U.S. report concluded COVID-19 may have leaked from Wuhan lab – WSJ
Outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Wuhan
(Reuters) -A report on the origins of COVID-19 by a U.S. government national laboratory concluded that the hypothesis of a virus leak from a Chinese lab in Wuhan is plausible and deserves further investigation, the Wall Street Journal said on Monday, citing people familiar with the classified document.
The study was prepared in May 2020 by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and was referred to by the State Department when it conducted an inquiry into the pandemic’s origins during the final months of the Trump administration, the WSJ report https://on.wsj.com/3pw8T5F said.
Lawrence Livermore’s assessment drew on a genomic analysis of the COVID-19 virus, the Journal said. Lawrence Livermore declined to comment on the Wall Street Journal report.
President Joe Biden said last month he had ordered aides to find answers to the origin of the virus.
U.S. intelligence agencies are considering two likely scenarios – that the virus resulted from a laboratory accident or that it emerged from human contact with an infected animal – but they have not come to a conclusion, Biden said.
A still-classified U.S. intelligence report circulated during former President Donald Trump’s administration alleged that three researchers at China’s Wuhan Institute of Virology became so ill in November 2019 that they sought hospital care, U.S. government sources have said.
U.S. officials have accused China of not being transparent about the virus’ origins, a charge Beijing has denied.
Separately, Mike Ryan, a top World Health Organization official said on Monday the WHO cannot compel China to divulge more data on COVID-19’s origins, while adding it will propose studies needed to take understanding of where the virus emerged to the “next level”.
Earlier this month, U.S. infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci called on China to release the medical records of nine people whose ailments might provide vital clues into whether COVID-19 first emerged as the result of a lab leak.
(Reporting by Akriti Sharma and Kanishka Singh in Bengaluru and Eric Beech in Washington; Editing by Chris Reese, Leslie Adler and Edwina Gibbs)
Arizona governor issues declarations of emergency in response to wildfires
Tori B. Powell
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey has issued Declarations of Emergency in response to two wildfires that have burned more than 146,000 acres in his state, he announced Wednesday. The declarations will provide up to $400,000 for response efforts.
“The Declarations of Emergency and Federal Grants will help make sure responders have the necessary resources for response and recovery — protecting people, pets & property,” Ducey tweeted. “We will continue to work closely with local officials to ensure the needs of those communities are met.”
The Telegraph Fire was first reported Friday afternoon and was estimated to be over 80,000 acres in size as of midday Wednesday, according to incident information management system InciWeb. The fire was 21% contained and more than 750 personnel were responding to it.
The cause of the “fast moving” and “dynamic fire” near the southern border of Tonto National Forest is still under investigation.
Residents in the Top-of-the-World area were instructed Sunday to “evacuate immediately” by the Pinal County Sheriff’s Office. “Numerous evacuation status alerts” have been issued in nearby areas in response to the “extreme fire activity” as well.
The Red Cross of Arizona has set up evacuation centers and large animal sheltering has also been made available, the sheriff’s office said. Telegraph Fire Information advised residents in surrounding areas to “remain vigilant and be prepared to evacuate.”
The second active wildfire, called the Mescal Fire, was reported last Monday and was an estimated 70,066 acres in the Mescal Mountains as of Wednesday, according to Inciweb. The 610 responders have made “significant progress” on containing the fire by using methods like aerial water drops.
“Firefighters have been successful in reducing the fire threat to important infrastructure, resources and communities,” the incident overview stated. “Fire potential continues to exist.”
Certain highways in the area have begun to reopen and all residents in San Carlos have been directed to return home. Other areas like East El Capitan remain under evacuation. The cause of the Mescal Fire is also still under investigation.
“Arizonans must take the threat of wildfires seriously and follow all safety precautions during these dry months, including following evacuation orders,” Ducey stated. “I’m grateful to our brave firefighters and everyone working to protect Arizonans this wildfire season.”
American democracy is fighting for its life – and Republicans don’t care
Robert Reich
Photograph: Getty Images
On Sunday, the West Virginia senator Joe Manchin announced in an op-ed in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he opposes the For the People Act. He also opposes ending the filibuster.
An op-ed in the most prominent state newspaper is about as non-negotiable a position a senator can assert.
It was a direct thumb-in-your-eye response to President Biden’s thinly veiled criticism of Manchin last Tuesday in Tulsa, where Biden explained why he was having difficulty getting passage of what was supposed to be his highest priority – new voting rights legislation that would supersede a raft of new voter suppression laws in Republican-dominated states, using Trump’s baseless claim of voter fraud as pretext.
“I hear all the folks on TV saying, ‘Why doesn’t Biden get this done?’” Biden asked rhetorically in Tulsa. “Well, because Biden only has a majority of effectively four votes in the House, and a tie in the Senate, with two members of the Senate who vote more with my Republican friends. But we’re not giving up.”
Everyone knew he was referring to Manchin, as well as Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema, another Democratic holdout.
Manchin’s very public repudiation of Biden on Sunday could mean the end of the For the People Act. That opens the way for Republican states to continue their shameless campaign of voter suppression – very possibly giving Republicans a victory in the 2022 midterm elections and entrenching Republican rule for a generation.
