Category: Health – Happiness

Associated Press

Deadline looms for drought-stricken states to cut water use

Sam Metz and Felicia Fonseca – August 14, 2022

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — Banks along parts of the Colorado River where water once streamed are now just caked mud and rock as climate change makes the Western U.S. hotter and drier.

More than two decades of drought have done little to deter the region from diverting more water than flows through it, depleting key reservoirs to levels that now jeopardize water delivery and hydropower production.

Cities and farms in seven U.S. states are bracing for cuts this week as officials stare down a deadline to propose unprecedented reductions to their use of the water, setting up what’s expected to be the most consequential week for Colorado River policy in years.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in June told the states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — to figure out how to use at least 15% less water next year, or have restrictions imposed on them. On top of that, the bureau is expected to publish hydrology projections that will trigger additional cuts already agreed to.

“The challenges we are seeing today are unlike anything we have seen in our history,” Camille Touton, the bureau’s commissioner, said in a U.S. Senate hearing that month.

Tensions over the extent of the cuts and how to spread them equitably have flared, with states pointing fingers and stubbornly clinging to their water rights despite the looming crisis.

“It’s not fun sitting around a table figuring out who is going to sacrifice and how much,” said Bill Hasencamp, the Colorado River resources manager at Metropolitan Water District, which provides water to most of Southern California.

Representatives from the seven states convened in Denver last week for eleventh-hour negotiations behind closed doors. Officials party to discussions said the most likely targets for cuts are farmers in Arizona and California. Agricultural districts in those states are asking to be paid generously to shoulder that burden.

But the tentative agreements fall short of what the Bureau of Reclamation has demanded and state officials say they hope for more time to negotiate details.

The Colorado River cascades down from the Rocky Mountains into the arid deserts of the Southwest. It’s the primary water supply for 40 million people. About 70% of its water goes toward irrigation, sustaining a $15 billion-a-year agricultural industry that supplies 90% of the United States’ winter vegetables.

The river is divided among Mexico and the seven U.S. states under a series of agreements that date back a century, to a time when more water flowed through the river. But climate change has transformed the river’s hydrology, providing less snowmelt and causing hotter temperatures and more evaporation. As it’s yielded less water, the states have agreed to cuts tied to the levels of reservoirs that store river water.

Last year, federal officials for the first time declared a water shortage, triggering cuts to Nevada, Arizona and Mexico’s share of the river to help prevent the two largest reservoirs — Lake Powell and Lake Mead — from dropping low enough to threaten hydropower production and stop water from flowing through their dams.

The proposals for supplemental cuts due this week have inflamed disagreement between upper basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — and lower basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — over how to spread the pain. The lower basin states use most of the water and have thus far shouldered most of the cuts. The upper basin states have historically not used their full allocations but want to maintain their water rights to plan for population growth.

Gene Shawcroft, the chairman of Utah’s Colorado River Authority, believes the lower basin states should take most of the cuts because they use most of the water and their full allocations.

He said it was his job to protect Utah’s allocation for growth projected for decades ahead: “The direction we’ve been given as water purveyors is to make sure we have water for the future.”

In a letter last month, representatives from the upper basin states proposed a five-point conservation plan that they said would save water but argued most of the cuts needed to come from the lower basin. The plan didn’t commit to any numbers.

“The focus is getting the tools in place and working with water users to get as much as we can rather than projecting a water number,” Chuck Cullom, the executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission, told The Associated Press.

That position, however, is unsatisfactory to many in lower basin states already facing cuts.

“It’s going to come to a head particularly if the upper basin states continue their negotiating position, saying, ‘We’re not making any cuts,’” said Bruce Babbitt, who served as Interior secretary from 2003-2011.

Lower basin states have yet to go public with plans to contribute, but officials said last week that they had a tentative proposal to reduce consumption that fell slightly short of the federal government’s request to cut 2 to 4 million acre-feet.

An acre-foot of water is enough to serve 2-3 households annually.

Hasencamp, the Metropolitan Water District’s Colorado River resource manager, said all the districts in the state that draw from the river had agreed to contribute water or money to the plan, pending approval by their respective boards. Water districts, in particular the Imperial Irrigation District, have been adamant that any voluntary cut does not curtail their high priority water rights.

