Articles by Jim Lauria

  1. Water Is Technology 10/7/2022

    When we think of high tech, we typically think about electricity. Fair enough. But power up a deeper search and you'll see how integral water is to the high-tech world.

  2. Water Is Money 8/9/2022

    "Why isn't water free?" Not surprisingly, that's a common query on Google — common enough that there are some outstanding responses right at the top of the screen when you type it in. After all, water is everywhere. And because it's vital to survival, we see it as a human right, linked to a moral imperative different from any other commodity. Of course, there are significant costs tied with pumping, conveying, metering and, perhaps most importantly, purifying the water we pay for. So, although we tend to undervalue water compared to its importance, we do have to pay something for it. Or, as my friend Steve Bhaerman likes to say, "water is a we-source, not a free-source."

  3. Smart Irrigation For Agriculture Leads To More Efficient Carbon Capture 7/7/2022

    Farmers are key to carbon capture, though many plans to reverse greenhouse gas emissions — such as the one described in Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's 2020 report on California's efforts, Getting to Neutral — largely ignore them.

  4. Water Is Energy 6/21/2022

    More than 2,000 years ago, Greek and Roman engineers harnessed the power of water to drive grain mills, and the technology soon spread as far as China, where it was used to forge iron. By the 4th century, the Romans had scaled up water wheel technology to build a massive flour plant in Arles, France, powered by 16 overshot water wheels. During the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci sketched out visions of water-driven sawmills, forges, factories, and spinning works.

  5. Water Is Food 4/28/2022

    Celebrating Earth Day always reminds me of the great Arthur C. Clarke's observation that we shouldn't have called our planet "earth," but "ocean" instead — after all, it's mostly water. The same is true of food: most food is literally largely water, and every morsel of our food figuratively floats on a sea of water that was necessary to produce it.

  6. Community Voices: California Farmers Are Key To Carbon Capture 4/22/2022

    "Getting to Neutral" by the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory (LLNL) draws a roadmap to California's carbon neutrality by 2045, removing 125 million tons of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere (and the economy). But unlike the actual map of California, LLNL's carbon roadmap barely includes the 27 million acres of cropland and 16 million acres of grazing land. And that's a massive oversight.

  7. A Perilous Choice: COVID Patients Or Safe Drinking Water? 4/20/2022

    In August 2021, as Florida's hospitals were filling up with COVID-19 patients, the mayor of Orlando pleaded with local residents to reduce water use to free up liquid oxygen to provide life support for victims of the pandemic.

  8. Water Is Health 3/22/2022

    World Water Day both celebrates clean water and reminds us that 2 billion people live without access to it. Safe drinking water is one of the most fundamental elements of health — healthy water keeps people healthy; sick water makes people sick.

  9. The Age Of Aquarius 2/14/2022

    The cast of Hair seemed to know the start date of the Age of Aquarius — "when the moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars" — though astrologers have argued for centuries about when the sun would be lined up with the constellation of the water carrier and signal the start of an era of enlightenment.

  10. Water Is Life 1/21/2022

    In the Beginning, there was water. The first couple of lines of the Bible describe a newly formed earth covered in water, a swirling deep. From there, the rest of creation emerged.