Category: Politics and American Democracy

• California has been hit by a “megadrought” that has dried up key reservoirs in the state.
• Entire lakes have shrunk exponentially, leaving yachts and docks beached on dry land.
• Nearly 95% of the state is experiencing “severe drought” and is susceptible to wild fires.

California is facing its worst drought in over four years.

Over 37 million people have already been impacted by the “megadrought” and nearly 95% of the state has been classified as experiencing “Severe Drought,” which puts the land in significant danger of wildfires, according to the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).

Last year, California land was consumed by over 8,200 wildfires – a number double the state’s previous record. This year, scorching weather has dried out reservoirs and made the state even more susceptible to breakout wildfires than the record 2020 season. NIDIS analysts call the outlook for the land “grim.”

Water levels of California’s over 1,500 reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be at this time of year, Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at UC-Davis told the Associated Press.

In April, scorching weather turned the San Gabriel reservoir lake bed to dust. The reservoir is not expected to see rain fall until the end of the year.

On Wednesday, the drought dried up a lake so much that it potentially exposed a decades old mystery, allowing officials to find a plane that had crashed in 1965.

The California drought has been caused by climate change which has pushed temperatures an average of about 2 degrees hotter, drying out soil and melting Sierra snow rivers, which causes less water to soak into the ground, as well as flow through rivers and reservoirs. The state also endured two unusually dry winters that didn’t bring needed storms to the area.

Officials are predicting the water level of Lake Oroville – a primary body of water that helps the state generate energy through hydroelectric power plants – will hit a record low in August. If that happens, they would need to shut down a major hydroelectric power plant, putting extra strain on the electrical grid during the hottest part of the summer.

Earlier this month, about 130 houseboats had to be hauled out of the lake as its water levels hit 38% capacity. The water levels are only at about 45% of average June levels, according to California Department of Water Resources.

It’s going to be a rough summer for boat owners in the state.

Pictures from the Associated Press show massive lakes have run dry, leaving boats and docks completely beached

Experts say the drought could devastate local wildlife populations, as well as California’s tourism industry.

In April, Governor Gavin Newsom held a press conference in the dried up waterbed of Lake Mendocino. Where he stood there should have been about 40 feet of water.

“This is without precedent,” Newsom said. “Oftentimes we overstate the word historic, but this is indeed an historic moment.”

The month before, the California Department of Water Resources reduced farmers and growers to 5% of their expected water allocation in March. A move that has farmers leaving large portions of their land unseeded, while other have been forced to purchase supplemental water, which comes at a hefty cost. Supplemental water was priced at $1,500 to $2,000 per acre-foot in mid-May, according to a report from California Farm Bureau.

It has also made it difficult for ranchers to feed and water their livestock

As California temperatures continue to rise while water reservoirs fall, the state could be in for a devastating summer. From increased fears for wildfires to the impact on state agriculture and tourism, California residents are bracing for the worst drought season since 2014.

TRENTON, Maine – At the height of tourist season, the recycling bins at this coastal town used to swell with glass and plastic, office paper and piles of cardboard from the local boatyard. But the bins are gone, and their contents now join the trash, destined either for an incinerator to generate electricity or a landfill.

Trenton is one of many Maine towns that had to cut back or close their recycling operations after events both global and local. In 2018 China, which used to take much of America’s plastic waste, banned most of those imports. Last year, a plant in Hampden, Maine, that promised to provide state-of-the-art recycling for more than 100 municipalities shut down.

With mountains of boxes and bubble wrap from online pandemic shopping now going in the trash, lawmakers are trying to make Maine the first state to shift some of the costs of its recycling onto companies – not taxpayers. If the bipartisan bill passes, Maine will join several Canadian provinces, including neighboring Quebec, and all European countries, which have for decades relied on so-called extended producer responsibility programs, or EPR, for packaging.

“It’s good that the bottom fell out,” said Rep. Nicole Grohoski, D-Ellsworth, the bill’s Democratic sponsor, whose district includes Trenton. She doesn’t believe the old system of shipping products halfway around the world to China made sense as countries try to reduce their carbon footprints.

“We have to face this problem and use our own ingenuity to solve it,” Grohoski said.

The proposed legislation, which is vehemently opposed by representatives for Maine’s retail and food producing industries, would charge large packaging producers for collecting and recycling materials as well as for disposing of non-recyclable packaging. The income generated would be reimbursed to communities like Trenton to support their recycling efforts. EPR programs already exist in many states for a variety of toxic and bulky products including pharmaceuticals, batteries, paint, carpet and mattresses. At least a dozen states, from New York to California and Hawaii, have been working on similar bills for packaging.

