ebmgh.com

Just added to the Bay Area African Music Calendar: the Mendes Brothers will be in town to promote their new album at the Museum of the African Diaspora in SOMA.

The Boston Herald says this about the duo:

Though it’s been more than a decade since the Brockton-based Mendes Brothers released an album, their skills remain undiminished. Prior outings have sought to update the West African/Portuguese/Caribbean hybrid of Cape Verde with hip-hop, calypso, reggae and other current flavors. Not so on “Porton De Regresso 1.” Relying on traditional sounds with touches of synthesizers and horns, the brothers focus on their familial harmonies and lyrics, which celebrate the 550th anniversary of Cape Verde and its pioneering role in music, culture and race relations. True to form, the Mendes Brothers never let the words get in the way of a thoroughly enjoyable warm-weather party.

Head to their MySpace page to sample their music.

I really like the newspaper or TV stories where they publish a list of the top water users in an area. Where I live, in California, we’re coming out of 3 years of drought, and water managers have been gnashing their teeth trying to figure out how to get people to cut back. Some say, just raise everybody’s rates. There are a couple of problems with that. For the über-rich, the price of water is no object. Bill Gates used 4.7 million gallons in 2001, and had a $24,828 water bill, and I don’t suppose that troubled him much. But perhaps we can “name and shame” them out of their profligacy? If nothing else, it sends a few publicists scrambling.

These stories must be a breeze to write. Just send in a written request to the water utility. If they drag their feet or refuse, have your legal department remind them that these are public records, and threaten them with Freedom of Information Act request or whatever the equivalent is in your state. Publish the list, and as much data on the property and residents as you can find. Use your archives, wikipedia, Google Earth, and Zillow. Express outrage and indignation. Conjecture on whether or not they even look at their water bill, or merely have their accountant pay it. Try to contact them for comment. Dutifully print the statement from their publicist saying how surprised they are, they had no idea, they’re looking into it immediately. Print a detailed map (bonus points for a Google map mashup in your online edition).

My favorite story was the one in the Las Vegas Sun in 2008. The city is entirely dependent on water from Lake Mead, the big reservoir on the Colorado River behind the Hoover Dam. Problem is, the reservoir has been half-empty for years, and some scientists have openly conjectured that it might never refill, what with climate change and all. In the midst of all this, Vegas’ imperious water czar Pat Mulroy launches an improbable scheme to build a 10-foot pipeline to tap groundwater aquifers in the arid lands north of the city. You can guess how well that went down with the local ranchers and wildlife lovers. Amidst this backdrop, you have a prince from Brunei who uses 17 million gallons per year. That would ordinarily be enough for like 200 American families, or about 10,000 in Kenyan. Right after the prince in the list is Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, and a fellow Tufts alumnus. Oh, for shame, Jumbo, for shame.

Here’s a roundup of some of the stories I’ve found.

• Las Vegas, NV
• Sacramento, CA (boring because it includes institutions. We already know that power plants, colleges, parks, and jails use a lot of water.)
• Dallas/Ft. Worth, TX
• Vancouver, BC Canada
• San Diego, CA (another dull one because it includes institutional water users)
• Jacksonville, FL
• San Antonio, TX
• Kansas City, MO
• Austin, TX
• East Bay, CA (only reports water use for the agency’s board members)
• Seattle, WA
• Cobb County, GA (suburbs north of Atlanta)
• Santa Fe, NM (I especially like this one because they repeat the story every year.)
• Scottsdale, AZ (This one is no fun, because it doesn’t name names. Apparently, “a 2006 state law prohibits entities from revealing the names of top water users.”)

From ESRI’s Spring 2010 Environmental Observer newsletter: GIS Aids Dry Cleaner Water Risk Analysis.

I had to read it about 8 times before I could figure it out. Modifying compounds should be hyphenated to avoid confusion.

Interesting. A lot of us in the conservation community have been saying, “If we only told people how much [water, electricity, scarce commodity] they use by giving them smart meters and more informative bills, they’d come to their senses and start using less.”

Apparently, that can backfire if your customers are Republicans. From E&E News Climatewire (subscription required):

Political ideology helps determine whether homeowners respond to voluntary energy conservation programs, two University of California, Los Angeles, economists have found.

