Environment Evaluation

Food & Water Watch learned that German Environment Ministers have banded together to make changes to mining lawthat will effectively create a de facto moratorium on fracking in most areas of Germany. The law would ban fracking from important drinking water zones such as Lake Constance, areas surrounding dams and protected areas, as well as areas with private water wells or where water sources are used by breweries.

The Milwaukee Institute will provide high-performance computing and storage resources to tenants in the new Global Water Center under the terms of a partnership announced Monday morning.

A.O. Smith Corp. will be the first water center tenant to use the institute's resources, the organizations said. Other companies are in discussions with the institute.

In their search for renewable electric power, China’s engineers have been building mega-dams at a rate unmatched in human history. Many far larger than the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River — which is 221 meters high and capable of generating more than 2,000 megawatts of power — are being constructed on China’s greatest rivers. Best known is theThree Gorges Dam, completed in 2008, which stretches a mile-and-a-half across the Yangtze and can generate ten times the hydropower of the Hoover Dam.