less extreme forms. Nearly two-fifths of the United States’ 25,000 sewer systems illegally discharged raw sewage or other nasty stuff into rivers or lakes in 2007-09, and over 40% of the country’s waters are considered dangerously polluted. Contaminated water lays low almost 20m Americans a year.

Pollution, however, is not the reason that people in rich countries have taken to drinking bottled water. In the developing world they do it because that is often the only water fit to drink, and for the poor it is usually a significant expense. Not only are their incomes small, but they often pay a lot more for drinking water than do their richer compatriots. A litre of bottled water in India costs about 15 rupees (35 cents).

Bottled water often comes from the same source as tap water, where that is available (sometimes at a hundredth of the price), though it should at least be clean. It is often indistinguishable from tap water. In rich countries, it may have come from exotic sources like Fiji or Lapland, packed in glass or plastic destined to become rubbish, devouring energy on its travels and thus making it one of the least green and least defensible rip-offs on the market.

A concerted international effort is now under way to improve sanitation and the supply of drinking water. One of the development goals set by the United Nations at the millennium was to halve the proportion of people without basic sanitation and a decent source of fresh water by 2015. Progress is slow, especially for sanitation, and particularly in Africa, and increasingly policymakers are finding that heavily subsidised projects are failing.

Sexy loos

Outfits like the World Toilet Organisation, based in Singapore, now believe you have to make lavatories “as sexy as mobile phones” if you are to get people to accept them, and that means literally selling them. Once people have invested some of their own money in a loo, they will use it. The World Bank confirms that the most successful sanitation projects involve only a small subsidy.

Where building a fixed latrine is not possible—slum-dwellers seldom own the land they live on, or have much incentive to improve a site to which they have no legal rights—entrepreneurs may help out. The Peepoo is a personal, single-use bag that the Swedish founder of the company, Anders Wilhelmsen, describes as the hygienic version of Nairobi’s flying toilet, intended, to begin with, for the same Kenyan users. Sealed by knotting, it acts as a micro treatment plant to break down the excreta. Since the bag is made of degradable bio-plastic, when it has served its primary purpose it can be sold with its contents as fertiliser. Indeed, the hope is that a market will develop in which the same people will trade in the bags before and after use. Each will sell for 5-7 cents, about the same as a conventional plastic bag, and though a subsidy will be needed at first, the operation is meant to become self-sustaining, and indeed profitable.

Private enterprise also has a role in the provision of safe drinking water. A large market in home water-purifiers now exists all over the world. But a typical one, using reverse osmosis, may cost at least $170 in a country like India. Kevin McGovern, a self-described pro bono capitalist from New York, wants to bring cheaper purifiers to the poor. His company, the Water Initiative, has developed a filtering device that takes all the nasties out of water in the home and needs to be replaced only once a year. Unlike osmosis, it consumes no energy, and every drop of incoming water can be used for drinking.

The first country Mr McGovern has in his sights is Mexico, the second-biggest consumer of bottled water in the world because of the high incidence of arsenic, fluoride and pathogens in the water. Mr McGovern hopes to put in place a distribution system with a commercial interest in providing the machines and selling the filters. Volunteers and NGOs, he says, tend to set things up and then move on; a local commercial incentive is needed to sustain the operation, even if subsidies are required to get it started. Fortunately, two Mexican organisations have already promised grants, and the project is backed by the country’s popular first lady, Margarita Zavala.