Southern California cities likely will be putting up money that could fund fallowing farmland in places like Imperial County and water managers are considering leaving water they’ve stored in Lake Mead as part of their contribution.

Arizona will likely be hit hard with reductions. The state has in the past few years shouldered much of the cuts and with its growing population and robust agricultural industry, has less wiggle room than its neighbors to take on more, said Arizona Department of Water Resources Director Tom Buschatzke. Some tribes in Arizona have also contributed to propping up Lake Mead in the past, and could play an outsized role in any new proposal.

Irrigators around Yuma, Arizona, have proposed taking 925,000 acre-feet less of Colorado River water in 2023 and leaving it in Lake Mead if they’re paid $1.4 billion, or $1,500 per acre-foot. The cost is far above the going rate, but irrigators defended their proposal as fair considering the cost to grow crops and get them to market.

Wade Noble, the coordinator for a coalition that represents Yuma water rights holders, said it was the only proposal put forth publicly that includes actual cuts, rather than theoretical cuts to what users are allocated on paper.

Some of the compensation-for-conservation funds could come from a $4 billion drought earmark in the Inflation Reduction Act under consideration in Washington, U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona told the AP.

Sinema acknowledged paying farmers to conserve wasn’t a long-term solution: “In the short-term, however, in order to meet our day-to-day needs and year-to-year needs, ensuring that we’re creating financial incentives for non-use will help us get through,” she said.

Babbitt, too, said money in the legislation will not “miraculously solve the problem” and prices for water must be reasonable to avoid gouging because most water users will take a hit.

“There’s no way that these cuts can all be paid for at a premium price for years and years,” he said.

Fonseca reported from Flagstaff, Arizona. Associated Press reporter Kathleen Ronayne contributed from Sacramento, California.

Yahoo! News

Here’s what the Inflation Reduction Act will do to combat climate change

Ben Adler, Senior Editor – August 9, 2022

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) passed by the Senate over the weekend will pursue an extremely wide and varied array of strategies intended to combat climate change. The $369 billion in climate-related spending over 10 years targets five areas: consumer clean energy costs, decarbonizing various sectors of the economy, domestic clean energy manufacturing, environmental justice, and agriculture and land use. Taken together, these programs would help the U.S. reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from 2005 levels by 2030, and would save an estimated 3,700 to 3,900 lives per year thanks to cleaner air from a reduction in burning fossil fuels.

This approach represents a break from many past congressional proposals designed to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming, most of which proposed using a singular, overarching policy, such as taxing emissions or requiring tradable permits for emissions. Those measures all died in Congress, but this one made it through the Senate and is expected to pass the House later this week.

“The whole package in terms of dealing with climate change is a long-overdue improvement,” former Democratic Rep. Henry Waxman told Yahoo News on Tuesday. Waxman was chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee for many years, and he co-wrote a bill that passed the House but died in the Senate that would have capped carbon emissions and gradually reduced the number of tradable credits for them, a system known as cap-and-trade.

“Unlike other efforts in the past, such as cap-and-trade or a carbon tax, this approach gives a lot of incentives, financial especially, through the tax code and appropriations for industry to accomplish a reduction in emissions,” Waxman said. “This climate proposal has very little, if any, regulation. It’s a lot of incentives to develop, in effect, a partnership with industry and the government … to sharpen up the technology to accomplish our goals.”

Here’s a guide to the biggest programs in each bucket of climate policies, and what they will mean for American families.

Consumer clean energy costs

The IRA would pour money into helping homeowners, especially those with low and moderate incomes, and lower their carbon footprint and their energy bills by helping them transition to more efficient heating and cooling systems. There will be a $9 billion program to help low-income households switch to electric appliances (such as stoves) and to retrofit their homes for energy efficiency (by insulating windows, for example).

There will also be tax credits for replacing oil and gas burners with electric heat pumps and water heaters and installing rooftop solar, allowing customers to get 30% off the cost of these purchases.

To reduce dependence on oil, the bill would provide a $4,000 consumer tax credit for lower- and middle-income individuals to buy used electric vehicles, and a $7,500 tax credit to those who make less than $150,000 per year or couples who make less than $300,000 per year who buy new electric vehicles. (Qualifying EVs must cost less than $55,000 for cars and less than $80,000 for trucks.) There is also a $1 billion grant program to help local authorities make affordable housing more energy-efficient.