As it is, registered Republicans make up only about 25% of the American electorate, and that percentage appears to be shrinking in the wake of Trump’s malodorous exit.
But because rural Republican states like Wyoming (with 574,000 inhabitants) get two senators just as do urban ones like California (with nearly 40 million), and because Republican states have gerrymandered districts that elect House members to give them an estimated 19 extra seats over what they would have without gerrymandering, the scales were already tipped.
Then came the post-Trump deluge of state laws making it harder for likely Democrats to vote, and easier for Republican state legislatures to manipulate voting tallies.
Manchin says he supports extending the John Lewis Voting Rights Act to all 50 states. That’s small comfort.
The original 1965 Voting Rights Act was struck down by the supreme court in 2013, on the dubious logic that it was no longer needed because states with a history of suppressing Black votes no longer did so. (Note that within 24 hours of the ruling, Texas announced it would implement a strict photo ID law, and Mississippi and Alabama soon followed.)
The efficacy of a new national Voting Rights Act would depend on an activist justice department willing to block state changes in voting laws that suppress votes and on an activist supreme court willing to uphold such justice department decisions. Don’t bet on either. We know what happened to the justice department under Trump, and we know what’s happened to the supreme court.
Besides, a new Voting Rights Act wouldn’t be able to roll back the most recent round of voter suppression laws from Republican states.
Without Manchin, then, the For the People Act is probably dead, unless Biden can convince one Republican senator to join Senate Democrats in supporting it – like, say, Utah’s Mitt Romney, who has publicly rebuked Trump for lying about the 2020 election and has something of a reputation for being an institutionalist who cares about American democracy.
Yet given Trump’s continuing hold over the shrinking Republican party, any Republican senator who joined with the Democrats in supporting the For the People Act would probably be ending their political career. Profiles in courage make good copy for political obituaries and memorials.
I’m afraid history will show that, in this shameful era, Republican senators were more united in their opposition to voting rights than Democratic senators were in their support for them.
The future of American democracy needs better odds.
Amid mega-drought, rightwing militia stokes water rebellion in US west
Jason Wilson
Photograph: Dave Killen/AP
Fears of a confrontation between law enforcement and rightwing militia supporters over the control of water in the drought-stricken American west have been sparked by protests at Klamath Falls in Oregon.
Protesters affiliated with rightwing anti-government activist Ammon Bundy’s People’s Rights Network are threatening to break a deadlock over water management in the area by unilaterally opening the headgates of a reservoir.
The protest has reawakened memories not only of recent standoffs with federal agencies – including the one led by Bundy in eastern Oregon in 2016 – but a longer history of anti-government agitation in southern Oregon and northern California, stretching back to 2000 and beyond.
The area is a hotbed of militia and anti-government activity and also hit by the mega-drought that has struck the American west and caused turmoil in the agricultural community as conflicts over water become more intense. Among the current protesters at Klamath Falls are individuals who have themselves been involved in similar actions over two decades, including an illegal release of water at the same reservoir in 2001.
In May, the federal Bureau of Reclamation announced that there would be no further release of water from the reserves in the Klamath Basin for irrigators downstream, who rely on the Klamath Project water infrastructure along the Oregon-California border.
Later in the month, two Oregon irrigators, Grant Knoll and Dan Neilsen, began occupying a piece of land adjacent to the headgates of the main canal which pipes water to downstream farmers and Native American tribal groups, like the Yurok, who depend on the water “flushing” the river for the benefit of salmon hatchlings.
Knoll and Nielsen, along with members of the People’s Rights Network, which has engaged in militant anti-mask protests in neighboring Idaho, began staffing a tent on the property which they dubbed a “water crisis info center”.
Grant Knoll and Dan Nielsen have set up a large tent on land adjacent to the headgates of the main canal.Photograph: Dave Killen/AP
They also told a number of media outlets that they were prepared to restore the flow of water, even at the price of a confrontation with the federal government, with Knoll telling Jefferson Public Radio last Monday: “We’re going to turn on the water and have a standoff.”
Also on the property is a large metal bucket, daubed with anti-government slogans, which is a memento of a 2001 confrontation at the same spot. That July, 100 farmers, including Knoll and Nielsen, used an 8in-wide irrigation line to bypass the headgate, sending water down the canal. That year, the action by the farmers was followed by other protest actions, such as an American flag-bedecked horse charge, similar to the one that took place on the Bundy ranch during that family’s standoff with federal authorities in 2014.
The confrontation was only defused after appeals were made to the farmers in the wake of the World Trade Center attacks on September 11.
Then as now, the reduced flows were partly with environmental issues in mind.
This year, amid the severe drought, the measure is being taken in accordance with the Endangered Species Act, to ensure the survival of two species of suckerfish whose last remaining habitats are in the reservoirs.
In order to keep enough water in the system to ensure their survival, water must be denied to those who rely on it downstream, including both farmers and tribes who depend on fishing.
