In the arid West, water is life.  And life may get a lot more difficult for the Colorado River - a major source of water for Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California - over the next few decades.

First, there's the double whammy of population growth and climate change, the first demanding more water from the river, and the second making it extremely likely that there will be less water for that population to drink, use to grow crops, etc.

Second, there's the threat from oil shale development.  The Bush administration pushed through midnight regulations last month to spur development of oil shale deposits in Colorado and Utah.  The Bureau of Land Management estimates that it will take three gallons of precious West Slope Colorado water to produce one gallon of fossil fuel.  And while no one in the world has yet figured out how to develop shale commercially, Shell - which is researching and investing in oil shale - has already bought large numbers of water rights in the Colorado River basin.  That has the water buffalos at the Denver Water Board worried.

At the just-concluded U.N. climate negotiations in Poznan, Poland, Earthjustice attorneys Martin Wagner and Erika Rosenthal advocated for rapid action to reduce emissions of black carbon, now considered one of the most effective strategies to slow near-term global and Arctic warming.

This could prevent catastrophic, irreversible tipping points such as the melting of Arctic sea ice and the Greenland ice sheet, and buy time for implementation of critical strategies to cut long-lived greenhouse gas emissions.

Recent studies identify black carbon, a component of ultrafine particulate air pollution, as a critical climate warming agent both in the atmosphere and when deposited on snow and ice. Technologies exist to rapidly reduce black carbon emissions from diesel and coal sources, and fast-track mitigation efforts will have an immediate cooling effect. As black carbon is a leading cause of mortality from air pollution and accelerates the melting of glaciers that provide fresh water for millions, controlling these emissions is critical to promote sustainable development, improve human health and save lives.

A miracle, just take a look around: this inescapable earth.
– Wislawa Szymborska, Polish poet and Nobel Laureate

Yes, we can.

As Martin wrote earlier in the week, the negotiations that just concluded in Poznan fell short of expectations. But take heart – the talks did deliver on the fundamental objective of providing a negotiation blueprint for an agreement that can be signed next year in Copenhagen.

There was no movement though on the issues at the heart of the new agreement – how much industrialized countries will cut their emissions; what they expect in return from major emerging economies like China and India; and how much finance and technology transfer for low-carbon initiatives will be provided to developing countries.

One of the primary tasks of this conference was to determine the outlines of a "shared vision"—areas where all parties were in agreement concerning what the negotiations would try to achieve. The hope was that this vision would move the negotiations from the very general goals established in the Bali Action Plan toward the kinds of specifics necessary to reach a final agreement a year from now in Copenhagen. So how the negotiators doing? Well, do you want the good news first, or the bad?

Let's start with the good. The negotiations haven't completely broken down—the negotiators have committed to continuing to talk next year, and have set out a work plan to do so. They've even authorized themselves to hold an extra meeting next year, which is fortunate, because they also agree that they still have an extraordinary amount of information to gather on nearly every component of a final agreement.