Now that I am starting to get technically sound and sassy on this site, I've been thinking about tightening up the writing.
From now on, I'm dividing up the posts between "fusees" - little fireworks - and dope. Dope will be elaborate, fusees will be one to two grafs.

This, for example, is dope:

The NYT report on water this morning -Near Vast Bodies of Water, Land Lies Parched - reminds me of a large piece I wanted to do on water last year. It is going to be one of the fascinating fights of the future. Very simply, the problem goes like this.

In the twentieth century an elegant technical solution was found to the problem of the land surface to crop ratio. This was synthesizing ammonia from hydrogen and nitrogen gases - fertilizer. It is a sign of how accustomed we are to our present food system that fertilizer, as a technical advance, doesn't even register in the popular imagination. Fritz Haber's name is generally not known - Time magazine did not include him among the worthies of 20th century civilization, even though they included Elvis Presley. Haber and Bosch's work is probably the most important technical innovation of the 20th century, even if it is not difficult to see, in hindsight, that it was technically inevitable, given the state of the German Dye industry. It's estimated, by the historian William McNeil, that without synthetic fertilizers the present population of the earth would require an addition of farmland equivalent to all of South America to feed it.

Now, however, we are just on the limits of a problem that is technically more intractable. Because the effect of water can't, so far, be synthesized - in fact, it is difficult to see what that would mean. Water is a very strange liquid - it has properties, notably those when it is heated or cooled, that seem different from other liquids in ways that aren't clearly understood.

Okay. Now, who do we meet at the crossroads of want and necessity but this decade's candidate for the anti-Christ - Enron corporation!

Graf from the Times story that should scare us:

"Already, bottled water costs more than gasoline in most stores, but nearly 90 percent of all municipal water systems are publicly owned. Enron, the nation's No. 1 marketer of natural gas and electricity, saw water as a commodity that would eventually be deregulated, just as electric power was in California. If that happened, Enron would be free to buy and sell water to the highest bidders � no different from oil or megawatts.
The company set up a Web site to trade water, and went prospecting for liquid gold. The people at Enron followed a trail already blazed by a fellow oilman, T. Boone Pickens, who has been buying underground water from farmers in hopes of selling it to parched cities in Texas, and the Bass brothers, who bought 46,000 acres in the desert of Southern California, only to be stymied by legal and technical problems over underground water rights."

Enron, it appears, has not yet prospered in the water trade - but that was before the Corporation owned a president. Look to see the Republicans in the House try to strip states and localities of rights to their water. The principle of local control, remember, is always subservient, among business conservatives, to the principle of profit.