Politics and American Democracy – Page 208

Climate Change Might Be Threatening the Future of Apples

Bloomberg

Climate Change Might Be Threatening the Future of Apples

Eric Francis June 7, 2021

(Bloomberg) — Patrick and Sara McGuire have been growing apples since they were married 25 years ago. Their 150 acres in Ellsworth, Michigan—dubbed Royal Farms—are a mix of sweet apples and the bitter varieties suited for making hard cider.

Last spring they put in a new crop of Honeycrisps, one of America’s favorite apples, only to discover an unwelcome visitor just a few weeks later: A bacterial menace known as fire blight.

“We actually removed about $10,000 worth of trees by hand,” Patrick McGuire said. “It might’ve been 25% of that lot.”

Fire blight is a bacterial pathogen that spreads easily during blooming season. It has the potential to kill not just individual trees but entire orchards. Though not a new problem for apple growers, it’s been looming larger as the climate crisis brings longer, warmer and rainier springs that expand the window for it to infect trees.

The disease poses a particular threat to cider apple growers. Terry Bradshaw, a research assistant professor at the University of Vermont, said they are at risk because the European varieties they rely on are biennial, making them especially vulnerable to fire blight. “[They will produce] a lot of fruit in one year and a little in the other,” said Bradshaw. “It’s just wall-to-wall blossoms during bloom—those are a whole lot more targets [for the bacteria] to hit.” Making matters worse, they bloom later in the year.

If one crop of cider apples is lost to fire blight, it will be two years before those trees produce again, he said. And with a 10-year pipeline from ordering trees to producing fruit, that kind of setback could prevent growers from staying afloat. “Twenty-five years ago, fire blight was novel, it was rare,” said Bradshaw. “Now climate change is a thing, and fire blight is a thing, and everyone thinks about it every year.”

But it’s not just cider apples that are at risk. Increasingly, all apples as well as other fruit crops such as pears are in danger from such climate-induced afflictions.

Nikki Rothwell, a specialist with the Northwest Michigan Horticulture Research Center at Michigan State University [MSU], said the climate crisis isn’t just problematic in terms of fire blight, but also because it’s allowing for more generations of insect pests each year.

“If growers cannot mitigate risk in some way, fruit farming is not a sustainable model or business,” she said.

Apples used in ciders, with flavors described as “bittersweet” and “bittersharp,” can be traced back to traditional cider apples from England, France and Spain, said Gregory Michael Peck, an assistant professor of horticulture at Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. They have high levels of tannins and phenolic compounds that make them unpalatable for eating, but ideal for cider.

The craft cider industry has been on a decade-long growth spurt, according to Michelle McGrath, executive director of the American Cider Association, an industry lobby. In 2019, Nielsen research said the sector was worth $1.2 billion, with about 1,000 cider makers in the U.S.

Over the last decade, the industry grew tenfold both in terms of sales and producers, according to McGrath. Regional and local craft brands account for 35% of market share, Nielsen reported. In 2020, despite pandemic lockdowns (or perhaps because of them), sales reached $577.4 million, representing more than 9% growth over the previous year and 23% over three years. Regional brands earned 51% of sales, edging out national brands for the first time.

But climate change and the resulting uptick in fire blight may put an end to the good news, warned researchers and orchard operators.

Karen Lewis is a regional fruit tree specialist with the Center for Precision & Automated Agricultural Systems at Washington State University. Her state is the nation’s leading apple-producer. “From 2016 to 2018, we had considerably more days of fire blight risk during bloom than in the previous 10 years,” said Lewis. “In areas where climate change results in warmer springs, fire blight risk will increase.”

Once inside a tree—through a blossom, a broken stem, even a torn leaf—the bacteria causes growths that can girdle the tree and kill it. A few weeks after infection, it will produce “ooze,” explained George Sundin, a professor at MSU who researches fire blight. “Ooze is what the pathogen uses to travel between trees. When rain hits an ooze droplet, a cloud of pathogen can rise from there and be taken by the wind to settle wherever. And if that’s on another apple tree, it can lead to infection.”

Since fire blight is easily spread by wind, rain and insects, stopping it in the McGuires’ Honeycrisps was key to reducing the chance it would infect their 60 acres of cider trees. “Fire blight was not typically a problem in northern Michigan, because we’re so far north and these bacteria really love warm weather,” said Rothwell of MSU. “That’s really changed.”

Rothwell said colleagues in Canada have contacted her because they are seeing fire blight for the first time and have no experience in treating it.

MSU tracks the epiphytic infection potential, or EIP, of fire blight by using a model that gauges how rapidly the bacteria can reproduce, depending on environmental conditions. In the past, “when EIP got close to 100, we would tell growers that’s when you need to spray,” she said. “We’ve backed that down to 70; we’re being much more conservative now.”

