California Orders Grid Emergency, Power Shortfalls Loom
David R. Baker, Will Wade and Mark Chediak
(Bloomberg) — California ordered a stage-2 power-grid emergency — one step away from rolling blackouts — as a searing heat wave drives temperatures into triple-digits and sends demand for electricity soaring.
The state’s grid operator called for the measure as wildfires — including the Bootleg Fire in south-central Oregon — threaten transmission lines bringing power into California. It comes as a historic drought grips the Western U.S. and temperatures reach record levels in parts of the region.
The threat of blackouts underscore the power grid’s increasing vulnerability as climate change disrupts weather patterns and signal that shortfalls may continue this summer. Last August, California suffered its first rolling outages in almost two decades after hot weather sent electricity demand soaring beyond supplies. Parts of Washington and Idaho recently lost power as all-time high temperatures battered the electricity system.
Excessive heat warnings cover most of California and parts of Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Arizona. The California Independent System Operator, the state’s power grid manager, on Friday issued a statewide alert asking consumers to voluntarily cut back on power use. The state on Thursday asked businesses, farms and residents to voluntarily cut water use by 15% as drought emergency declarations cover 50 of 58 counties.
Power imports to the state, meanwhile, have been squeezed. The Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration said it had to reduce capacity on a key transmission line, the Northwest AC Intertie, by 90% because of the Bootleg fire, a spokesman said.
Temperatures hit 107 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) Friday in Sacramento and 112 Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.
California has pushed hard to switch to solar and wind power while closing older gas-burning plants, but that’s left it vulnerable in evenings when solar production fades. California Independent System Operator Chief Executive Officer Elliot Mainzer said Friday that consumer conservation to avoid outages may be needed for years.
“We recognize these are transitional days and months and years for the California grid,” he said on a conference call with reporters.
Heat waves across the U.S. this year have put utilities on notice that their grids may not be adequate. California had to urge people to conserve power last month to avoid a repeat of last year’s outages, and New York City averted widespread blackouts last week after issuing its own rare emergency call for conservation. Texas also avoided a similar fate in June as unexpected plant outages cut capacity as temperatures spiked.
Read More: A Hotter World Means Keeping the Lights On Is Harder Than Ever
California officials are bracing for a difficult summer. The usual winter rains that water supplies depend on were largely absent. The drought stretching from West Texas to the California coast and north to the Canadian border is already testing power grids as hydro generation dries up just as homes blast air conditioners.
The grid manager has delayed planned retirements of several old, gas-fired power plants along the coast and tweaked electricity market rules to encourage more imports during peak-demand periods. In addition, power companies are installing large-scale batteries to store solar power during the day and supply the grid at night.
The state estimates that doing so will boost capacity by about 2,000 megawatts — roughly the output of two nuclear reactors — by August, and some are already running. Officials forecast demand Friday will peak at about 43,000 megawatts. Demand load typically peaks hours after solar output reaches its maximum.
Also See: California Summer of Heat, Power and Fire Woes Arrives Early
However, while the state can often avoid power shortages by importing power from neighbors, capacity across the west has been unusually stretched amid waves of extreme heat.
The re-opening of offices and other facilities has also added to elevated power use. Electricity generation nationwide increased by 5.9% in April from a year earlier as a result of the country returning to normal levels of electricity demand following pandemic-related shutdowns, according to a June 24 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that gives the most recent data available.
A true daughter of the confederacy has written what should be the last words on the monuments:
By Caroline Randall Williams June 26, 2020
I have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
Dead Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues, solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to redress it. But there are still those — like President Trump and the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell — who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past. I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new perspective.
I am a black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow.
According to the rule of hypodescent (the social and legal practice of assigning a genetically mixed-race person to the race with less social power) I am the daughter of two black people, the granddaughter of four black people, the great-granddaughter of eight black people. Go back one more generation and it gets less straightforward, and more sinister. As far as family history has always told, and as modern DNA testing has allowed me to confirm, I am the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
It is an extraordinary truth of my life that I am biologically more than half white, and yet I have no white people in my genealogy in living memory. No. Voluntary. Whiteness. I am more than half white, and none of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed to claim their children.
What is a monument but a standing memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
You cannot dismiss me as someone who doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
And here I’m called to say that there is much about the South that is precious to me. I do my best teaching and writing here. There is, however, a peculiar model of Southern pride that must now, at long last, be reckoned with.
This is not an ignorant pride but a defiant one. It is a pride that says, “Our history is rich, our causes are justified, our ancestors lie beyond reproach.” It is a pining for greatness, if you will, a wish again for a certain kind of American memory. A monument-worthy memory.