“Ten years ago, this would have been unthinkable,” said Dylan de Thomas, vice president of external affairs at the Recycling Partnership, who said he is seeing far more openness to EPR bills from such corporate giants as Coca-Cola and Unilever than in the past.

“It’s a reflection of the pressure they are seeing from corporate investors,” said de Thomas, who anticipates there may be similar shifts in national policies.

“That’s the big enchilada,” he said.

EPR programs for packaging, which accounts for about 40 percent of the municipal waste stream, have worked well in other countries, said Scott Cassel, CEO of the Product Stewardship Institute, who said benefits include new jobs as well as reinforcing the circular economy – or continual reuse of resources.

“These are tried-and-true strategies,” he said. None of these first bills will be perfect. But this is a path that we need to start down in the U.S.”

In Maine, the bill’s opponents raise concerns about the logistics retailers may face policing the new policies and the potential for food costs to rise for consumers who are just emerging from the pandemic. They cite a study from Toronto’s York University, which analyzed New York’s EPR bill and estimated an additional $36 to $57 per month in grocery costs for the average family of four. EPR advocates contest those findings, saying there is little evidence of significant costs ending up with consumers in other countries.

For many rural Mainers who don’t enjoy the benefits of free curbside waste collection, the debate over recycling seems irrelevant. They haul their own trash to transfer stations to avoid the $6 weekly charge for having it collected.

“I’ve never been one to recycle,” said Penny Lyons, a Trenton resident, although her family has a stash of bottles and other beverage containers on a flatbed trailer that can be turned in for cash. Her husband, who works in car sales, is able to dispose of their solid waste at work, she said.

Chocolate maker Kate McAleer, who owns chocolate maker Bixby &. Co, said that to follow federal food safety guidelines her company uses metalized film that is a challenge to recycle but protects against pests, air, sunlight and tampering. Changing that would have an impact on her products’ shelf life.

She doesn’t believe legislators understand the complexity of food safety. “I think they think there are solutions that there aren’t,” Bixby said.

Christine Cummings, executive director of the Maine Grocers and Food Producers Association, said her primary concern is “the unknowns” for businesses in a state that sits at the end of distribution routes and relies heavily on incoming goods.

“What is this going to do on our supply chain?” she asked.

Grohoski dismisses such concerns.

“We won’t be out on a limb for long,” she said, anticipating that if her bill passes, other states will soon follow suit.

In the meantime, some communities are paying a premium to continue recycling programs by shipping materials south to Portland, the state’s biggest city. Others are devising ways to process and sell recyclable materials.

In Unity, Maine, about 90 miles north of Portland, Steve Wright and Jeff Reynolds are running an eight-town sorting operation, feeding paper and plastics into giant green balers and glass into a machine that grinds bottles into a glistening powder that can be used for insulating boxes around lithium batteries or with aggregate to make driveways.

Each of the surrounding towns pays in according to its population – Unity has 2,000 residents – and individuals from further away can join for an annual fee of $30.

The pandemic has increased the piles of cardboard, particularly from pet owners leery of going inside stores, Wright sad..

The operation is powered by 40 solar panels and has room to expand – particularly if the EPR goes through.

“We have to move now,” said Rep Stanley Paige Ziegler, D-Montville, whose district includes Unity and who has worked alongside Grohoski to advance the EPR bill.

Sarah Nichols, Sustainable Maine director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, sees the bill as the logical next step for a state that has led the way in environmental policies. Maine passed one of the first bottle bills in the 1970s and in 2004 the first laws requiring manufacturers to pay the entire cost of recycling computers and televisions. In 2019, the legislature passed the nation’s first statewide ban on Styrofoam food containers that will soon go into effect.

“Maine is seen as a national leader in environmental policy,” Nichols said. “That’s why people move here and visit. It’s part of our state’s personality.”

Nichols points out that Department of Environmental Protection estimates show it can cost 67 percent more to recycle than dispose of packaging. Taxpayers pay at least $16 million annually to manage packaging material through recycling or disposal – costs they have no control over.

Nichols argues the EPR bill would give manufacturers an incentive to reduce packaging and design packaging that is more easily recycled.

Old recycling habits die-hard at the transfer station in Southwest Harbor, with its stunning views toward the forested slopes of Acadia National Park.

Residents drive up to pitch their waste into bays still bearing green signs reminding them of the old days when they sorted their waste: Glass, tin, aluminum and plastic in one; magazines, catalogues and other paper goods in another.

The baler that used to package up paper hasn’t been used for a couple of years, according to the site’s owner, Mark Worcester. Instead, Worcester is sending out a 25-30 ton container of trash – sometimes two – every day, usually to be incinerated for electricity.