Francis Otto, the orchard manager for Cherry Bay Orchards in Suttons Bay, Michigan, started noticing a buildup in fire blight about 7 years ago. Last spring, he said, the conditions for infection in their 275 acres of trees were unprecedented.

“We had a really cold spring and all of a sudden, once we started blooming, we were a couple of days in the eighties with rain showers every other day,” said Otto, who has been growing apples for 30 years. “The EIP was over 400 for a couple of days.”

Otto said they were able to ward off fire blight last year by using sprays including copper sulfate and streptomycin. This year he started spraying his trees the first week of April—20 days earlier than usual.

Chemical sprays aren’t an option for Tieton Cider Works in Yakima, Washington, since the company is working toward organic certification for its 50 acres of apples. General Manager Marcus Robert said Tieton anticipates selling about 150,000 cases of cider this year, representing about $5.5 million in sales, mostly in the Pacific Northwest, California and Idaho.

Robert said they’ll visually inspect the orchard for any signs of infection, prune bad stems off the trees, take them out of the orchard and burn them. But there is a price to be paid.

“By June or July, you’re seeing a lot of impact in the orchard,” he said. “You end up with less canopy, and less canopy means less fruit.”

Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950’s

The Guardian

Republicans pledge allegiance to fossil fuels like it’s still the 1950’s

Oliver Milman June 7, 2021

Joe Biden may be pressing for 2021 to be a transformational year in tackling the climate crisis, but Republicans arrayed in opposition to his agenda have dug in around a unifying rallying theme – that the fossil fuel industry should be protected at almost any cost.

For many experts and environmentalists, the Republican stance is a shockingly retrograde move that flies in the face of efforts to fight global heating and resembles a head in the sand approach to the realities of a changing American economy.

In a recent letter sent to John Kerry, Biden’s climate envoy, more than a dozen Republican state treasurers accused the administration of pressuring banks to not lend to coal, oil and gas companies, adding that such a move would “eliminate the fossil fuel industry in our country” in order to appease the US president’s “radical political preferences”.

The letter raised the extraordinary possibility of Republican-led states penalizing banks that refuse to fund projects that worsen the climate crisis by pulling assets from them. Riley Moore, treasurer of the coal heartland state of West Virginia, said “undue pressure” was being put on banks by the Biden administration that could end financing of fossil fuels and “devastate West Virginia and put thousands of families out of work”.

“If a bank or lending institution says it is going to do something that could cause significant economic harm to our state … then I need to take that into account when I consider what banks we do business with,” Moore, who has assets of about $18bn under his purview, told the Guardian. “If they are going to attack our industries, jobs, economy and way of life, then I am going to fight back.”

The shunning of banks in this way would almost certainly face a hefty legal response but the threat is just the latest eye-catching Republican gambit aimed at propping up a fossil fuel industry that will have to be radically pared back if the US is to slash its planet-heating emissions in half this decade, as Biden has vowed.

In Louisiana, Republicans have embarked upon a quixotic and probably doomed attempt to make the state a “fossil fuel sanctuary” jurisdiction that does not follow federal pollution rules.

In Texas, the Republican governor, Greg Abbott, has instructed his agencies to challenge the “hostile attack” launched by Biden against the state’s oil and gas industries while Republicans in Wyoming have even set up a legal fund to sue other states that refuse to take its coal.

The messaging appears to be filtering down to the Republican electorate, with new polling by Yale showing support for clean energy among GOP voters has dropped dramatically over the past 18 months.

But critics say Republicans are engaged in a futile attempt to resurrect an economic vision more at home in the 1950s, rather than deal with a contemporary reality where the plummeting cost of wind and solar is propelling record growth in renewables and a cavalcade of countries are striving to cut emissions to net zero and, in the case of some including the UK and Germany, completely eliminate coal.

“We are seeing desperate attempts to delay the inevitable, to squeeze one more drop of oil or lump of coal out of the ground before this transition,” said Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at New York University. “They are looking to go back to a prior time, but the trend is absolutely clear. The stone age didn’t end for the lack of stones and the oil age won’t end for the lack of oil,” he added, paraphrasing a quote attributed to the former Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani.

The Republican backlash is characterized by a large dose of political posturing, according to Wagner. “If you have aspirations of higher office in some states, you just want to signal you will sue those hippie liberals,” he said. “These are delay tactics and some of them are very ham-fisted.”

Supporters of of Donald Trump wearing mining gear attend a rally in Charleston, West Virginia, in 2018. Photograph: Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images

The US emerged from the second world war with more than half a million coalminers but this workforce has since dwindled to barely 40,000 people, amid mass automation and utilities switching to cheap sources of gas. Large quantities of jobs are set to be created in renewable energy, but some places built upon fossil fuels risk being left behind.

