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Chapter Eight summarizes the federalism safeguards debate, considers the role of negotiated governance, and highlights potential contributions from the academic negotiation literature. Most importantly, Chapter Eight introduces the phenomenon of federalism bargaining among all branches of government. Using the negotiation theorist’s definition, it broadly understands bargaining as “an iterative process of joint decision-making,” encompassing conventional political haggling, formalized methods of collaborative policymaking, and even more remote signaling processes by which state and federal actors negotiate consensus. Reverse-engineering the most successful examples would reveal the very considerations built into the Chapter Six balancing test—rendering bilateral bargaining by the political branches the functional ex ante equivalent of the ex post balancing analysis contemplated there. The federalism bargaining taxonomy charts opportunities for intergovernmental negotiation within various constitutional and statutory frameworks. It begins with the most familiar forms of negotiation used in lawmaking, including conventional negotiations over law enforcement, under the federal spending power, and for exceptions from otherwise applicable laws. It then considers more interesting forms of negotiated policymaking, including negotiated federal rulemaking with state and local stakeholders, federal statutes that share policy design with states, and intersystemic signaling negotiations, by which independently operating state and federal actors trade influence over the direction of evolving interjurisdictional policies. Examples include the 2008 Stimulus Bill, banking and financial services reform, criminal law enforcement, immigration, radioactive waste siting, offshore drilling, hydroelectric dam licensing, medical marijuana, climate governance, and the No Child Left Behind, Endangered Species, Clean Water, Clean Air, Real ID, Coastal Zone Management, and Medicaid Acts.

This chapter focuses on a topic of growing importance to infrastructure governance: cost overruns, when a project ends up exceeding its anticipated budget. The chapter presents the results of a linear regression analysis of the construction costs involved with 401 electricity infrastructure projects built between 1936 and 2014 in fifty-seven countries. Included in this sample are dozens of hydroelectric dams, nuclear reactors, thermoelectric power plants, utility-scale solar facilities, wind farms, and transmission projects that collectively required more than $800 billion of investment and constituted more than 325,000 megawatts of capacity. The chapter shows that larger projects such as hydroelectric dams and nuclear power plants are highly correlated with cost overruns, and that wind farms and solar facilities are negatively correlated. This finding implies that smaller, more flexible, decentralised systems have a suite of (possibly undervalued) factors that make them less prone to the risk of an overrun.

The convergence of five river systems in far western Kentucky significantly influenced the progress of human settlement and activity over the past several thousand years in the area now known as the Jackson Purchase. The geological history of the Jackson Purchase set the stage for the development of unique land- and waterscapes with natural histories very different from the rest of Kentucky. The Ohio, the Mississippi, the Cumberland, and the Tennessee Rivers define the present boundaries of the Purchase area, and the smaller Clarks River provides the major drainage through its midsection. Major geological, hydrological, and human historical events including the New Madrid earthquakes, Civil War, floods, water-borne diseases, the ever-changing focus of agriculture and industry, and 20th century dam building, including construction of two major hydroelectric reservoirs (Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley) all affected peoples’ choices of where to live and how to use the land and water resources of the region.Today, western Kentuckians are actively engaged in preserving the quality of the region’s water resources because of the recreational, agricultural, industrial, transportation, and ecological services they provide.

This chapter presents the author's field notes from the North Cascades Environmental Learning Center. The center was built as mitigation for the environmental harm caused by the hydroelectric dam when the dam was relicensed in 1989. It was a unique idea, to mitigate environmental damage with environmental education by building a world-class field campus. The idea was supported by the National Park Service, the Forest Service, local tribes, the North Cascades Conservation Council, and the city of Seattle, which owns the hydroelectric project. The chapter then focuses on Diablo dam. The author's residency there was termed a “creative residency,” and was scheduled to last a month. During his residency, the author was able to spot a lot of birds, including white-winged scoters.

