Rivers Unlimited

Efficiency!

It's too big a subject to encompass here. Here's a quick visit:

Efficiency determines our national welfare: our security from wars and terror, our health and life expectancy, our quality of life, the sustainability however defined of our country and the planet, the markets for our goods and the prospect for a bright future.

Our country is unbelievably inefficient, ignoring simple actions that would make this a utopia (leaving out religion and politics).

A few examples starting with rivers and water --

* Forty percent of our waters are not fishable or swimmable. That converts to an annual economic loss, or forgone gain, of about $10 billion. We say $666 million in Ohio alone. Yes, every year.

* We pay exorbitant prices for water in arid lands while draining our great aquifers such as the Ogalalla and rivers such as the Colorado and Rio Grande. We could be catching the rainfall and storing it in our aquifers instead of pumping melted snow over mountains hundreds of miles where much of it evaporates, or collected behind expensive dams. Some 20,000 villages in India have learned to catch and store rainfall and their crops and gardens profit.

* Our 7 years of River Resource Economics have shown the likelihood that most degraded rivers hide their great potential to improve the regional economy - if they were restored. Their benefits in increased property values, tax base, recreation and park land, better public image and amenities for tourism and new settlement far exceed the costs of restoration.

* Beyond water, the Clean Air Act has had benefits over forty times its costs and the Clinton-proposed tightening would have benefits four times its costs. The ultimate unwisdom of weakening this Act is under way now.

* Agriculture: roughly 2/3 of our crop land is devoted to putting meat, poultry, eggs, and milk on our dining tables. One calorie from meat requires 9 calories from grain to produce. How's that for efficiency?

Change our diet? NEVER! Free up our cropland? But we need no meat, no poultry, eggs or milk, none whatsoever, never! Yes, we have addictions, to meat, cheese, sugar and chocolate, but there are cures. Could we change? We've made many changes. Smoking. Social changes: the move toward equality for women, Native Americans, African Americans, gays.

* Energy. A huge inefficiency is our waste of and use of fossil fuel, highways instead of light rail, SUV's. S. David Freeman, former director of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) stopped 5 nuclear power plants by offering low-interest loans for 800,000 families to insulate their homes (we live in sieves - Amory Lovins). He said conservation is the largest, fastest, cheapest, safest and cleanest source of energy.

Leamington and Kingsville, Ontario (near Detroit) are a good setting for wind farms. An option on 4600 acres for 134 large silent turbines will provide electricity for 58,000 homes -- no oil, no gas, no trucks, no drilling, no air pollution...No need for Middle East oil.

Transportation efficiency is how much energy to move a person or a ton of freight a mile. Compare cars with rail!

* Public health. Ten years ago we spent one out of every seven dollars on health care. . It is now one out of six dollars and moving to one out of five dollars. Almost all this money goes to repair us, prop us up, not armor us against sickness. That would take a healthy lifestyle. We are fat, sick and inactive. If we moved to a better diet we would charge up this great national battery with higher productivity and enormous savings.

* Our tourism and travel agencies print beautiful brochures and flyers and advertise events. If some fraction of their investments went to restoring the natural wonderland that used to be here, tourists would respond to their genes and seek the woods, the trees, the open spaces, waters, birds and animals we evolved among. More would seek our shores. Potentially we have a lot more to offer than we do now. (Only 3/10ths of 1 percent of our rivers are protected after 35 years!) We should invest in that potential. It would have a permanent payoff.

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As a nation, our assets are human resources, natural resources, energy and capital. We watch the exodus of manufacturing to China, Mexico and other low-wage countries including India, which has enormous intellectual capital to do our computer transactions.

Our national effort is crimped by our inefficiency. Our waste of human resources because of poor health with high costs, our waste of energy causing us to import 55% of our oil while embarking on a mad hunt to squeeze more out of our remaining natural national monuments; our misuse of agricultural land.

These are reasons we have so many poor, are losing our health, quality of life, international competitiveness, possibility of sustainability.

posted by Mike at 12:42 PM