Biden has proposed a huge infrastructure plan which would, the president says, help retrain and retool regions of the US long economically dependent upon mining and drilling. The administration has promised a glut of high-paying jobs in expanding the clean energy sector and plugging abandoned oil and gas wells, all while avoiding the current ruinous health impacts of air pollution and conditions like black lung.

But unions have expressed wariness over this transition, with Republicans also highly skeptical. The promise to retrain miners is a “patronizing pipe dream of the liberal elites completely devoid from reality”, said Moore, who added that previous promises of renewable energy jobs have not materialized. “And now they are trying to sell us on the same failed idea again.”

However the shift to cleaner energy happens, it’s clear the transition is under way – last year renewable energy consumption eclipsed coal for the first time in 130 years and US government projections show renewables’ overall share doubling by the middle of the century. A key question is whether the completion of this switch will be delayed long enough to risk triggering the worst impacts of disastrous global heating.

“The Republican response is predictable and pathetic. It is from a very old playbook,” said Judith Enck, who was a regional administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency under Barack Obama. “The party will cling to fossil fuels to the bitter end. It’s so sad because so many Republican voters are damaged by climate change, if you look at deaths from the heat or wildfires we are seeing in California. But the party right now is just completely beholden to the fossil fuel industry.”

“Mega-drought” depletes system that provides water to 40 million

CBS News

“Mega-drought” depletes system that provides water to 40 million

This morning, our series “Eye on Earth” looks at the punishing drought gripping much of the western U.S.

Scientists are calling it a “mega-drought” brought on by climate change.

The latest U.S. Drought Monitor Map shows large areas of the Southwest are “exceptionally dry,” the worst category.

/ Credit: National Drought Mitigation Center

It’s taking a dramatic toll on the Colorado River system that provides water to 40 million people in seven states — and may force the federal government to make a drastic and historic decision.

For more than eight decades, the iconic Hoover Dam has relied on water from Nevada’s Lake Mead to cover up its backside. But now, at age 85, it finds itself uncomfortably exposed. Much of the water the dam is supposed to be holding back is gone.

“This is like a different world,” said Pat Mulroy, the former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. She told CBS News senior national and environmental correspondent Ben Tracy that Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is on track to soon hit its lowest level ever recorded.

This part of the Colorado River system is a crucial water supply for Las Vegas, Phoenix and Southern California. It makes the vast agricultural land of the desert Southwest possible.

Mulroy said, “This landscape screams problems to me. I mean, just look at the bathtub rings. To me, that is an enormous wake up call.”

Water levels at Lake Mead have dropped precipitously due to the ongoing western drought.  / Credit: CBS News — Water levels at Lake Mead have dropped precipitously due to the ongoing western drought. / Credit: CBS News

Lake Mead is at just 37% of its capacity.

It hasn’t been full since back in 2000, when the water came right up to the top of Hoover Dam:

A view of the Hoover Dam in 2000. / Credit: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation

This is what it looks like now:

The view at Hoover Dam, 2021.  / Credit: CBS News — The view at Hoover Dam, 2021. / Credit: CBS News

Since 2000, Lake Mead has dropped 130 feet, about the height of a 13-story building. Islands in the lake that used to be completely submerged are now visible.

Back in 2014 Tracy had visited the dam, and asked Mulroy about water levels at Lake Mead, which she described as being at “a pretty critical point.”

Today, Tracy asked, “If you look at 30 feet lower now, what point are we at?”

“We’re at a tipping point,” said Mulroy. “It’s an existential issue for Arizona, for California, for Nevada. It is just that simple.”

For the first time ever, the federal government is expected to declare a water shortage on the lower Colorado River later this summer. That will force automatic cuts to the water supply for Nevada and Arizona starting in 2022. Homeowners have higher priority and, at first, won’t feel the pain as badly as farmers.

Dan Thelander is a second-generation family farmer in Arizona’s Pinal County. The water to grow his corn and alfalfa fields comes from Lake Mead. “If we don’t have irrigation water, we can’t farm,” he said. “So, next year we are going to get about 25% less water, means we’re going to have to fallow or not plant 25% of our land.”

In 2023 Thelander and other farmers in this part of Arizona are expected to lose nearly all of their water from Lake Mead, so they are rushing to dig wells to pump groundwater to try to save their farms.

“The future here is, honestly I hate to say it, pretty cloudy,” Thelander said.

Back at Hoover Dam, facility manager Mark Cook has his own concerns. Lake Mead has dropped so much that it has cut the dam’s hydropower output by nearly 25%.

Cook wanted to show Tracy the brand-new turbine blades they just installed, designed to keep power flowing efficiently at rapidly-dropping lake levels. At some point, the dam could stop producing electricity altogether.

