Red tides return to Florida, leaving beaches covered in dead fish
Garin Flowers, National Reporter and Producer August 6, 2021
Thousands of dead fish in Boca Ciega Bay in Madeira Beach, Fla., on July 21. (Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
An unwelcome visitor is once again killing fish and causing issues for beachgoers along Florida’s Gulf Coast. A red tide bloom has been spotted in several areas near the shore in recent days. Local officials say they’ve already found more than 3.4 million pounds of red tide debris since mid-July.
The organism known as Karenia brevis has caused thousands of dead fish to wash up on shores and has displaced sharks into local canals as they flee the toxins.
Red tides, which have been linked to the release of polluted water from Lake Okeechobee and which thrive in warm water, also present a threat to human health, causing respiratory issues like eye, nose and throat irritation that have landed some residents in hospital emergency rooms this year.
“The ecosystems over the millennia have figured out how to digest the natural inputs of nutrient pollution. Humans come along and they add all of these extra inputs of nutrient pollution into our receiving water bodies,” said Cris Costello, organizing manager in Florida for the environmental organization the Sierra Club, who has studied red tides for 14 years. “It gets there through fertilizer, both urban and agricultural fertilizer, undertreated or inadequately treated wastewater, whether from septic tanks or wastewater treatment plants that aren’t as high level as they need to be.”
A protest in Tampa Bay, Fla., on July 17 to raise awareness about the red tide outbreak. (John Pendygraft/Tampa Bay Times via Zuma Press Wire)
Most recently, 56 samples of bloom concentrations were detected in multiple counties, especially Pinellas (25 samples) and Sarasota (19), according to a weekly update from the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission posted Wednesday.
“While K. brevis is a naturally-occurring organism, nutrient enrichment of our coastal waters can make blooms worse and longer-lived,” Pinellas County says on a webpage dedicated to red tide.
The Sierra Club believes pollution is a part of the problem and sent a letter to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis calling for action.
“Yet another summer of slime has unfolded in Florida and we all have been horrified by the devastation to our environment, coastal economy, and quality of life,” it reads.
On Aug. 2, as complaints from residents and business leaders grew louder, DeSantis appointed a task force to further research the causes of red tide outbreaks.
“My administration will continue to press forward to find solutions and empower our brightest minds to help protect our environment,” DeSantis said in a statement. “The issues of Red Tide are complex, but with the appointments of these leading scientists and researchers, we hope to make a difference.”
Thousands of dead fish in Madeira Beach, Fla. (Octavio Jones/Getty Images)
This year’s outbreak is the most serious since 2018, when then-Gov. Rick Scott declared a state of emergency as the bloom wreaked havoc on tourism.
This year’s high concentrations of red tide have again turned the Gulf waters red, dark green or brown in certain areas. While Karenia brevis has been recorded in Florida since the 1800s, it has historically been more prevalent in the Gulf of Mexico’s warmer water. In recent years, however, as more overflow from Lake Okeechobee has been released into the Atlantic, blooms that can last anywhere from days to months have erupted there too.
“At this point, our water bodies are at the tipping point,” Costello said. “We have more problems here in Florida all year round than they do up north because our water is warmer. Climate change, climate disruption, has warmed our water. So the warmer the water is and the more nitrogen and phosphorus pollution there is, the more these algae, whether they are toxic or just a nuisance, they grow. It’s a population explosion.”
A sign at Indian Rocks Beach, Fla. (Arielle Bader/Tampa Bay Times via Zuma Press Wire)
The Florida Department of Health in Pinellas County is warning residents and visitors to the state to avoid swimming in areas where red tides have killed fish, to refrain from eating seafood in affected locations and to keep pets away from water, sea foam and dead fish where Karenia brevishas been detected.
The guidelines underscore the impact to a state whose greatest natural attraction is its miles of coastline.
“If outdoors, residents may choose to wear paper filter masks, especially if onshore winds are blowing,” the Department of Health said on its website.
Homeland Security warns of ‘increasing but modest’ threat of violence from Trump conspiracy
Luke Barr
The Department of Homeland Security said Friday they have observed “an increasing but modest level of activity online” by people who are calling for violence in response to baseless claims of 2020 election fraud and related to the conspiracy theory that former President Donald Trump will be reinstated.
“Some conspiracy theories associated with reinstating former President Trump have included calls for violence if desired outcomes are not realized,” according to a DHS Office of Intelligence and Analysis bulletin obtained by ABC News.
There is no evidence that shows there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election.
“Over the last few days what has occurred is there’s been much more public visibility, meaning the discussions and these theories have migrated away from being contained within the conspiracy and extremist online communities, to where they’re being the topic of discussion on web forums, or more public web forums, and even within the sort of media ecosystem,” a senior DHS official explained.
DHS says in the bulletin they do not have specific evidence there is a plot imminent.
“As public visibility of the narratives increases, we are concerned about more calls to violence. Reporting indicates that the timing for these activities may occur during August 2021, although we lack information on specific plots or planned actions,” the bulletin sent to state and local partners reads.
PHOTO: Former President Donald Trump arrives at the Sarasota Fairgrounds to speak to his supporters during the Save America Rally in Sarasota, Fla., July 3, 2021. (Octavio Jones/Reuters, FILE)
The department “does not have the luxury of waiting till we uncover information with the level of specificity, regarding a potential location and the time of an attack” to act on potential threats due to the threat environment, the senior DHS official explained.
“Past circumstances have illustrated that calls for violence could expand rapidly in the public domain and may be occurring outside of publicly available channels. As such, lone offenders and small groups of individuals could mobilize to violence with little-to-no warning,” the bulletin says.
The senior official said that one of the lessons learned from the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol is “that information that may reflect a growing threat may be communicated on public forums.”
“The current threat environment is one which is fueled in large part by conspiracy theories and other false narratives that are spread online by foreign governments, by foreign terrorist groups and by domestic extremist thought leaders, and are consumed by individuals who are predisposed to engage in violence,” the official said.