A family that uses all these rebates and tax credits could receive an additional grand total of $28,500 in incentives, according to the Center for American Progress. Rewiring America, an advocacy group that promotes electrification, estimates that a family that takes advantage of these incentives will save an average of $1,800 per year on home heating fuel and lower energy bills.

However, in order to win the crucial support of Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., the IRA requires that an EV eligible for the tax credit must have a battery built in North America with minerals mined or recycled there as well. Currently, most EVs on the market would not qualify. The purpose is to develop EV building capacity domestically, instead of relying on China, which is the main producer of lithium-ion batteries. But automakers have expressed doubts that they will be able to meet the bill’s requirements on its timeline.

Decarbonizing the economy

About $30 billion will be doled out in grants and loan programs to states and electric utilities to switch utilities from burning gas and coal to using clean energy sources such as wind and solar power. There are also grants and tax credits for clean commercial vehicles — think electric delivery trucks, buses and taxis — and money for efforts to reduce emissions from industrial processes, such as chemical, steel and cement plants.

In order to use the federal government’s buying power to catalyze private sector investment as well, the IRA contains $9 billion for the U.S. to buy clean technologies. For example, it includes $3 billion for the U.S. Postal Service to purchase zero-emission vehicles.

As part of this bill’s emphasis on equity, there is a $27 billion “clean energy technology accelerator” that will distribute funds to deploy clean energy technologies, especially in lower-income communities. An example of a recipient of these funds would be, say, a nonprofit that helps low-income renters, who can’t buy a solar panel for their own home, enjoy the cost savings of buying solar panels by pooling their money and buying solar panels to go in a public space and sharing in the savings

In a major win for environmentalists, there is also going to be a program to reduce the leakage of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, from oil and gas wells and pipelines. This is the rare portion of the IRA that includes sticks as well as carrots: grants to help the industry comply and the imposition of fees for operators that continue to leak methane at a high rate.

Domestic clean energy manufacturing

Whatever the costs and benefits of Manchin’s buy-American requirements for the EV tax credits, every Democrat agrees that developing the ability to produce the key ingredients of a clean energy economy within the United States would be beneficial. So the IRA includes $30 billion worth of tax credits for manufacturing solar panels, wind turbines, batteries capable of storing wind and solar energy, and the processing of key minerals needed for all those technologies (and for electric vehicles).

Separate from those tax credits for making the actual products, there are $10 billion in tax credits for building the infrastructure needed for that production, such as wind turbine and solar panel factories, and $2 billion for renovating auto factories to make EVs. The federal government will also offer up to $20 billion in loans to build new EV manufacturing facilities across the country and will provide $2 billion for additional clean energy research.

Environmental justice

Predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods and poorer communities suffer an outsize share of the effects of climate change, such as extreme heat, flooding and the pollution from burning fossil fuels on highways and in factories and power plants. The IRA will give out $3 billion in block grants for community-led projects to deal with those kinds of problems, another $3 billion for neighborhood improvements like reconnecting areas separated by highways, $3 billion to reduce pollution at ports and $1 billion for electric heavy-duty vehicles, like garbage trucks.

Agriculture and land use

Plants absorb carbon dioxide, so how they are managed can affect how much carbon is in the atmosphere. The IRA will spend $20 billion on climate-smart agriculture practices (rotating crops instead of planting the same ones in the same place every year, for example) and $5 billion for forest conservation and urban tree planting.

The bill also incorporates tax credits and grants to support the domestic production of lower-carbon biofuels and $2.6 billion in grants to conserve and restore coastal areas that are needed both to absorb carbon and to manage storm surges that are becoming severe because of climate change, via rising sea levels and more intense storms.

The bill also includes some measures that were needed to win Manchin’s support that will actually make climate change worse, such as requirements that the federal government lease swaths of federal land and coastal areas for oil and gas drilling. As with the electric vehicles, Manchin is focused on producing as much energy domestically as possible. Still, the overwhelming majority of environmentalists are exultant at the IRA’s overall potential to reduce the severity of climate change.