But here’s the thing: Our ancestors don’t deserve your unconditional pride. Yes, I am proud of every one of my black ancestors who survived slavery. They earned that pride, by any decent person’s reckoning. But I am not proud of the white ancestors whom I know, by virtue of my very existence, to be bad actors.
Among the apologists for the Southern cause and for its monuments, there are those who dismiss the hardships of the past. They imagine a world of benevolent masters, and speak with misty eyes of gentility and honor and the land. They deny plantation rape, or explain it away, or question the degree of frequency with which it occurred.
To those people it is my privilege to say, I am proof. I am proof that whatever else the South might have been, or might believe itself to be, it was and is a space whose prosperity and sense of romance and nostalgia were built upon the grievous exploitation of black life.
The dream version of the Old South never existed. Any manufactured monument to that time in that place tells half a truth at best. The ideas and ideals it purports to honor are not real. To those who have embraced these delusions: Now is the time to re-examine your position.
Either you have been blind to a truth that my body’s story forces you to see, or you really do mean to honor the oppressors at the expense of the oppressed, and you must at last acknowledge your emotional investment in a legacy of hate.
Either way, I say the monuments of stone and metal, the monuments of cloth and wood, all the man-made monuments, must come down. I defy any sentimental Southerner to defend our ancestors to me. I am quite literally made of the reasons to strip them of their laurels.
Caroline Randall Williams(@caroranwill) is the author of “Lucy Negro, Redux” and “Soul Food Love,” and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University.
Handful of cities driving urban greenhouse gas emissions – study
Emma Rumney and Isla Binnie
Woman wearing a mask walks past buildings on a polluted day in Hebei.
LONDON/MADRID (Reuters) – Just 25 big cities – almost all of them in China – accounted for more than half of the climate-warming gases pumped out by a sample of 167 urban hubs around the world, an analysis of emissions trends showed on Monday.
In per capita terms, however, emissions from cities in the richest parts of the world are still generally higher than those from urban centres in developing countries, researchers found in the study https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2021.696381/full published in the open access journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities.
The study compared greenhouse gas emissions reported by 167 cities in 53 countries, and found that 23 Chinese cities – among them Shanghai, Beijing and Handan – along with Moscow and Tokyo accounted for 52% of the total.
It included more cities from China, India, the United states and the European Union because of their larger contribution to global emissions and significance to the climate debate.
The findings highlighted the significant role cities play in reducing emissions, said study co-author Shaoqing Chen, an environmental scientist at Sun Yat-sen University in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.
“It is simple, logical,” he said. “If you don’t act, eventually you will suffer from (climate change),” he said.
Average global temperatures have already risen by more than 1 degree Celsius compared to the pre-industrial baseline and are still on track to exceed the 1.5-2 degree limit set by the Paris Agreement.
Chen and other scientists cautioned, however, that some of the data available for use in their study was patchy, with some cities reporting numbers from as far back as 2005.
A lack of consistency in how cities report emissions also makes comparisons tricky, they added.
‘LAST BIG PUSH’
Research published in 2018 in the Environmental Research Letters journal analyzed a much larger sample of 13,000 cities, big and small, finding 100 cities containing 11% of the world’s population drove 18% of its carbon footprint.
Still, the new analysis “contributes to the growing literature and our understanding of urban emissions”, said Yale University Geography and Urban Science professor Karen Seto, who co-authored the 2018 paper.
“It’s really difficult to compare apples to apples on city greenhouse gas emissions but you have to try, and the paper makes a pretty good effort,” added Dan Hoornweg, a professor at Ontario Tech University and former adviser to the World Bank on sustainable cities and climate change.
Chen said the new analysis was the first to look at megacity emissions reduction targets and progress in cutting back.
Sixty-eight of the cities – mostly in developed nations – had set absolute emissions reduction targets.
But only 30 of the 42 cities where progress was tracked in the study had shown a reduction. Most of them were in the United States and Europe.
The analysis confirms scientists’ expectations that whereas in China, cities with high per capita emissions are generally major manufacturing hubs, those in developed nations with the highest per capita rates tend to have strong levels of consumption.
While more developed economies in Europe and elsewhere can now grow without increasing emissions, the world is moving at different speeds, Hoornweg said.
“They generated a tonne of emissions on the way to get there and China is in that stage now. We know India is getting there at some point and the last big push in all of this will be Africa,” he said.