“Our previous number [for cutoff] was at elevation 1,050, and now we’ve lowered that number to 950,” Cook said. “So, we bought ourselves 100 feet.”

Mulroy said a rapidly-retreating reservoir may be the new normal – and the millions of people who rely on this water supply will have to quickly learn to live with less of it. “We don’t change unless we absolutely have to,” she said. “Well, when you look out at this lake, I think that moment of ‘it’s absolutely necessary’ has arrived.”

‘Truly an emergency’: how drought returned to California – and what lies ahead

The Guardian

‘Truly an emergency’: how drought returned to California – and what lies ahead

Gabrielle Canon in San Francisco June 7, 2021

Photograph: Josh Edelson/AP

Just two years after California celebrated the end of its last devastating drought, the state is facing another one. Snowpack has dwindled to nearly nothing, the state’s 1,500 reservoirs are at only 50% of their average levels, and federal and local agencies have begun to issue water restrictions.

Governor Gavin Newsom has declared a drought emergency in 41 of the state’s 58 counties. Meanwhile, temperatures are surging as the region braces for what is expected to be another record-breaking fire season, and scientists are sounding the alarm about the state’s readiness.

“What we are seeing right now is very severe, dry conditions and in some cases and some parts of the west, the lowest in-flows to reservoirs on record,” says Roger Pulwarty, a senior scientist in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) physical sciences laboratory, adding that, while the system is designed to withstand dry periods, “a lot of the slack in our system has already been used up”.

How did we get here?

A creeping trend

Drought is not unnatural for California. Its climate is predisposed to wet years interspersed among dry ones. But the climate crisis and rising temperatures are compounding these natural variations, turning cyclical changes into crises.

Drought, as defined by the National Weather Service, isn’t a sudden onset of characteristics but rather a creeping trend. It’s classified after a period of time, when the prolonged lack of water in a system causes problems in a particular area, such as crop damages or supply issues. In California, dry conditions started to develop in May of last year, according to federal monitoring systems.

Dry banks rise above water in Lake Oroville on Sunday 23 May in Oroville, California. Photograph: Noah Berger/AP

The effects really began to show in early spring 2021, when the annual winter rainy season failed to replenish the parched landscape and a hot summer baked even more moisture out of the environment. By March, conditions were dire enough for the US agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, to designate most of California as a primary disaster area. Just two months later, 93% of the south-west and California was in drought, with 38% of the region classified at the highest level.

“When you have droughts with warm temperatures, you dry out the system much faster than you’d expect,” says Pulwarty, adding that climate change can make droughts both more severe and harder to recover from. “It is not just how much precipitation you get – it is also about whether or not it stays as water on the ground.”

Dwindling water, rising temperatures

The state’s previous drought lasted roughly seven long years, from December 2011 to March 2019, according to official estimates. But some scientists believe it never actually ended. These researchers suggest that the west is gripped by an emerging “megadrought” that could last for decades. A 2020 study that looked at tree rings for historical climate clues concluded that the region may be entering the worst prolonged period of drought encountered in more than 1,200 years and attributed roughly half of the effects to human-caused global heating.

Meanwhile, California has been getting warmer, and 2020 brought some of the highest temperatures ever recorded. In August of last year, Death Valley reached 130F (54C) and a month later, an area in Los Angeles county recorded a 121F (49.4C) day – the hottest in its history.

When we do not have the snowpack, it puts our water system under tremendous pressure

Safeeq Khan, professor and climate researcher

Heat changes the water cycle and creates a thirstier atmosphere that accelerates evaporation. That means there’s less water available for communities, businesses, and ecosystems. It also means there will be less snow, which California relies on for roughly 30% of its water supply.

“The snowpack, in the context of the western US and specifically in California, is really critical for our water supply,” says Safeeq Khan, a professor at University of California, Merced, who researches the climate crisis and water sustainability. “The snowpack sits on the mountain and melts in the spring and early summer. That provides the buffer to overcome the extreme summer heat,” he explains.

But in recent years, even during wet winters, he says, the snowpack wasn’t as strong as it used to be. This year, even before the summer, it is already nearly gone. The melt has also produced less runoff than expected, meaning less trickled into streams, rivers and reservoirs.

“Years like this, when we do not have the snowpack, it really puts our water system under tremendous pressure,” Khan says. He doesn’t think that will change anytime soon, adding that, while drought isn’t new in the west, “the kind of drought we are experiencing is new. The impact is a lot more than it was in the past.”

What will the impact be?

Drought disasters are among the most costly, according to the US National Centers for Environmental Information, running an average of $9.3 bn in damage and loss. Dry conditions are also expected to fuel another potentially devastating wildfire season. In 2020, roughly 4.1 m acres were consumed by the flames, tens of thousands of buildings burned and 31 people lost their lives.