Endangered Coho Salmon will likely suffer from the lack of water, along with migrating birds later in the season whose refuges have dried up. But previous court decisions have determined that the interests of those upstream should take precedence, including the Klamath Tribes, for whom the suckerfish have a spiritual significance.
While the protesters claim to represent the interests of farmers, they have been disavowed by agricultural leaders, including Ben DuVal, president of the Klamath Water Users Association, who told the Sacramento Bee that the protesters were “idiots who have no business being here”, who were using the crisis as “a soapbox to push their agenda”.
Whether or not DuVal speaks for the majority of farmers, there is no sign that the so far small protest is catching on like 2001’s anti-government surge, which saw protest crowds in the thousands in the lead up to the breaching of the headgates.
And while the protesters’ placards promise “Ammon Bundy coming soon”, their leader has so far not made the trip to the Klamath camp from neighboring Idaho, where he recently filed to run for governor.
The Superrich Bought Up This Idaho Town and Regular Folks Now May Have to Live in Tents
Kate Briquelet
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast / Photo Courtesy Brad Womack
Affordable housing in Ketchum—the Idaho resort community adjacent to billionaire and celebrity playground Sun Valley—has been a problem for decades.
But the situation is becoming so dire in the wake of COVID-19 that city officials are considering an unusual range of quick fixes—including building tent cities and RV parks for the common folk in the ultra-rich mountain town, where the average median home listing price is hovering above $900,000.
Residents and housing activists say their friends and neighbors, some whose families have lived in Ketchum for generations, are being priced out as landlords sell buildings to well-heeled buyers and out-of-town investors. The problem is exacerbated, they say, by property owners renting homes for a bigger profit on sites like Airbnb to short-term remote employees escaping Silicon Valley and big cities.
“There’s a joke going around: you either have three houses in Ketchum or three jobs,” said Kris Gilarowski, a hospitality worker and father of two who recently launched a Facebook group titled Occupy Ketchum Town Square to address the housing crisis.
And those losing homes and apartments aren’t just service industry workers, but teachers, nurses, and other professionals who are fast becoming the hidden homeless in the picturesque city of roughly 2,800 people.
“I think the people who have three jobs don’t have time to write a letter to the editor or go to a city council meeting,” Gilarowski told The Daily Beast. “It got me thinking that you need to get these people involved, because if they don’t come out, a solution won’t happen.”
As local TV station KTVB reported, some temporary housing solutions weighed by city officials include “a plan to allow Ketchum’s nurses, teachers, and service workers to sleep in tents in the city park as rent and housing costs continue to soar out of their grasp.”
The discussions come at a time when one developer is seeking approval for an affordable housing complex downtown called Bluebird Village but facing backlash from residents who claim the building will be an eyesore and absorb valuable parking spaces.
They also follow another developer’s $9 million sale of an affordable apartment building called KETCH, leaving residents unable to pay new rates imposed by the new landlord. (At a recent city council meeting, one KETCH resident said the new owner increased rents by 50 to 60 percent. “He wants me to be paying $1,700 for 425 square feet. It’s insane, it shouldn’t have happened,” the woman said.)
“One of the biggest oppositions to Bluebird and any affordable housing, really, was aesthetics,” Reid Stillman, a mayoral candidate who works in advertising and is scrambling to find rental housing himself, told The Daily Beast. “That is so embarrassing when we’re dealing with human lives.”
“We have this older generation worried about the look and color of the brick of the building,” Stillman added. “What they don’t understand is these are the people that serve them food, sell them clothes, bag their groceries… and you’re not allowing them to have affordable places to live because you’re worried about the color of brick in town.”
Affordable housing has become a crisis in Ketchum, Idaho, where the middle class is struggling with skyrocketing rents and home prices as wealthy buyers flood into town. Courtesy Gary Hoffman
Meanwhile, Gilarowski said he’s heard from long-term residents who received notices of rent hikes anywhere from $600 to $1,500—and one well-paid hospital worker lived in his car for three weeks because he couldn’t find a place to live.
Gilarowski shared another horror story at a special city council meeting last month to address the crisis: A couple was living in a tent in Sawtooth National Forest for 94 days through January before they found affordable housing.
“I do support the city of Ketchum opening up some public spaces, so people could temporarily park an RV, pitch a tent, because then we can’t hide from these people,” Gilarowski said at the meeting. “These are the people that work at your school. These are the people that work at your local business. These are the people that serve you. I know some of you put up your $8 million houses … but you don’t have compassion for working class people. You say you’re for community housing but ‘not this project, not that project…’”
In an interview with The Daily Beast, Gilarowski alluded to the wealth infused in Ketchum and neighboring Sun Valley, including Allen & Co.’s annual media conference, sometimes referred to as a “summer camp for billionaires.” (This year, the guest list includes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos.)
“There’s so much wealth here and it’s kind of embarrassing to hear that people, families, decide to live for 94 days in a national forest, hidden,” Gilarowski said.
Ketchum Mayor Neil Bradshaw raised a variety of possible solutions to the housing crisis at the council meeting: using city funds to rent hotel rooms this summer and encouraging local residents to rent out spare rooms. He also floated using public lands, including parks or parking lots, for temporary tent sites or RV parking.