(Additional reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor in Singapore; Editing by Katy Daigle and Helen Popper)
California wildfire grows by 20,000 acres, destroys 20 homes
Dennis Romero
California’s largest wildfire burning amid a scorching summer heat wave consumed more than 20,000 more acres Sunday and destroyed about 20 homes, authorities said.
The fire, called the Beckwourth Complex, has expanded to Nevada, where it jumped a popular highway along the Sierra Nevada mountain range and forced evacuations in Washoe County.
“I know the dry conditions and the winds have been a factor,” said U.S. Forest Service incident spokeswoman Kimberly Kaschalk. “That’s been a challenge since Day One.”
The Doyle Fire Protection District in Doyle, about 50 miles north of Reno, Nevada, estimated in a statement Sunday that 20 homes had been lost to the expanding blaze.
The California Transportation Department said Sunday afternoon that part of Highway 395 was closed in Lassen County, and the sheriff’s office said the mandatory evacuation zone had been expanded.
The 83,926-acre blaze was 8 percent contained Sunday. Federal fire officials reported some progress in holding the fire on the south and southwestern flanks.
Forecasters were optimistic.
“Good news!” the National Weather Service in Reno tweeted Sunday. “Temperatures finally start to cool mid to late week.”
Federal forecasters said overnight lows in some Sierra Nevada valleys could dip into the 40s by midweek.
As brick-and-mortar retailers struggle to stay afloat, many malls around America are slowly dying — and Amazon may capitalize on these now-empty spaces. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the e-commerce giant is in talks with mall owner Simon Property Group to take over anchor department-store spaces previously occupied by Sears and J.C. Penney — both of which have filed for bankruptcy and closed numerous locations in recent months — and turn them into fulfillment centers. This would allow Amazon to have fulfillment centers in more places and cut down on delivery times.
And Amazon wouldn’t be the first company to make use of former mall real estate.
Doctors and Dentists Move Into The Landings in Columbus, Georgia
“Now, supply of available space is up and retailer demand is softer,” Ami Ziff, director of national retail for Time Equities, told CNN. “So you have to be nimble and creative with who to lease it to and go out there and pull in a different type of tenant.”
At a Time Equities property — The Landings in Columbus, Georgia — Ziff said that there’s been an increase of doctors and dentist offices signing leases.
A Charter School Is Opening in a Former Sears in Idaho Falls, Idaho
A former 70,000-square-foot Sears anchor store at the Grand Teton Mall in Idaho Falls, Idaho, is being converted into a charter school, set to open in the fall of 2021, CNN reported. Alturas Preparatory Academy — owned by Alturas International Academy — will house around 600 students in grades six to 12 and will include an outdoor recreation area built on part of the mall’s parking lot.
A 600-Apartment Complex Stands in the Former Site of the Cloverleaf Mall in Chesterfield, Virginia
The Cloverleaf Mall was opened in 1972 and closed in February 2008, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. Crosland LLC, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based developer, bought the entire property and built a shopping and housing complex where the mall once stood, which includes the 600-apartment complex Element at Stonebridge.
Google Takes Over the Westside Pavilion in Los Angeles
In 2019, Google signed a 14-year lease to take over the entirety of the office space available in the now-closed Westside Pavilion mall in Los Angeles, Curbed Los Angeles reported. The former shopping mall will eventually be home to nearly 600,000 square feet of Google offices.
Editorial: Welcome, Republicans, to the real, warming world
The Times Editorial Board
Oil rig pump jacks work near the town of Maricopa, west of Bakersfield. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Faced with polls showing not only that most Americans want more done about climate change, but that a majority of Republicans feel the same way, a substantial number of GOP lawmakers are sounding a conciliatory note on the issue.
Sixty House Republicans have now joined a Conservative Climate Caucus, formed by Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), that is willing at least to acknowledge the problem instead of labeling it a hoax, as President Trump did early on, or pretending that it’s temporary and that human actions haven’t contributed. Among its members are three Californians: Reps. David Valadao of Hanford, Michelle Steel of Seal Beach and Jay Obernolte of Big Bear Lake.
Republicans in both chambers appear ready to start talking — and go a little bit further. The Senate recently voted 92 to 8 for the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which was supported by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. If it passes the House as expected and is signed by President Biden, it would ease the way for farmers and ranchers to earn and sell credits for reducing or mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
That’s progress, as is the less divisive approach. But in truth, the climate caucus and its somewhat more solutions-oriented tone are far too little, coming this late in the game.