The browning hillsides and dying trees are not only increasing the risk of ignitions, they also cause fire behavior to be more extreme when blazes erupt, according to Scott Stephens, a fire ecologist at the University of California, Berkeley. “We’ll probably get to typical fire season moisture levels six weeks early this year because of the drought,” he said as part of an interview series for the Public Policy Institute of California.

Along with wildfire risks, short water supply is putting immense pressure on the state’s agricultural industry, which grows over a third of the country’s vegetables and supplies two-thirds of the fruits and nuts in the US. Already farmers are culling crops and fallowing fields in anticipation of water shortages. Karen Ross, California’s food and agriculture secretary, told the California Chamber of Commerce that she expected 500,000 acres would have to sit idle this year.

Shallow, stagnant water lines the ‘A Canal’ in Klamath Falls, Oregon, on Tuesday. Photograph: Dave Killen/AP

The federal government has already announced a dramatic reduction in water allotments to farmers in California’s Central Valley, while further north, tensions are running high in the Klamath Basin, where a federal canal servicing 150,000 acres of farmland will run dry for the first time in 114 years.

Cities and other urban regions are also set to receive less water, and residents are being asked to conserve where they can.

“We are truly in an emergency situation,” Rick Callender, CEO of the Santa Clara Valley Water District, which delivers water to 2 million residents south of the San Francisco Bay Area, told the Mercury News last week. The agency will enact mandatory restrictions across the county, adding that the public should anticipate cutbacks to increase as the situation intensifies. “We’re going to be seeking everything we can do to address this emergency.”

Worsening drought will also exacerbate longstanding problems for people in the Central Valley, who have suffered through shortages in water for drinking, cooking and sanitation. During the previous drought, wells ran dry and never recovered. More than a million Californians still don’t have access to safe drinking water.

Low water levels also have the potential to affect the state’s electrical grid, which depends on hydroelectric power plants, the Los Angeles Times has reported. Lake Oroville is expected to fall below 640 ft – the level state officials say is required to run a plant – by August. Currently, it stands just above 700ft.

How ready is the state?

California has already invested billions to prepare and has learned key lessons from the last round, when the state experienced its driest four-year stretch in history. In 2014, the state also passed the Groundwater Management Act, landmark legislation that requires communities to monitor groundwater basins and develop plans to protect them. But implementation is still in its early stages.

Newsom has proposed a $5.1 bn investment over the next four years to respond to the disaster and improve infrastructure. Cal Fire, the state’s firefighting agency, has also added 1,400 new firefighters to its ranks, along with picking up new helicopters and fire engines.

“California has done a remarkable job,” says Pulwarty, but he adds that more ambitious solutions are still needed.

“There are innovations that we need to scale up,” he says, from urban conservation and reuse to upping agricultural efficiency and creating land reserves that will help regions become more resilient when drought disasters strike.

Others warn the state must take the long view, with drought conditions likely to get worse before they get better.

“If we are worried about this year we are really playing the short game,” says Doug Parker, the director of the California Institute for Water Resources. “It’s next year that I think is more important.”

The water system, he says, is designed to handle short-term shortages. “When you get into three, four, five years in a row of drought – that’s when things really start to get serious. We all wish we knew what was going to happen next winter.”

We’re Inching Towards Actual Violence Over Access to Water

Esquire

We’re Inching Towards Actual Violence Over Access to Water

Charles P. Pierce June 7, 2021

Photo credit: Robert Alexander - Getty Images — Photo credit: Robert Alexander – Getty Images

Here at the shebeen, one of the larger elements in our portfolio is water—specifically, the increasing political salience of water, especially in the West, where they are experiencing such profound drought conditions that the Hoover Dam, of all things, is losing its reason for being. From CBS News:

For more than eight decades, the iconic Hoover Dam has relied on water from Nevada’s Lake Mead to cover up its backside. But now, at age 85, it finds itself uncomfortably exposed. Much of the water the dam is supposed to be holding back is gone. “This is like a different world,” said Pat Mulroy, the former head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. She told CBS News senior national and environmental correspondent Ben Tracy that Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is on track to soon hit its lowest level ever recorded.

The dam is estimated to have lost a quarter of its customary hydroelectric power. Worse, the lower Colorado River, without which the country would have a lot of new deserts, is at a crisis stage, and the federal government may have to take serious action that will affect the region’s farmers—and that I guarantee you will set off the Bundy-ite fringe.