PHOTO: A Department of Homeland Security seal hangs on a wall before a speech by Vice President Mike Pence at the agency headquarters in Washington, D.C., July 6, 2018. (Bloomberg via Getty Images, FILE)
The official pointed to the events of Jan. 6 and the attacks on the synagogues in Pittsburgh and Poway, California, as examples.
The senior DHS official also pointed to the balance DHS has to walk when putting out products.
“We don’t want to overreact, but we want to make sure that we are at the earliest stage possible providing awareness to law enforcement and other personnel who are responsible for security and are critical to mitigating risk,” the senior official said, adding the bulletin was done with civil rights and civil liberties in mind.
California drought forces shutdown of historic Hyatt hydropower plant
Anya van Wagtendonk
A large scale California hydropower plant was shut down on Thursday after ongoing drought conditions reduced water levels in Lake Oroville to historic lows, according to the Sacramento Bee.
Why it matters: It is the first time the Edward Hyatt hydroelectric power plant has ceased operations since it was constructed in 1967, at a time when California is warning about the potential for rolling blackouts.
The plant feeds from a reservoir at Lake Oroville in Butte County, the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas in Northern California, and has the capacity to power almost half a million households, according to the Bee.
But the lake is less than one-quarter full — surpassing its record lowest level set in 1977 — amid the state’s ongoing water crisis.
What they’re saying: “This is just one of many unprecedented impacts we are experiencing in California as a result of our climate-induced drought,” said Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources, in a statement.
“DWR anticipated this moment, and the state has planned for its loss in both water and grid management,” the statement adds.
“Falling reservoir levels are another example of why it is so critical that all Californians conserve water. We are calling on everyone to take action now to reduce water use by 15 percent, to preserve as much water supply in storage as possible should we experience another dry year. We are all in this together.”
Sooner or Later, Climate Change is Coming for Your Wallet
By Jennifer Marlon and Bianca Taylor August 6, 2021
Richard Van Der Spuy/Dreamstime.com
Last week Gary Gensler, the chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission, made what seemed like an uncontroversial statement: “I think we can bring greater clarity to climate risk disclosures.” The SEC, he said, will begin to consider requiring public companies to tell their investors how climate change could threaten their business. That’s an important step, because for as much as we know about how the climate crisis is changing our lives, we’re only starting to get our heads around what it will truly cost you and me.
The oil and gas industry is already pushing back. Industry groups are stepping up lobbying to avoid disclosing their emissions, according to the Financial Times. These short-sighted attempts will unfortunately hurt our economy.
According to a report released in April by SwissRe, the global reinsurance company, the U.S. economy stands to lose 10% of its economic value by 2050 under a worst case scenario, where average global temperatures rise 3°C compared to pre-industrial levels. The SwissRe “worst case” scenario, however, is our current reality—one in which temperatures remain on their current trajectory, and both the Paris Agreement and 2050 net-zero emissions targets are not met.
To some, SwissRe’s projection of a 10% loss in 30 years may not sound alarming. But that datapoint can otherwise be stated as: The U.S. will suffer natural disasters such that it is not expected our economy will be able to recover from them. The prospect of suffering damage so profound that we are unable to economically recover is alarming. And it is not a distant future.
Scientists had hoped that Covid-related disruptions would produce a large reduction in carbon emissions. But the reductions were less than expected. The world produced only 6% less carbon last year than the one before. This modest response to an unprecedented synchronous global shutdown of economic activity puts the scope and scale of current emissions into perspective. To quantify the challenge, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change indicates that emission reduction ranges must be around 45% lower than present to meet a 1.5°C temperature goal.
Weather and climate disasters cost the U.S. economy $450 billion (2.1% of GDP) in 2020, the highest year on record. And we hold the No. 1 spot for the number of disasters year-to-date according to EM-DAT, a database that tracks disasters globally. We also know climate change has made most of these events worse than they would have otherwise been.
The mere 1°C temperature increase that has already occurred has contributed to new water shortages in towns across California, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico. Increasing evaporation has also reduced soil moisture, which helps explain the $7 billion to $13 billion cost to insurers from the 2020 wildfires. Costs that will inevitably translate into a higher price tag to you, the consumer.
The future costs of climate change on the U.S. economy are uncertain, but what is worse is that they may be underestimated. Underestimation occurs because projections are often made using an enumerative approach, where losses are valued sector by sector and then tallied to estimate the total impact on social welfare.
In other words, current approaches miss cascading risks, problems that exacerbate other disasters in unforeseen ways. Global supply-chain disruptions are an example of why cascading risks are difficult to model—because all industries can be affected when businesses of all sizes as well as national and subnational governments are interdependent. Economic disruptions from Covid-19 provide a case in point. The pandemic highlighted the vulnerabilities of complex supply chains that are now ubiquitous. As severe weather events continue to worsen, the U.S. economy will continue to suffer shortages — not only from domestic disruptions to products like orange juice, corn, and soy, but also from disasters abroad. The regions that produce most semiconductor chips and rare earth elements, critical in computers, smartphones, aerospace and defense, and medical appliances are concentrated in regions particularly vulnerable to climate hazards.
The economic consequences of climate change are countless. Under the last administration the U.S. Commodities and Futures Trade Commission released the first-ever assessment of the impact of climate change on the financial system. The 196-page report’s first sentence reads: “Climate change poses a major risk to the stability of the U.S. financial system and to its ability to sustain the American economy.”
The good news is that scientists, economists, and financial regulators agree on what needs to be done—even the oil and gas executives are on board. The key recommendation from the CFTC is that “The United States establishes a price on carbon. It must be a fair, economy-wide price… at a level that reflects the true social cost of those emissions.” The authors go further, stating that “a carbon price is the single most important step to manage climate risk and drive the appropriate allocation of capital.” The SEC’s moves toward mandatory climate risk disclosures are first steps on that path.
