Category: Politics and American Democracy

California’s drought and wildfire dangers rising at stunning pace

California’s drought and wildfire dangers rising at stunning pace

Faith E. Pinho, Alex Wigglesworth                 
A home destroyed in the 2020 North Complex Fire sits above Lake Oroville on Sunday, May 23, 2021, in Oroville, Calif. At the time of this photo, the reservoir was at 39 percent of capacity and 46 percent of its historical average. California officials say the drought gripping the U.S. West is so severe it could cause one of the state's most important reservoirs to reach historic lows by late August, closing most boat ramps and shutting down a hydroelectric power plant during the peak demand of the hottest part of the summer. (AP Photo/Noah Berger)

 

California’s drought and wildfire conditions are accelerating at unprecedented rates, according to state officials, and residents should brace for a summer of widespread burning and mandatory water conservation measures in some regions.

As reservoir levels across the state continue to drop, and as parched vegetation poses an increasing threat of wildfire, officials in Sacramento and Southern California offered a bleak assessment of the state’s drying climate, saying it has already begun to affect people, plants and animals.

The current drought, which blankets the entire state and a broad swath of the western United States, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, is already outpacing the state’s devastating 2012-16 drought, said Karla Nemeth, director of the California Department of Water Resources.

“It really wasn’t until year three or four when we saw these intense conditions … we’re now experiencing in the second year of the drought,” Nemeth said Friday. “That acceleration is really what’s new about this drought and what we’re working to respond to.”

California typically relies on the gradual melting of Sierra snowpack to fill its reservoirs, Nemeth said. But this year, the state saw record evaporation and record low runoff into streams and reservoirs.

It is “unprecedented in the breadth and severity of this regional drought,” said Wade Crowfoot, secretary of the state’s Natural Resources Agency.

At the same time, fire officials in Southern California warned that wildfire conditions are already like those typically seen in August and September.

“We’re seeing fires move fast,” said Chief Brian Fennessy of the Orange County Fire Authority. “Fires that normally would be an acre, 2 acres, 5 acres, so far this year are getting to 30, 50 and beyond.”

They’re also spreading more quickly, he said.

“We are seeing fire spread that is even stunning many of us that have been doing this for a very long time — fire spread that could quite easily surprise many of the citizens within this region,” he said. He urged people to evacuate as soon as they’re told to do so.

These dry conditions do not bode well for the Fourth of July weekend, when first responders will probably face their first big test as a predicted heat wave collides with amateur fireworks displays.

Last month, Gov. Gavin Newsom expanded a drought emergency to 41 California counties, covering 30% of the state’s population. On Friday, Santa Clara County declared its own local emergency, saying drought conditions were so extreme that water levels were not adequate to meet demand.

“The reality is we live in an arid region that will continue to experience droughts,” Jasneet Sharma, director of Santa Clara County’s Office of Sustainability, said in a statement. “There are many steps that we should all take, from large-scale conservation projects and household-level water conservation retrofits to simple household changes like turning off the faucet when you brush your teeth. Each one is an important part of sustainability.”

Water conservation is likely to ramp up, possibly becoming mandatory in some communities, said Joaquin Esquivel, chair of the State Water Resources Control Board.

“It’s not about conservation just because it’s drought. … We really need to see conservation and efficiency here as just [a] simple course of action that we must do, no matter if it’s dry or it’s wet,” Esquivel said.

This year’s parched conditions are already causing concern, especially after a heat wave swept across Southern California this month, breaking several records and heating Palm Springs to 123 degrees.

Usually the natural world can adapt to gradual changes in the climate, but California’s conditions are changing so frequently that plants and animals are not able to keep up, said Chuck Bonham, director of California’s Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“They don’t have the luxury of adapting over millennia anymore; they’re being forced to adapt over a period of years,” he said.

The decrease in water levels has caused some rivers to heat up, becoming uninhabitable for some fish. Department of Fish and Wildlife teams recently removed almost 17 million Chinook salmon from four hatcheries in the Central Valley and released them into the ocean at places such as San Francisco Bay. The number of fish rescues has increased since the previous drought, Bonham said.

“We also know we’re going to end up serving as a Noah’s Ark,” he added, referring to a menagerie of animals kept at UC Davis until their environments become cool enough to live in again. “Every drop of water we can save as Californians is going to matter for people, but it’s going to matter for nature too.”

The drying also carries severe consequences for wildfire.

On Friday, fire officials gathered outside a Los Angeles County fire station in La Cañada Flintridge and said the heightened fire conditions were due to drought and unseasonably warm temperatures. Scientists say that climate change has driven the shifts by creating hotter, drier weather interspersed with more extreme, erratic precipitation events.

Live fuel moisture levels, which measure the dryness of vegetation, are on par with those typically seen in the late summer or fall, said Los Angeles County Fire Chief Daryl Osby, who serves as mutual aid coordinator for the region comprising Los Angeles, Orange, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara and Ventura counties.

“You saw the fire in L.A. city, the Palisades fire that burned in the fog,” he said, referring to the blaze that forced evacuations in Topanga Canyon in mid-May. “That’s kind of unprecedented, you would think in years past, but it’s the norm now.”

The fire broke out in an area that hadn’t burned in 50 years and that was choked with drought-killed vegetation, he said. Because of the topography and dryness, it grew to more than 1,000 acres before firefighters were able to bring it under control, despite relatively calm winds.

“Our expectations are that during this summer, we’re going to have those types of fires and larger with just the winds off the ocean,” Osby said. “And then we’re really concerned moving into the fall months when we start getting our significant wind-driven fires.”

Officials have taken steps to prepare. When the forecast looks dire — for instance, if the National Weather Service issues a red-flag warning — the California Governor’s Office of Emergency Services works with local jurisdictions to pre-position extra firefighters, engines and aircraft and reimburses the governments for the added cost, said Cal OES Fire and Rescue Chief Brian Marshall.

“That gives us a fighting chance to catch the fires when they’re small,” he said.

Key to that is the prompt use of aircraft, which enables ground crews to then go in and extinguish the fires, Fennessy said. Southern California fire personnel have more aircraft available this year than in years past, including large helitankers that can fly at night, he said.

The California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection moved to peak staffing earlier this year, sooner than normal, and will maintain that level for the rest of the year, said Chief Glenn Barley, assistant region chief for Cal Fire’s Southern Region.

“Last year was the worst fire season we’ve seen in California,” Barley said. “At this point this year, we are ahead of those numbers for last year, both in terms of number of fires and number of acres burned.”