Bradshaw said Ketchum’s Rotary Park could house a number of tents, has public restrooms and was across from a YMCA, which has showers. “It would require a certain level of qualification to stay there, so the people would have to show they are working for a local business and contributing to our economy in a certain way. It wouldn’t just be for roadtrippers passing through Ketchum,” Bradshaw told the crowd.
But Stillman blamed Bradshaw and city officials for not acting sooner and called the tent city for nurses and teachers “a joke.”
“We have homeless people,” Stillman countered at the meeting. “They may not be on the street and you may not see them, which is good for you and good for business. But they’re living on couches, they’re in our friends’ houses, they’re in tents up north, they’re camping down south, they’re doing anything they can to get to work here in town.
“We’re not just talking waitresses and waiters,” Stillman added. “We’re talking nurses, and medical supply people, teachers. My best friend works at Montessori school—he’s a teacher, he has nowhere to live.”
Stillman said his own landlord sold his apartment building and he must be out by September. “I make good money and I still can’t find a place,” Stillman said. “So it’s not just affecting one income level … To live in a tent in Rotary Park is a joke especially for people who need WiFi, have to work and have to make a living. That’s a joke.”
“Not only am I going to be homeless with a good job Sept. 1, but my friends who are in the service industry who don’t make a lot of money, they can’t pay $2,900 a month for a two bedroom in Ketchum. This isn’t San Francisco, Neil,” Stillman fumed.
In an interview on Monday, Stillman told us Ketchum suffers from a disconnect among the city’s classes, a situation that stymies action on workforce housing. He said there’s everyday permanent residents who have three to four jobs just to live in the city, second-homers who travel in for vacations, and extremely wealthy people who own a house in Ketchum which they visit only a week or so out of the year.
“Not everyone has a seat at the table,” Stillman said. “I feel our current leader caters to a certain population and there’s not an open line of communication with longterm residents.”
Bradshaw told The Daily Beast that the tent housing was only one idea suggested during a community workshop and bristled at The Daily Beast, and local media, playing up the specter of tent cities. He said Ketchum city planners are also looking into whether elderly homeowners could rent out rooms in their homes in exchange for tenants helping with yard work or other chores, and into altering city code to allow RVs on private property or using federal funds for rental assistance.
An aerial view of the stunning area around Ketchum and Sun Valley, which hosts the annual “billionaire’s camp,” the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference. Drew Angerer/Getty
The mayor said newer, wealthier residents who fled cities for mountain ski towns during the coronavirus pandemic put pressure on Ketchum’s already limited housing market, driving up rental prices as much as 50 percent.
“We are a small town,” Bradshaw said. “We have seen over the last year, an influx of more people moving to our town due to COVID. COVID has taken what was probably going to happen in 15 years and accelerated it into 15 months.”
“COVID has been the catalyst to amplifying our housing situation,” added Bradshaw, who like others interviewed for this story, noted that for dozens and dozens of help-wanted ads in local press, there’s only a handful of rental advertisements.
“This is so complicated and so nuanced, and it’s happening around the country, it’s not just us,” the mayor continued. “Just like we were during COVID, because we had the highest density of COVID cases per capita at one point, we’re having our little moment of fame here with this idea of affordable housing. But we’re a microcosm of what’s happening around the country.”
The city’s hands are tied, Bradshaw said, because its taxing authority is limited—other hotspots for the uber-rich like Aspen, Colorado, for example, enjoy a real-estate transfer tax that Idaho lacks—and it’s unable to limit Airbnb, VRBO and other short-term rentals because of a 2017 state law.
“We have a very wealthy population and most of them are very supportive of affordable housing although, you know, always wanting something else that’s maybe not quite in their backyard,” Bradshaw said.
In recent months, a retired doctor named Gary Hoffman parked a trailer throughout Ketchum and covered it with a massive sign that declared, “What The One Percenters Ignore: Affordable housing has always been the lifeblood of a vibrant community. A town dies when its most productive people cannot afford to live in it.” Hoffman’s banner also demanded in all caps: “Worker housing now!”
The 79-year-old physician owns a pair of mobile home parks just outside Ketchum and a rental cabin on a 28-acre ranch about 24 miles south of the city.
After the tenant of the cabin announced she was moving out, Hoffman placed a rental ad in the local newspaper, for $650 a month, and received 85 phone calls in 48 hours. “It went to the second person who called. So I had 83 more calls to field,” he said.
The doc saw it as an opportunity to galvanize more residents into fighting for affordable housing. “Everybody I talked to after that, I said, ‘What the hell are you doing to get things changed around here? What are you doing besides bemoaning the fact that we don’t have housing? Are you going to meetings? Are you writing letters to the editor, are you protesting, are you picketing, are you going down to Boise and haranguing the legislators who said Airbnbs and VRBOs are wonderful in resort communities?’”
On Monday, Hoffman was busy doing his own roofing repairs at the mobile home park since he couldn’t find construction workers who were immediately available. “There’s a lot of construction already, everybody who’s got a contracting construction company is working to the max,” Hoffman said.