But if you’re not in a position to influence the risk calculus of public companies, there is something else you can do. You can buy insurance. The IMF’s researchers find that insurance penetration is a top factor in determining the resilience of a country to the impact of climate change. Yes, it might cost you a little more than you expected to spend this year. But climate change is coming for your wallet sooner or later.
Guest commentaries like this one are written by authors outside the Barron’s and MarketWatch newsroom. They reflect the perspective and opinions of the authors.
About the authors: Jennifer R. Marlon is a research scientist at Yale University’s School of the Environment. Bianca Taylor is founder of Tourmaline Group and a member of the Bretton Woods Committee. The two are public voices fellows of the OpEd Project and the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication.
The World Has Been On Fire for the Past Month. Here’s What It Looks Like
Ciara Nugent
Firefighters take a defensive stand against a home burning in Redwood Valley, Calif., ignited by an 80 acre wind whipped brush fire fed by tinder dry conditions, on July 7.
Firefighters take a defensive stand against a home burning in Redwood Valley, Calif., ignited by an 80 acre wind whipped brush fire fed by tinder dry conditions on July 7. Credit – Kent Porter—The Press Democrat/AP
Flames light up hillsides in British Columbia. Smoke swells over highways into Athens. A swimming pool in California is surrounded by charred rubble. Thick forests in Siberia lie shriveled and brown.
Countries across the northern hemisphere this summer are experiencing the worst wildfires in years of recorded history, with large swaths of land and entire towns in Europe, North America and Russia consumed by flames since the start of July.
Though many of these countries are used to summer fire seasons, climate change is making the hot, dry conditions that allow fires to catch and spread more common and more intense.
In parts of the western U.S., a summer of intense heat waves has arrived on the back of a weak rainy season, as a two-year-long drought stretches on. In mid-July, fires broke out in parts of Oregon and California, together consuming more than 230,000 hectares, part of a nationwide toll of over 1 million hectares burned so far in wildfires this year.
Firefighters battle a wildfire in Mugla, Marmaris district, Turkey, on Aug. 2. Turkey’s struggles against its deadliest wildfires in decades come as a blistering heatwave grips southeastern Europe.Yasin Akgul—AFP/Getty Images
A couple rides a pedal boat as smoke from nearby forest fires hangs over the city of Yakutsk, in Sakha (Yakutia), Russia on July 27.Dimitar Dilkoff—AFP/Getty Images
Fire retardant dropped from an airplane falls to the ground near the Chuweah Creek Fire as wildfires devastate Nespelem, Wash. on July 14.David Ryder—Reuters
In early July, the Canadian province of British Columbia became an icon for the extremes of destruction that wildfires can bring: the small town of Lytton briefly became one of the hottest places on earth, obliterating Canada’s heat records with temperatures topping 49.5° C (121.1° F). Then a fierce wildfire tore through town, destroying 90% of its buildings and leaving residents minutes to escape.
This month, southern Europe’s Mediterranean countries are sweltering under one of the worst heat waves to hit the region in decades. The temperature in one town in northern Greece reached 47.1°C (116.8°F) on Aug. 4, not far below Europe’s all-time record of 48°C (118.4°F). Fires in the south of the country hit residential areas on the outskirts of the capital, Athens, forcing people to flee into the city center as huge smoke plumes followed them.
In Turkey, the most severe fires on record have burned through more than 11,000 hectares of forest, killing eight people, most of them in the southern town of Manavgat. The devastation has led to anger at Turkey’s government, which has struggled to respond to the flames, admitting it has no working firefighting planes.
Men gather sheeps to take them away from an advancing fire in Mugla, Marmaris district, Turkey on Aug. 2.Yasin Akgul—AFP/Getty Images
Firefighters battle the Sugar Fire, part of the Beckwourth Complex Fire, burning in Plumas National Forest, Calif., on July 8.Noah Berger—AP
In Italy, where some 800 fires burned this week across multiple regions, tourist resorts on the eastern coastal town of Pescara rushed from a resort beach as a nearby wood went up in flames on Aug. 1.
Almost 2,000 miles north of the Mediterranean Sea, in northern Finland—where wildfires are rare—flames consumed 300 hectares of forest in the remote Kalajoki River basin in the last week of July, the worst wildfire recorded in the country since 1971.
Some of the world’s most worrying fires, in terms of managing climate change, have happened a few thousand of miles east of Finland, in eastern Russia’s Siberian Yakutia region. There, more than 4.2 million hectares have burned so far this year, and scientists fear they are destroying wetlands and causing layers of permafrost to melt—which could release large amounts of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. On Aug. 4, the E.U.’s Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service said fires in the area had unleashed 505 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent into the atmosphere—already surpassing 2020’s record for emissions released in an entire fire season, 450 megatonnes.
All of this could put us at risk of falling into a devastating cycle: as the greenhouse gases released by fires like these—and by other human activities including the burning of fossil fuels—continue to drive up global temperatures over the coming years, conditions will likely become even more favorable for fires, which in turn could keep driving up temperatures. If we can manage to rapidly cut our emissions, set up programs to restore natural ecosystems and get much better at preventing and controlling wildfires, we could, possibly, put a stop to that cycle some day. But between now and then, there may be many more fire seasons like this.