Yet fire officials said that while they’re well resourced, they still don’t have enough, particularly in light of the potentially historic fire season bearing down on the region.

“I will say that from my municipality to the state to the federal government, that we’re stretched. We’re busy,” Osby said, adding that local municipalities still have to go on medical calls — more than 1,000 a day in the case of his department — in addition to fighting fires. “None of us have all the resources that we need.”

He said L.A. County would normally have 24 inmate firefighting crews but is down to eight, as many were sent home from prison after the state granted them early release because of the pandemic. That has forced the department to dip into its budget to train more paid crew members, he said.

Meanwhile, the National Interagency Fire Center this week raised its preparedness level to 4, the second-highest, said Angeles National Forest Fire Chief Robert Garcia.

“The significance of that is that the last time we were in this preparedness Level 4 at this time of year was in 2002,” he said. “And prior to that, the last time was 1991.”

West coast drought leads to grasshopper plague

West coast drought leads to grasshopper plague

Oriana Gonzalez                        

 

As the Southwest remains stuck in the most intense drought of the 21st century, a plague of grasshoppers has emerged, threatening farmers’ rangelands, AP reports.

 

Driving the news: The Department of Agriculture has responded by launching an extermination campaign against grasshoppers, the largest since the 1980s. Authorities have started to spray thousands of square miles with pesticide to kill immature grasshopper before they become adults.

  • But, but, but: Some environmentalists worry the pesticides could kill other insects, including grasshopper predators and struggling species such as monarch butterflies, AP notes.
  • The USDA said it would spray rangelands in sections to prevent other insect wildlife from being affected by the pesticide.

State of play: The USDA released a grasshopper hazard map that shows some areas have more than 15 grasshoppers per square yard in Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska.

Why it matters: “Left unaddressed, federal officials said the agricultural damage from grasshoppers could become so severe it could drive up beef and crop prices,” AP writes.

What they’re saying: “Drought and grasshoppers go together and they are cleaning us out,” Frank Wiederrick, a farmer in Montana, told AP.

When it’s 115 degrees in the shade

The Week

When it’s 115 degrees in the shade

William Falk, Editor-in-chief, The Week Magazine   
Phoenix heat.
Phoenix heat. Caitlin O’Hara/Getty Images

This is the editor’s letter in the current issue of The Week magazine.

The first time I experienced 110 degrees, I walked out of a strenuously air-conditioned hotel into the blast-furnace heat of a June day in Phoenix. WHAM. It was so hot, so crazy over-the-top hot, that I burst into laughter. You kidding me? That was a couple of decades ago, and now 110 is not unusual in Arizona, which had its hottest year ever in 2020, with 53 days of 110-degree heat and 14 days of 115 degrees or higher. This year might be hotter still — it was 118 degrees in Phoenix last week — as the entire Southwest and California bake in a pitiless megadrought. The Southwest has always been one of my favorite parts of the country; just before the pandemic halted travel in March 2020, I spent a delightful week in a casita tucked into Saguaro National Park south of Tucson. In recent decades, millions of “snowbirds” have permanently fled the upper Midwest and the Northeast for Arizona, Nevada, Utah, and Texas. But as the climate changes, will truly oppressive heat, and a dire lack of water, begin to force a reverse migration north?

The term “climate refugee” may summon images of Bangladesh, sub-Saharan Africa, or sinking islands in Micronesia. But in coming years, it could include Californians fleeing apocalyptic wildfires and choking air, and Arizonans and Nevadans facing unbroken months of heat so intense it is dangerous to leave the house much of the day. In this arid region, battles over scarce water will intensify. And the Southwest is not alone in its vulnerability. By 2040, climatologists warn, the Southeast will become noticeably hotter and even more humid. Southern Florida and coastal communities along the Atlantic will be so routinely flooded by rising seas and stronger storms that homeowners may have to retreat inland. Midwestern farmers are likely to see crop yields plunge. While we argue over other things, we might take note of the fact that the climate is already changing, with even more dramatic change to come.

It’s Not the Heat—It’s the Humanity

The New Yorker

Annals of a warming planet

It’s Not the Heat—It’s the Humanity

Rising air temperatures remind us that our bodies have real limits.

By Bill McKibben                June 23, 2021

A sign warns of high temperatures in foreground as people walk in the desert behind.
Last week, researchers at nasa and noaa found that “the earth is warming faster than expected.”Photograph by Kyle Grillot / Bloomberg / Getty

 

It’s hard to change the outcome of the climate crisis by individual action: we’re past the point where we can alter the carbon math one electric vehicle at a time, and so activists rightly concentrate on building movements large enough to alter our politics and our economics. But ultimately the climate crisis still affects people as individuals—it comes down, eventually, to bodies. Which is worth remembering. In the end, we’re not collections of constructs or ideas or images or demographics but collections of arteries and organs and muscles, and those are designed to operate within a finite range of temperatures.

I happened to be talking with Dr. Rupa Basu, the chief of air-and-climate epidemiology at California’s Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment, on Friday, a day after Palm Springs had tied its all-time heat record with a reading of a hundred and twenty-three degrees Fahrenheit. That’s hot—hotter than the human body can really handle. The day before, with temperatures topping a hundred degrees before noon, a hiker in the San Bernardino National Forest had keeled over and died. “We talk a lot about biological adaptability, but as humans we’re not supposed to adapt to temps that high,” Basu said. “If your core body temp reaches a hundred and five, that means death can be imminent. As humans, we can only adapt so much. Once the air temperature is above a hundred and twenty, there’s only so much you can do, except rely on air-conditioning and other mitigation strategies. And that puts a lot of pressure on the power grid, and that could result in brownouts and blackouts. It’s not really a long-term, chronic solution. It’s just living for the moment and hoping it works.”

And often it doesn’t work. Last summer, Basu published a remarkable paper, a “systematic review” of research on pregnant women. The studies she looked at—which collectively examined more than thirty-two million births—found that higher temperatures in the weeks before delivery were linked to stillbirths and low birth weights. “It’s weeks thirty-five and thirty-six that seem to be the trigger,” she told me recently. “What we think is happening is that a lot of the mechanisms from heat-related illness start with dehydration. If there are symptoms of dehydration, those might be overlooked. If someone doesn’t connect it with heat, they might not get to a cooler environment. You see vomiting—and people might say, ‘That’s O.K. Bound to happen when you’re pregnant.’ But it’s because of the dehydration.” Further along in the pregnancy, she said, “your body releases oxytocin, which triggers contractions. And if it happens prematurely—well, heat raises the level of oxytocin faster. If you’re not able to thermoregulate, get the temp down, it can trigger low birth weight or, earlier on, miscarriage or stillbirth.” Past a certain point, the body diverts blood flow to the subcutaneous layer beneath the skin, where the body’s heat can radiate out into the air. That diverts the blood “away from vital organs,” Basu said. “And away from the fetus.”