Curtis talks about how he has spent a lot of time trying to understand the science; he and other Republicans needed to be quicker studies because the world is running out of time to avert the worst effects of climate change. Worse, the caucus’ public statements indicate that its members won’t support reining in the use of fossil fuels in serious ways, as climate scientists insist we must do. Instead, the caucus calls those sources of greenhouse gases part of the solution to the need for stable sources of energy.
The caucus’ other areas of interest — safe nuclear energy and carbon sequestration — are more promising, with caveats. If Republicans can somehow come up with a truly safe nuclear path, the nation will be all ears. Right now, however, “safe nuclear” rings a little bit like the oxymoron “clean coal.” And before any thought of expanding nuclear energy can occur, the country would first have to identify a place to store spent fuel rods and then figure out a foolproof way to transport them there.
The most stable forms of energy are the nearly infinite ones, such as solar and wind, not fuels that will eventually be tapped out (and that cause other environmental harms in their extraction). Nor does this country need to rely on foreign sources to maintain a steady supply of the sun.
It will be important for Republicans not to use this as a shield to convince America that they really do care about climate change and the increasingly frequent droughts, wildfires and extreme weather events, when in fact they aren’t willing to take tough steps to soften future blows. Any discussion of environmental reform that excludes a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels is just happy talk, not reality.
Nor is it helpful to complain, as Curtis does, that nothing we do will matter much as long as China emits more carbon than the United States. On a per capita basis, this country still produces more greenhouse gas emissions, and China has been making major strides toward clean energy.
For now, incremental change is better than none at all. The reality is that support from both parties will be needed to pass important new climate change laws, and so the help of Republicans is welcome in accomplishing that — as long as they don’t demand concessions on the move to clean, sustainable energy in exchange for supporting tree-planting. With the mounting evidence all around us, the GOP should not have to be dragged kicking and screaming into admitting that there is a climate crisis and that it will require serious and sometimes uncomfortable commitments from the nation.
John Roberts,Dianne Feinstein,Lindsey Graham – Credit: J. Scott Applewhite/AP
WASHINGTON — In the fall of 1981, a young conservative lawyer named John Roberts, fresh off a Supreme Court clerkship, arrived at the Justice Department at the start of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. Hired as a special assistant to the attorney general, Roberts focused on voting rights, and in particular the battle underway in Congress over the reauthorization of parts of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965. That included Section 2 of the law, which gave voters a tool to fight discriminatory voting laws and rules in the states.
As Roberts settled in at DOJ, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans in Congress wanted to reform Section 2. Under their plan, voters could strike down discriminatory voting laws by proving those laws caused discrimination, not that the people who made the laws had set out to discriminate. In other words, intent didn’t matter; outcomes did.
John Roberts helped lead the fight to stop this change. He drafted op-eds, talking points, and memos arguing that the proposed reforms gave the federal government too much power to influence state voting laws and would lead to a quota system for who held elected office.
Roberts and the Reagan DOJ failed. The Voting Rights Act reauthorization passed with bipartisan support in 1982, and the number of lawsuits about discriminatory voting laws brought under Section 2 went from three in 1981 to 175 in 1988, according to the book Give Us the Ballot by the journalist Ari Berman. But Roberts would get his revenge. He claimed the Supreme Court chief justice’s seat once held by his mentor, William Rehnquist, in 2005. In the ensuing years, Roberts has chiseled away, piece by piece, at the nation’s laws for voting rights, campaign spending, and other democracy issues. Today, voting-rights activists and election-law scholars say the Roberts court, having dismantled chunks of the post-Watergate ethics reforms and the Voting Rights Act, is one of the biggest impediments to democratic reform at a time when the country needs those reforms more than ever.
The final two opinions of the most recent Supreme Court term put this phenomenon on full display. In Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta, the court’s six conservative justices ruled that California’s requirement that charities disclose their biggest donors to state regulators was unconstitutional. Critics of anonymous political spending say the decision will fuel future challenges to transparency laws and empower anonymous donors at a time when American politics is awash in dark money from Democratic and Republican groups alike. “We are now on a clear path to enshrining a constitutional right to anonymous spending in our democracy, and securing an upper hand for dark-money influence in perpetuity,” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) said in a statement reacting to the decision.
In the second decision, Brnovich v. DNC, the Roberts court knee-capped Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The Brnovich decision, legal experts say, will give greater leeway to state governments when they craft voting rules, and makes it much harder to prove that a voting law is discriminatory. “This is the rewrite of Section 2 that John Roberts couldn’t get in 1981,” Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, tells Rolling Stone. “I think it’s going to be extremely difficult now (to bring Section 2 challenges) except for the most egregious forms of voter discrimination.”