The mobile home parks are some of the area’s only workforce housing, where tenants pay an average of $550 a month. Many of Hoffman’s tenants work in construction, landscaping or basic clerical work, speak Spanish as a first language, and “do the work nobody else wants to do,” he said.
“People look at the parks I have and they say, ‘My God, you could double your rents.’ People are working, they live there,” Hoffman told us. “Why would I do that if I don’t need the money? And I don’t, so there you go.”
California and much of the American West face mega-drought brought on by climate change
David Knowles, Senior Editor June 7, 2021
Thanks in part to rising temperatures due to climate change, “extreme” or “exceptional” drought conditions are now occurring in 74 percent of the state of California, while 72 percent of the Western U.S. is classified as experiencing “severe” drought, according to data from the U.S. Drought Monitor.
With the risk of wildfires growing with every passing day in states like California, which receives only minimal precipitation during the summer months, temperatures last week continued to trend 3 to 6 degrees above normal, the Drought Monitor said on its website.
In May, California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in 41 of the state’s 58 counties, putting in place water conservation restrictions.
“We’re working with local officials and other partners to protect public health and safety and the environment, and call on all Californians to help meet this challenge by stepping up their efforts to save water,” Newsom said.
A map provided by the U.S. Drought Monitor shows the extent of severe drought now gripping the Western portion of the country. (U.S. Drought Monitor)
Back-to-back dry years in conjunction with above-average temperatures have exacerbated drought conditions across the American West, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on its website. The extent of the drought is unprecedented in recorded history, with 100 percent of both California and Nevada now classified as experiencing “moderate to exceptional drought.”
“Snowpack since April 1 has rapidly decreased earlier than normal to near zero, with run-off going into parched soils,” the NOAA said. “Reservoir levels are low throughout the region.”
Low water levels at Lake Oroville in California. (Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
In fact, California’s reservoirs, more than 1,500 in all, now contain 50 percent less water than they normally do at this time of year, according to Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. With water levels falling precipitously, the dry, exposed shorelines and boat slips attest to the severity of mounting water shortages.
But water shortages are just one consequence of the ongoing drought. An even more palpable risk hanging over the region due to bone-dry conditions is that of wildfires.
According to the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection (Cal Fire), climate change has helped extend the duration of so-called fire season in the state by 75 days.
“While wildfires are a natural part of California’s landscape, the fire season in California and across the West is starting earlier and ending later each year,” Cal Fire said on its website. Climate change is considered a key driver of this trend. “Warmer spring and summer temperatures, reduced snowpack and earlier spring snowmelt create longer and more intense dry seasons that increase moisture stress on vegetation and make forests more susceptible to severe wildfire.”
While the 2018 fire season in California remains the deadliest and most destructive on record, with 97 civilians and six firefighters killed and over 24,000 buildings destroyed, the trend line for the number of acres burned by wildfires in the state continues to rise.
“Since 2015, the term ‘unprecedented’ has been used year over year as conditions have worsened, and the operational reality of a changing climate sets in,” a Cal Fire report on the 2020 fire season stated. “In California, the 2020 Fire Siege claimed the lives of 28 civilians and three firefighters, destroyed 9,248 structures and consumed 4.2 million acres.”
In April, Newsom signed a $536 million wildfire package that will allow the state to implement wildfire-suppression efforts.
“This crucial funding will go toward efforts including fuel breaks, forest health projects and home hardening,” Newsom said when he signed the bill into law.
A month later, he signed a proclamation declaring May 2 to May 8 as “Wildfire Preparedness Week.”
“Hotter, drier conditions driven by climate change are contributing to unparalleled risk of catastrophic wildfire across landscapes,” the proclamation stated. “With continued dry conditions and ever-present climate change, California is facing another difficult and dangerous wildfire year.”
Drought-stricken Nevada enacts ban on ‘non-functional’ grass
Sam Metz
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Nevada Legislature Grass Ban
FILE – In this April 9, 2021, file photo, sprinklers water grass near a street corner in the Summerlin neighborhood of northwest Las Vegas. Nevada Gov. Steve Sisolak signed legislation on Friday, June 4 to make the state the first in the nation to ban certain kinds of grass. The measure will ban water users in southern Nevada from planting decorative grass in an effort to conserve water. (AP Photo/Ken Ritter, File)
CARSON CITY, Nev. (AP) — In Sin City, one thing that will soon become unforgivable is useless grass.
A new Nevada law will outlaw about 31% of the grass in the Las Vegas area in an effort to conserve water amid a drought that’s drying up the region’s primary water source: the Colorado River.
Other cities and states around the U.S. have enacted temporary bans on lawns that must be watered, but legislation signed Friday by Gov. Steve Sisolak makes Nevada the first in the nation to enact a permanent ban on certain categories of grass.
Sisolak said last week that anyone flying into Las Vegas viewing the “bathtub rings” that delineate how high Lake Mead’s water levels used to be can see that conservation is needed.
“It’s incumbent upon us for the next generation to be more conscious of conservation and our natural resources — water being particularly important,” he said.