The brain is an organ, too. For all its metaphysical magnificence, it’s a hunk of cells that comes with operating specs. Again, don’t let its temperature get too high: in 2018, Basu published a study showing the effect of seasonal temperatures on mental health. A ten-degree-Fahrenheit jump in temperature during the warm season was associated with an increase in emergency-room visits for “mental-health disorders, self-injury/suicide, and intentional injury/homicide” of 4.8, 5.8, and 7.9 per cent, respectively. Those are big numbers, and the search for mechanisms that explain them is fascinating. Among other things, certain medications impede the body’s ability to thermoregulate: beta-blockers, for instance, decrease the flow of blood to the skin, and antidepressants can increase sweating, Basu told me. “There’s also some evidence to show that heat affects neurotransmitters themselves—that everything is just a little bit slower.”

Both these effects show up more strongly in this country in Black and Hispanic patients—probably, as Basu explained, because those groups disproportionately live in low-income neighborhoods. “They’re often in areas where there are more fossil-fuel emissions, fewer green spaces, and more blacktop and cement, which really absorbs and retains the heat,” she said. “And also living closer to freeways. That exacerbates air pollution. And, with the heat, that’s a synergistic effect. It’s environmental racism that leads to these differences in exposure.” Some people, she added, bristle at hearing that: “Someone said to me, ‘Oh, so now we’re breathing different air?’ And I said, ‘Yes, that’s exactly right. We can track it down to the Zip Code level.’ ” Call it critical race epidemiology.

Which leads us, of course, back to politics. There’s only so much that doctors can do to help us deal with heat; ultimately, it’s up to the Joe Bidens and the Joe Manchins—and the Xi Jinpings—of the world. “We’re seeing these kinds of extreme temperatures in Palm Springs right now,” Basu said. “If we start to see those in more populated areas, imagine the public-health impact.” That’s obviously what’s coming. Last week, researchers at nasa and noaa found that, according to satellite data, “the earth is warming faster than expected” and that the planet’s energy imbalance—the difference between how much of the sun’s energy the planet absorbs and how much radiates back out to space—has doubled since 2005, an increase equivalent to “every person on Earth using 20 electric tea kettles at once.” And the National Weather Service is forecasting a heatwave this week for the Pacific Northwest that could smash regional records.

Amid the endless deal-making—the U.S. last backed off what would have been a G-7 plan to end coal use—the human body is a useful bottom line. “I think what we need to do is prevent the warming,” Basu said, when I asked her for a prescription. “So it doesn’t get that hot.”

Passing the Mic

A 1999 graduate in sustainable design from the University of Virginia, Dana Robbins Schneider led sustainability efforts for many years at the commercial-real-estate giant J.L.L. As the director of sustainability at the Empire State Realty Trust, she oversaw an energy-efficiency retrofit of the iconic Manhattan skyscraper on Thirty-fourth Street, which demonstrated how landlords could save both carbon and money, and which helped pave the way for Local Law 97, the city’s effort to force large buildings to improve their energy performance. (Our interview has been edited.)

How did the Empire State Building retrofit come about? What are the bottom-line before-and-after numbers?

The Empire State Building’s ten-year energy-efficiency retrofit started as an exercise to prove—or disprove—that there could be an investment-and-return business case for deep energy retrofits. Once it was proven, it was implemented to save energy and reduce costs for both the tenants and Empire State Realty Trust. We partnered with the Clinton Climate Initiative, Rocky Mountain Institute, Johnson Controls, and J.L.L. to manage the project. Through the rebuild, we were able to cut emissions from the building by fifty-four per cent and counting, which has saved us upward of four million dollars each year, with a 3.1-year payback. We have attempted to inform policy with local, state, and federal governments to share what we’ve learned to reduce emissions—and to meet E.S.R.T.’s target for the building to achieve carbon neutrality by 2030.

As a result of the retrofit, the building is in the top twenty per cent in energy efficiency among all measured buildings in the United States. E.S.R.T. is the nation’s largest user of a hundred-per-cent green power in real estate and was named Energy Star Partner of the Year in 2021.

What were the key interventions? And do people working in the building even realize that much has changed?

The biggest lesson we learned was that there is no silver bullet—there is silver buckshot. A combination of measures that interact effectively delivers optimal savings. More than fifty per cent of the energy consumed in an office building is consumed by tenants, so the actions of tenants are critical. Landlord-tenant partnerships are the only way to drive deep energy-and-emissions reductions in the built environment.

The best practice for the lowest-cost implementation of energy-efficiency strategies is to make the right steps in the right order. Start with the envelope, or the exterior, of the building. Each project contributes to the success of other projects, so, when we measure effectiveness and R.O.I., it’s important to look at how each project interacts with another.

We were able to decrease energy use through strategic tactics throughout the building, with an emphasis on the reuse of existing resources. We executed eight major projects, which included:

  • Renovation of the central chiller plant.
  • On-site refurbishment of all sixty-five hundred and fourteen of the building’s double-glass windows, for which we reused more than ninety-six per cent of existing materials, to quadruple their performance.
  • Reflective insulation placed behind each radiator, to reduce energy.
  • Regenerative braking technology added to each elevator, to store energy instead of heat.

Do you hear from other building owners wondering how to do this? What do you think are the keys to getting it done?

From the earliest announcement, we have shared all our work for free with the public, and we have rolled out best practices from the Empire State Building’s deep energy retrofit to our entire portfolio. E.S.R.T. has a target to achieve carbon neutrality as a commercial portfolio by 2035. With Local Law 97 emissions limits effective in 2024, many building owners are unsure of how to make their buildings compliant. Our chairman, president, and C.E.O. serves on the LL97 Advisory Board and on the LL97 Technical Pathways for Commercial Buildings Working Group to develop and improve policy based on practice, and we are the only commercial landlord to serve on the Implementation Advisory Board.

