OIL / WATER & ADAPTATION! by Johnnie Buttram

Please find below the judging results for your proposal.

Semi-Finalist Evaluation

Judges'' comments

SUBJECT: Your proposal in the Climate CoLab

Proposal: Oil/Water and Adaptation

Contest: Adaptation

Thank you for your contest entry. We appreciate your willingness to share your ideas and also the time and effort you put into developing a proposal and submitting it to the contest.

We, the Judges, have strongly considered your proposal and found that it contained intriguing elements; however, we have chosen to not advance it to the next round of competition.

We encourage you to keep developing your idea. Transfer your proposal to the Proposal Workspace to re-open it, make edits, add collaborators, and even submit it into a future contest. You can do so by logging into your account, opening your proposal, selecting the Admin tab, and clicking “Move proposal”.

We welcome you to stay involved in the Climate CoLab community: support and comment on proposals that have been named Semi-Finalists and finalists, and even volunteer to join one those teams if you have relevant expertise. During the voting period, you can help select the contest’s Popular Choice Winner. The Climate CoLab will be opening more contests in the coming months, and you are welcome to submit your proposals to those contests as well.

Keep up the great work. We hope that by working together, we all can create solutions that wouldn’t otherwise be possible.

2015 Climate CoLab Judges - further specific comments

This proposal provides a creative re-imagining of potential uses for the keystone XL pipeline. It also correctly identifies water shortages as an issue that will be increasingly difficult to manage in North America (and globally).

But the main weakness in this proposal is that there is no accepted legal framework for the bulk export of water between Canada and the US. There is currently a voluntary ban in place against the bulk export of water at both the provincial and federal level. The politics around this issue are extremely contentious with many groups actively opposing bulk water exports. And there are important unresolved questions about how water exports, if allowed, would function under existing NAFTA regulations.

The discussion of the technical means for transporting water between the two countries is interesting. But it is putting the cart before the horse. What is missing to make this kind of trade feasible are complex political negotiations - not infrastructure.

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