Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming (12 page)

The specialist Moshe found, a Finnish Olympic coach, was flown down to South Africa. According to Moshe, he declared the pile “fine snow for ski—not powder, like in Aspen, but it’s what the professionals call spring snow.” IDE then flew a dozen ski-area executives down, Moshe says, “and we built two snow mountains, and we spent two days with the guys, and we ate, we drink, and already after this I get two orders.” Iconic Zermatt, the village below the Matterhorn and the now melting, shifting Swiss-Italian border, got the first IDE snowmaker. Pitztal got the second.

In 2009–2010, the first full season it deployed its new snowmaker, Pitztal became the first ski area in the Northern Hemisphere to open. The date: September 12. After the debacle that was the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, when helicopters had to ferry in snow for the events on the barren slopes of Cypress Mountain, Russia—the host of the 2014 Winter Olympics—asked IDE for a demo at Pitztal. Officials were impressed. Russia began stockpiling snow underground and under tarps, with plans to have as many as three thousand tons stored when the games began.

“We managed to sell snow to the Eskimo,” Avraham said.

“Now I want to sell sand to the Bedouins,” said Moshe.

“They have no money,” Rafi said with a laugh.

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FOR IDE AND THE REST
of the desalination industry, there was an aspect of the planet’s ice loss that was even more auspicious. What comes after melt is drought. In the Alps, no less than in the Himalaya or Rockies or Rwenzoris or Andes, disappearing ice is disappearing water storage. Glaciers are reservoirs. Snowfields are reservoirs. In winter, they grow with precipitation, trapping it uphill. In summer, just when it is most needed, their water is slowly released. Shrinking glaciers imperil the water supplies of seventy-seven million people in the tropical Andes, along with the hydropower providing half the electricity in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru. In Asia, two billion people in five major river basins—the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Yangtze, and Yellow—depend on Himalayan meltwater. The range’s glaciers, which irrigate millions of acres of rice and wheat in China, India, and Pakistan, lose an estimated four to twelve gigatons of ice a year. In Spain, which is becoming so dry so quickly that some warn of “Africanization”—of the Sahara jumping across the Strait of Gibraltar—the Pyrenees have lost nearly 90 percent of their glacial cover. A century ago, the glaciers feeding such agriculturally important rivers as the Cinca and the Ebro stretched 8,150 acres across the range. They now cover 960 acres. And even in the United States, millions of people depend on glaciers and winter snowfall: Southern California, kept green by mountain-fed rivers, especially the Colorado, is in danger of losing 40 percent of its water supply by the 2020s if melt in the Rockies and Sierra Nevada continues apace.

In a sense, Israelis understood better than anyone what it was like to descend into drought. They knew what to do. Coming here from Europe, as Avraham had explained, they had faced a changed environment—hotter, drier, and less hospitable than what they had known before—and they had faced it head-on. Zionism had been guided by Enlightenment ideals: faith in reason, faith in capitalism, faith that any problem, even the treatment of Jews in Europe, had a rational solution if man was rational enough to find it. The first Israelis did not bow before nature. The Enlightenment answer to water scarcity, then as now, was to seek the silver bullet—an engineered solution, a supply-side solution.

“For those who make the desert bloom there is room for hundreds, thousands, and even millions,” Ben-Gurion had written in 1954, when he himself moved to the Negev Desert. Next, the prime minister underwrote Zarchin’s test plant in the Negev. He began funding cloud-seeding operations, including 1960’s Operation Rainfall, in which silver-iodide dispensers were attached to the wings of fighter jets. He built the National Water Carrier, eighty miles of pipes, canals, tunnels, and reservoirs, to move water from the Sea of Galilee, in the relatively wet north, to the Negev, in the bleak, underpopulated south. Some of the fixes failed. Some had side effects. The water carrier would stoke war with Syria over the headwaters of the Jordan River, and it would soon feed a massive, export-focused agricultural industry. To export a gram of wheat was the equivalent of exporting a liter of water, so eventually Israel would export the equivalent of 100 billion liters a year. But at the time, few people questioned if any of this made sense.