In a study published last month on the National Bureau of Economic Research website, Dora Costa and Matthew Kahn concluded that providing feedback on energy use can actually backfire with some conservatives.

Costa and Kahn merged utility data from 80,000 homes with corresponding voter registration and donation records. The economists found that a Democratic household with green bona fides — paying for electricity from renewable sources, donating to environmental groups and living in a neighborhood of fellow liberals — will reduce its consumption by 3 percent in response to feedback.

Meanwhile, a Republican household that doesn’t adhere to environmental behaviors will actually increase its consumption by 1 percent. The households that received home energy reports reduced their consumption by about 2 percent overall, but the Republican subset of this group reduced their energy use by 0.4 percent.

About half of the homeowners in the study received home energy reports from OPOWER, a company that contracts with utilities to compare homeowners’ energy use with that of neighboring homes of comparable size. Homeowners earn smiley faces if they use less energy than their neighbors. The reports also suggest efficiency improvements, such as installing solar panels or cleaning air conditioner filters.

One question is: what’s “conservative” about over-consumption? Someone needs to spend time with a dictionary here. But I think that the bigger story is that we can’t just suppose things work—we have to formulate hypotheses and then test them. In other words, when it comes to trying to nudge people towards more desirable behaviors, our actions need to be based on evidence.

I wonder how many millions have been spent by public agencies to print advertisements telling people to turn off their lights or take shorter showers. Seriously, has anyone tested whether these messages work? You’d better believe that by the time Coca-Cola or Volvo launch an ad campaign it has been thoroughly tested with focus groups, and that it produces the desired emotional trigger.

When I opened up my latest water bill from the venerable East Bay Municipal Utility District, or EBMUD, I found an insert about efficient landscape irrigation based on the concept of “hydrozones” (online here), which included this picture:

Are you kidding me? Maybe this is actually a screw-up: Is this the before picture, and someone forgot the after?

This can’t be their version of an efficient landscape with all that grass. I almost feel sorry for the three little “low-water native plants” tucked into the back right corner. And why so many high-water use flowers, probably all petunias and pansies and such?

We live in a Mediterranean climate; let’s live like it. Plants like lavender, rosemary, and sage thrive here. Many of them are bursting with color and they hardly use any water at all once they’re established.

Contrast this with what the Department of Water Resources considers water-efficient. There’s till a bit of grass for the kids to play, but it’s limited and surrounded by better plant choices. (From the free publication Water Efficient Landscapes, 1.2 MB PDF)

Or with these lovely designs from Santa Monica. (From Emily Green’s excellent blog Chance of Rain, which covers everything from dry gardens to water politics.)

It might even be illegal to install EBMUD’s landscape. Wait, illegal? Really?

Yup. In 2006, California’s legislature passed a law called the Water Efficient Landscape Ordinance. It mostly covers large commercial landscapes, but it also applies to new or remodeled homes with landscapes over a certain size. The rules are needlessly complicated in my opinion, but the intent is to limit the how much area is planted with grass or other high water-use plants. In other words, landscapes are subject to a water budget.

You go over your “maximum applied water allowance” and you may be subject to fines or a citation. The landscape in the EBMUD brochure is probably too small to be subject to the ordinance in most cities. But this mix of plant types would almost certainly put you above your water budget. It helps to have a degree in hydrology or agronomy to figure out how much you’re entitled to, but I digress…

My advice to EBMUD: wander over to the Bay Friendly Gardening website. Now—are you suitably embarrassed that our waste management agency is more thoughtful and progressive when it comes to landscapes?

You should be. People expect their water supplier to be a leader on environmental issues. In a recent poll, 91% of residents said “it was important for their water utility to be an environmental leader.” (See the 2006 report Stakeholder Perceptions of Utility Role in Environmental Leadership by the American Water Works Association. It’s not available online, but you can preview on Google Books.)

This isn’t leadership; it looks more like an entry on the FAIL blog. C’mon guys, the drought’s not over, and you can do better!

Lastly, with apologies to Aquadoc Michael Campana, I pretty much stole the title for this post from this (hilarious) post on his blog.