For the first time ever, the federal government is expected to declare a water shortage on the lower Colorado River later this summer. That will force automatic cuts to the water supply for Nevada and Arizona starting in 2022. Homeowners have higher priority and, at first, won’t feel the pain as badly as farmers. Dan Thelander is a second-generation family farmer in Arizona’s Pinal County. The water to grow his corn and alfalfa fields comes from Lake Mead. “If we don’t have irrigation water, we can’t farm,” he said. “So, next year we are going to get about 25% less water, means we’re going to have to fallow or not plant 25% of our land.” In 2023 Thelander and other farmers in this part of Arizona are expected to lose nearly all of their water from Lake Mead, so they are rushing to dig wells to pump groundwater to try to save their farms.

Meanwhile, a few degrees north, the High Country News reports the drought is killing fish and local economies, in that order.

Fish have been dying on the Klamath since around May 4, according to the Yurok Tribal Fisheries Department. At that time, 97% of the juvenile salmon caught by the department’s in-river trapping device were infected with the disease C. shasta, and were either dead, or would die within days. Over a two-week period, 70% of the juvenile salmon caught in the trap were dead.

Irrigators upriver from the fish kill were told in mid-May that for the first time since “A” Canal in the Klamath Project began operating in 1907, they would not receive any water from it. The irrigators say they need 400,000 acre-feet of water but this year, they will receive just 33,000 acre-feet from the Klamath Project — a historic low. The situation has put pressure on an embattled region already caught in a cyclical mode of crisis due to a drying climate. “For salmon people, a juvenile fish kill is an absolute worst-case scenario,” Myers said in a statement.

As is obvious, this is all yet another crisis within the general climate crisis. We are inching closer to the days when we might see actual violence over access to water. As if we all need another excuse.

Arizona farmers to bear brunt of cuts from Colorado River

Associated Press

Arizona farmers to bear brunt of cuts from Colorado River

Felicia Fonseca April 29, 2021

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Colorado River Water Storage

FILE – In this Oct. 8, 2019, file photo, the Central Arizona Project canal runs through rural desert near Phoenix. Water officials in Arizona say they are prepared to lose about one-fifth of the water the state gets from the Colorado River in what could be the first federally declared shortage in the river that supplies millions of people in the U.S. West and Mexico. The voluntary and mandatory Tier 1 cuts mean Arizona will lose 18% of its Colorado River supply, or 512,000 acre-feet of water. The amount represents 30% of the water that goes to the Central Arizona Project, which manages the canal system and had made excess water available for farmers. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

Arizona stands to lose more than any other state in the Colorado River basin that also takes in parts of Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Nevada and California. That’s because Arizona agreed long ago to be the first in line for cuts in exchange for federal funding for a canal system to deliver the water to Arizona’s major metropolitan areas.

The Arizona Department of Water Resources and the Central Arizona Project, which manages the canal system, said the anticipated reductions will be painful, but the state has prepared for decades for a shortage through conservation, water banking, partnerships and other efforts.

“It doesn’t make it any less painful. But at least we know what is coming,” said Ted Cooke, general manager of the Central Arizona Project.

Farmers in central Arizona’s Pinal County, who already have been fallowing land amid the ongoing drought and improving wells to pump groundwater in anticipation of the reductions, will bear the brunt of the cuts. Most farms there are family farms that are among the state’s top producers of livestock, dairy, cotton, barley, wheat and alfalfa.

In Pinal County, up to 40% of farmland that relies on Colorado River water could be fallowed over the next few years, said Stefanie Smallhouse, president of the Arizona Farm Bureau Federation.

“That’s a big blow,” she said. “I can’t think of many other businesses that can take a 40% cut in their income within a few months and still be sustainable. When you farm, it’s not only a business, it’s your livelihood.”

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projected earlier this month that Lake Mead, which delivers water to Arizona, Nevada, California and Mexico, will fall below 1,075 feet (328 meters) for the first time in June 2021. If the lake remains below that level in August when the bureau issues its official projection for 2022, Arizona and Nevada will lose water.

The two states already voluntarily have given up water under a separate drought contingency plan.

The voluntary and mandatory Tier 1 cuts mean Arizona will lose 18% of its Colorado River supply, or 512,000 acre-feet of water. The amount represents 30% of the water that goes to the Central Arizona Project and 8% of Arizona’s overall water supply.

Some of that water will be replaced through water exchanges, transfers from cities to irrigation districts or through water that was stored in Lake Mead in a sort of shell game. The state, tribes and others also contributed financially to help develop groundwater infrastructure.

“We like to think we find ways to take care of ourselves collectively,” said Tom Buschatzke, director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources.

Smallhouse said farmers are thankful for the help coming but believes there’s more flexibility in the system to further ease the reductions. While farmers regularly face criticism for the amount of water they use, Smallhouse said the coronavirus pandemic highlighted the importance of a local supply chain for meat, dairy and crops.

Some water users simply won’t get the water they once had if the Bureau of Reclamation’s projections pan out.