Combined, the AFPF and Brnovich decisions continue the Roberts court’s decade-plus track record of undermining the hard-fought voting laws enacted during the Civil Rights Movement and the anti-corruption reforms passed in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. And with a six-vote conservative majority on the Supreme Court in place for years — if not decades — to come, that trend shows no sign of ending soon. “As long as there’s a strong conservative majority on the court, any hope that the courts will do anything to rein campaign spending or states’ efforts to restrict the vote or tilt the playing field is indeed a hollow hope,” says Lee Drutman, a senior fellow in the Political Reform program at New America.
In the face of the Roberts court’s agenda, reformers in Congress and in state legislatures as well as election-law scholars say the need for new policies tailored to survive the high court’s scrutiny. Coming at a time when Republican state governments are seeking to restrict access to the ballot box, the Supreme Court’s latest decisions are “yet another affront to Americans’ right to pick their elected officials and know who is working to influence the democratic process,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) tells Rolling Stone. “This further underscores the need for Congress to pass legislation to protect the freedom to vote and ensure that our democracy works for the people, not for special interests and billionaires.”
Before surveying the options under consideration by reformers, it’s worth better understanding how far-reaching and potentially damaging the Supreme Court’s last two decisions were.
In the AFPF case, the court struck down California’s requirement that large donors to charities must be disclosed to the state government so that the state can root out possible fraud related to those donors. The Americans for Prosperity Foundation, a Koch-backed group, and the Thomas More Law Center challenged that requirement, saying it violated the group’s freedom to associate in private. They also cited the risk of harassment if the private donor information became public (as had happened in the past when some donor information was leaked).
The case harkened back to the influential NAACP v. Alabama decision in 1958, when the Supreme Court ruled that the NAACP didn’t have to disclose members who feared facing retribution in the Jim Crow South. In AFPF, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, ACLU, and other civil-rights groups invoked that earlier case in a friend-of-the-court brief that argued for the right to associate in private and urged the court to reach a narrow decision that would have struck down California’s rule without broader implications for transparency in civic and political life.
Instead, the majority’s opinion, written by Roberts, has broad implications for politics and activism. Before, the Supreme Court had made clear that disclosure was important enough to preserve even if it led to some nastiness or vitriol as a result. In his AFPF opinion, Roberts tossed that out the window. The mere possibility of a chilling effect on association was enough, he wrote in his opinion, to justify getting rid of certain disclosure requirements.
Roberts’ decision does more than wipe out California’s law, experts say. Under this reasoning, it opens the door to future challenges to longstanding laws on the disclosure of campaign donations put in place after Watergate, when untraceable money flooded into American elections and led to corruption. “Today’s analysis marks reporting and disclosure requirements with a bull’s-eye,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent in the AFPF case.
In Brnovich, the voting-rights case, the Roberts court took the opposite stance toward a state’s authority to set the rules. This time, in an opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito, the court deferred to the states to set their own voting rules and raised the bar almost impossibly high to challenge those laws for alleged discrimination, voting-rights advocates say. The majority’s opinion makes it so that a state can justify voting changes (cutting early voting, restricting absentee voting, reducing polling places) if it did so in the interest of preventing possible fraud, even if such fraud is vanishingly rare. The majority’s Brnovich ruling also takes as its benchmark the year 1982 — the year when Congress last passed major updates to the Voting Rights Act — for gauging the discriminatory nature (or not) of voting changes.
Rick Hasen, the election-law expert, describes the practical effect of the decision like this. Imagine that a state offered a week of early voting, he says, and there was evidence that a large number of African American voters used the Sunday before the election to do Souls to the Polls drives to get people to vote right after church. Then imagine that, post-Brnovich, the same state got rid of Sunday early voting and the evidence suggested the state did so to blunt African American turnout.
Under the Roberts court majority’s approach, Hasen says, this would likely not run afoul of Section 2. In his opinion, Alito says the benchmark for measuring whether a voting change is discriminatory is how it compares to the voting rules when the VRA was last reauthorized — in 1982. His test also implies that as long as a state can point to other voting opportunities, it can fairly justify cutting something like Sunday early voting. “For one reason, in 1982 there were very few early voting opportunities, so eliminating early voting can’t be a Section 2 violation because that wasn’t the norm in 1982,” Rick Hasen says. “For another thing, you have to look at the election system as a whole, so long as there are other ways to vote, then it’s not discriminatory under this court’s ruling.”
So what can — and what should — Congress do?
