preimert, Yes the cost is going to go up. Thanks for all that digging (it did not advance the pipeline). I have thought about digging into the details, but I doubt it would matter.

Sorry for the delay, db. Had to research the Southern Delivery System between Pueblo Reservoir an Colorado Springs. It looks like there is a lot more to it than just laying pipe (which would be more pleasureful in a different context) They have to secure easements, dig 60 miles of trench to underground it, build several pumping stations due to the elevation difference, build a treatment and distribution plant at the terminus. Then I guess the water water is going to flow back via Fountain Creek to the Arkansas river (mistake--they should recycle it as non-potable for local irrigation.) For some reason they plan to create an ox bow in Fountain Creek and enhance wet lands. I guess that's what you object to? That's going to cost them a lot more than $100 million.

Meanwhile we have a much more expensive boondoggle about to happen her in California. Jerry Brown wants to dig tunnels under the San Joaquin Delta to move water from northern to southern CA in order to save the Delta Smelt among other things. We are already drinking some "Astronaught" water, as the West Basin Reclaimation District euphemistically calls it and a desalination plant is in our future as well. As you noted, the cost of clean water has historically become cheaper, but I fear that trend is going to reverse.

There is no such thing as an optimal balance between people and water. The price of clean water has been falling ever since the industrial revolution began. The only reason it will not continue to fall is if environmentalists and socialist put in the way too many regulations.

For instance, environmental and other regulations (cronism) have caused the cost of a 60 mile water pipe line from Pueblo reservoir to Colorado Springs to balloon to almost $3 Billion. Note the Keystone pipeline carry oil and going over 2000 miles was only suppose to cost $5 Billion. That has nothing to do with technology. That pipeline could easily be built for under $100 million.

There are some great links in the Gulch. Man is innovative enough to help species' of birds survive in spite of invention and resource consumption. But the work of man should not be interfered with by regressive politics and mystical alliances. The negative consequences for instance of a government concerned with "cow farts" is that the regulations associated with their idiocy has a very negative impact on the GDP, when the concern of mammal gas expulsion is childish in the scheme of things--and not even relevant. Yet man is forced to address these issues because small-minded government types have failed to understand the value of life and the true nature of reality.

I agree with you on the nuclear power issue. Thorium is a far better option than smart meters shutting off our appliances because some pin head thinks we are consuming too much power--afraid that we'll kill some turtle in Nevada.

Well I'll be swoggled. If its in the Congressional record, who am I to argue.
Sorry, I couldn't resist this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUUKrHO3w...

Maybe I should say...with respect to reasonably priced potable water.

An ideal goal would be to reach an equilibrium between people and water. How to get there? Education on best practices for water treatment, sanitation and conservation. Reclaimation and tertiary treatment. Desalination. All of which require money and energy. Unfortunately I see this as a (choke... dare I say) collective effort.

Getting back to Rich's (OMW) conjecture, even though man is the reasoning, dominant species, without these measures there is only going to be a finite amount of potable water even if we allow the rest of the planet to dry to death.

Actually, the bird population issue was a lie by Rachel Carson and has been proven to be so. See http://junkscience.com/1999/07/26/100-th...

OK, db, I guess by "opportunity cost" you mean negative consequences. To reiterate pantheism is a paradigm concerning the relationship of god and the universe that I am personally comfortable with. Its not a faith in the religious sense. I read your post on "death by environmentalism" so I see where you're coming from. Conservation, recycling and growing some of my own food is a personal ethic and not part of some rabid, misanthropic movement.

DDT as an effective, low-cost insecticide eradicated malaria in the southern US (although banned in the US since 1972) and has greatly reduced it in South America. Although considered harmless to humans, it is unfortunately lethal to some marine life and has a drastic impact on bird populations due to egg shell thinning. You and Rich may not agree with me but I don't think its necessary to wipe out a bird species for man to survive.

I read that DDT is still made in Mexico and other places and is still used in malarial hot spots in Africa. That's a good thing. But I think it should be used sparingly where necessary and curtailed when no longer needed. Don't want to OD on it and risk mutations of super resistant bugs.

DB, I guess you are referring to the 100s that perished from heat prostration in Paris during a particularly hot "ete" due to lack of air conditioning and blamed on French energy policy. What can I say? France seems to have always had some weird policies on lots of things. Should have gotten better after the revolution but didn't. What's ironic is that France is a leader in nuclear power usage. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Countr...
Actually I'm a supporter of nuclear power--even took a couple of courses in Nuclear Engineering at UCLA. It's unfortunate that our San Onofre plant was shut down last year due to technical problems and obsolescense.

BTW thanks for leading me to the Atlas Society site. I read the excellent article, "Green Cathedrals" by Robert James

Rachel Carson and friends lied about the dangers of DDT. The conservative estimate is that the ban on DDT that resulted from this killed well over 100 million people.

Al Gore and his hockey stick graph is just one of thousands of lies by AGW prophets. Anyone who knows anything about history knew immediately saw that the graph ignored the Little Ice age and the Roman warming period. Did AGW prophets disown this blatant lie? No they tried to cover it up with Climategate.