The Empire State Building has long been a modern marvel, and we intend to keep that reputation as we transparently share our research and best practices in our annual sustainability report. As we prove that it works in the “World’s Most Famous Building,” which this year celebrates its ninetieth anniversary, we prove that it can work anywhere.

Climate School

The searing heat in Arizona and Utah has translated into early-season wildfires. The Pack Creek Fire, in the La Sal Mountains, scorched, among many other things, Ken and Jane Sleight’s Pack Creek Ranch, a literary landmark, where for decades many of the region’s writers have gathered. Some of them have put together a chapbook, “La Sal Mountain Elegies,” which includes Terry Tempest Williams’s account of being at the ranch, in 1989, on the day that Edward Abbey died.

There’s another controversy emerging at the Nature Conservancy.—this time about the use of forests. Last summer, a coalition of environmental groups around the country sent T.N.C. a letter asking it to reëvaluate support for promoting forestry as a “natural climate solution” and, in particular, to come out against burning trees to produce electricity—the so-called biomass energy that scientists now understand to be a major climate threat and that sociologists know to be a prime example of environmental racism. T.N.C. executives replied in a letter, saying that “reasonable people can disagree on approaches.” (I should note that I served for a decade as a board member of the Adirondack chapter of the Conservancy, and last winter I participated in a fund-raiser for it.) T.N.C. gets things done, but one of its strengths—access to lots of high-powered financial players who can bankroll their conservation efforts—can sometimes pose a problem, at least of optics. A board member and investor from Enviva sits on the group’s advisory board for its NatureVest “in-house impact investing program,” and Enviva is building plants across the Southeast to produce wood pellets for burning in European power plants. Danna Smith, of the Dogwood Alliance, which led the coalition that sent the letter last summer, told me, “Unfortunately, T.N.C. seems to be centering the financial interests of large landowners, investors, and corporations in ways that are seriously undermining efforts to protect biodiversity, solve the climate crisis, and advance environmental justice.”(In a statement, T.N.C. noted that it “only supports qualified use of biomass for energy generation produced as a by-product of native forest restoration,” and added that all of its decisions, “including on biomass, are informed by science, and are not influenced by the business relationships of any of our independent advisors. TNC is not engaged with Enviva, and we have no partnerships or plans for partnering with them.”)

Here’s a revealing examination of the weaknesses of carbon offsets: some University of California professors studying the system’s efforts to go carbon-neutral scrutinized the offsets that it was spending millions to purchase—and discovered that it was paying landfills in low-regulation states to burn methane as it was emitted by rotting garbage. This has, at best, a modest effect on greenhouse gases, and seems a very long way from the visionary leadership one would expect from one of the world’s greatest public university systems.

Writing in The Atlantic, Robinson Meyer lays out a useful case for the proposition that renewable-energy costs have become so low that they’re now driving rapid change even in politics and economics. What he calls the “green vortex” demonstrates “how policy, technology, business, and politics can all work together, lowering the cost of zero-carbon energy, building pro-climate coalitions, and speeding up humanity’s ability to decarbonize. It has also already gotten results. The green vortex is what drove down the cost of wind and solar, what overturned Exxon’s board, and what the Biden administration is banking on in its infrastructure plan.”

Anyone who’s lived in upstate New York or Vermont knows, and generally loves, Stewart’s Shops. The chain of convenience stores, based in Saratoga County, is the Wawa of the North. But, because it derives much of its income from selling gasoline, Stewart’s Shops is objecting to legislation passed, in April, by the New York State Senate mandating that only zero-emissions cars be sold by 2035. In an excellent letter to the Albany Times Union, a New Lebanon resident named Elizabeth Poreba chides the chain for embracing “nostalgia as a business plan.” (Maybe the executives figure that, if temperatures continue to rise, sales of its renowned ice cream will, too.)

Meanwhile, climate action from the state legislature in Albany seems to have ground to a halt, as the veteran activist Pete Sikora, of New York Communities for Change, points out. “For another year, legislators slinked out of Albany after failing to take climate action,” he writes. His remedy: more activism. Victories such as New York’s ban on fracking and the divestment of its pension fund from fossil fuels were “not won in dingy backrooms,” he writes, adding that it took “handing out leaflets, holding signs as backdrops for press conferences, blocking entrances to government offices to draw attention to the issues, lobbying and calling representatives to carry the day.” (On Tuesday, Sikora predicted that, if early election returns hold and Eric Adams is New York City’s next mayor, the city’s efforts to force buildings to conserve energy may be derailed.)

Scoreboard

A new report from Clean Energy Canada finds that, if the country pushed hard for a renewable-energy switch, the new jobs created by 2030 would far outnumber those lost as fossil fuels decline.

A United Nations report found that drought has affected 1.5 billion people so far this century. According to Mami Mizutori, the U.N. Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, “this number will grow dramatically unless the world gets better at managing this risk and understanding its root causes and taking action to stop them.” Meanwhile, the U.N.’s eighty-five-billion-dollar pension fund has set out to decarbonize its portfolio: a forty-per-cent reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions from 2019 levels by 2025 is the target, with divestment from fossil-fuel stocks a key tool.

Warming Up

I have no idea who the Climate Change Jazz Fighters are—although I’m guessing from the song title “No More Petrol” that they may be European—but their album “Fridays for Future” is breezy listening on a hot summer afternoon.

Republicans can win the next elections through gerrymandering alone

Republicans can win the next elections through gerrymandering alone

David Daley                          
<span>Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images</span>
Photograph: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images

 

In Washington, the real insiders know that the true outrages are what’s perfectly legal and that it’s simply a gaffe when someone accidentally blurts out something honest.

And so it barely made a ripple last week when a Texas congressman (and Donald Trump’s former White House physician) said aloud what’s supposed to be kept to a backroom whisper: Republicans intend to retake the US House of Representatives in 2022 through gerrymandering.

“We have redistricting coming up and the Republicans control most of that process in most of the states around the country,” Representative Ronny Jackson told a conference of religious conservatives. “That alone should get us the majority back.”

He’s right. Republicans won’t have to win more votes next year to claim the US House.

In fact, everyone could vote the exact same way for Congress next year as they did in 2020 – when Democratic candidates nationwide won more than 4.7m votes than Republicans and narrowly held the chamber – but under the new maps that will be in place, the Republican party would take control.

How is this possible? The Republican party only needs to win five seats to wrench the speaker’s gavel from Nancy Pelosi. They could draw themselves a dozen – or more – through gerrymandering alone. Republicans could create at least two additional red seats in Texas and North Carolina, and another certain two in Georgia and Florida. Then could nab another in Kansas, Kentucky, Tennessee and New Hampshire.