We were all becoming Israelis now. In Peru in 2009, a scientist won a World Bank award for his proposal to paint the Andes white and repel the sun’s lethal heat. In India’s Ladakh region, a retired engineer built a $50,000 artificial glacier in the shadow of the Himalaya, collecting runoff in rock-lined ponds that would freeze and attach to an existing glacier in winter. In Spain, Barcelona became the first city in mainland Europe to resort to emergency water imports: five million gallons transported in 2008 in a converted oil tanker. In China, the central government prepared to divert rivers at a scale the world had never seen: The $62 billion, three-canal, 1,812-combined-mile South-North Water Transfer Project will someday move 4.5 trillion gallons each year from the Tibetan Plateau, home to nearly forty thousand melting glaciers, to the cities in the country’s arid, industrializing north. More than 300,000 citizens were being displaced to make room for canals and pipes. While China waited for Tibet’s water, its Weather Modification Office—thirty-two thousand on-call peasants manning thirty bases across the country at a cost of $60 million a year—was shelling its skies with rocket launchers and 37-millimeter anti-aircraft guns, delivering silver-iodide pellets in hopes of inducing rain. And in China, India, Peru, Spain, and seemingly every country where rising heat and melt had induced drought, massive desalination plants were also on the rise. Between 2003 and 2008, 2,698 plants were built worldwide, and hundreds more were under construction.

By the time I visited Israel, IDE was responsible for nearly four hundred of the world’s desalination plants, including what was then the biggest, most efficient, and most celebrated: the 86-million-gallon-per-day (mgd) plant in Ashkelon, Israel, next to the Gaza Strip at the edge of the Negev. IDE’s partner at the plant was Veolia, the world’s biggest water company and one of Deutsche Bank’s top stock picks. After Ashkelon, IDE had won contracts to construct the largest plant in China, a $119 million job; a 43-mgd plant in desiccating Australia, a $145 million job; and a giant, 109-mgd plant north of Tel Aviv in Hadera, a $495 million job. IDE was also part of the consortium building two contentious 50-mgd plants in Carlsbad and Huntington Beach, California. An engineer at the company leading the construction, Poseidon Resources, told me they would be able to create water with the exact mineral content and taste of Pellegrino. “People will drink Pellegrino out of the tap,” he said, “and they’ll take showers in Pellegrino.”

Ashkelon met almost 6 percent of Israel’s total water demand, a first step in the country’s plan to get a quarter of its water from the sea by 2020. After subsidies, its price per cubic meter was just sixty cents—on par with tap-water costs in the United States, far cheaper than in parts of Europe. Once bought by the government, nationalized, and dumped into the National Water Carrier, its water was indistinguishable from the rest. But, as the Shell scenarios team highlighted in its exploration of the water-energy-food nexus, there was a problem: Desalination plants, even Ashkelon, use vast amounts of power. Power plants—whether nuclear, coal, gas, or hydroelectric—use vast amounts of water for cooling. If they are fueled by coal, or, to a lesser degree, natural gas, they also emit vast amounts of carbon. Carbon furthers warming, warming furthers drought, and desalination begins to resemble a snake eating its own tail.

If a glass of water is eight ounces, a glass of water from Ashkelon takes 10,200 joules. The plant runs on natural gas, making it cleaner than most, but that glass of water still translates to 0.0011 pounds of CO
₂
emissions. If the average Israeli were to take all his or her water from Ashkelon, it would cause 0.6 metric tons of annual emissions—about half of what each person on the planet can emit if we’re to someday halt warming. (Israelis currently emit about 10 metric tons, Americans 20 metric tons—both already well over that limit.) In California, the numbers are much worse. The Carlsbad desalination plant, the largest in the United States, may get most of its energy from coal. It will then be responsible for more carbon emissions—97,000 metric tons a year—than a dozen island nations. But no one claims desalination can save the world. Nor can any snowmaker save all the world’s glaciers. They can only save the rich parts from the fate befalling the rest.

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“IF YOU HEAR A WHISTLE,
get under the car,” the IDE engineer Elisha Arad said when he, Rafi, and I set out for Ashkelon. The Palestinians had just begun firing their first Grads, 170-millimeter rockets with enough range—8.6 miles—to reach Ashkelon from the Gaza Strip. The day before, a school had been hit, and a pair of tractors was needed to dislodge the rocket from its crater.