Forest fire rages in Varybobi, north of Athens, Greece on Aug. 3. Residential areas in Athens northern suburbs were evacuated as wildfires reached the outskirts of the city.Gerasimos Koilakos—NurPhoto/Getty Images
View of a beach resort as a wildfire burns on a hillside in Osoyoos, British Columbia, Canada, on July 20.Sara Mahony—Reuters
Children watch a helicopter dumping water on burning peatland at Palem Raya village in Ogan Ilir district, South Sumatra, Indonesia, on July 31.M. Hatta—Xinhua/eyevine/Redux
This aerial picture shows the shadow of an aircraft of the Air Forest Protection Service flying over a burned forest outside the village of Berdigestyakh, in the republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in Siberia, Russia on July 27.Dimitar Dilkoff—AFP/Getty Images
A dead goat lies on the ground in a burnt-out riding club after a forest fire in the Varibobi region of northern Athens, Greece on Aug. 4.Angelos Tzortzinis—DPA/picture alliance/Getty Images
In this photo taken by a drone, damaged structures are seen in Lytton, British Columbia, Canada on July 9, after a wildfire destroyed most of the village on June 30.Darryl Dyck—The Canadian Press/AP
Civil Defense personnel monitor a wildfire burning through hills in Qobayat, Lebanon on July 28. A Lebanese teenager was killed as he joined volunteers battling to fight the fire.Ethan Swope—Getty Images
A helicopter flies above a fire at Le Capannine beach in Catania, Sicily, Italy on July 30.Roberto Viglianisi—Reuters
‘Running out of options’: California resorts to water cutoffs as drought worsens
Julia Wick
Boat docks at the Browns Ravine Cove sit on dry earth at Folsom Lake on May 10, when California Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in 41 of the state’s 58 counties. (Getty Images)
California water regulators took unprecedented action this week, passing an emergency regulation that will bar thousands of Californians from diverting stream and river water as the drought worsens.
The State Water Resources Control Board voted unanimously Tuesday to pass the “emergency curtailment” order for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta watershed. The watershed encompasses a wide swath of the state, from the Oregon border in northeastern California down into the Central Valley.
The regulation — which gives the state water board the authority to issue emergency curtailments and require reporting on water use — will go into effect about two weeks from now, subject to approval by the state Office of Administrative Law, with the issuing of formal curtailment orders to follow.
California’s complex water rights system is designed to allocate water use during times of shortage, and such curtailments, although rare, are not unheard of. But the scope of Tuesday’s order — which will apply to thousands of senior water rights across a wide swath of the state — goes beyond anything seen in prior droughts.
“The fact remains that water supplies are extremely limited, and we are running out of options,” Ernest A. Conant, Bureau of Reclamation California-Great Basin regional director, said during the meeting, expressing his agency’s support for the emergency regulations.
Some farmers strongly criticized the move, but regulators said it was necessary given the conditions.
Who is affected by the decision?
About 5,700 Northern California and Central Valley water rights holders — who collectively hold about 12,500 water rights — will be subject to the forthcoming curtailments, according to Erik Ekdahl, deputy director of the state water board’s Division of Water Rights. Once the regulation is in place, further curtailments in the delta watershed may be issued as the situation progresses.
“It really depends on compliance with this order, climate hydrology, and what water supply conditions evolve,” Ekdahl said.
The order will largely affect rights holders using water for agricultural irrigation purposes, though some municipal, industrial and commercial entities also will be affected. The regulation carves out an exemption for health and human safety purposes, meaning that water for drinking, bathing and domestic purposes won’t be subject to the curtailment.
The water board previously released a draft version of the proposed order in mid-July, following a notice of water unavailability — which urges, but does not order, people to stop diverting water. That was sent to many rights holders in mid-June.
The curtailments will create hardships for many growers, particularly those without access to well water. But the burden may be lessened by the time of year. Irrigation needs vary widely from farm to farm and crop to crop. Generally speaking, however, the biggest demands for agricultural irrigation in the delta watershed tend to be in the late spring and summer, meaning the bulk of water use for the year is likely behind many growers.
“It’s coming toward the end of the season here. As everything’s dwindling in a very dry year, the curtailments may not make a huge difference for a lot of crop types,” said Chris Scheuring, senior counsel for the California Farm Bureau.
Scheuring said the real question is what happens if drought conditions persist next year.
What prompted the decision?
The bottom line is there isn’t enough water to meet competing demands. The curtailments are necessary, according to the state water board’s finding of emergency, “to avoid catastrophic impacts to reservoir storage needed for human health and safety and other purposes.” Essentially, regulators need to drastically reduce the amount of water being diverted from rivers and streams to ensure that enough water remains for essential purposes and that those who are diverting are doing so legally.
“It’s pretty important for the integrity of the system to curtail water rights when there’s not enough water,” said Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC Davis. “Otherwise, it’s just whoever gets their pump in first. And that’s not really a very fair way to do things.” In times of water shortage, rights holders are curtailed in order of seniority.
Drought conditions in the state rapidly worsened this spring, when expected snowpack runoff to the watershed decreased by almost 800,000 acre-feet — an amount nearly equivalent to the capacity of Folsom Reservoir — between April and May.
Gov. Gavin Newsom declared a drought emergency in 41 of California’s 58 counties on May 10. In that same month, many farmers were warned that they would receive little or nothing from two large allocation systems, the federal Central Valley Project and the State Water Project.
What happened to the snowpack?
“The simplest terms are the snow was kind of there and then it wasn’t,” said David Rizzardo, chief of the hydrology branch at the state’s Department of Water Resources.
Rizzardo said it’s not uncommon to lose 10%-20% of the snowpack to normal hydrological processes, particularly following a dry year. But losing just under 80% — let alone in such a short period of time?
“It’s beyond unprecedented,” Rizzardo said. The hydrologic conditions witnessed this year have been forecast in climate change models, but according to Rizzardo, such scenarios weren’t expected for decades from now.
Rizzardo characterized higher temperatures, drier soils and the effect of large-scale fires in the watershed as three of the primary factors driving the loss in projected runoff. (The effect of fires is two-fold, according to Rizzardo. The loss of tree cover and brush puts more direct sun radiation on the snow, which causes it to melt faster. Sooty debris from fires also creates dark surfaces, which absorb — rather than reflect — the sun’s radiation, causing even more melting.)