For many communities, exposure to mercury through fish consumption is an exemplary case of environmental injustice. Groups that rely on fishing for food, cultural identity, spiritual wellbeing, or economic prosperity are more vulnerable to mercury pollution. The vulnerability is heightened because sources and hotspots of mercury are found disproportionately in areas near communities of color, low-income and immigrant communities, and indigenous peoples. This chapter reviews cases where mercury has impacted the health, culture, and identity of local communities. Such communities are victims of environmental injustice because they have derived little or no benefit from the products and services of mercury-releasing industries, but they now bear the burden of the wastes left behind. Existing strategies for reducing mercury exposure are not always effective in communities at risk. Fish advisories that warn of health risks from eating contaminated fish themselves perpetuate environmental injustice. The shift in policy from risk reduction to risk avoidance places these communities in a lose-lose situation: either eat fish and suffer the health effects from contaminants or do not eat fish and suffer the health and cultural effects of losing a critical diet food. By allowing significant mercury contamination to remain in place while advising the population at risk to change their lifestyle, regulators are indirectly perpetuating discrimination against communities that attach different normative values to fish.

We looked in the previous chapter at the prospects for our current energy infrastructure and asked how we can make it more flexible and sustainable. In this chapter, we fast-forward to the new energy economy after the oil era. The quantity of available energy is not the main worry in the postcarbon era. We’re surrounded by tremendous amounts of energy. The power of the sun’s rays was there long before we started to discover fossil energy sources, and on Earth’s surface, we can harness wind and water. Another vast amount of energy is encapsulated in our planet in the form of heat. As yet, we only tap small fractions of these natural energy supplies. Evaluating our long-term options, we have to ask ourselves: How can we harness these energy sources in such a way that they may serve us without a serious regress in our human civilization? Only then may we hope for a gradual transition to a new energy era. In the course of our history, we have used ever more concentrated forms of energy. In the era when we warmed ourselves by a wood fire and ate the grains of the field, we needed about 1 square meter of land for each watt of energy that came available. When we tamed wind and water power, the energy yield of a square meter of land rose by a factor of ten. The advent of coal, oil, and gas accounted for another factor of hundred improvement. This is calculated by summing up the amount of land you need for excavating the energy carriers and converting them to a useful form of energy. A similar calculus can be made using the energy content of the energy carriers themselves. Society has evolved with each subsequent energy innovation. More concentrated forms of energy allowed for a more concentrated community with a more complex division of labor. Now we don’t have to search large areas of land for some useful calories for ourselves; we can devote our time to comfort and complicated products.

The coda brings readers up to date with developments around Lake Baikal since the study upon which the book is based was completed (2013–2017). The coda discusses the closing of the Baikalsk Pulp and Paper Mill, Mongolian dam projects on Selenga River tributaries, problems resulting from the growth in tourism, and a recent drop in the level of Baikal below the officially safe minimum. The coda also informs readers about the trajectories of the people and organizations described in the book in the years since 2013. Only one of the three principal organizations comprising this study remains, but the individuals are still involved in a variety of environmental projects around Lake Baikal.

Over a billion people don’t have access to a safe water supply. And a third of the world’s population lacks basic sanitation with the result that more than 2 billion human beings are afflicted with infections that result in diarrhea and other diseases. Tens of millions of them die every year. Improving this state of affairs poses a massive challenge. Take sanitation: What if we could provide basic facilities for all those people over the next 20 years? You’d have to hook them up to the sewer system at the rate of half a million a day. We know how to install individual toilets and sewage pipes, but a project on that kind of scale is way beyond our capabilities. It would not only require new technology but a huge amount of money and political will, too. The challenges for providing all humanity with access to clean water are similarly gigantic. It’s not a matter of scarcity. There is enough drinking water for everyone on Earth even as its population continues to grow. According to the United Nations, a human being needs 20 liters of drinking water a day to live healthily. Every year, 100,000 cubic kilometers of rain fall on the earth, which translates into 40,000 liters per person per day. That would be plenty even if you only manage to tap a tiny fraction. Sufficient drinking water is available for all even in the driest regions of the earth. The problem is one of quality: People don’t die of thirst; they die from drinking water that’s not safe. The use of water for agriculture is another story. Roughly 70 percent of the human use of fresh water is for farming. People rarely realize just how much water agriculture requires. It takes 1,000 liters to grow the wheat for a single kilogram of fl our, for instance. Other products soak up even larger amounts of water. A kilogram of coffee needs 20,000 liters, and a liter of milk takes 3,000—mostly for the cattle feed and the grass consumed by the cow.