The ban targets what the Southern Nevada Water Authority calls “non-functional turf.” It applies to grass that virtually no one uses at office parks, in street medians and at entrances to housing developments. It excludes single-family homes, parks and golf courses.
Nevada Assemblyman Howard Watts III, the bill’s sponsor, said he hopes other western states consider similar action leading up to 2026, when they renegotiate the Colorado River’s Drought Contingency Plan. He applauded Sisolak for taking concrete action on conservation after Utah Gov. Spencer Cox asked people to pray for rain last week.
“There’s broad acceptance in southern Nevada that if we can take some grass out to preserve the water supply for our communities, then that’s something that we need to do,” he said. “This sends a clear message about what other states need to be looking at in order to preserve water.”
The measure will require the replacement of about 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) of grass in the metro Las Vegas area. By ripping it out, water officials estimate the region can conserve 10% of its total available Colorado River water supply and save about 11 gallons (41 liters) per person per day in a region with a population of about 2.3 million.
“Replacing non-functional turf from Southern Nevada will allow for more sustainable and efficient use of resources, build resiliency to climate change, and help ensure the community’s current and future water needs continue to be met,” said Southern Nevada Water Authority General Manager John Entsminger.
The ban was passed by state lawmakers with bipartisan support and backing from groups like Great Basin Water Network conservation group and the Southern Nevada Homebuilders’ Association, which wants to free up water to allow for projected growth and future construction.
When the ban takes effect in 2027, it will apply only to Southern Nevada Water Authority jurisdiction, which encompasses Las Vegas and its surrounding areas and relies on the Colorado River for 90% of its water supply.
As the region has grown, the agency has prohibited developers from planting grass front lawns in new subdivisions and has spent years offering some of the region’s most generous rebates to owners of older properties — up to $3 per square foot (0.1 square meters) — to tear out grass and replace it with drought-tolerant landscaping.
Water officials have said waning demand for those rebates has made bolder measures necessary. The legislation also mandates the formation of an advisory committee to carve out exceptions to the ban.
Other cities and states have enacted temporary grass bans during short-term droughts, but Nevada is the first place in the country to put in place a regional ban on certain uses of grass.
The ban came as the seven states that rely on the over-tapped Colorado River for water — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — reckon with the prospect of a drier future.
Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two reservoirs where Colorado River water is stored, are projected to shrink this year to levels that would trigger the region’s first-ever official shortage declaration and cut the amount allocated to Nevada and Arizona.
Water officials in both states have said that even with the cuts, they’ll still have enough water to accommodate projected population growth, but are working to limit certain kinds of consumption.
In Arizona, farmers in Pinal County south of Phoenix have had to stop irrigating their fields because of the cuts. Nevada stands to lose about 4% of its allocation, although the state has historically not used its entire share.
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This version corrects that the ban on “non-functional turf” will require the replacement of 6 square miles (16 square kilometers) of grass, or about 31% of turf in the Las Vegas metro, not 8 square miles (21 square kilometers) and 40%.
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Sam Metz is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.
Michigan health officials on Monday reported the state’s first confirmed human case of the deadly hantavirus.
The rat-borne illness, which U.S. health officials say cannot be transmitted from person-to-person, is typically passed to patients when they breathe in air contaminated with the virus through rodent droppings.
The confirmed case under investigation by county and state health officials involved a woman in Washtenaw County, “recently hospitalized with a serious pulmonary illness from Sin Nombre hantavirus,” according to a release from the Michigan Department of Health & Human Services. “The individual was likely exposed when cleaning an unoccupied dwelling that contained signs of an active rodent infestation.”
It’s also possible to contract the virus through a bite from an infected rodent, or if people touch something that has been contaminated with rodent urine, droppings or saliva and then touch their own nose or mouth. It may also be possible to contract the virus by eating food contaminated by an infected rodent’s droppings, urine or saliva, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Michigan officials explained hantavirus was first tied to hantavirus pulmonary syndrome in sick patients in southwest U.S. in 1993, though the earliest case involves a Utah man in 1959, according to the CDC. Most infections have been reported among adults, and crop up in the spring and summer.
Symptoms of the disease include fatigue, fever, and muscle aches, as well as headaches, dizziness, chills and abdominal pains. Late symptoms may include coughing and shortness of breath, and the disease has about a 40% fatality rate. Several of the symptoms mimic the signs for COVID-19.
“We can prevent and reduce the risk of hantavirus infection by taking precautions and being alert to the possibility of it,” Dr. Juan Luis Marquez, medical director with Washtenaw County Health Department, said in a statement. “Use rubber, latex, vinyl or nitrile gloves when cleaning areas with rodent infestations, ventilate areas for at least 30 minutes before working, and make sure to wet areas thoroughly with a disinfectant or chlorine solution before cleaning.”
Fox News’ Alexandria Hein contributed to this report.
Climate Change Might Be Threatening the Future of Apples
Eric Francis
(Bloomberg) — Patrick and Sara McGuire have been growing apples since they were married 25 years ago. Their 150 acres in Ellsworth, Michigan—dubbed Royal Farms—are a mix of sweet apples and the bitter varieties suited for making hard cider.
