Dubai's World Islands cause environmental concern

The Economist featured an article on Dubai’s land reclamation projects off the coast to create a collection of islands that form an image of the world. As luxurious and wonderful I’m sure it would be to visit or live on an island of the world these projects have environmental impacts including ecosystems disturbance. While I think it’s important to protect the animals that live in area, it seems more important to realize what is at stake for the global community in building real estate developments like this. The energy resources to build and support this kind of a life style seem rather extreme. Fresh water resources are scarce and the Economist article notes that most of the water supply in Dubai comes from desalination which uses lots of energy!!! I can’t understand why building these little islands seem like a good idea when global climate change is such a concern worldwide. We should be helping to preserve the land and water we have now, not creating new land whose future may be short lived if we continue with our current behavior.

Water and Ethanol

There has been a lot of attention brought out in the media recently bringing attention to the troubles in making biofuels – in particular corn based ethanol. There are concerns about the energy intensity of ethanol and questions of how green the production of ethanol is. Using corn based ethanol is also driving the price of corn up. Additionally, producing corn based ethanol requires a lot of water despite technology improvements in plant efficiency over the last 10 years. An article in the Economist – Ethanol and Water Don’t Mix discusses how ethanol plants are being built and then requesting insane amounts of water. The Florida plant discussed in the article requested 400 million gallons per day. Citizens in other states are also stepping out against ethanol plants being built. I hope this starts to get noticed by our politicians, and they realize this does not make any sense! Ethanol is already driving up the cost of food, what next? I don’t want to see the cost of water and availability of water increase because we’re making bad energy choices.