They won’t need to embrace policies favored by a majority of Americans. All they need to do is rework maps to their favor in states where they hold complete control of the decennial redistricting that follows the census – some of which they have held since they gerrymandered them 10 years ago. Now they can double down on the undeserved majorities that they have seized and dominate another decade.

If Republicans aggressively maximize every advantage and crash through any of the usual guardrails – and they have given every indication that they will – there’s little Democrats can do. And after a 2019 US supreme court decision declared partisan gerrymandering a non-justiciable political issue, the federal courts will be powerless as well.

It’s one of the many time bombs that threatens representative democracy and American traditions of majority rule. It’s a sign of how much power they have – and how aggressively they intend to wield it – that Republicans aren’t even bothering to deny that they intend to implode it.

“We control redistricting,” boasted Stephen Stepanek, New Hampshire’s Republican state party chair. “I can stand here today and guarantee you that we will send a conservative Republican to Washington as a congressperson in 2022.”

In Kansas, Susan Wagle, the Republican party state senate president, campaigned on a promise to draw a gerrymandered map that “takes out” the only Democrat in the state’s congressional delegation. “We can do that,” Wagle boasted. “I guarantee you that we can draw four Republican congressional maps.”

Texas Republicans will look to reinforce a map that has held back demographic trends favoring Democrats over the last decade by, among other things, dividing liberal Austin into five pieces and attaching them to rural conservative counties in order to dilute Democratic votes. Texas will also have two additional seats next decade due largely to Latino population growth; in 2011, when similar growth created four new seats for Texas, Republicans managed to draw three for themselves.

North Carolina Republicans crafted a reliable 10-3 Republican delegation throughout the last decade. When the state supreme court declared the congressional map unconstitutional in 2019, it forced the creation of a fairer map in time for 2020. Democrats immediately gained two seats. But the state GOP will control the entire process once again this cycle, so those two seats will likely change side – and Republicans could find a way to draw themselves the seat the state gained after reapportionment.

Two Atlanta-area Democrats are in danger of being gerrymandered out of office by Republicans. The single Democratic member from Kentucky, and one of just two from Tennessee, are in jeopardy if Republicans choose to crack Louisville and Nashville, respectively, and scatter the urban areas across multiple districts. Florida Republicans ignored state constitution provisions against partisan gerrymandering in 2011 and created what a state court called a conspiracy to mount a secret, shadow redistricting process. It took the court until the 2016 election to unwind those ill-gotten GOP gains, however, which provides little incentive not to do the same thing once more. This time, a more conservative state supreme court might even allow those gains to stand.

Might Democrats try the same thing? Democrats might look to squeeze a couple seats from New York and one additional seat from Illinois and possibly Maryland. But that’s scarcely enough to counter the overall GOP edge. In Colorado, Oregon and Virginia, states controlled entirely by Democrats, the party has either created an independent redistricting commission or made a deal to give Republicans a seat at the table. Commissions also draw the lines in other Democratic strongholds like California, Washington and New Jersey. There are no seats to gain in overwhelmingly blue states like Massachusetts, New Mexico and Connecticut.

In many ways, the Republican edge is left over from 2010, when the party remade American politics with a plan called Redmap – short for the Redistricting Majority Project – that aimed to capture swing-state legislatures in places like North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida, among others. They’ve never handed them back. Now Redmap enters its second decade of dominance – just as the lawmakers it put into office continue rewriting swing-state election laws to benefit Republicans, under the unfounded pretext of “voter fraud” that did not occur during 2020.

Republicans already benefit from a structural advantage in the electoral college and the US Senate. Presidents that lost the popular vote have appointed five conservative justices to the US supreme court. Now get ready for a drunken bacchanalia of partisan gerrymandering that could make “hot vax summer” look like a chaste Victorian celebration.

Meanwhile, this is how a democracy withers and disappears – slowly, legally, and in plain sight.

  • David Daley is the author of Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count and Unrigged: How Americans Are battling Back to Save Democracy. He is a senior fellow at FairVote

New Michael Wolff book reports Trump’s confusion during Capitol attack

New Michael Wolff book reports Trump’s confusion during Capitol attack

Edward Helmore in New York                          

Donald Trump told supporters he would march on the Capitol with them on 6 January – then abandoned them after a tense exchange with his chief of staff, according to the first excerpt from Landslide, Michael Wolff’s third Trump White House exposé.

The extract was published by New York magazine. Wolff’s first Trump book, Fire and Fury, blew up a news cycle and created a whole new genre of salacious political books in January 2018, when the Guardian revealed news of its contents.

That book was a huge bestseller. A sequel, Siege, also contained bombshells but fared less well. Wolff’s third Trump book is among a slew due this summer.

On 6 January, Congress met to confirm results of an election Trump lost conclusively to Joe Biden. Trump spoke to supporters outside the White House, telling them: “We’re going to walk down [to the Capitol to protest] – and I’ll be there with you.”

According to Wolff, the chief of staff, Mark Meadows, was reportedly approached by concerned Secret Service agents, who he told: “No. There’s no way we are going to the Capitol.”

Wolff, one of a number of authors to have interviewed Trump since he left power, writes that the chief of staff then approached Trump, who seemed unsure what Meadows was talking about.

“You said you were going to march with them to the Capitol,” Meadows reportedly said. “How would we do that? We can’t organize that. We can’t.”

“I didn’t mean it literally,” Trump reportedly replied.

Trump is also reported to have expressed “puzzlement” about the supporters who broke into the Capitol in a riot which led to five deaths and Trump’s second impeachment, for inciting an insurrection.

Wolff says Trump was confused by “who these people were with their low-rent ‘trailer camp’ bearing and their ‘get-ups’, once joking that he should have invested in a chain of tattoo parlors and shaking his head about ‘the great unwashed’.”

Trump and his family watched the attack on television at the White House.

As reported by Wolff, the exchange between Trump and Meadows sheds light on how the would-be insurrectionists were abandoned.

The White House, Wolff writes, soon realised Mike Pence had “concluded that he was not able to reject votes unilaterally or, in effect, to do anything else, beyond playing his ceremonial role, that the president might want him to do”.

Trump aide Jason Miller is portrayed as saying “Oh, shit” and alerting the president’s lawyer and chief cheerleader for his lie about electoral fraud, Rudy Giuliani.