The delta itself is formed by the convergence of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers in the western Central Valley, but the sprawling delta watershed stretches all the way from the Oregon border in the northeastern corner of the state to just north of Fresno, encompassing much of the Sierra Nevada, as well as cities like Redding, Chico, Sacramento and Stockton.
Broadly speaking, runoff from the Sierra snowpack, which feeds major Northern California reservoirs and dozens of rivers, travels through the watershed and into the delta, which then connects to the San Francisco Bay. Water from the delta contributes to the water supply for more than two-thirds of Californians and is also used to irrigate millions of acres of farmland.
What about the rest of the state?
In July, Newsom urged all Californians to voluntarily cut their water usage by 15%, but what exactly does that mean for the average California household?
The governor made the request as he extended a regional drought emergency to 50 counties, which comprise about 42% of the state’s population. For many, the talk of water reductions reminded them of the shriveled lawns, attenuated showers and water-bucket toilet flushing of the last devastating drought.
If achieved, a voluntary 15% water reduction statewide would save roughly 850,000 acre-feet of water, which is enough to supply 1.7 million households for a year, according to the governor’s office.
In April 2015, then-Gov. Jerry Brown ordered cities and towns across California to cut water use by 25%, marking the first mandatory statewide water restrictions in state history. Californians came close to meeting the goal, with residents reducing the amount of water they used by 24.5%. Now, a handful of years after the last drought, per-capita residential water use remains about 16% below 2013 levels.
Newsom’s request is intended to bring California water production roughly back to where it dropped to in 2015 and 2016, said Marielle Pinheiro, research data specialist at the State Water Resources Control Board. Pinheiro said the number seemed feasible to the board because the state had been able to maintain those levels during the last drought.
Household water usage varies dramatically across the state based on a number of factors, but speaking in the broadest terms, Pinheiro said a 15% reduction would equate to a cut of roughly 14 gallons a day per person.
Newsom’s drought emergency declaration excludes almost all of Southern California, where the drought picture is much less dire. That’s because the region is mostly supplied by big federal and state water systems, rather than local precipitation.
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which imports water from the Colorado River and the north, says it has sufficient reserves in regional reservoirs and groundwater banks — enough to carry it through this year.
Los Angeles, which is partly supplied by the MWD, similarly doesn’t expect any shortages, officials have said.
Federal judge sanctions lawyers who brought conspiracy theory-filled lawsuit trying to overturn the 2020 election, reap $160 billion in damages
Jacob Shamsian
Former President Donald Trump. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
A federal judge in Colorado sanctioned two lawyers who challenged the 2020 election results.
He called their claims “fantastical” and “the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”
The lawyers had asked for $160 billion in damages because Joe Biden won the presidential election.
A federal judge in Colorado has sanctioned attorneys who brought a lawsuit that challenged the results of the 2020 presidential election and sought $160 billion in damages, calling their conspiratorial claims “the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”
The Wednesday ruling from US Magistrate Judge N. Reid Neureiter concludes that the lawsuit “was filed in bad faith” and orders the attorneys, Ernest J. Walker and Gary D. Fielder, to pay the opposing lawyers’ expenses and fees. The order does not bar them from practicing law.
“This lawsuit was filed with a woeful lack of investigation into the law and (under the circumstances) the facts,” Neureiter wrote. “The lawsuit put into or repeated into the public record highly inflammatory and damaging allegations that could have put individuals’ safety in danger. Doing so without a valid legal basis or serious independent personal investigation into the facts was the height of recklessness.”
The lawsuit was first filed on December 22, more than a month after then-President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Though it was filed in Colorado, the lawsuit named as defendants the governors and secretaries of state for swing states which Trump lost to now-President Joe Biden.
The plaintiffs – a smattering of Trump supporters who said in declarations that they believed the election results were rigged, were upset their Facebook posts were deleted, and didn’t want to get vaccinated against COVID-19 – also named Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Priscilla Chan, and Dominion Voting Systems as defendants.
Neureiter’s ruling criticized the attorneys in scathing terms for purporting to “represent 160 million American registered voters,” seeking to nullify “actions of multiple state legislatures, municipalities, and state courts,” and then demand a “nominal amount of $1,000 per registered voter” in damages, which would amount to “a figure is greater than the annual GDP of Hungary.”
“In short, this was no slip-and-fall at the local grocery store,” Neureiter wrote. “Albeit disorganized and fantastical, the Complaint’s allegations are extraordinarily serious and, if accepted as true by large numbers of people, are the stuff of which violent insurrections are made.”
The lawyers’ ‘massive cut-and-paste job’ recycled claims from other failed lawsuits
The judge noted that sanctions were warranted because the attorneys did not bring the lawsuit based on the claims of the people they represented.
“It must also be noted that this was not a client-driven lawsuit. As Plaintiffs’ counsel, Mr. Fielder, conceded at the July 16 hearing, the lawsuit was his idea,” Neureiter wrote. “Mr. Fielder and Mr. Walker were not relying on information from the named Plaintiffs to construct the suit or for any of the substantive factual allegations.”
Neureiter said Walker and Fielder acted improperly by failing to research any factual basis for their claims that the 2020 election results were rigged, and by bringing a claim in Colorado against state officials in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Wisconsin.
Neureiter also criticized the lawyers’ “massive cut-and-paste job.” They recycled claims in their lawsuit from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and Trump-affiliated lawyer Sidney Powell, both of whom failed in their own lawsuits challenging the election results.
The lawyers recycled claims from Sidney Powell, who led several failed lawsuits seeking to overturn the election results. Associated Press
The judge also criticized them for uncritically including a false Trump tweet about “Dominion deleting 2.7 million trump votes nationwide.” Neureiter wrote that when asked in a hearing about including the claim, Fielder’s only justification was that Trump was the president.