“We get tons and tons of cardboard,” Worcester said.

On a busy Saturday morning, car after car pulled up loaded with packaging materials, folded ready for the recycling that would not happen.

“It’s a reflex,” said Jon Zeitler, as he broke down a box and chucked it into the bay that used to be for paper goods.

“Mentally, I have to,” said Jonathan Quebben as he, in turn, pitched his cardboard in.

Susan Raven, a third-grade teacher, said she has made a point of telling her students how to be responsible custodians of the earth. But it’s hard for them to put that into practice, she said, as she pulled out of her car’s trunk the plastic boxes her family of four always used to sort their recycling and then pitched it all into the trash.

“We can’t break the habit,” she said.

John F. Kerry, the special presidential envoy for climate, said only months ago that those losing fossil fuel jobs in coal and hydraulic fracturing will find they have a better choice of jobs in either the solar industry or as wind turbine technicians.

That was then. Now, a wind blade manufacturing plant located in Aberdeen, South Dakota, has announced it is shutting its doors permanently in less than two months.

The disappearance of Molded Fiber Glass will displace over 300 workers and their families. It marks another major loss of energy jobs in the state following President Joe Biden’s halting of the Keystone pipeline on the first day of his administration.

MFG said in a news release that the closure will happen because of changing market conditions, foreign competition, and proposed revisions to tax policies affecting the wind energy industry in the United States.

Since 2007, the Aberdeen plant has been producing wind turbine blades. The plant will remain in operation for the next two months until it has fulfilled existing orders.

A family member of one of the workers said they were informed of the closure last Monday. Employees were completely taken off guard by the announcement. She was also perplexed by it. “They should be swimming in orders right now,” she said.

In 2017, MFG threatened to kill 400 jobs at the plant and shut down because of the “proposed revisions to tax policies.” At that time, Republican U.S. Sen. John Thune stopped the closure by pushing for revisions of the 2017 tax bill to be more favorable to the industry.

Thune, in an emailed statement, said it is troubling that at a time when wind energy is seeing record investment that this growth is not translating to American jobs. It’s especially hard for those working these good-paying jobs in Aberdeen to face uncertainty yet again. Thune criticized Biden’s statement from his address to Congress: “There’s no reason, the president said, “the blades for wind turbines can’t be built in Pittsburgh instead of Beijing.” But Beijing is getting all the business.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s recent ranking of global wind turbine manufacturers last year showed that seven of the top 10 wind turbine manufacturers are Chinese companies. General Electric, an American company, is first, but Goldwind of China is in second place. The study also found more than half of the world’s newly installed wind power capacity was built in China in 2020.

Last month, Thune proposed an amendment to the Democrats’ expansive energy tax credit bill, requiring the administration to certify that U.S. manufacturers would not be undercut by foreign suppliers using low-cost labor and creating higher emissions. MFG, in closing its 14-year-old plant, cited precisely these two adverse factors as its reasons.

One day after the announcement, TC Energy, the Canadian pipeline company that sought to build the Keystone XL pipeline, announced that it was terminating the project, a 1,700-mile pipeline intended to carry 800,000 barrels of oil a day from Alberta to the Gulf Coast, passing through five states, including South Dakota.

Although the wind and pipeline industries are different sides of the climate change coin, both were considered economic lifelines to small-town South Dakota. Both promised economic stability and a revenue stream that would keep many towns hopping until tourism hit its stride once again.

“We are a smallish community of 28,000 people, so 300 jobs is a big deal,” said the family member of a worker. “Granted, two facilities in town, 3M and Banner Engineering, have recently doubled capacity, so most of the hourly employees should be absorbed by that,” she said. “However, some of these people have been with the company since 2008. How do you start over after 13 years?”

It is a question that has been asked by many Americans in manufacturing jobs, who have had to compete with cheaper overseas products for generations. And it is a question many workers in the energy industry may be asking soon.

The heatwave gripping the US west is simultaneously breaking hundreds of temperature records, exacerbating a historic drought and priming the landscape for a summer and fall of extreme wildfire.

Salt Lake City hit a record-breaking 107F (42C), while in Texas and California, power grid operators are asking residents to conserve energy to avoid rolling blackouts and outages. And all this before we’ve even reached the hottest part of the summer.

Among the 40 million Americans enduring the triple-digit temperatures are scientists who study droughts and the climate. They’d long forewarned of this crisis, and now they’re living through it. The Guardian spoke with researchers across the west about how they’re coping.