Wolff writes that the former New York mayor was “drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania”.

Related: ‘Republicans are defunding the police’: Fox News anchor stumps congressman

As the riot escalated – soon after Trump issued a tweet attacking the vice-president – aides reportedly pressed the president to command his followers to stand down.

Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and adviser, reportedly saw the assault on the Capitol as “an optics issue”. After an hour or so, Wolff writes, Trump “seemed to begin the transition from seeing the mob as people protesting the election – defending him so he would defend them – to seeing them as ‘not our people’”.

In a further exchange, Trump reportedly asked Meadows: “How bad is this? This looks terrible. This is really bad. Who are these people? These aren’t our people, these idiots with these outfits. They look like Democrats.”

Trump reportedly added: “We didn’t tell people to do something like this. We told people to be peaceful. I even said ‘peaceful’ and ‘patriotic’ in my speech!”

Russian snipers are picking off Ukrainian soldiers

Russian snipers are picking off Ukrainian soldiers

Abraham Mahshie                       

HRANITNE VILLAGE, Ukraine front line — Ukrainian soldiers are taught to drop in their trench position and stay down for at least 15 minutes if a sniper’s bullet misses them. The hope is the sniper will believe them dead. But elite Russian snipers usually don’t miss.

In a hand-dug trench a half-mile from the front line in the restive Donbas region on eastern Ukraine, bright green grass grows and red poppies flower just inches above the heads of Ukrainian soldiers manning their position.

The nearby village of Hranitne is like many in post-industrial eastern Ukraine. A showy, Soviet-era rectangular City Hall, an abandoned agricultural factory converted to a military installation, and a central plaza with a stepped platform where a statue of Lenin once stood.

But this village is different.

Schoolchildren cross a military checkpoint from occupied territory to Ukrainian-controlled territory so they can continue attending the same school. Young soldiers walk the streets. Many of them volunteered from wealthier western Ukraine to fight Russian officers and commandos and their own Ukrainian brethren who have taken sides with Vladimir Putin in yet another protracted conflict spurred by the Russian president.

The war between Ukraine and Russian-backed separatists in the semi-states known as the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics is largely contained to a no man’s land in empty fields on the outskirts of small villages like this. Tree lines are where the opposing sides establish their positions, digging trenches to store weapons and provisions and to hide armored vehicles, should they be necessary.

In this low-intensity conflict, most soldiers are dying from sniper fire.

“At night, you see nothing,” said a Ukrainian soldier who gave his name as Unit Commander “Marhanets” to the Washington Examiner for operational security.

“Right now, there is no sniper at this position, but they are there. We received a warning because their intelligence position is nearby,” Marhanets said, a green face mask pulled up just below his eyes to conceal his identity.

All day, every day, he and the other dozen or so troops in his unit take turns peering through periscope binoculars positioned just below camo netting and fixed on the enemy front line.

They used to watch the enemy dig trenches until spring rains came and the grass grew taller. Now, they stare at a tree line across the field, looking for movement.

The view of the enemy frontline in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic through periscope binoculars near Hranitne village, eastern Ukraine June 6, 2021. Photo by Abraham Mahshie/Washington Examiner

Marhanets knows two comrades hit by sniper fire. One died. One survived. The one who survived is still in the hospital, paralyzed from the neck down.

In the underground network of sandbag positions and lookout spots, any peek above ground level is potentially lethal.

“There’s a little window where you look up, and the sniper hits exactly where you look,” he said.

In 2015, shortly after the conflict broke out, Marhanets was on the front line with no night-vision goggles or thermal vision technology.

“We were in a position at the north, and on the radio, we captured a signal, that’s how we knew a diversion group was moving towards our direction,” he said. “But what can you do? You cannot make your eyes see better, you cannot make your ears hear better. You are just sitting and waiting, and there’s nothing you can do to know when they will arrive. And when you have this vision, it really helps to see the situation.”

Russian snipers with night-vision technology can see Ukrainian movements and kill the soldiers one by one. Enemy intelligence groups known as “sabotage groups” can walk right up to a position, shielded by darkness, and kill soldiers directly in the trench.

Then, American assistance began to arrive.

It included sniper rifles, thermal optics, laser rangefinders, optical detection systems, and electronic warfare systems.

“There’s actually a very dangerous situation in eastern Ukraine in terms of the sniper attacks that we see on Ukrainian forces,” Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Russia, Ukraine, and Eurasia Laura Cooper told the Washington Examiner in a May Pentagon interview.

“There’s also a number of other systems that we’re providing that are effective and fill critical requirements for the Ukrainian armed forces. That includes sniper rifles, counter-artillery radars, grenade launchers,” she added, noting that nonlethal assistance includes military medical equipment and armored Humvees. “I want to also be clear that this isn’t something we invent in Washington. This is something that responds to what the Ukrainian armed forces themselves have identified.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba underscored the importance of the American support in a meeting with the Washington Examiner in Kyiv.

“Almost every week, we lose soldiers in the east, and almost every day, some young Ukrainian man enlists in the Ukrainian army willing to defend it,” Kuleba said.

“All of us have friends or relatives or someone who has been affected by the war, either as an internally displaced person or as a soldier or as a civilian. I mean, this is part of our life,” he said. “We know that no one is going to fight this war for us. We’re going to fight it, but it’s much easier to fight and prevail when you have reliable friends next to you, standing by you and behind you. And that’s the role of the United States of America.”

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dymtro Kuleba in an interview with the Washington Examiner in Kyiv June 3, 2021 described his country’s hopes for a comprehensive defense agreement with the United States. Photo courtesy Ukrainian Foreign Ministry

In late March, Russia built up 100,000 troops on the border of eastern Ukraine, threatening another invasion and escalation in the conflict. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited front-line positions, calling for international assistance and a path to entry into NATO.

Leaders of NATO, the European Union, and President Joe Biden condemned the Russian move.

The U.S. spoke of support for a path to eventual NATO entry, but needed reforms would have to come first. Secretly, the National Security Council prepared a $100 million contingency aid package, the NSC confirmed to the Washington Examiner.

“In addition to the $275 million that has already been authorized for aid to Ukraine this fiscal year, as has been reported, a $100 million contingency package was prepared given escalating tensions on Ukraine’s border in April 2021,” a U.S. official said. “That contingency package is prepared for whenever it is needed.”

U.S. assistance to Ukraine since Russia’s invasion of Crimea in 2014 has totaled $2.5 billion.