“Under the circumstances of this case, with this election, with this insurrection, with the on-going threats to election officials and company employees, including in a federal filing as if it were true such an inflammatory and damaging allegation, without any attempt at verification, merely because the out-going President had said it, was reckless and did not represent a reasonable inquiry under the circumstances,” Neureiter wrote.
Rights Attorney Pays Price for Defending Indigenous in Ecuador Poisoned by Oil
Greg Palast
Look at his face. Emergildo Criollo, Chief of the Cofan people of the Amazon in Ecuador. Determined, dignified, in war paint, bare-chested.
Cofan Chief Emergildo Criollo, Ecuador
It was back in 2007, when I found him in his thatched stilt home in the rainforest. Criollo told me his 5-year-old son had jumped into a swimming hole, covered with an enticing shine. The shine was oil sludge, illegally dumped. His son came up vomiting blood, then dropped dead in the Chief’s arms.
I followed him to the courthouse in the dusty roustabout town of Lago Agrio (Bitter Lake) where, with a sheaf of papers, Criollo sought justice for his son.
Behind Criollo, the court clerks, in their white shirts and ties, were giggling and grinning at each other, nodding toward this “indio” painted up and half naked, thinking he can file a suit against a giant. A giant named Chevron.
In 2011, they stopped laughing. That’s when an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron to pay Criollo and other indigenous co-plaintiffs $9.5 billion. The courts found that Chevron’s Texaco operation had illegally dumped 16 billion gallons of deadly oil waste.
Steven Donziger with Indigenous clients
(courtesy AmazonWatch)
What the gigglers didn’t know is that the Chief had a secret weapon: Steven Donziger, a US attorney, classmate of Barack Obama at Harvard law, who gave up everything — literally everything — to take on Criollo’s case.
It’s been a decade, and Chevron still hasn’t paid a dime. But Donziger has paid big time: For the last two years, he’s been under house arrest, longer than any American in history never convicted of a crime.
But weeks ago, he was convicted of contempt by a judge who denied him a jury. (The Constitution? Faggedaboudit.) And on October 8, this contemptible judge will sentence Donziger, and could put him behind bars.
Who was the prosecutor? Not the US government, but Chevron’s law firm. The first-ever criminal prosecution by a US corporation.
Say what?
On Friday, August 6 at 4pm Pacific, I will be speaking at the Free Donziger Rally at the Chevron Station on the corner of Laurel Canyon Blvd and Sunset Blvd. This is one of more than a dozen rallies on Friday from San Francisco to Tel Aviv. Check the list.
I can’t make this up.
Chevron set out to destroy Donziger, to make an example of a human rights lawyer that dares take on the petroleum pirates.
They filed suits against Donziger and the Cofan and found a former tobacco industry lawyer judge Lewis Kaplan to find Donziger in contempt for refusing to turn over his cell phone and computer to Chevron — an unprecedented attack on attorney-client privilege. To give Chevron the names of indigenous activists in South America can be a death sentence.
When Donziger said he’d appeal, the judge charged him with criminal contempt — that’s simply unprecedented. But a far more dangerous precedent was set. When federal prosecutors in New York laughed off and rejected Kaplan’s demand that they charge Donziger, the judge appointed Chevron’s lawyers, Gibson Dunn, to act as the prosecutors!
So far, 60 Nobel Laureates, several US Senators and Congresspeople, and a Who’s Who of human rights groups have publicly registered their horror at this new corporate prosecution. (Note: Gibson Dunn represented me. Never again. I’ve taken the trash to the curb.)
Chevron also went after journalists, in one case, filing a complaint against the BBC Television reporter that broke the story that Chevron had destroyed key evidence in the case. I was that reporter — and survived with my job after a year of hearings. But Chevron’s prosecution did a damn good job of scaring off other journalists.
Some were scared off; some bought off. PBS News Hour wouldn’t touch the death-by-oil story. The official chief sponsor of the PBS News Hour? Chevron.
I’ve gone way out of my way to get ChevronTexaco’s side of the story. I finally chased them down in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. I showed them a study of the epidemic of childhood leukemia centered on where their company dumped oil sludge. Here’s their reply:
“And it’s the only case of cancer in the world? How many cases of children with cancer do you have in the States?”
Texaco’s lawyer, Rodrigo Perez, was chuckling and snorting.
“Scientifically, nobody has proved that crude causes cancer.”
OK, then. But what about the epidemiological study about children with cancer in the Amazon traced to hydrocarbons?
The parents of the dead kids, he said, would have some big hurdles in court:
“If there is somebody with cancer there, they must prove it is caused by crude or by the petroleum industry. And, second, they have to prove that it is OUR crude.”
Perez leaned over with a huge grin.
“Which is absolutely impossible.”
He grinned even harder.
Maybe some guy eating monkeys in the jungle can’t prove it. And maybe that’s because the evidence of oil dumping was destroyed.
Deliberately, by Chevron.
Jaime Varela, Chevron Attorney, Quito, Ecuador
I passed the ChevronTexaco legal duo a document from their files labeled “Personal y confidential.” They read in silence. They stayed silent quite a while. Jaime Varela, Chevron’s lawyer, was wearing his tan golf pants and white shoes, an open shirt and bespoke blue blazer. He had a blow-dried bouffant hairdo much favored by the ruling elite of Latin America and skin whiter than mine, a color also favored by the elite.
Jaime had been grinning too. He read the memo. He stopped grinning. The key part says,
“Todos los informes previos deben ser sacados de las oficinas principales y las del campo, y ser destruidos.”
“. . . Reports . . . are to be removed from the division and field offices and be destroyed.”
It came from the company boss in the States, “R. C. Shields, Presidente de la Junta.”
Removed and destroyed. That smells an awful lot like an order to destroy evidence, which in this case means evidence of abandoned pits of deadly drilling residue. Destroying evidence that is part of a court action constitutes fraud.
In the United States, that would be a crime, a jail-time crime. OK, gents, you want to tell me about this document?