Lee Drutman, the New America political-reform expert, says the For the People Act, aka H.R. 1 and S. 1, contains a number of provisions that could repair some of the damage done by the Supreme Court’s two most recent decisions. That bill — which was recently filibustered in the Senate but Democrats have vowed to revive — would increase disclosure of dark-money donations, mandate paper ballots, and give the federal government more latitude to expand access to the ballot box.
But Drutman acknowledges that many of the most popular pieces of the For the People Act — which has a slim change of passing in the first place — will face challenges by conservative and libertarian legal groups. “Republicans are going to litigate the hell out of it,” he says.
As pressure builds inside the American democratic system because of hyper-partisanship, the nationalization of politics, and many other factors, what’s needed are release valves, Drutman says. He supports reforms that might break the “two-party doom loop,” as he puts it. Those include Alaska’s model of a top-four primary election and ranked-choice voting like in New York City but applied to, say, the U.S. Senate. “I think you’d see opportunities for more political parties and new coalitions forming,” he says. “You’d get the release valves.”
Rick Hasen says lawmakers should focus for now on the most immediate threat to American democracy: election subversion. He says the country narrowly avoided such a disaster in the 2020 election despite Trump’s attempts to pressure state and local election officials, like when he asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,870 votes to give him the victory in Georgia. But with the Trumpist wing of the GOP in full control, and Republican state legislatures moving to pass laws that empower partisans to dictate how elections are run and counted, subversion remains a threat, whether it’s the prospect of a state legislature selecting a rival slate of electors, a president pressuring election workers to change the count, or members of Congress disrupting the certification process in Washington, D.C.
Hasen says the universal use of paper ballots, tougher penalties for anyone who interferes with the election-counting process, and reform of the antiquated Electoral Count Act could all help prevent a future attempt to overturn or change an election outcome. It’s also a more narrowly tailored solution that, he says, could win over 10 Senate Republicans.
“We may not know until January 2025, when Congress has counted the Electoral College votes of the states, whether those who support election integrity and the rule of law succeeded in preventing election subversion,” Hasen wrote this spring. “That may seem far away, but the time to act to prevent a democratic crisis is now.”
Editorial: Trumpification complete: The mess in Ohio is a terrible sign for America
New York Daily News, New York Daily News
After losing the presidency and the Senate thanks to Donald Trump’s disastrous management of COVID, Republicans look determined to try to ascend again in Washington by parroting his stolen election lies. If you can’t snap out of a slumber, it seems, the second best thing is to dive back into the delusions of your dream.
Consider Ohio, where a recent two-term Republican governor named John Kasich spoke up with intelligence and strength against Trump, and where the current Republican governor, Mike DeWine, correctly diagnosed the Jan. 6 insurrection, saying that the ex-president ”has started a fire that has threatened to burn down our democracy.”
The Kasich-DeWine GOP is nowhere to be found among the current crop of Republicans vying to replace the retiring Sen. Rob Portman next year.
Jane Timken, former state GOP chair, has boasted of turning the party into “a well-oiled, pro-Trump machine.” Another Senate candidate, former state Treasurer Josh Mandel, called Rep. Anthony Gonzalez a “traitor,” the likes of whom should be “eradicated from the Republican Party,” after Gonzalez voted to impeach Trump.
Then there’s J.D. Vance, author of “Hillbilly Elegy.” The Republican golden boy who grew up poor in Appalachia, went to Iraq, then graduated from Yale Law School and became a venture capitalist is in the midst of a bout of self-flagellation for telling the truth about Trump in 2016. Back then, he tweeted that Trump was “reprehensible” for his views on “immigrants, Muslims, etc.” and told NPR, “I can’t stomach Trump.” In his desperate bid to get on the right side of the monster, Vance has deleted the offending tweets, saying “I regret being wrong about the guy.”
If the Republican Party in not-long-ago-swing-state Ohio has been swallowed whole by Trump, even as his free-fall dive off the deep end continues, even as he and his confidantes, buying into a clinically insane conspiracy theory, seem to think his return to the Oval Office could come as soon as August, what hope does the national GOP have?
Opinion: Think Los Angeles is a desert? You need to see it from the San Gabriel Mountains
Paul Thornton
Low clouds drift into the mountains and valleys of the San Gabriels in 2020. (Los Angeles Times)
There are a few things wrong with the libelous statement “Los Angeles is in a desert.” First, it is factually inaccurate (but maybe not for much longer), as explained by The Times Editorial Board recently. Second, even if it were true, it wouldn’t explain the whole story. A trip into our local mountains can help explain why.
