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Proposed pipeline and refinery projects around the lakes are expected to lead to total investments of more than $31-billion (U.S.) by 2015, spending similar in scale to expenditures at many oil sands projects. For this reason, the report says the various projects, when taken together, threaten to “wipe out many of the pollution control gains” achieved around the lakes since the 1970s.

The massive expenditures are needed because typical refineries can't process heavy crude derived from tar sands without costly upgrades.

Even as we continue to push to protect Puget Sound, the entire effort is up against the fact that we also need to make room for as many as 4 million more people who could move here this century.

And as we do, we are gradually eating away at the Sound's finely tuned water-cleaning system by leveling as much as 10,000 acres of forest every year.

At McCormick Woods near Port Orchard, Kitsap County commissioners promised in 2003 to require builders to follow the most up-to-date stormwater standards. At the same time, they approved what will amount to a small city with a business park, shopping, and more than 4,000 homes and apartments, ranging from big houses along a golf course to modest ones aimed at first-time buyers.

Yet they didn't change any county stormwater rules. Kitsap County still follows the 1992 manual.

That's not unusual. Snohomish, Skagit, Pierce, Thurston, Mason and Island counties all follow the 1992 manual, and so do countless cities.

Environmentalists and some developers say low-impact development is one answer. The state is starting to promote it, and some local governments say they want to change their rules to allow it.

It turns out it's easier said than done.

But some of the area's top low-impact experts say the builders are copping out, and low-impact methods can still work with customized approaches to each project, instead of cookie-cutter formulas.

"It's way easier for those guys to come in and do what they've always done until there's some regulation that comes in and tells them to do something else," said Curtis Hinman of Washington State University, who has written a widely used manual on low-impact development.

London's infrastructure has a more fundamental problem: It's creaking with age. "Charles Dickens was the best-selling author when most of our pipe work went in," says John Halsall, director of water services at Thames Water, the private company that provides water to greater London. Thames Water maintains more than 300 reservoirs, 99 treatment plants, and more than 20,000 miles of pipe. The city's water system was a triumph of 19th-century engineering, but one-third of the mains are more than 150 years old, veterans of such scourges as Hitler's bombs and corrosively acidic soil. Thames' system leaks 180 million gallons a day, 30 percent of overall flow. To fix a leak, which the company does some 82,000 times a year, it has to shut down traffic and dig up the streets in one of the most congested cities on Earth. A brief walk around the West End turns up a half-dozen work crews digging up Victorian mains, scooping through layers of history to repair the pipes one segment at a time.

Replacing all the Victorian pipes would cost an estimated $3.6 billion. The conundrum facing Thames Water is how to upgrade the crumbling system without tearing up the city or bankrupting the company. There are two sets of solutions: On one hand are small, local, high tech projects. On the other are traditional large-scale civil engineering initiatives that have been a staple of water management since the Roman Empire. Tompkins favors the small-scale approach. In particular, he likes metering. There's no way to measure the water flowing through much of the underground infrastructure, which makes it hard to identify leaky sections. Likewise, not even a quarter of the city's households are metered, and that makes it difficult to encourage conservation. If consumers understood exactly how much they were using, Tompkins reasons, perhaps they would change their behavior, like a dieter motivated by the scale readout every morning.

Thames Water's most controversial project is a $400 million desalination plant called the Thames Gateway. The proposed facility could take in seawater, filter out the salt, and deliver 35 million gallons of drinking water a day during drought emergencies. Desalination would essentially drought-proof the city, the company claims. It's an appealing solution. The ocean is practically limitless, and the plant would run on biodiesel, giving it a green imprimatur. The project was moving through the approval process in 2006 when London's tough, left-leaning mayor, Ken Livingstone, blocked it.

Livingstone argued that the plant was too expensive and that desalination is too energy-intensive. Stripping seawater of its salt is a pricey way to obtain freshwater, cost-effective only for high-end uses like drinking, but not bathing or watering gardens. And the mayor questioned the proposal's environmental cred: Biodiesel emits carbon, and desalination's super-salty byproduct is toxic to marine life. Thames Water would do better, he insisted, to repair London's decrepit labyrinth of pipes.