“Can we have a copy of this?” Varela asked me, pretending he’d never seen it before in his life.
I’ll pretend with them, if that gets me information. “Sure. You’ve never seen this?”
The ritual of innocence continued as they asked a secretary to make copies. “We’re sure there’s an explanation,” Varela said. I’m sure there is. “We’ll get back to you as soon as we find out what it is.”
Column: Here’s why the GOP smears everything it doesn’t like as ‘socialism’
Michael Hiltzik
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) exults upon her election as House GOP conference chair in May, replacing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), who went against Republican orthodoxy in the 2020 election. (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times)
There are two things one can be sure of when politicians denigrate government programs as “socialist.” One is that they don’t know anything about “socialism.” The other is that they don’t know anything about the programs they’re trying to smear.
So here comes Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the third-ranking member of the House Republican leadership, with an especially absurd example of the genre.
Marking the birthdays of Medicare and Medicaid, which were enacted on July 30, 1965, she took to Twitter to celebrate “the critical role these programs have played to protect the healthcare of millions of families.” Then she pivoted to add, “To safeguard our future, we must reject Socialist healthcare schemes.”
The cry of socialism has been patented by the powerful interests that desire to put a damper on progressive legislation….for over a quarter century.
Al Smith, Democratic candidate for President, in 1928
Stefanik’s remark was particularly incoherent in part because of the history of Republican opinion on Medicare and Medicaid: Almost universally, they derided the programs as “socialism.”
The Medicare and Medicaid bill placed before Congress by President Lyndon Johnson was “not only socialism — it is brazen socialism,” declared Sen. Carl Curtis (R-Neb.).
During his 1964 presidential campaign against Johnson, Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-Ariz.) asked: “Having given our pensioners their medical care in kind, why not food baskets, why not public housing accommodations, why not vacation resorts, why not a ration of cigarettes for those who smoke and of beer for those who drink?”
Reagan’s AMA patrons were only sticking to a successful script — their cry of “socialized medicine” had helped them defeat an effort by Harry Truman to enact a public healthcare plan in 1945. (The AMA also derided Truman and his aides as “followers of the Moscow party line.”)
More recently, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) announced that the GOP strategy in the 2020 election would be to present itself as “the firewall that saves the country from socialism.”
Did it work? This was the election that turned McConnell from Senate majority leader to Senate minority leader.
Stefanik, who has been making a name for herself on Capitol Hill as someone who will say anything if she thinks it will bring her advancement, wasn’t clear in her tweet what she meant by “Socialist healthcare schemes.”
Perhaps she meant the public option, a government-sponsored program to compete with private insurance. The public option was rejected during the debate preceding enactment of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, though it has lately gained new attention. But Stefanik didn’t need to be that specific; her goal was to place the term “socialism” out there.
Stefanik was using the term as a shibboleth — a code word directed at her political base, much as her GOP colleagues have used “vaccine passport” to demonize vaccination requirements designed to protect public health, or “Faucism” to undermine vaccination, or “critical race theory” to manipulate education standards.
Stefanik didn’t expect to be heard by the public at large, and certainly not by Democrats. She was merely sending a signal to her peeps that she was one of them.
The effectiveness of shibboleths doesn’t depend on an understanding of a particular term’s meaning — in fact, any such understanding would work against its effectiveness as a partisan dog whistle. It’s useful to recall that one of the rallying cries against the enactment of the ACA was “keep your government hands off my Medicare.”
Nevertheless, before looking at the technique’s long, discreditable history, we should be reminded that true socialism is defined as a belief that the means of production should be publicly, not privately, owned. That encompasses manufacturing plants and their machines and tools. Such conditions imply an economy in which output and the use of labor are publicly directed and social benefits evenly distributed.
Any functioning economy, then, comprises purely capitalist elements as well as those that might be labeled socialist. But the programs denigrated as socialist by the American right tend to place private enterprise at their center.
That includes the ACA, which dictates that all Americans must carry a form of health insurance and subsidizes their purchase by the working and middle class, but relies on private insurers to provide the coverage. In Medicaid and Medicare, the government sets the prices for procedures and services, but leaves it up to doctors and hospitals to decide whether to join.
The American system also recognizes that market capitalism, for all its virtues, has its flaws — chiefly that all participants don’t enter the marketplace with equivalent power. That’s why we have a safety net of social insurance programs aimed at ensuring that nobody is left entirely out of the market — the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and Medicare, food stamps and child tax credits, free COVID-19 testing and vaccinations, to name a few.
As I’ve reported before, the branding of progressive programs, especially those proposed by Democrats, as “socialist” is not a new stratagem. The “socialism” smear has long since become so common that it’s easy — almost too easy — to ridicule.
The best example dates back to January 1936 and a gala dinner sponsored by the American Liberty League, a splinter group of wealthy business leaders and old-guard Democrats opposing Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Its star was former New York Gov. Al Smith, who had run for president on the Democratic ticket in 1928 as a progressive leader and then thrown in his lot with the party’s Wall Street wing.
No one was ever quite sure what motivated Smith’s apostasy, whether personal resentment of his former ally FDR or the financial blandishments of his new friends. FDR had a withering opinion of the Liberty League, describing it as “an organization that only advocates two or three out of the Ten Commandments…. [They] say you shall love God and then forget your neighbor.”
At the league gala, Smith told his audience, “Make a test for yourself. Just get the platform of the Democratic Party and get the platform of the Socialist Party and lay them down on your dining-room table, side by side…. After you have done that, make your mind up to pick up the platform that more nearly squares with the record, and you will have your hand on the Socialist platform.”
A thunderstruck FDR remarked to his Labor Secretary, Frances Perkins: “Practically all the things we’ve done in the federal government are like things Al Smith did as governor of New York. They’re things he would have done if he had been president of the United States. What in the world is the matter?”
But he also had an ace up his sleeve — a speech Smith had delivered during the 1928 campaign in which he ridiculed the same charge of “socialism” from Republicans that he now leveled against Roosevelt.