The cutbacks come at a time when temperatures are rising and drought has tightened its grip on the U.S. Southwest, increasingly draining Lake Mead and Lake Powell, the two largest man-made reservoirs in the U.S., to their lowest levels since they were filled.

Lake Mead along the Arizona-Nevada border has dropped by about 16 feet (4.88 meters) feet since this time last year. Lake Powell on the Arizona-Utah border has fallen by 35 feet (10.67 meters) feet, the Bureau of Reclamation said.

The reductions in Arizona won’t hit cities or people’s homes, or affect water delivered through the canal system for Native American tribes. Still, anyone living in the desert should be concerned — but not panic — about water and think ways to live with less, said Rhett Larson, an associate professor at Arizona State University and an expert on water law and policy.

“The fact that you’re not feeling it in your tap doesn’t mean you won’t feel it at the grocery store because Pinal County farmers are growing a lot of the things you eat and use,” he said.

A ‘megadrought’ in California is expected to lead to water shortages for production of everything from avocados to almonds, and could cause prices to rise

Business Insider

A ‘megadrought’ in California is expected to lead to water shortages for production of everything from avocados to almonds, and could cause prices to rise

Grace Kay June 4, 2021

California is facing its worst drought in four years.
As water levels continue to fall, farmers have left large portions of their fields unseeded.
The state’s $50 billion agriculture industry supplies over 25% of the nation’s food.

A megadrought in California is threatening to push food prices even higher.

The state is already facing its worst water shortage in four years and the its driest season has only just begun, according to data from the National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS).

As water levels continue to fall, farmers and ranchers will be unable to maintain key crops and feed livestock. As of Tuesday, nearly 75% of California was classified as in “extreme drought,” meaning the land does not have adequate water supplies to sustain agriculture and wildlife, according to the NIDIS.

While farmers have come to expect and prepare for droughts, this year has already been much hotter and drier than previous ones. Scorching California weather is drying up reservoirs, as well as the Sierra Nevada snowpack that helps supply them. The reservoirs are 50% lower than they should be in June, Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California-Davis, told Associated Press.

The farmer’s plight could make products like almonds, avocados, and milk more expensive for shoppers as farmers struggle to produce crops of the state’s top exports. California produces over 25% of the nation’s food supply. California agriculture is a nearly $50 billion industry and is known for producing over 400 key commodities, according to the California Department of Food and Agriculture.

Dave Kranz, a California Farm Bureau spokesperson, told Insider it’s too soon to tell whether the drought will have a significant impact on grocery prices, but it is sure to be a “catastrophic” year for farmers. He said he’s already seen several farmers scaling back their crops and prioritizing ones that rely less on water supplies.

“A lot of factors play into the prices people see at stores,” Kranz said. “The payment that farmers receive for their crops is a very small portion of the price shoppers pay. Most of it comes from transportation, packaging, and marketing.”

The last time the state faced a drought of this magnitude, experts said shoppers could expect prices to rise about 3% and predicted the Californian agriculture industry could be handicapped for years, Gannett reported. During the 2014 drought, experts told CNBC prices for top California exports like avocados, berries, broccoli, grapes, and lettuce could rise anywhere from 17 to 62 cents, depending on the product.

Any potential price increases do not occur immediately or all at once. They are often felt long after the drought has already wreaked havoc on local farm crops, Annemarie Kuhns, a member of the Agriculture Department’s Economic Research Service, told the Des Moines Register in 2015.

“It takes time before the effects are seen at the retail level,” Kuhns said. “Once you see drought conditions start to improve you’ll see these effects further down the road.”

Droughts are nothing new for California farmers, who use conservation practices that reduce water runoff and allow moisture to enter the soil. Farmers also focus on crops that require less water, though about 40% of the 24.6 million acres of farmland in California require irrigation, Reuters reported. Many farmers told the publication that they are planning to leave large portions of their land unseeded due to this year’s drought.

The farms are allocated some water from the state, but this year the California Department of Water Resources reduced farmers and growers to 5% of their expected water allocation in March. Last month, Chris Scheuring, California Farm Bureau senior counsel, said it appears the state will soon not be able to deliver even at the 5% level.

“It’s one of those existential years in California, when we’ve got an extreme drought and farmers are going to be hurting all over the place,” Scheuring said. “Some folks may be able to default to groundwater, but it’s going to be a very, very tough year for farmers.”

Farmers can purchase supplemental water if they can find it, but it comes at a hefty price. Supplemental water was priced at $1,500 to $2,000 per acre-foot in mid-May, according to a report from California Farm Bureau.

During the state’s last drought, which ended in 2016, the agriculture industry lost roughly $3.8 billion, according to National Geographic. NIDIS analysts said in their last report that the outlook for this year is “grim.”

