The Sam Whitmore Sampler

Water

Which is more valuable to business -- oil or water? 

Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Nestlé (Arrowhead, Poland Springs) and other multinationals might give us a surprising answer. Without water, their businesses would crater.

Marc Gunther this week calls attention to McKinsey's newly-released report on the rising water crisis. Quoting here: 

By 2030, more than a third of the world’s population will live in severely water-stressed areas. We therefore expect water to grow from being a marginal issue to one that is central to all parts of the economy.

Only indirectly does the crisis concern drought or global warming. The central issue: governments continuing to give businesses all the cheap water they want, irrespective of all else. 

To date, they have. McKinsey's report suggests those days are coming to a close.

Paul Kedrosky writes frequently and eloquently on this topic.

The Rain in Maine...

My sister, the one who runs the organic farm we wrote about way back when, reports that it just won't stop raining in Maine, and it's wreaking havoc on the farmers there.

You need long stretches of dry weather in order to hay a field. When you don't get it, your choices are to bale up moist hay, which then rots, or you let it continue to grow and time ticks away. Soon the winter comes, and you don't have enough hay to feed your animals. You then either have to sell some animals at unfavorable prices, or you pay usurious prices for someone else's hay -- if you can find any.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco Bay area hasn't had a drop of rain in months. Water rationing is already in place. Christy and I can be fined for overuse and probably will be. Life sometimes isn't fair, you know?

The Segway

Got a chance to use a Segway today. It's pretty cool. You place your feet on the pedals and press down with your toes to go forward and lean back on your heels to slow down or go back. Top speed is 12 MPH. They cost $5,350. You can't use them on sidewalks in Berkeley and San Francisco; bike paths are OK. They probably suck in the rain or in high winds.

The Bay Area rapid transit system, BART, is temporarily banning them on its trains while it considers its long-term policy. A Segway owner lost control of one recently inside a station: the thing rolled itself onto the tracks, whereupon a BART train promptly ran over it.

Wind and Rain

As I write this, winds in Oakland are sustained at 37 mph, gusting to 55. A few minutes ago one of our planter boxes flew off the deck and plummeted to Earth.

I complained about this bad weather to my friend Marty, who's back in Massachusetts.

"When the rain piles up high enough so that you have to shovel it, let me know," he said.

GPS

Santa was good to me... can't wait to play with my new TomTom GPS. Hope you got good stuff too.

Amicalola Falls, Ga.

Amicalola Falls, in Amicalola State Park in Georgia, was under stress when we saw it today. Normally, you can't get too close to the falls because the spray will drench you. Today, because of the extreme drought here, there was no spray whatsoever. In fact, instead of the water cascading over the rocks in a single sheet as it usually does, the depleted flow emerged over the rocks in a series of four weak streams. The folks here in this state are praying for lots of rain, and they should be.

Spies in the Sky

From The Economist, Sept. 27, 2007:

In Britain, Italy and America, police are experimenting with the use of miniature remote-controlled drone aircraft, fitted with video cameras and infra-red night vision, to detect “suspicious” behaviour in crowds.

Weighing no more than a bag of sugar and so quiet that it cannot be heard (or seen) when more than 50 metres (150 feet) from the ground, the battery-operated UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) can be flown even when out of sight by virtue of the images beamed back to a field operator equipped with special goggles.

MW Power, the firm that distributes the technology in Britain, has plans to add a “smart water” spray that would be squirted at suspects, infusing their skin and clothes with genetic tags, enabling police to identify them later.

India, China Can Bail Out Big Pharma

U.S. pharmaceutical companies have become "commercialization organizations, with declining research on new products," asserts biotech executive Pravin Chaturvedi in this contributed article for Mass High Tech. Being publicly-held companies, Chaturvedi says, Big Pharma feels pressure to produce blockbuster lifestyle-enhancer drugs (like Viagra or Lipitor) rather than churning out less-profitable drugs that might help treat or cure diseases. Meanwhile, insurance costs skyrocket and people suffer.

The alternative: tapping life-science talent in India and China:

As the availability of skilled industrial R&D talent diminishes in the U.S. and Europe, there appears to be an increasing availability of skilled pharma and biotech R&D specialists in China and India that can be integrated into the R&D value chain to discover and develop new therapeutic products.

For starters, the U.S. will need to relax its H-1B visa rules. Any other ideas?

Drought Map, September 2007

This is a NOAA map of US drought conditions as of September. The darkest reds indicate extreme drought. The tobacco is probably a bit crunchy these days. On the other hand, Las Vegas -- in the desert -- is the wettest spot in the country.

At the end of September about 43 percent of the contiguous United States was in moderate to extreme drought, the National Climate Data Center said Tuesday.

The good news is, Alabama got some rain since the last time we looked.

Uh-Oh

According to this BBC article, "Arctic sea ice shrank to the smallest area on record this year, US scientists have confirmed...the figure shatters all previous satellite surveys, including the previous record low of 5.32 million sq km measured in 2005." Ships this summer sailed through the Northwest Passage -- the path from Greenland through the Northwest Territory islands to Russia -- without being impeded by ice. This is unheard of.

It'll be interesting to see if U.S. media have the spine to cover stories like this one, from The Economist, about how melting ice is impacting Peru and Bolivia. They don't call it global warming for nothing.