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It's not about 'not having enough water.' California is not like the midwest, or Texas, where water is removed from the ground; in California, the reservoirs are replenished every year with water from the mountains, and when that goes onto fields, it actually replenishes the water table.

I suggest you examine you reservoirs before you make that statement. Most of the ones in California are running around 60% full and dropping. As to your second point about replenishing the water table, it doesn't. Most irrigation techniques involve spraying the crops as opposed to root irrigation. Doing so involves approximately 8% evaporation. Following that, farms target irrigation volumes and timing to maximize penetration at the root level and minimize any further penetration. In short, they explicitly try not to replenish the water table.(Nebraska's water management recommendation - they're similar for every farming application with minor variations for indigenous soils & climate.)

The issue right now is that a lot of water from the reservoirs is being dumped into the ocean instead of onto fields in an effort to protect the delta smelt.

[sigh] What exactly will happen to the delta if the smelt die off? The general hint is that nothing lives in a vacuum. The smelt are relatively insensitive to salination changes. However the vast majority of the life in a delta are not. If you overdrain the open water sources - lakes, streams, etc - the delta is going to turn into a salt swamp. I'm absolutely certain that you'll appreciate living in the area then because areas undergoing swampification smell so nice. Oh, don't forget to add in the malaria issue due to the large pockets of standing water.

but either way you're not going to get a dust bowl in Central California.

The people of Owen's Lake would disagree with you.

Nor does it have anything to do with forest fires.

That you would state this indicates you have no understanding of the roles the natural aquifer plays in underbrush management.

In short, just because the water is there and free flowing, it doesn't mean that it's not already serving a purpose.

Mercury is an essential ingredient for most energy-efficient lamps. Fluorescent lamps and high intensity discharge (HID) lamps are the two most common types of lamps that utilize mercury. Fluorescent lamps provide lighting for most schools, office buildings and stores. HID lamps, which include mercury-vapor, metal halide and high-pressure sodium lamps, are used for street lights, floodlights and industrial lighting. A typical fluorescent lamp is composed of a phosphor-coated glass tube with electrodes located at either end. The tube contains mercury, of which only a very small amount is in vapor form. When a voltage is applied, the electrodes energize the mercury vapor, causing it to emit ultraviolet (UV) energy. The phosphor coating absorbs the UV energy, causing the phosphor to fluoresce and emit visible light. Without the mercury vapor to produce UV energy, there would be no light. A four-foot fluorescent lamp has an average rated life of at least 20,000 hours. To achieve this long life, lamps must contain a specific quantity of mercury. The amount of mercury required is very small, typically measured in milligrams, and varies by lamp type, date of manufacture, manufacturing plant and manufacturer.

If products aren't 'worth' what people pay for them, then the whole field of economics is complete nonsense(I will allow that plenty of it is nonsense, but plenty of makes sense too); the value of a product is whatever somebody is willing to pay for it. Sure, that number often has little to do with the actual cost of making said product, but that's why trade is so nifty, someone with a lot of potatoes and no salt is willing to trade quite a few potatoes for some salt, and someone with a lot of salt and no potatoes is willing to trade quite a bit of salt for some potatoes, and they both walk away thinking about what a deal they got, especially when potato guy is good and growing potatoes and salt guy is good at mining salt. Your 'require' is simply a euphemism for placing a very high value on the product(i.e., if you require it, you are made so much better off by it that it is, in fact, 'worth' acquiring, even at seemingly obscene prices).

As far as my wandering opinion, as far as I can tell, you are being obtuse, either by purpose or accident. I would in fact, at a given price, prefer secure, cheap, renewable and efficient energy production, but the difference in price that I am willing to pay for those things is very low; my price preference outweighs my feel good about it preference. So I guess I should have said that I care very little where it comes from, but I was going for emphasis or accuracy.