“The cry of socialism,” Smith declared, “has been patented by the powerful interests that desire to put a damper on progressive legislation. Is that cry of socialism anything new? Not to a man of my experience. I have heard it raised by reactionary elements and the Republican Party … for over a quarter-century.”
Nearly a century later, the GOP is still at it. The cry of “socialism” is still used to put a damper on progressive legislation, whether it’s requiring the wealthy to pay their fair share of taxes instead of enjoying the lowest tax rates in 50 years, or looking for further means to ensure universal healthcare. It’s been a tried-and-true method for decades, but as Stefanik’s inept version shows, it’s getting a little threadbare.
Oil producers used Facebook to counter President Biden’s clean energy message, a study shows.
Hiroko Tabuchi August 5, 2021
An Exxon Mobile oil refinery in Channahon, Ill. The oil giant was one of the largest users of paid ads promoting fossil fuels on Facebook’s U.S. platforms in 2020.Credit…Tannen Maury/EPA, via Shutterstock.
Soon after Joseph R. Biden Jr., then a presidential candidate, released his $2 trillion climate plan last year that promised to escalate the use of clean energy in the United States, the world’s major oil and gas dialed up their presence on Facebook.
Overnight on Facebook’s U.S. platforms, 25 of the biggest oil and gas producers, industry lobby groups and advocacy organizations unleashed a surge in ads promoting fossil fuels, according to ad spending data analyzed by InfluenceMap, a London-based watchdog that tracks corporate influence on climate policy.
By the following week, collective ad spend by the companies like Exxon Mobil — as well as powerful lobby groups like the American Petroleum Institute — had risen more than 1,000 percent, from a seven-day rolling average of about $6,700 a day to more than $86,000 a day, according to the data, based on disclosures by Facebook and tallied by InfluenceMap. For the whole of 2020, some25,147 ads logged more than 431 million views, bringing Facebook almost $10 million in advertising revenue on those ads.
“Do you support America’s pipelines? We all depend on this critical infrastructure for affordable energy supplies!” said an ad run by Exxon starting on July 15, 2020, the day after Mr. Biden’s climate announcement. “Natural gas is already clean, affordable and efficient — and it’s getting better every day,” said an ad by the American Petroleum Institute starting on July 20.
An Exxon Mobil ad that appeared on Facebook. Ad spending by oil groups surged on the platform last year. Credit…via Facebook
Of the 25 companies and groups, Exxon and API were the largest users of paid ads on Facebook’s U.S. platforms in 2020, accounting for 62 percent of the total ads analyzed by InfluenceMap. The analysis found that ads were shown to more men than women overall, though there were some variations: posts that focused on fossil fuels as part of the climate solution were shown to more women, while those that argued oil and gas were a pragmatic choice economically were shown to more men.
Recent research has highlighted that though natural gas is a cleaner-burning fuel than coal or oil, releasing less greenhouse gases that are the driver of global warming, there are heavy emissions associated with producing the gas. Scientists, environmentalists and, increasingly, regulators have called out the portrayal of gas as a low-carbon fuel as misleading.
In a statement, Facebook pointed out that similar ads run on many platforms, including television, and that the social networking platform offered transparency by making its ad data available. (Many large traditional news organizations, including The New York Times, also accept oil-company advertising.) Facebook’s advertising policies also ban ads containing misleading information, and require those on social or political issues to be clearly labeled.
“We reject ads when one of our independent fact-checking partners rates them as false or misleading and take action against pages, groups, accounts, and websites that repeatedly share content rated as false,” Facebook said.
An Exxon spokesman, Todd M, Spitler, said the oil producer believed “that sound public policy is achieved when a variety of informed voices participate in the political process. For these reasons, Exxon Mobil exercises its right to support and participate in policy discussions.” An API spokeswoman, Megan Bloomgren, said that the lobby group’s social media spending was “a fraction of the robust investments our companies are making every day into breakthrough technological research to shape a lower carbon future.”
Geoffrey Supran, a Harvard University researcher who has examined the fossil fuel industry’s climate messaging, said aspects of InfluenceMap’s findings were consistent with his research. InfluenceMap identified several different types of messaging in the Facebook ads — including presenting oil and gas as part of the solution on climate change — that had become part of the industry’s playbook, he said.
An Exxon Mobil ad that appeared on Facebook. “Exxon Mobil exercises its right to support and participate in policy discussions,” a spokesman said.Credit…via Facebook
“What our research has shown is that over the past decade or so, the industry has gradually shifted from outright disinformation about climate science to more subtle and insidious messaging,” he said. But those messages “work to muddy the waters to the same end — which is to stop action on climate change,” he said. “Media and communication platforms need to stop being used — they need to stop being pawns of fossil fuel propaganda and to protect the public.”
The analysis comes as a big part of Mr. Biden’s climate vision, his $1 trillion infrastructure package, moves forward in Congress, with substantial investments aimed at addressing climate change. But it is far from the broader package that Mr. Biden had sought, and has also angered climate advocates for extending a lifeline to fossil fuels by allocating some funds to natural gas infrastructure.
Facebook temporarily suspended new political ads ahead of the U.S. presidential elections in November to reduce misinformation and interference. The social networking site has since lifted that ban, and most of the groups tracked by InfluenceMap continue to run ads.
“While this research focused on 2020,” said Faye Holder, who authored the InfluenceMap report, “the reality is the oil and gas sector is continuing to use Facebook as a key tool.”
Hiroko Tabuchi is an investigative reporter on the climate desk. She was part of the Times team that received the 2013 Pulitzer for explanatory reporting.
Firefighters take a defensive stand against a home burning in Redwood Valley, Calif., ignited by an 80 acre wind whipped brush fire fed by tinder dry conditions on July 7. Credit – Kent Porter—The Press Democrat/AP