Ukrainian soldiers walk near a frontline position in the ongoing war with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine June 6, 2021 Photo by Abraham Mahshie/ Washington Examiner

Kuleba said absent NATO entry, his country seeks a broader defense agreement with the U.S.

“Ukraine exists in a security void. We are not members of NATO. We do not have a single security guarantee agreement,” he said.

“If NATO membership is not an immediate answer, then a defense partnership with the United States could be an answer,” he suggested. “We are buying the military equipment from you. You are giving us some of the equipment, but what we need is an agreement that would kind of certify that relationship that would bring it to the next level.”

Kuleba said his government envisions tying up disparate programs so that U.S. departments from the State Department to USAID to the Defense Department are working in concert to secure Ukraine’s democracy against Russian aggression.

Meanwhile, 600 miles from the capital, over muddy tracks on gently rolling hills outside an otherwise peaceful village, young Ukrainian soldiers forfeit rotations back home to serve repeat tours on the front line.

Here, they live in a sort of primitive brotherhood but with the sophisticated tools they need to survive.

“Right now, many people die from snipers,” Marhanets said. “When there is a ceasefire, when there is no heavy artillery working, then snipers are working.”

Sea level rise due to climate change eyed as contributing factor in Miami-area building collapse

Sea level rise due to climate change eyed as contributing factor in Miami-area building collapse

David Knowles, Senior Editor                            June 25, 2021

 

As the search for survivors of the collapse of a 12-story beachfront condominium in Surfside, Fla., continued on Friday, building experts began looking at the possibility that sea level rise caused by climate change may have contributed to the disaster that has left at least 4 people dead and 159 missing.

From a geological standpoint, the base of South Florida’s barrier islands is porous limestone. As the oceans encroach on land due to sea level rise and the worsening of so-called king tides, groundwater is pushed up through the limestone, causing flooding. That brackish water, which regularly inundates underground parking garages in South Florida, can potentially lead to the deterioration of building foundations over time.

“Sea level rise does cause potential corrosion and if that was happening, it’s possible it could not handle the weight of the building,” Zhong-Ren Peng, professor and Director of University of Florida’s International Center for Adaptation Planning and Design, told the Palm Beach Post. “I think this could be a wakeup call for coastal developments.”

While it is too early to say whether climate change is to blame for the collapse of the 40-year-old Champlain Towers South, or if it also threatens thousands of similar structures along Florida’s coastline, sea-levels rose by 3.9 inches between 2000 and 2017 in nearby Key West, according to a 2019 report by the Southeast Regional Climate Change Compact.

SURFSIDE, FLORIDA - JUNE 25: Maria Fernanda Martinez and Mariana Cordeiro (L-R) look on as search and rescue operations continue at the site of the partially collapsed 12-story Champlain Towers South condo building on June 25, 2021 in Surfside, Florida. Over one hundred people are being reported as missing as search-and-rescue effort continues with rescue crews from across Miami-Dade and Broward counties. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)
Search and rescue operations continue at the Champlain Towers South condo building on June 25, 2021 in Surfside, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

 

Future projections are much more dire.

“Just using the U.S. government projections, we could be at 11 to over 13 feet [of sea level rise] by the end of century,” Harold Wanless, director of the University of Miami’s geological sciences department and a leading expert on sea level rise, told Yahoo News. “There’s only 3 percent of Miami-Dade County that’s greater than 12 feet above sea level.”

The Champlain Towers South, which had been built on reclaimed wetlands, was found in to have sunk by roughly two millimeters between 1993 and 1999, the Washington Post reported.

“It appears to be something very localized to one building, so I would think the problem was more likely to be related to the building itself,” Shimon Wdowinski, a professor at Florida International University’s department of earth and environment, told the Post.

Though federal and state investigators will attempt to pinpoint the cause of the collapse, rising seas and flooding from king tides will certainly be examined as a possible contributing factor.

But even if climate change is ruled out as significant contributor to this particular instance of structural failure, there is no avoiding the fact that if seas continue to rise, the habitability of much of South Florida will be put in question.

“People have to understand how serious this is going to be quickly, in the next two or three decades,” Wanless said. “We’re just seeing the beginning of this accelerated ice melt.”

Plastic Bottlers Are Lying About Recycling

Plastic Bottlers Are Lying About Recycling

By Edward Humes                        June 25, 2021

Photo by kwangmoozaa/iStock.

“100% recyclable”? In your dreams, Coca-Cola.
What a wonderful thing it is to purchase an ice-cold bottle of water from a major global brand and see these comforting words of guilt-free consumption right there on the label: “100% recyclable.” Makes the drink go down so much easier, doesn’t it?

Too bad it’s not true.

On the contrary, the product Americans use at a rate of 3,400 every second—100 billion a year—is far more likely to end up in rivers, oceans, roadsides, landfills, and incinerators than inside any sort of recycled product.

On June 16, federal lawsuits were filed by the Sierra Club and a group of California consumers against major bottled water manufacturers Coca-Cola, Niagara, and BlueTriton (a subsidiary of global giant Nestlé). The suits allege that these companies’ labeling and marketing claims about the full recyclability of their beverage bottles are not just a little off, but blatantly false and a violation of consumer and environmental protection laws. They accuse the three global beverage titans of unfair business practices, false advertising, consumer fraud, and violations of state environmental marketing claims laws and Federal Trade Commission regulations.

The plaintiffs argue that these companies must be compelled to admit that their claims of recyclability are false and to end them.

Calling the recycling labels “a misinformation campaign,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said, “These major plastic bottle manufacturers have known for decades that their products aren’t truly recyclable, and the public deserves to know the truth.”

That truth, according to the lawsuits and the studies they cite, is that the US recycling system is currently unable to recycle even a quarter of those supposed 100 percent recyclable bottles and lacks the capacity to recycle more than 12 percent of the bottle caps. Even the portion that does get recycled is never “100 percent recyclable”—about 28 percent is lost to processing or contamination and ends up in landfills.

In a final irony, the polypropylene plastic film labels on which the “100 percent recyclable” claims are printed on the bottles are themselves completely unrecyclable.

FTC Green Guide regulations state that a company can claim that a plastic bottle is recyclable only if recycling facilities for that type of plastic are available to at least 60 percent of the consumers or communities where the product is sold. Under 60 percent, and all recycling claims have to be qualified on the label—such as saying, for example, “This product is recyclable only in the few communities that have appropriate recycling facilities.”