I fail google though, searching for "Netherlands switchgrass" doesn't yield much; there is this article:

http://www.eeci.net/archive/biobase/B10189.html

Which says that it grows ok there and will be neat. There is this pdf:

http://www.p2pays.org/ref/17/16274/kuiper.pdf

which is about bio energy in Europe; it mentions a project, but not anything like a plant. This article:

http://biopact.com/2007/03/disappointing-yields-da mpens.html

talks about costs being higher than previously estimated. Adding 'ethanol' to that search yields this article:

http://cels.uri.edu/news/nSwitchgrass.html

which talks about 'developing enzymes' and ethanol costing $2.70 a gallon(which competes with gasoline sourced at $3.15, that's pretax), but doesn't talk about somebody shipping anything just yet. This article:

http://www.newfarm.org/news/2005/0805/082305/swtic hgrass.shtml

has cellulosic on the verge of the mainstream(yes, it's two years old, but I am somewhat past a 'quick' google at this point). And on and on.

I wish you luck, but I will remain skeptical until somebody stands up and announces that they are producing ethanol that is cheaper than gas, without the benefits of any subsidies whatsoever, because that's what it is going to take for biofuels to work.

Excuse me, but do you have any Fluorescent lights? They have mercury as well: http://www.p2pays.org/mercury/lights.asp

Just to clarify, you recover part of a cost--the recycling overhead. The claim is that, even after revenue, this exceeds landfill overhead for the same ton of garbage.

It's partly a question of scale, and fluctuates wildly. In my state, it can cost 4x more to recycle, or 2x more to landfill, with no clear trend. The graph there doesn't justify the clever use of bolding in the text. The longer version is an insult to high school stats projects.

I'm tempted to think intelligent management makes the difference. We should tune in to local details and do cost analysis, rather than assume recycling's always cheaper (like we tend to). Your university could be saving $200K with recycled paper, or your city could be throwing away $200M for a municipal recycling program. There's no way to know until you run the numbers.

Just to clarify, you recover part of a cost--the recycling overhead. The claim is that, even after revenue, this exceeds landfill overhead for the same ton of garbage.

It's partly a question of scale, and fluctuates wildly. In my state, it can cost 4x more to recycle, or 2x more to landfill, with no clear trend. The graph there doesn't justify the clever use of bolding in the text. The longer version is an insult to high school stats projects.

I'm tempted to think intelligent management makes the difference. We should tune in to local details and do cost analysis, rather than assume recycling's always cheaper (like we tend to). Your university could be saving $200K with recycled paper, or your city could be throwing away $200M for a municipal recycling program. There's no way to know until you run the numbers.

This is what is both magical and terrifying about it. In theory, it will allow us to build anything we can conceive of. Are you aware that Titanium is one of the more common elements? It is a source of whiteness in the earth, and I seem to recall reading that it is more common than Aluminum. Aluminum was formerly one of the most expensive metals until 1886, when Charles Martin Hall started using an electrolytic process;A carbon rod in the cell is charged and the reaction results in carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide and aluminum. Nasty. That last text explains what they do with the gases. You hope. Incidentally Bauxite contains Titanium. I remember reading someplace on slashdot about someone having come up with a small-scale electrolytic process for refining titanium from titanium dioxide, which is what's everywhere.

And then there's construction diamond, since carbon is (obviously) quite common and should be easy to handle. In fact we've accomplished a great deal with carbon already, both in and out of nanoscale. And the possibility for an interstitial "double diamond" has been discussed, though I don't have a link on that, which would be like diamond, only moreso. Of course it would have twice as much mass. But, if you can place atoms, you can make structures with both that and regular diamond.

So, obviously, no one is doing this yet. But if someone figures it out, the question is, who gets their hands on it first? And what do they have to say about it? It might not turn out to be a very difficult thing to build a nanoassembler. Even just taking nanotech for the advantage you get where everything is made out of the best possible materials, with no flaws in manufacturing (but once you get to assembly, all bets are off) and, once you've done it once, it scales as far as you're willing to feed it resources and dedicate space to it. It creeps me out just thinking about it, even as I'm imagining how science and technology would be advanced. You could build impossibly well-equipped armies in days. You can construct power generation and storage devices far improved from what we have available to us now. It's either going to send us directly into our next phase of evolution, or destroy us completely. But then, this isn't the first time that's been true.