Found posted on a colleague’s office door, I think it’s one of those things that used to get passed around by email. Still remarkably accurate. It only says Source: King 2005 (?).

Notes:

• Expect each stage to be stretched out as long as possible.
• Several stages may take place simultaneously.
• State 13 only arrives when industry leaders become concerned that continued claims of unbearable compliance costs and penalties are beginning to affect stock prices.

Not much to add to this message:

I really like no-flush urinals, and I’ve been promoting them in my talks about water conservation and efficiency. But this article from a newspaper in Arizona makes me wonder whether they’re ready for prime time: Doubts swirl over effectiveness of no-flush urinals.

The article has quotes from two of the leading minds in the water efficiency world.

Mary Ann Dickinson, executive director of the Chicago-based Alliance for Water Efficiency, a nonprofit that promotes water conservation, fears no-flush urinals will fizzle and deter other water-saving innovations just as underperforming low-flow toilets did in the early 1990s.
…
Al Dietemann manages a regional utility consortium in Seattle called the Saving Water Partnership that in 2002 started offering rebates to commercial water customers for installing no-flush urinals. The rebate program ended after Dietemann determined that more than half the 200 urinals installed under the program were removed by their owners within three years. Maintenance issues and costs were the main reason, he said, and involved all brands of no-flush urinals.

I just finished reading the excellent book, The Big Necessity: The Unmentionable World of Human Waste and Why It Matters by Rose George, and this story sounds familiar. She discusses the backlash against so-called “efficient” toilets that were mandated by federal law in 1992. The law was ahead of the technology, and American manufacturers weren’t ready to start making low-flow toilets that worked well, even though they had been the norm in Europe and Japan for years. The backlash by consumers created a black market for toilets from Canada, where toilets still used 3 ½ gallons or more per flush. People rightfully demanded, “If I have to flush two or three times, where’s the savings?”

When humor columnist Dave Barry wrote a piece called “The Toilet Police” in 2002, he tapped into a vein of populist resentment that lives on to this day. Despite the fact that today’s models are far better than ones sold ten years ago, grudges die hard and there are many that still want the federal government to “stay out of our bathrooms.” (Amazingly, this story still has legs, based on a reference in the NY Times.)

For water saving fixtures and appliances to deliver on their promises, they need to do more than just save water. I agree with hot-water evangelist Gary Klein that most people inherently want to save water, but care even more about comfort, convenience, cleanliness, style, ease of use, and low maintenance. This is how we should really be marketing water-efficient devices.

As Ms. George describes in The Big Necessity, the Japanese figured this out decades ago, creating toilets that not only use less water, but give you a refreshing spritz, play your favorite music, and can even take your blood pressure and monitor your health.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from installing waterless urinals. We need innovators and early adopters. I think they’re a great technology in the right setting. But perhaps mass market adoption is still a few years away.

Missed this when it came out in 2002, but probably still relevant. From the EPA: Cases in Conservation, How Efficiency Programs Help Water Utilities Save Water and Avoid Costs. 54 pages. (PDF, 560K)

Californians will be hearing a lot more about “the Delta” in the months leading up to the November election, when we’ll be asked to approve borrowing $11 billion for various water projects, including $3 billion to “fix the Delta”. What is this place? Why does it need fixing?

The publishers of Bay Nature magazine recently published The Once and Future Delta which I highly recommend:

About the only thing people agree on about the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta–the subject of countless white papers, editorials, and political debates–is that it’s in a heap of trouble. But this 1,000-square-mile patchwork of islands, sloughs, wetlands, and farmlands is also a rich and complex–if highly altered–ecosystem at the core of the San Francisco Estuary. Here we take a look behind today’s news to understand what the Delta once was, how it has been changed, and what it might become… with a lot of help from its friends.

It is probably the best introduction to the region that I’ve seen. It is thoughtful, well-researched and written, and full of great photos. It also includes a great map, probably the best map of the Delta I’ve seen, made by the folks over at the GreenInfo Network (available as a 5-MB PDF).

I’m going to try to get copies of this publication to give out at my California water talks this summer and fall.