Sustainability Science

This is the latest high profile failure of our water infrastructure here in California.  This pipe was laid a century ago and concrete-lined to extend its useful life...in the 1950s.  One might think that servicing more than once a century would be on the to-do lists of public works agencies.  I understand all the arguments about why this is so hard, but the fact remains: physical materials wear out and need physical replacing.  That is the long and the short of it.

Wow...it only took a billion dollars, a decade of active planning/construction (on top of our twenty previous years of discussions), unions screaming for the "high paying jobs" the construction would provide, beyond aggravated motorists, etc., etc.

Who says we can't do overpriced, car-centric, gasoline-centric, dated-before-it-launches transportation planning?

This is single storage well failure erased all the work we have done fro the past year in terms of CO2 emission reduction in the state of California.  Crazy.  A clear sign that we need to get our energy infrastructure together and another example of why natural gas isn't as clean and the proponents often articulate (hint: leaks are the norm with natural gas infrastructure, not the exception).

This is increasingly a problem for our coastal zone worldwide.  And beyond the coastal zone as well.  Just this week we saw flooding outside the Arizona Cardinal's stadium in September and the greatest single day rain event in Nevada history.  While we are always cognizant of not wanting to confound "weather" with "climate," it should be clear to just about everyone that our infrastructure and hardened infrastructure is increasingly not up to the task of 21st century natural hazards.