“We give them water; they give us rockets,” Rafi complained. This was true but incomplete: In the previous month’s offensive against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, which the Israel Defense Forces called Operation Cast Lead, Israel had damaged eleven wells, twenty miles of water networks, and more than six thousand rooftop water tanks. It then kept the borders locked down, which had the effect of keeping pumps, pipes, and cement out of Gaza—and making repairs impossible. A year after the operation, ten thousand people would still be without access to the water network, and Gaza’s principal aquifer would turn saline. Palestinians would begin tapping into Israeli pipelines, and Israel would crack down on what was termed water theft. In Israel, per capita water consumption was 280 liters a day; in Gaza, it was 91 liters—below the 100–150 liters the World Health Organization says is necessary. Elisha suggested that Hamas hadn’t hit the Ashkelon plant because it didn’t want to: The plant was producing the water everyone needed. Rafi suggested it was because members of Hamas were bad shots.

Our SUV rumbled down an empty freeway into the Negev, past a plantation of cacti and a strange outpost of ten-year-old prefab homes in the sand, populated by Jewish settlers who’d relocated there from Gaza in a political tussle my hosts remembered little about. Elisha, a sixty-year-old who had a bald head and, when asked a question, a single, deep furrow in his brow, told me about the Dead Sea: It was supposed to be replenished by the Jordan River, but the National Water Carrier kept carrying water elsewhere. “Now it’s dying, literally dying,” he said. “It’s losing one meter a year. We will face no water in twenty years unless supply is given.” He claimed no one bothered to conserve: “Agriculture pays ten times less for water. If he pays ten cents, while I pay a dollar? Of course then he doesn’t care.”

Around a corner, just before reaching the desalination plant, we caught sight of a blimp hovering over the border with Gaza: a sentry system for rocket fire. “It gives the alert in the townships,” Elisha explained. “It gives people time. Time, let’s say, to find a shelter.” Silent, all seeing, futuristic, the blimp must have looked oppressive to those on the other side of Israel’s walls. But on this side it was comforting. The country’s approach to drought—so many carbon emissions from so much desalination, a detriment to the world, in exchange for endless water, a boon for Israel—was similar, I thought. What made sense within the borders of one nation, especially one surrounded by enemies, would not always make sense outside it.

The desalination plant shared a site with an eleven-hundred-megawatt, coal-fired power plant, the largest in Israel. It was a location chosen not for cheap electricity but for the chance to minimize environmental impacts: The coal plant discharged hot water; the desalination plant discharged hypersaline brine. When the streams were mixed, each was diluted. “Now the fish are suffering . . . but, uh, less,” Moshe had told me. The seventeen-acre facility was sprawling, eerily empty, staffed by just forty employees who took turns working eight-hour shifts, almost alone in an automated future.

Under a low-slung sky of cumulus clouds, we put on yellow hard hats. The Mediterranean was dark green, but the buildings were painted ocean blue. Elisha led us from one to another, from the settling ponds to the pretreatment pumps to the carbon filters to the synthetic filters. The plant used reverse osmosis, a rival process to Zarchin’s first developed in the 1950s and 1960s by a Jewish chemical engineer in Southern California, then perfected in the 1970s at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Its main hangar was dominated by a quadruple array of reverse-osmosis membranes—forty thousand of them, arranged end to end in eight-inch pressure tubes. Everywhere we walked, I heard a rush of water. Outside, concrete bomb shelters were spaced every few hundred yards. “If you are within zero to 4.5 kilometers of Gaza, you have fifteen seconds,” Elisha said. “If you are within 4.5 to 10 kilometers, you have thirty seconds.” We were within zero to 4.5 kilometers. We stopped at a control room, and there, sticking out from a blue holding tank, a faucet appeared. Elisha produced a cup. The water tasted pure, perfectly natural, and after we all downed a first round, I had a second.

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BACK IN TEL AVIV,
I had a series of meetings with other water entrepreneurs, each hawking his own techno-fix. Israel was, to borrow a phrase, the “start-up nation,” but this was the embodiment of another trend: Export-ready water technology seems to emit most readily from water-strapped countries—Israel, Singapore, Spain, and Australia—whose backs are up against the climatic wall. In Israel, traditional cloud seeders were still legion, but one group of researchers also proposed covering a two-thousand-acre expanse of the Negev with black heat-absorbing material to create an artificial heat island, thus inducing downwind rains. In a high-rise downtown, I sat with executives at a firm called Whitewater whose founder had once helped Domino’s Pizza penetrate the Israeli market. It had close ties to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and its approach was distinctly Israeli: It helped secure nations’ water supplies from contaminations and terrorist attacks.