From sea level or thereabouts, much of Los Angeles feels flat and dry — like a desert. But take a steep hike to one of the looming peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains, and you’re rewarded with views that are both visually stunning and educational. Perched a mile above the city, you see vast alluvial fans and washes emanating from the mountains that are graded, dammed up and otherwise “controlled” in ways that shunt water to the ocean and make urbanization possible. Prior to the area’s buildup, this water was left to find its own way to the sea or fan out over the basins that would eventually be paved over and turned into tidy street grids. Even if precipitation over what would become Los Angeles wasn’t plentiful, the water that flowed from the San Gabriels and San Bernardinos was much more so, percolating into the aquifers beneath us and creating a wetter, vastly more complex landscape than we can imagine today. There’s a reason one of our major streets is called “La Cienega.”
The letters here were written in response to the previously mentioned editorial. As we discuss yet another water emergency in California and climate change’s role in it, perhaps it’s worth remembering how our alteration of the landscape to make the area “habitable” may have made it less so.
To the editor: Every time I read an article about how we don’t have enough water and all the ways we should preserve what we have, I think about the thousands of new houses and apartments we are building in and around Los Angeles without sufficiently considering how that affects our water use.
Why is it that water usage is not considered more thoroughly when building all these new units? It should be the first consideration. I also rarely read about how much traffic density will change with all this unlimited growth in Southern California.
When I look at the photos that The Times has been running of Lake Mead, I think of the phenomenal growth of Las Vegas and am not surprised that the reservoir, the largest in the United States, is running out of water.
We have to look at the whole picture when we decide to build, build, build. That is not happening now.
Marie Gamboa, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Once again, kudos to The Times for its unwavering persistence in keeping at the forefront the very real and threatening effects of climate change to those of us right here, right now in California.
Unlike those past civilizations that were not able to adapt to the reduction in water resources, I’d like to think many of us want to answer the call and support whatever measures are deemed necessary to meet the current challenges.
So, L.A. Times, please write another editorial outlining how we can support or demand from our water resource officials the historic actions necessary to meet the moment.
In the interim, can we all agree a monumental next step would be for all of us to demand passage of pending legislation in Congress to attach a fee to carbon production and fossil fuels? This would reduce carbon emissions and provide funding for the kind of necessary innovation mentioned above.
Wayne Bass, Mission Viejo
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To the editor: Right — we are not yet living in a desert, but the California landscape is a charred husk as fire crews put out yet more blazes up and down the state. And it’s almost beside the point to bolster water infrastructure without addressing the imperative to sharply reduce emissions and sequester carbon.
We will have more fires, more drought, more lake and reservoir loss and more sea level rise until we face this climate Armageddon.
Elizabeth Fenner, Los Angeles
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To the editor: Your editorial was a well-written piece about the state of the local area and the western United States as a whole with respect to our water supply.
In listening to all the discussion of President Biden’s infrastructure plan, why do I hear no mention of desalination plants for the western United States? Global warming is making oceans rise, so there is abundant supply.
This truly would be an infrastructure project and would help alleviate the Achilles’ heel of living in an arid climate.
Frank Perri, Claremont
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To the editor: Part of the solution — which would help solve two problems — is covering the surface-level aqueducts that bring water to urban areas with solar panels.
A great deal of water is lost to evaporation. Covering these aqueducts would reduce that as well as provide vast amounts of electricity while not putting open land at risk of destruction.
‘We live in a desert. We have to act like it’: Las Vegas faces reality of drought
Oliver Milman
Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
Investigator Perry Kaye jammed the brakes of his government-issued vehicle to survey the offense. “Uh oh this doesn’t look too good. Let’s take a peek,” he said, exiting the car to handle what has become one of the most existential violations in drought-stricken Las Vegas – a faulty sprinkler.
Kaye is one of nearly 50 water waste investigators deployed by the local water authority to crack down on even the smallest misuse of a liquid perilously scarce in the US west, desiccated by two decades of drought. The situation in Las Vegas, which went a record 240 consecutive days without rain last year, is increasingly severe.
Lake Mead, the vast reservoir that supplies Las Vegas with 90% of its water, has now plummeted to a historic low, meaning Nevada faces the first ever mandatory reduction in its water supply next year. This looming cutback is forcing restrictions upon the city that has somehow managed to thrive as a gaudy oasis in the baking Mojave desert.
“The lake isn’t getting any fuller at this time so we need to conserve every single drop,” said Kaye, an energetic former US air force serviceman who wears a hi-vis vest and brandishes a badge as he does his rounds searching for violators. He starts his shift at 4am. “A lot of people think because we are government workers we are not out there at that time but we are out 24/7, every day of the year,” he said.
