Petey's Pipeline E-zine

Issue #46

February 19, 2007

Contents

Business First Recurring Themes
Random Ramblings & Miscellaneous Musings National Security—Safe or Sorry: Water Security
Write Thinking Punctuation – the Marks of Professionals (Brackets)

Business First (Editorial)

Recurring Themes
by Phil Hanson

If you're a longtime reader of Petey's Pipeline E-zine, you've probably noticed that certain themes keep repeating themselves on these pages. Sustainability. The environment. Renewable energy. Cannabis hemp legalization. Global climate change. Government responsibility and accountability. Sane fiscal policy. Coherent foreign policy. Runaway population growth. Of these, sustainability is the key. Unless sustainability is factored into each of the others, any decisions or actions regarding them will probably be wrong.

The same principle applies in business. Sustainability determines whether a business has favorable long-term prospects or whether, with the unavoidable disappearance of a critical component, the business goes belly up.

Business owners, employees and investors might want to think about what effect changing conditions and demographics will have on local, regional, national and global economies five, ten, or even twenty years into the future. As fossil fuels become increasingly scarce, can alternative fuels replace them in sufficient quantities to avert serious disruptions throughout the transportation industry? How might the trucking industry be affected? What about air travel? And how will you make that 40-minute commute to work across town if you can't buy fuel for your car? Finally, does your primary occupation or source of income have the flexibility it needs to adapt to changing conditions so that its relevance and, therefore, demand for your products or services continue?

Unless an eleventh-hour discovery turns up abundant supplies of cheap renewable energy sometime soon, many of the things we take for granted today would become tomorrow's nostalgic memories. The time for paying lip service to these—and other—looming problems is over. Now, it's time to take positive steps to head off an economic disaster.

A cascade event, monstrous in size and scope, lurks just over the horizon. When the transportation industry collapses because of acute, and then chronic, fuel shortages, other businesses that rely heavily on transportation will also collapse, and businesses that depend on these will in turn grind to a halt.

We can't put off the inevitable indefinitely. At some point, we simply must take necessary steps to divest ourselves of an obsolete economy that's no longer viable and replace it with a renewable resource-based economy that's sustainable far into the future. We must grasp the true meaning of economy, then rebuild society in ways that reflect our newfound understanding.

The transition can be relatively easy, or it can be difficult beyond our abilities to imagine. It all depends on what we do—or don't do—next.

Copyright © 2007 by Phil Hanson
All rights reserved.

• • •

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Random Ramblings & Miscellaneous Musings

National Security—Safe or Sorry: Water Security
by Phil Hanson

Because threats to water security generally fly beneath most people's radar, they rarely get the attention they deserve. Although I briefly touched on water security in earlier segments of this national security series, I failed to present the subject in enough detail to arouse any real concerns. Therefore, I'll cover water security now, and postpone the article Combating Terrorism until the next issue.

In most populated areas of the US, potable water is plentiful and readily available. Citizens, spoiled by easy access and relatively low cost, take water for granted. Open the tap and water flows. What could be simpler than that? The idea that something could interfere with the water supply is unthinkable. But in reality, many things pose serious risks to the nation's water resources, and that's precisely why we need to think about them.

Once again, population leads the list of possible offenders. Too many people making too many demands for too many reasons threaten to overwhelm water supply systems. Energy companies, agriculture, industry, and individual households all compete for shares of available water. When demand exceeds supply, shortages develop.

Hydroelectric companies need to spill more water over dams to generate more electricity to power new homes and new businesses that support a growing population. Of course, new homes and new businesses need water, too, as do farmers and ranchers who provide food for the teeming masses. By the time everyone's needs are met, precious little water remains for the fish.

In areas far removed from rivers and streams, farmers and ranchers and growing communities draw down underground aquifers at unsustainable rates. To make matters worse, these same competing forces contaminate the water they use with varying amounts and kinds of pollutants before returning it to the environment. By various processes and convoluted routes, human and animal wastes, toxic industrial byproducts, and an assortment of agricultural chemicals make their way into the water supply.

Sulfur dioxide and traces of mercury, released by coal-fired power plants, carry downwind, mix with rainfall, enter rivers and streams and aquifers, and eventually find their way to the oceans, along with other toxic chemicals and heavy metals. This toxic stew's effects on ocean ecology are widespread and profound. Chemical imbalances kill coral reefs, cause algae blooms that render large areas of ocean uninhabitable by other life forms; mercury now contaminates most large species of food fish.

But threats to water security don't end there. Climate changes spurred by global warming might lead to altered precipitation patterns. Conceivably, deserts could get more rainfall, while rain forests get less. Mountain regions might get more rain and less snow than normal.

Arctic and Antarctic ice sheets are melting; Greenland is on the verge of becoming just that. Around the globe, mountain glaciers are in retreat. Changing weather conditions pose serious threats to water security in regions that depend on spring runoff and summer ice melt to replenish rivers and streams.

And while we're on the subject of water security, we might as well consider the aging water delivery infrastructure to be a possible threat, too. Wells dry up. Decrepit pumps fail. Rusted-out pipes leak, and sometimes collapse. Old tanks, cisterns, and reservoirs succumb to a litany of problems. It's not a question of if we should make upgrades; it's only a question of when we should make them. Sooner will be less expensive—and more expedient—than later.

Finally, in the interests of political correctness, let us also consider terrorism as a potential threat to water security. The possible scenarios are almost endless. Poison a well. Introduce LSD into a local water bottler's entire production run. Spike the Kool-aid. Toss a handful of potassium permanganate tablets into the municipal reservoir. Sink a couple of leaking radioactive waste containers a few miles upstream. Blow up a dam. I'm sure aspiring terrorists will come up with even more creative ways to sabotage the water supply.

Frankly, though, terrorism poses less of a risk to water security than do the other threats I mentioned. Those threats are very real, and any terrorist worth the powder to blow him to hell would make better use of his time by blowing himself up.

Coming in issue #47: Combating Terrorism

Copyright © 2007 by Phil Hanson
All rights reserved.

Write Thinking

Punctuation – the Marks of Professionals

Getting punctuation right is critical to making your writing intelligible and coherent. As with misspelled and misused words, misused or missing punctuation takes your message off track and confuses your readers. To help you avoid the avoidable, the next few installments of Write Thinking deal with punctuation marks, in all their many forms, with example sentences provided for clarification.

Brackets [ ]

Use brackets for editorial comments regarding quotations, and as parentheses within parentheses.

• The most common reasons for inserting your own comments into a quotation are to signify an error in the original text or to add essential information to clarify meaning.

• In the above sentence, [sic] (sic Italicized, not so the brackets) indicates that the misspelled LeMans is being quoted correctly. The bracketed text in the sentence below clarifies meaning.

• The sentence below shows the proper way to introduce parenthetical material into a sentence that's already parenthesized.

• Use brackets sparingly; overuse tends to clutter text, posing impediments to easy reading and comprehension.

Disclaimer

The articles appearing in Petey's Pipeline E-zine are based on information believed to be true at the time of publication. Neither Perfecttext.com, Petey's Pipeline E-zine nor their publisher assume any liability or responsibility as to the accuracy or efficacy of any information, products or services that are submitted, advertised or rendered by contributors to Petey's Pipeline E-zine. While we make every effort to screen out scam artists and bogus offers, you should still do your homework. Caveat emptor!

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