Windfall
Page 9
Snowmaking has become a billion-dollar global industry. Cannons now spray man-made snow on nearly half of Austria’s ski terrain, sucking up roughly 500,000 gallons of water per acre of artificial snow. Across the Alps, snowmakers use more water than does Vienna, a city of 1.7 million people—as much water per acre, it turns out, as a typical field of wheat. But traditional snowmaking, no matter how much it drains Europe’s ponds and lakes, cannot secure the Alpine economy. It requires perfect conditions—below-freezing temperatures, a humidity of less than 70 percent, and minimal winds—and at Pitztal at least, these conditions are rarely present anymore when they’re most needed.
When I visited the resort, the mountains were blindingly white, drenched in full sun and cloaked in natural February snow. The boulders were buried, while parts of the insulated blanket remained visible, its ridged individual sections poking out of the slope like vertebrae. From the end of the funicular at 9,318 feet, I followed the crowds to ride a clear-walled cable car to 11,286 feet, looking out at a vast fishbowl of a basin split by jagged ridges. A blast of cold wind met me at the top, and I quickly clicked into my skis. I dropped through patches of ice to an expanse of soft powder that led to a groomed run that led, eventually, to a modernistic, slate-paneled, fifty-foot-high cement building—the reason I’d come. The building housed one of the world’s first models of the IDE All Weather Snowmaker, a $2 million device capable of shooting out thirty-five thousand cubic feet of snow in twenty-four hours at any temperature on any day of the year. For Pitztal, it was the latest salvo in the war against melt. For me, after travels in Alaska, Norway, and Greenland, it was a symbol of a new kind of climate response. Here, as in many of the places I would soon visit, the effects of global warming were no boon. They were a problem. The upside, if any, was in selling the best Band-Aid.
A ruddy-faced lift manager named Reinhold let me into the building, and he stood with me as I stared at a giant white cylinder, a welter of tubes and pipes, and a row of gray instrument panels lining the back wall. Neither of us could read the labels. They were written in Hebrew.
• • •
“THE ECONOMIC IMPACT of Global Warming Is Beginning to Show,” the press release had read. “IDE’s All Weather Snowmaker brings under your control what previously could not be controlled!” It sounded like snake oil, but the pitch that had attracted the Austrians carried a good pedigree. It came from a nation with a history of overcoming the worst, from a corporation—Israel Desalination Enterprises—already making millions off climate change by wringing the salt out of salt water. The reason I traveled to Austria, and soon to Israel, is that the small story of the snowmaker—and its intertwining with desalination—represented the perfection of a rosy ideal: that innovation and market forces, when unleashed on climate change, can save us from it. Both Israel and IDE also embodied a worldview that was at once empowering and dangerous: that solutions are worth their side effects. And their machines were more proof that technological defenses against climate change are generally going first to people who can afford them, those who are emitting the most carbon, who are taking care of themselves before turning to the developing world.
How Israelis could know about snow was explained to me a week after I left Pitztal, when I met IDE’s technology chief and self-proclaimed “best skier” at his home thirty minutes from Tel Aviv. Avraham Ophir was dying of cancer, a white-haired man with a soft voice. His two colleagues who sat with me on a couch, Moshe Tessel and Rafi Stoffman, looked at him with a mixture of fondness and awe. He was the institutional knowledge of IDE, a now iconic Israeli company, and the hero of one of its two gulag creation stories. He sat back in a red leather chair and began telling it.
“Look, it’s a long story, but I try to make it short,” he said. “I was born in eastern Poland, in a town called Bialystok. My father owned the factory that produced turpentine, which comes from the wood of trees in this region. Now, in the beginning of the Second World War, we were first occupied by the Germans for two weeks, and then the Russians came in. My father being a capitalist, he was taken prisoner and sent to a gulag in northern Siberia. And we, as the family of a prisoner, were sent to the south of Siberia, actually northern Kazakhstan.” There, Avraham was forced to learn how to ski. “You would take two simple wooden planks that were very strong,” he said, “and you would put a leather strip around it, and with your normal boot you would enter the leather. This is how we would go to school.” Normally, an older boy led the students, because of the wolves. When blizzards, known as buran, came, they found their way by triangulating off telephone poles spaced every 150 feet near their route. They survived the long winters by eating fish caught during summers and cured with salt.
The story of the snowmaker also started in Siberia. In Russia, Avraham said, “there was a Jewish engineer by the name of Alexander Zarchin. This engineer was a Zionist. Being a Zionist and being a technologist, the Soviets sent him to one of the gulags, the same one as my father. And in Siberia it’s very cold, but the summer did not have any rain. The gulag was close to the Arctic Ocean.” The labor camp needed a source of drinking water. So in the summer, Avraham said, “they would open a gate and let seawater enter a lagoon. At the end of summer, they would close the gate, and the upper layer of the lagoon would freeze.” When it did, the salt and water were forced apart. “By nature, ice crystals from seawater are pure water,” he explained. When summer came again, the surface began to melt, flushing any residual brine from the ice pack, and Zarchin and the other prisoners began pumping liquid from the saline depths of the lagoon. They measured its salt content as they pumped, and once it was low enough, Avraham said, “they closed the gates and let the sun melt the rest of the ice—and they had drinking water.” He looked at us proudly. “So you see,” he said, mangling the phrase I would soon hear everywhere in Israel, “need is the father of invention.”
After the war, Avraham was allowed to return to Poland, then smuggled with a group of Jewish children, Holocaust survivors, across the Alps to Italy—and eventually to the newly declared state of Israel. Alexander Zarchin, his future boss, also fled from the gulags to Israel, where he soon found fame as an inventor. In 1956, the country’s first prime minister, the water-obsessed David Ben-Gurion, gave Zarchin a quarter-million dollars to build a pilot desalination plant. In 1960, Look magazine declared that what was being called the Zarchin process could “have more significance than the atomic bomb.” Zarchin’s trick was to replicate the Siberian freeze using a vacuum chamber: when pressure drops below four millibars, chilled salt water becomes ice, and thus becomes desalinated. His project, eventually incorporated as the for-profit IDE, became a vehicle for both capitalism and nationalism. “He wrote down the patent when he saw that the country needed water,” said Avraham. “Most of Israel was a desert at that time, but in the Bible the country was full of trees. You read that the son of David, Absalom, he was running away on a horse, and his hair got caught by the branch of a tree, and this is how he was killed.” Avraham gestured out a window toward his lush garden. “We decided we were going to make this country look like it did before,” he said. “And the people who came from Eastern Europe and other places, they wanted to convert it into something that reminded them of where they had lived before.”
When foreign investors came, a nervous Zarchin covered his machines’ dials with cloths, determined that no one should steal their secrets, or his profits. But vacuum desalination was quickly supplanted by more efficient reverse-osmosis techniques, and it took IDE forty years to find a real use for the Zarchin process. The eureka moment—this one belonging to Avraham—came in South Africa, where an IDE vacuum-ice machine was commissioned to help cool the world’s deepest gold mine, two miles below the surface of the Earth, where workers faced 130-degree temperatures.
It was back in 2005, Moshe explained. He and Avraham were in South Africa on a site visit, testing out the mine’s newest machine. Avraham saw a pile of snow produced in t
he heat of the African sun, and his eyes lit up. “Moshe, get me some skis,” he commanded. Moshe went into Johannesburg and found some skis. “At lunch, he had a big exhibition,” Moshe says. “I told him, ‘Avraham, I’m impressed you are a good skier for your age’”—he was seventy-two years old—“‘but before we take it to the Alps, let’s find a specialist.’ I looked for one on the Internets.”
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.
• • •
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 CO2 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.