Bob Morris @ Oct 23rd 2007 18:03 - Category: Unfiled ;
“I think it will go to the ocean before it stops”
— Chief Bill Metcalf, San Diego county area fire coordinator, on the Witch Fire
If that happens, it would be catastrophic.
San Diego Union-Tribune fire blog
LA Weekly writer Daniel Hernandez is also blogging the fires.
Bob Morris @ Oct 23rd 2007 14:49 - Category: Unfiled ;
Excellent source for local info, including the unsettling news that the fires are affecting power transmission in San Diego, with a transmission emergency having been called by power grid managers.
I lived in L.A. for thirty years. There’s never been this many fires at once or of this level of ferocity.
Last count. 1000+ structures burned in San Diego alone.
Bob Morris @ Oct 23rd 2007 13:24 - Category: Credit crisis ;
I took me a little while to understand this chart. Here’s what it says. 14% of the total dollar amount of subprime mortgages in 2006 went into 60-day delinquencies. Most did so within the first six months, a staggeringly high number. 2007 is expected to be about the same. Some of this has to be fraud, with a straw buyer who had no intention of paying. But many are probably people who really had no clue what they were getting into, and then found they couldn’t get out. Implicit in the chart is a whole lot of pain.
More pain. Note the spike in 2011 for option adjustable rate mortgages, Calculated Risk says many of these homeowners are doing negative amortization and will be upside down when the reset comes. Was it not insane that mortgage companies offered and homeowners accepted mortgages where the balance increased over time instead of of the normal decreasing? The rationale of course was they thought housing prices would keep soaring and they could re-fi any time with ease.
The peak of subprime mortgage resets will happen next year, which will trigger a whole lot of foreclosures, creating big downward pressure on housing prices. Consumer spending will drop along with this, causing further damage to the economy.
It’s important to remember that these aren’t just abstract charts. Real people with real homes are represented here. Many will take financial hits they may never recover from. This will create problems within families like fights about money, increased alcoholism and drug abuse, people sinking into despair. What will millions of families do when they get foreclosed?
Charts from IMF “Assessing Risks to Global Financial Stability” (PDF)
Bob Morris @ Oct 23rd 2007 11:48 - Category: Unfiled ;
Subsidies for sports teams but massive cuts for college education. Welcome to the Hotel California.
Bob Morris @ Oct 23rd 2007 11:23 - Category: Unfiled ;
L.A. Times interactive Google fire map
L.A. Times columnist Steve Lopez
In times of natural disaster, the best often surfaces in all of us. Donations, warm blankets, sandwiches. Whatever is needed, we’re at the ready.
Unless it involves Malibu.
Yeah, just why all the Malibu-bashing anyway? Not everyone who lives there is wealthy, there’s plenty of middle class folks too, and even if they were all rich - like that matters when you see all your personal possessions and mementos go up in smoke? The real problem, he suggests, is the playing chicken with Mother Nature.
“Living on hillsides that are proven to be future landslides and combining that with living in a dry area,” said Kevin, “comes down to not rich or poor but smart and stupid. . . . These lands were not meant to be built on but some people think money can overcome that. Good luck.”
San Diego county interactive Google fire map
U-Haul offers 30 days free storage for fire evacuees
Bob Morris @ Oct 23rd 2007 07:17 - Category: Unfiled ;
Food pantries are running out of supplies while large retailers are noticing pronounced drops in spending on the days leading up to shoppers getting a paycheck. The poor and even middle income working families increasingly can’t afford to make even basic food purchases and are going without.
7-Eleven says grocery sales are up 12% while other sales are flat. People are making emergency food purchases there rather than going to a supermarket. This seems counter-intuitive, as 7-Eleven charges more, but the reason is probably so they won’t be tempted to buy more food once at a supermarket, something which is telling and sad.
When hard working people with jobs increasingly can’t afford basic food and rely on food pantries, something is seriously wrong indeed.
Bob Morris @ Oct 23rd 2007 00:15 - Category: Unfiled, drought ;
Thoughts and quotes from the superb New York Times magazine feature story on drought in the southwest.
The problem
Lake Mead, the enormous reservoir in Arizona and Nevada that supplies nearly all the water for Las Vegas, is half-empty, and statistical models indicate that it will never be full again.
“As we move forward all water-management actions based on ‘normal’ as defined by the 20th century will increasingly turn out to be bad bets.”
Every available gallon of the Colorado River has been appropriated by farmers, industries and municipalities. And yet, the region’s population is expected to keep booming.
When I asked if the drought in his models would be permanent, he pondered the question for a moment, then replied: “You can’t call it a drought anymore, because it’s going over to a drier climate. No one says the Sahara is in drought.”
The real problem is the growing population and decreasing water supplies. Every drop has already been appropriated. But the snowmelt is lessening, and that means less water. You’ve heard of Peak Oil. We could be looking at Peak Water in the southwest - and the peak may have already occurred.
Possible solutions
Aurora CO plans to continually reuse water by pumping treated water into the South Platte river, then pumping it out miles downstream, purifying it again, and reusing it.
In the future, wastewater will have to be recycled and reused, so let’s all get used to it.
“Treated wastewater isn’t a liability, it’s an asset.” We don’t need potable water to flush our toilets or water our lawns. “One might say that’s a ridiculous use of potable water. In fact, I might say that. But that’s the way we’ve set it up. And that’s going to change, that’s got to change, in this century.”
Las Vegas, ground zero for southwest water problems.
From Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority.
“We have an exploding human population, and we have a shrinking clean-water supply. Those are on colliding paths. This is not just a Las Vegas issue. This is a microcosm of a much larger issue.”
I got the feeling that for Mulroy it means that every blade of grass in her state would soon be gone.
Presumably that will include golf courses. Any golf course in a southwest desert needs to be shut down. Period.
Mulroy has been jawboning, breaking up water accords made in the 1920’s in favor of newer ones that get Vegas more water, something every other city and town in the southwest wants to do with their water supply too.
Water shortages and global warming
The two problems — water and energy — are so intimately linked as to make it exceedingly difficult to tackle one without the other. It isn’t just the matter of growing corn for ethanol, which is already straining water supplies. The less water in our rivers, for instance, the less hydropower our dams produce. The further the water tables sink, the more power it takes to pump water up. The more we depend on coal and nuclear power plants, which require huge amounts of water for cooling, the larger the burden we place on supplies.
Should millions of people even live in deserts? If, because of crisis, water gets diverted from agriculture to humans, then there will be less food for all. What then? Clearly, these problems can not be solved on a local or even state-wide basis. The solutions will have to come from regional alliances and agreements where all the stakeholders have a say in what happens. the only alternative to a morass of lawsuits, turf wars, and nasty fights.
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