Last spring they put in a new crop of Honeycrisps, one of America’s favorite apples, only to discover an unwelcome visitor just a few weeks later: A bacterial menace known as fire blight.
“We actually removed about $10,000 worth of trees by hand,” Patrick McGuire said. “It might’ve been 25% of that lot.”
Fire blight is a bacterial pathogen that spreads easily during blooming season. It has the potential to kill not just individual trees but entire orchards. Though not a new problem for apple growers, it’s been looming larger as the climate crisis brings longer, warmer and rainier springs that expand the window for it to infect trees.
The disease poses a particular threat to cider apple growers. Terry Bradshaw, a research assistant professor at the University of Vermont, said they are at risk because the European varieties they rely on are biennial, making them especially vulnerable to fire blight. “[They will produce] a lot of fruit in one year and a little in the other,” said Bradshaw. “It’s just wall-to-wall blossoms during bloom—those are a whole lot more targets [for the bacteria] to hit.” Making matters worse, they bloom later in the year.
If one crop of cider apples is lost to fire blight, it will be two years before those trees produce again, he said. And with a 10-year pipeline from ordering trees to producing fruit, that kind of setback could prevent growers from staying afloat. “Twenty-five years ago, fire blight was novel, it was rare,” said Bradshaw. “Now climate change is a thing, and fire blight is a thing, and everyone thinks about it every year.”
But it’s not just cider apples that are at risk. Increasingly, all apples as well as other fruit crops such as pears are in danger from such climate-induced afflictions.
Nikki Rothwell, a specialist with the Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Center at Michigan State University [MSU], said the climate crisis isn’t just problematic in terms of fire blight, but also because it’s allowing for more generations of insect pests each year.
“If growers cannot mitigate risk in some way, fruit farming is not a sustainable model or business,” she said.
Apples used in ciders, with flavors described as “bittersweet” and “bittersharp,” can be traced back to traditional cider apples from England, France and Spain, said Gregory Michael Peck, an assistant professor of horticulture at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. They have high levels of tannins and phenolic compounds that make them unpalatable for eating, but ideal for cider.
The craft cider industry has been on a decade-long growth spurt, according to Michelle McGrath, executive director of the American Cider Association, an industry lobby. In 2019, Nielsen research said the sector was worth $1.2 billion, with about 1,000 cider makers in the U.S.
Over the last decade, the industry grew tenfold both in terms of sales and producers, according to McGrath. Regional and local craft brands account for 35% of market share, Nielsen reported. In 2020, despite pandemic lockdowns (or perhaps because of them), sales reached $577.4 million, representing more than 9% growth over the previous year and 23% over three years. Regional brands earned 51% of sales, edging out national brands for the first time.
But climate change and the resulting uptick in fire blight may put an end to the good news, warned researchers and orchard operators.
Karen Lewis is a regional fruit tree specialist with the Center for Precision & Automated Agricultural Systems at Washington State University. Her state is the nation’s leading apple-producer. “From 2016 to 2018, we had considerably more days of fire blight risk during bloom than in the previous 10 years,” said Lewis. “In areas where climate change results in warmer springs, fire blight risk will increase.”
Once inside a tree—through a blossom, a broken stem, even a torn leaf—the bacteria causes growths that can girdle the tree and kill it. A few weeks after infection, it will produce “ooze,” explained George Sundin, a professor at MSU who researches fire blight. “Ooze is what the pathogen uses to travel between trees. When rain hits an ooze droplet, a cloud of pathogen can rise from there and be taken by the wind to settle wherever. And if that’s on another apple tree, it can lead to infection.”
Since fire blight is easily spread by wind, rain and insects, stopping it in the McGuires’ Honeycrisps was key to reducing the chance it would infect their 60 acres of cider trees. “Fire blight was not typically a problem in northern Michigan, because we’re so far north and these bacteria really love warm weather,” said Rothwell of MSU. “That’s really changed.”
Rothwell said colleagues in Canada have contacted her because they are seeing fire blight for the first time and have no experience in treating it.
MSU tracks the epiphytic infection potential, or EIP, of fire blight by using a model that gauges how rapidly the bacteria can reproduce, depending on environmental conditions. In the past, “when EIP got close to 100, we would tell growers that’s when you need to spray,” she said. “We’ve backed that down to 70; we’re being much more conservative now.”
Francis Otto, the orchard manager for Cherry Bay Orchards in Suttons Bay, Michigan, started noticing a buildup in fire blight about 7 years ago. Last spring, he said, the conditions for infection in their 275 acres of trees were unprecedented.
“We had a really cold spring and all of a sudden, once we started blooming, we were a couple of days in the eighties with rain showers every other day,” said Otto, who has been growing apples for 30 years. “The EIP was over 400 for a couple of days.”
Otto said they were able to ward off fire blight last year by using sprays including copper sulfate and streptomycin. This year he started spraying his trees the first week of April—20 days earlier than usual.
Chemical sprays aren’t an option for Tieton Cider Works in Yakima, Washington, since the company is working toward organic certification for its 50 acres of apples. General Manager Marcus Robert said Tieton anticipates selling about 150,000 cases of cider this year, representing about $5.5 million in sales, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, California and Idaho.