Kaye regularly hands out fines – they start at $80 and then double for each further offense – for the sort of rule-breaking he has spotted in Summerlin, a wealthy Las Vegas enclave where landscapers tend manicured grounds in the soaring heat. Water sprayed on to lawns and plants isn’t allowed to flow off the property, but that day a damaged sprinkler had caused water to cascade into the gutter, where the precious resource is lost.
“Look, we’ve got a little creek or stream here,” said Kaye, as he used his phone to video the water snaking on to the road. “If everyone did this, quite a bit of water would be wasted.”
It’s so hot in Vegas – this July day’s temperature will breach 40C (104F) – that the errant water will evaporate within five minutes. Kaye planted a yellow flag next to the leak as a warning to the homeowners but a few taps on the computer mounted in his cruiser shows this property has a previous warning, so an $80 fine will be on its way.
There’s a growing realization, however, that such rules – no watering between 11am and 7pm, none at all on Sundays – won’t be sufficient as Nevada is squeezed by a drought that has escalated dangerously in 2021. In June, the state passed a law to rip up “non-functional” public turf in Las Vegas, such as grass planted beside roads or on roundabouts, over the next five years to save around 10% of city water use.
“That is just wasteful – the only person who walks on that is the person who cuts it,” said Kaye, jabbing a finger at a nearby grass verge median. “Some people just want to recreate home, where they grew up with grass.” The new law, along with a financial incentive given to homeowners to replace thirsty grass with more hardy desert plants and rocks, is an acknowledgment that climate change won’t easily allow the imposition of a verdant green oasis upon a bone-dry desert basin.
A city that contains a huge replica of the Eiffel tower, sprawling golf courses and a simulacrum of Venetian canals complete with gondolas can never be said to fit in with its surroundings. But Las Vegas, called “The Meadows” in Spanish due to its natural springs that were pumped dry by the 1960s, is at least aware of its setting in a place so arid that only a few small creosote bushes and tumbleweeds can survive here naturally.
“We live in the desert. We are the driest city in the United States, in the driest state in the United States,” said Colby Pellegrino, deputy manager of resources for the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “We have to act like it.”
Pellegrino said the recent escalation of the drought has been “very scary” for some Vegas residents, although she insists the water authority has planned for this moment. Lake Mead’s level dropped under 1,075ft in June, barely a third full, triggering what will be the first ever cutbacks under a seven-state agreement on sharing the water from the Colorado River, which is harnessed by the Hoover dam to create the reservoir.
Different states get different water allocations and Nevada is a victim of its depopulated history, getting just 300,000 acre-feet of water a year (by comparison California gets 4.4m acre-feet) under an agreement struck before the Hoover dam was completed in the 1930s. “The joke is that Nevada’s representative was drunk,” said Pellegrino, who was born in 1983, when the state’s population was barely 900,000. It’s now more than 3m and receives tens of millions of tourists a year.
Houses, trees and swimming pools spring from the desert in Henderson, Nevada.Photograph: David McNew/Getty Images
This small water allocation will shrink by 21,000 acre-feet with the new cuts, although Nevada has made impressive strides in keeping below its low cap, slashing its water use despite the population nearly doubling since the early 2000s. Pellegrino is confident that further savings can be made and scrutiny is being placed upon the water used in Vegas casinos’ ubiquitous cooling systems.
But global heating’s impact upon the west’s snowpack and rivers is unrelenting and the city’s water savings will only go so far. Las Vegas only has a supporting role in its own fate. Three-quarters of allocated Colorado River water is used to irrigate thirsty agriculture, and the overall water supply is more dependent upon the amount of snow melting hundreds of miles away in the Rocky Mountains than some extra marginal savings made in the suburbs.
“Vegas has done great things such as ripping out the grass, but we’ve lost 20% of the flow of the Colorado River since 2000 and another 10% loss by 2050 is completely possible,” said Brad Udall, a water and climate scientist at Colorado State University whose research has focused on the stresses facing the river.
“I worry it could be even more than that, and that should frighten everyone.”
Back in Summerlin, Perry Kaye is also relentless. A house opposite the first offender has broken sprinklers splurging water into puddles on the grass and road. Kaye bangs on the ornate door to inform the homeowner, but no one is in.
“These sprinklers haven’t popped up properly, they are just oozing everywhere,” muttered Kaye. He has been policing water waste for the past 16 years, issuing countless fines in that time. “I had hoped I would’ve worked myself out of a job by now. But it looks like I will retire first.”