“By that standard, these companies’ ‘100% recyclable’ claims are completely false,” said Sierra Club attorney Marie McCrary of San Francisco law firm Gutride Safier LLP. She said the suits are part of a larger campaign to educate consumers and businesses about recycling myths and the true impact of single-use plastic products on the environment. Accurate information stripped of green-washing claims, she says, can create demand for—and incentives to bring to market—truly recyclable and sustainable products and materials.

“As long as there are companies making 100 percent recyclability claims that are false, consumers can’t make an educated decision in the marketplace, and businesses lack an incentive to create an actually recyclable product,” she said.

A Coca-Cola representative said the company did not comment on active litigation, and spokespeople for BlueTriton and Niagara did not respond.

The brands specifically called out in the suits for allegedly deceptive recycling labels include Dasani, Arrowhead, Poland Springs, Ozarka, and Deer Park (in both lawsuits), and Niagara, Costco Kirkland, Save Mart Sunny Select, and Save Mart Market Essentials (in just the consumer class action lawsuit).

Lauren Cullum, Sierra Club California’s Sacramento-based policy advocate, said the suits are part of a broader effort to pick up lost ground after the ambitious California Circular Economy and Plastic Pollution Reduction Act stalled in the legislature in 2020. That act would have reinvented recycling in the state and created a system of producer responsibility, in which manufacturers of wasteful products such as plastic water bottles would have to bear the dollar cost of environmental damage and cleanup—an extension of the “polluter pays” concept in the state that already exists for the oil and gas industry.

Cullum says the costs to California cities to clean up single-use product litter on beaches, parks, and streets is massive: nearly a half billion dollars statewide, according to 2017 data compiled by the Natural Resources Defense Council. Los Angeles alone pays over $36 million a year, equivalent to $9.50 for every man, woman, and child in the city. Long Beach’s per resident cost is $28, and the city of Commerce, with a population of 12,000, pays $890,000 a year for litter cleanup, a whopping $69 for each citizen.

“Government and ratepayers are being swamped,” Cullum said.

Many of the goals of the circular economy and plastic pollution legislation have been resurrected as a citizen voter initiative, which will be on the November 2022 election ballot. Cullum sees the twin lawsuits as a means not only of holding global brands accountable for misinformation about recyclability, but also raising awareness about the need for new laws that rein in plastic pollution and lead to more sustainable products and materials.

“The end goal with all this is to get further and further away from relying on any type of single-use products,” Cullum said. “Any steps in that direction are what we need.”

“People want to make consumer choices that are good for the environment,” says Hoiyin Ip, Sierra Club California zero waste committee co-chair. “If they know the truth, I believe they will change those choices, just as they did with grocery bags. If they are confused or given false information, they end up making choices they might otherwise avoid.”

Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator who now leads the Vermont-based Beyond Plastics project, said the lawsuits pull the curtain back on the “abysmal failure” of plastics recycling and the beverage companies’ attempts to market their way out of taking responsibility for the damage their products cause. She puts the goal of the lawsuits in the bluntest of terms:

“We need companies to stop lying.”

Edward Humes is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author of 15 nonfiction books, including his latest, Burned: A Story of Murder and the Crime That Wasn’t (Dutton, January 2019) and Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash. In addition to Sierra, Humes has written for Los Angeles, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes and other publications.

Dry weather? Chop, drop and roll with it

Dry weather? Chop, drop and roll with it

John Molseed, Post-Bulletin, Rochester, Minn.      

 

Southeast Minnesota is officially in a drought.

Historically, June is the region’s wettest month, with an average of about 1.3 inches of rain per week, according to the National Weather Service in La Crosse.

With one week left in June, Rochester had seen less than an inch of rain all month.

The rain late in the week likely won’t make up for the accumulated deficit of moisture, but it will help, meteorologists said.

The dry spell reaches back to October, when, after the growing season, rain and snow replenishes soil moisture. Since that recharge cycle in October, Rochester has seen 13.77 inches of precipitation, which is 7.32 inches below normal of 21.09 inches through the third week of June, said Jeff Boyne, meteorologist with the NWS in La Crosse.

Boyne writes the drought reports available on the NWS website.

Despite some rain, he said the drought report won’t likely change much. Heavier rain northeast of Rochester into Wabasha County might change the drought status of that small area.

“It was still a good rain,” he said. “It keeps us from deteriorating any more.”

For a region that has gotten wetter on average, this dry pattern is uncommon. This is the first widespread drought in the region since 2012-13, Boyne said.

The early June heat wave has also put stress on plants as their demand for moisture goes up.

Heidi Kass, member of the Backyard Bounty Urban Homesteaders, said she has been watering her gardens more than she has in the past.

The easiest measure gardeners can take to protect plants from the drought would be to use mulch to help keep moisture in the soil. Regular mulch, straw, and grass clippings can help. Kass puts newspaper around her tomatoes to prevent soil from blighting the tomato plants’ leaves. (Soil-borne diseases can blight tomato plant leaves when uncovered soil is splashed onto them by rain or watering.)

She tops the newspaper with straw, which has helped her plants retain moisture through the drought. Using mulch is a good technique regardless of how much or little rain we get.

“Drought is a hard thing to plan for,” Kass said. “You can’t exactly plant your garden in the spring for a drought.”

One useful technique is to use weeds as a sort of mulch. When pulling up weeds, leave them between your plants. They will add nutrients and help retain a bit of moisture, while no longer robbing your plants of moisture and nutrients. Kass calls it “chop and drop.” Some plants are better for this technique than others. Using plants that root easily like creeping Charlie can backfire badly and create bigger problems than dry soil.

Another tip is to let your water run through your hose a bit before watering. Hot water in the hose could hurt your plants. Check your rain barrel if the water is low and it sits in the sun — the water inside could also be too warm to use.

For people sowing seeds this year for landscaping, lawns, rain gardens or prairies, if those seeds have germinated, keep them moist. However, it might have been dry enough that late-spring seeds might still be dormant.

Germinated seeds that weren’t watered might not have made it. Try planting again in the fall to germinate seeds but not let tender seedlings grow to die off in the winter. The timing — and watering — can be tricky to get right.

For now, keep what you have watered and watch the forecast. Boyne said forecast models show dry weather will persist through early July.

John Molseed is a tree-hugging Minnesota transplant making his way through his state parks passport. This column is a space for stories of people doing their part (and more) to keep Minnesota green. Send questions, comments and suggestions to life@postbulletin.com.