The Enemy of Sustainability: Bad Ideas
Last night I had a dinner meeting during which I was asked what I thought about a business plan that proposed to grow sugarcane (from which to make ethanol) in California’s Imperial Valley, one of the driest parts of the world. I was a bit stunned. Isn’t this equivalent to growing mangoes in Siberia, or raising polar bears in Panama?
The whole of Southern California is a vast semi-desert, but Los Angeles and the surrounding areas receive five times as much rain as the Imperial Valley, whose annual rainfall averages less than 3 inches. Yet LA’s rain is nowhere near enough to sustain its life; water needs to be diverted here from rivers hundreds of miles away, and at fantastic expense, both financially and environmentally. The cultivation of food takes about 70% of the region’s water, and 40% of the state’s energy is consumed in pumping water across these enormous expanses of land.
Even in the parts of North America that have abundant water, like the Southeastern U.S., sugarcane doesn’t grow well; in fact, the vast majority of sugarcane grown in the continental US comes from one state, Louisiana, whose average rainfall is more than twenty times that of the subject area.
I’m reminded of the indoor ski slopes in Dubai. Can it be done? Yes, the oil-rich Sheiks have proven that. Does such a project require a use of energy that represents a reckless and obscene disregard for what’s left of our natural environment? To be sure.
The driver behind sustainability must be finding the lowest resource use and lowest impact solution for a given geographical location. It sounds like Imperial Valley is a better candidate for PV to harvest and transfer energy.
Exactly. I know they have high unemployment, and water rights that were negotiated a million years ago. But now some of them can buy water at 1/100th the price that their neighbors can, and thus there is a huge amount of waste of this super-precious commodity. Sorry, I know I take flack over this, but it’s wrong. It may be complicated, but it’s still wrong.
The enemy of sustainability is talking and writing about it by people who think they know it all ..
Your article is a classic example of drawing analogies that speaks volumes about lack of common knowledge about Dubai GDP and how spectacles like indoor ski slopes actually contribute to a survival sustainability model.
Given that you’re more into energy, I’d say stick to what you know and by the way Dubai is building a 1000MW Solar project ..
Cheers