The anti-nuclear environmentalist consistently lied about the dangers. Their favorite one was that the half-life of some of the by products was hundreds of thousands of years. If you had any chemistry or physics in life, think about it. By their reasoning an infinite half-life would be the most dangerous. What is an element with an infinite half-life?

You are right, I was wrong to stoop to name calling. My bad! Please accept my apologies.

I'm not aware of environmentalists lying or being responsible for 100 million deaths. Please educate me.

Yes, very ignorant peas. There's an old adage I can never remember exactly that goes something like:
Those that know, will seldom say, while those that don't, continually say. Or something very similar.

One of the pseudoscience foundations of the environmental movement is the “balance of nature” nonsense. There is no balance. If there was then we would all be dead because so many species have gone extinct. But this straightforward logic and evidence contradicts with the environmentalists’ religion so they ignore it. Michael Crichton discussed this in his book State of Fear.

What is amazing is that environmentalists will complain that creationism is not scientific. Both of them ignore the evidence and logic and they are two peas in a pod.

Extinction of species is a natural and necessary component of the life and evolutionary process. By saving one species, we're halting the evolution of another. Some 99% of all the species that have ever existed on this planet went extinct. The vast majority before humans ever emerged on the planet.

What in the world does it take to get people to understand objective reality?

Brilliant - so you have no argument for why environmentalists lie and you know their policies killed over 100 million people in the last century, but you are going to bury your head in the sand.

"I don't understand what you mean by opportunity costs associated with my faith." Really how about the DDT ban which killed over 100 million people, how about the war on Nuclear power which has killed 100s of thousands of people, how about the war on energy which just a couple of years ago resulted in the deaths of 100s of French citizens in one summer? You either need to open your eyes, or you hate humans.

We have done many things to keep animals and plants from extinction. and many of these efforts have been extremely successful. We also have worked to save species to the detriment of human livelihood. Consider the case of the smelt and California's central valley-where much of the US produce is grown stateside. http://www.cfact.org/2009/08/31/tiny-fis... Many of the farms which employed hundreds if not thousands of people have been shut down due to water divergence. This preceded the drought issue, turning a once vibrant growing valley into a dustbowl. Jobs and Food were lost to protect salmon numbers in the Pacific NW. No one vetted whether the smelt was actually preserved due to these actions. But your food costs went up substantially and unemployment went up and many people who had thriving livelihoods went bankrupt. Here's another. Recent floods in Colorado have necessitated many urgently needed hiway projects. However, these projects have been delayed due to mandates by fish and wildlife over the protection of a little mouse called preble. turns out-studies are inconclusive as to whether these mice are a distinct species-which means they cannot be considered endangered. The flood damage occured primarily due to the devastation of rampant forest fires in Colorado last summer. As part of the regulations to protect this mouse, homeowners across millions of acres of land were not allowed to mow down their grass under threat of huge fines. When the fires began, just imagine all that dry grass....
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/sfallo...

It wasn 't that long ago on this site you deplored namecalling as unproductive

"I do think the earth may be getting overpopulated with respect to potable water..."
Let 's start there. If you believe that to be the case what do you see as the ideal solution?

Ignoramus.

Khalling--Its not "a religion by definition". I'd call it a philosophy that traces back to Spinoza and even to Stoics in ancient Greece. (I haven't read a lot of philosophy so I'll yield on the provenance.) Of course it could be seized upon by some quasi-religious huckster and become the basis for some kind of new-age religion by wrapping it in some ritual, liturgy,mantras, prostylizing(sp?), writing/selling a book on it, and figuring out other ways to make a buck off it. But to me its just a way to look at God, the universe and everything that I'm comfortable with.

"green"in m context means I'm frugal. I like to recycle stuff or re-purpose things where I can, walk or bicycle for the exercise when I don't have to go a long way or carry a load. Grow some of my own food and flowers, use worm tea instead of Ortho to get rid of white flys on my hibiscus, etc.

I do think the earth may be getting over populated with respect to potable water and arable land, but I don't support wiping out people or any other life form if I can help it. Better to promote quality of life than quantity. Better to free up time for using ones mind instead of struggling with a hand-to-mouth subsistence every day.

I don't understand what you mean by opportunity costs associated with my faith. Would you please elucidate?

Scientific consensus is NOT science. Science doesn't shift from side to side - it progresses on proven facts. Scientific consensus is politics. If scientific theories and evidence are not reproducible, they are simply wrong or made up.

Cap and Trade legislation was about someone seeing another way to steal money through furtherance of a massive fraud.

+1 for reading AR. But did you understand it?

It's not the other side that's hated. It's the lack of - reasoned logic vs. emotionalism, an understanding of reality science and facts based on verifiable evidence, respect for the value of the individual and his natural rights over the collective, and general distrust of populism/power driven arguments. It's not whether you leave or not - it's whether your consciousness and comprehension level has developed to such a stage as to be able to determine the reality of your existence as compared to the pablum fed to the general populace by those wishing for power over you.

Your comments that I've read so far are mere regurgitations of demonstrably distorted and exaggerated politically derived consensus science, rather than reasoned and logically derived discussion. This site can be tough for those not steeped in Objectivist philosophy and first principles.