Robert said they’ll visually inspect the orchard for any signs of infection, prune bad stems off the trees, take them out of the orchard and burn them. But there is a price to be paid.
“By June or July, you’re seeing a lot of impact in the orchard,” he said. “You end up with less canopy, and less canopy means less fruit.”
Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950’s
Oliver Milman
Photograph: Staff/Reuters
Joe Biden may be pressing for 2021 to be a transformational year in tackling the climate crisis, but Republicans arrayed in opposition to his agenda have dug in around a unifying rallying theme – that the fossil fuel industry should be protected at almost any cost.
For many experts and environmentalists, the Republican stance is a shockingly retrograde move that flies in the face of efforts to fight global heating and resembles a head in the sand approach to the realities of a changing American economy.
In a recent letter sent to John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, more than a dozen Republican state treasurers accused the administration of pressuring banks to not lend to coal, oil and gas companies, adding that such a move would “eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country” in order to appease the US president’s “radical political preferences”.
The letter raised the extraordinary possibility of Republican-led states penalizing banks that refuse to fund projects that worsen the climate crisis by pulling assets from them. Riley Moore, treasurer of the coal heartland state of West Virginia, said “undue pressure” was being put on banks by the Biden administration that could end financing of fossil fuels and “devastate West Virginia and put thousands of families out of work”.
“If a bank or lending institution says it is going to do something that could cause significant economic harm to our state … then I need to take that into account when I consider what banks we do business with,” Moore, who has assets of about $18bn under his purview, told the Guardian. “If they are going to attack our industries, jobs, economy and way of life, then I am going to fight back.”
The shunning of banks in this way would almost certainly face a hefty legal response but the threat is just the latest eye-catching Republican gambit aimed at propping up a fossil fuel industry that will have to be radically pared back if the US is to slash its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, as Biden has vowed.
In Louisiana, Republicans have embarked upon a quixotic and probably doomed attempt to make the state a “fossil fuel sanctuary” jurisdiction that does not follow federal pollution rules.
In Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has instructed his agencies to challenge the “hostile attack” launched by Biden against the state’s oil and gas industries while Republicans in Wyoming have even set up a legal fund to sue other states that refuse to take its coal.
The messaging appears to be filtering down to the Republican electorate, with new polling by Yale showing support for clean energy among GOP voters has dropped dramatically over the past 18 months.
But critics say Republicans are engaged in a futile attempt to resurrect an economic vision more at home in the 1950s, rather than deal with a contemporary reality where the plummeting cost of wind and solar is propelling record growth in renewables and a cavalcade of countries are striving to cut emissions to net zero and, in the case of some including the UK and Germany, completely eliminate coal.
“We are seeing desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, to squeeze one more drop of oil or lump of coal out of the ground before this transition,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. “They are looking to go back to a prior time, but the trend is absolutely clear. The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil,” he added, paraphrasing a quote attributed to the former Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani.
The Republican backlash is characterized by a large dose of political posturing, according to Wagner. “If you have aspirations of higher office in some states, you just want to signal you will sue those hippie liberals,” he said. “These are delay tactics and some of them are very ham-fisted.”
Supporters of of Donald Trump wearing mining gear attend a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, in 2018.Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
The US emerged from the second world war with more than half a million coalminers but this workforce has since dwindled to barely 40,000 people, amid mass automation and utilities switching to cheap sources of gas. Large quantities of jobs are set to be created in renewable energy, but some places built upon fossil fuels risk being left behind.
Biden has proposed a huge infrastructure plan which would, the president says, help retrain and retool regions of the US long economically dependent upon mining and drilling. The administration has promised a glut of high-paying jobs in expanding the clean energy sector and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, all while avoiding the current ruinous health impacts of air pollution and conditions like black lung.
But unions have expressed wariness over this transition, with Republicans also highly skeptical. The promise to retrain miners is a “patronizing pipe dream of the liberal elites completely devoid from reality”, said Moore, who added that previous promises of renewable energy jobs have not materialized. “And now they are trying to sell us on the same failed idea again.”
However the shift to cleaner energy happens, it’s clear the transition is under way – last year renewable energy consumption eclipsed coal for the first time in 130 years and US government projections show renewables’ overall share doubling by the middle of the century. A key question is whether the completion of this switch will be delayed long enough to risk triggering the worst impacts of disastrous global heating.
“The Republican response is predictable and pathetic. It is from a very old playbook,” said Judith Enck, who was a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama. “The party will cling to fossil fuels to the bitter end. It’s so sad because so many Republican voters are damaged by climate change, if you look at deaths from the heat or wildfires we are seeing in California. But the party right now is just completely beholden to the fossil fuel industry.”
Affordable housing has become a crisis in Ketchum, Idaho, where the middle class is struggling with skyrocketing rents and home prices as wealthy buyers flood into town. Courtesy Gary Hoffman
An aerial view of the stunning area around Ketchum and Sun Valley, which hosts the annual “billionaire’s camp,” the Allen & Company Sun Valley Conference. Drew Angerer/Getty