The paleoclimatologist: ‘Potentially the worst drought in 1,200 years’

Kathleen Johnson, California
Associate professor of Earth system science at the University of California, Irvine

I feel a little bit lucky because I’m in Orange county, relatively close to the coast – so the temperatures are not as severe here as they are in other parts of California and the west. I’m worried about this summer – this doesn’t bode well, in terms of what we can expect with wildfire and the worsening drought. This current drought is potentially on track to become the worst that we’ve seen in at least 1,200 years. And the reason is linked directly to human caused climate change.

As a paleoclimatologist my main point, always, is that we are able to look into the past. By looking at tree rings and other paleoclimate records, we’re able to gain really important perspectives about how climate has varied and changed in the past. And having done that, it’s clear that what we’re experiencing now is not natural. This is undoubtedly being caused by human activities, by greenhouse gas emissions.

The more we see these extreme events, piled on top of each other, and not just in the western US but globally, the more I think the reality of climate change becomes inescapable. And it feels absolutely overwhelming and sad. We are going to have less water, increased wildfires and more extreme heatwaves. But it’s also motivating. We need to continue to push for urgent action on climate change

The climate scientist: ‘The most distressing part? This was predictable’

Daniel Swain, Colorado
Climate scientist, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability,University of California, Los Angeles

This is really, really bad. Here on the eastern side of the Rockies, here in Boulder, we’re seeing record high temperatures. That’s the case in other parts of the state and in other states. And we’re seeing smoke plumes – not from local fires but from fires in Arizona and Utah. I think for a lot of people, it’s traumatic. The fires we saw in the last couple of years were really awful, and this year it seems like we’re on that same trajectory. It kind of feels like deja vu.

It does get rough sometime – talking about these things year after year. I live in the west, and all my family, pretty much, lives in the west. Most of my friends live in the west. It’s where I grew up, and seeing the landscape-scale transformations that are happening here, and seeing how it’s affecting people is overwhelming sometimes. But actually to me, the most distressing part is that this is very much in line with predictions. Climate scientists have been repeating essentially the same messages and warnings since before I was born.

Climate change is a major contributor to, if not the dominant factor, in a lot of the changes that we’re seeing out west and elsewhere. And it just is going to keep getting worse unless we do something about it. And so far, you know, we have yet to do the kinds of things, on a large enough scale, that are actually going to make a meaningful difference.

The atmospheric scientist: ‘It’s surreal to see your models become real life’

Katharine Hayhoe, Texas
Climate scientist and chief scientist at the Nature Conservancy

The extreme heat and the wildfires aren’t surprising. But it is just surreal to see what you only ever saw before in your research studies and models, actually happening in real life. And you’re almost dumbfounded by the speed at which your projections have become reality.

Climate change is loading the weather dice against us. We always have a chance of rolling a double six naturally, and getting an intense record breaking summer heatwave. But decade by decade as the world warms, it’s as if climate change is sneaking in and taking one of those numbers on the dice and turning it into another six, and then another six. And maybe even a seven. So we are seeing that heatwaves are coming earlier in the year, they are longer, they are stronger.

Still, public opinion data shows that there’s a disconnect, where even though about 72% of people in the US say global warming is happening, only 40% say that they think that it will affect them directly. But we actually did a recent study, looking at climate and weather extremes – and we found that really hot, dry conditions are the only thing that most people in the US directly connect to climate change. So right now is a really important time for scientists to communicate with the public that climate change is here, and climate action matters.

The meteorologist: ‘The ground is burning like a hotplate’

Simon Wang, Utah
Professor of climate dynamics at Utah State University

Yesterday, when Salt Lake City hit record temperatures, we went to one of our grad students’ back yards to barbecue some burgers and do some work. But it was so hot – oh my gosh, 107F (42C). So hot that, actually three out of five students’ computers overheated and broke. I was the first to throw in the white flag and ask to go home – I really hurting.

As a meteorologist, of course this isn’t a surprise. The warming climate is making these dry, hot periods even drier and hotter. Since we’re in a drought, we don’t really have much moisture in the soil. And without that moisture, the sun really heats up the ground and the air much faster. So, really what we’re seeing in the south-west is, the ground is burning like a hotplate. And we’re standing on it.

But you know, I actually feel kind of optimistic. In the restaurants and beer houses right now, everybody is talking about the weather, and how hot it is. And a few of them will even comment, “This is the new normal.” And I mean – we’re in Utah! Whatever people believe in, they know it’s really hot, and the climate is changing – and they don’t like that. These compounding extreme weather events are really bad – but they’re going to keep happening, no matter what. Maybe if there’s some good to come out of it, it’s that people are becoming more aware. And the sooner the general public starts to become aware of this issue, the sooner, hopefully, they’ll push for changes to address the crisis. So actually, if you saw me walking around outside this week, I probably had a smile on my face as I listened to some of these conversations.