The California water shortage and potential for a dip in food exports from the state pile onto a growing supply chain crisis precipitated by COVID-19 shutdowns. California dairy products, almonds, grapes, lettuce, and avocados won’t be the only products in short supply in the coming months. Imported goods like olive oil and cheese are also facing shortages, while meats, including hot dogs, bacon, and chicken have become increasingly valuable.

After judge overturns California assault weapons ban, state officials vow to fight back

By Alex Wigglesworth and Thomas Curwen June 5, 2021

Police photos of assault rifles and handguns are displayed during a news conference

Families of mass shooting victims, gun control advocates and California officials condemned a federal judge’s decision to overturn California’s 30-year-old ban on assault weapons, largely because of the manner in which he justified his ruling.

In declaring the ban unconstitutional late Friday, U.S. District Judge Roger Benitez compared the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle to a Swiss Army knife, calling it “good for both home and battle.”

Benitez, who was nominated by former President George W. Bush and serves in the Southern District of California, issued a permanent injunction against the law’s enforcement but stayed it for 30 days to give the state a chance to appeal.

California is one of seven states, plus Washington, D.C., that ban assault weapons, according to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

In his 94-page ruling, Benitez wrote that it was unlawful for California to prohibit its citizens from possessing weapons permitted in most other states and allowed by the U.S. Supreme Court. Advocates for the right to bear arms hailed the ruling.

“This is by far the most fact-intensive, detailed judicial opinion on this issue ever,” said Dave Kopel, an adjunct professor of constitutional law at the University of Denver and adjunct scholar at libertarian think tank the Cato Institute.

State Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta called the decision “fundamentally flawed” and said he would appeal.

“There is no sound basis in law, fact, or common sense for equating assault rifles with Swiss Army knives — especially on Gun Violence Awareness Day and after the recent shootings in our own California communities,” Bonta said in a statement.

Last month, a gunman opened fire at a light rail yard in San Jose, killing nine co-workers and dying of an apparent self-inflicted gunshot wound.

Officials said he was armed with three semiautomatic 9-millimeter handguns and 32 high-capacity magazines loaded with additional ammunition.

AR-15s have been used in some of the nation’s deadliest mass shootings, including the attack at Orlando’s Pulse nightclub that killed 49 people in 2016, and one in Las Vegas that killed 58 people in 2017.

“I can assure you — if a Swiss Army knife was used at Pulse, we would have had a birthday party for my best friend last week,” Brandon Wolf, who survived the Florida attack, wrote on Twitter. “Not a vigil.”

Kris Brown, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said the ruling made her do a double-take.

“I have two daughters, and they read dystopian fiction, like the ‘Hunger Games,’ and it was kind of like that,” she said. “It can’t be real. Nobody, ever, who is a thinking human being with a heartbeat, could possibly liken a Swiss Army knife to an AR-15.”

In response to several mass shootings on his watch, President Biden announced in April that his administration would take steps toward greater gun regulation.

They include a proposal to require background checks for self-assembled firearms — so-called ghost guns — and a law that would allow family members or law enforcement agencies to request a court order to take guns away from a person who is a danger to themselves or others. Nineteen states, including California, have already passed such laws.

“Today’s decision is a direct threat to public safety and the lives of innocent Californians, period,” Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday in a statement. “The fact that this judge compared the AR-15 — a weapon of war that’s used on the battlefield — to a Swiss Army knife completely undermines the credibility of this decision and is a slap in the face to the families who’ve lost loved ones to this weapon.”

The ruling came in response to a lawsuit filed in August 2019 by pro-gun groups, including the San Diego County Gun Owners Political Action Committee, California Gun Rights Foundation, Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition.

The plaintiffs also included three San Diego County men who said they own legal rifles or pistols and want to use high-capacity magazines in them but can’t, because doing so would turn them into illegal assault weapons under California statutes.

In cases in which the government seeks to limit people’s constitutional rights, such as those guaranteed by the 2nd Amendment, the government has the burden of proving the limitation is helping to advance an important public interest, like reducing mass shootings, Kopel said.

“You’re essentially weighing how much of a burden you are inflicting on law-abiding people versus how much you are reducing whatever problem you’re trying to deal with,” he said. In this case, he said, the judge found that “we’re not getting any reduction in mass shootings, and it’s imposing quite a severe burden on innocent people, like people who want to have these types of firearms for protection in the home.”

Other legal experts found the judge’s reasoning less compelling.

“The judge in this case, in declaring the ban on assault weapons to be a failed policy experiment and therefore unconstitutional, was engaging in his own policy judgment,” said Susan Estrich, professor at the USC Gould School of Law. “His very reasoning undercuts his own conclusion.”

California became the first state to ban the sale of assault weapons in 1989 in response to a shooting at a Stockton elementary school that left five students dead. The ban, signed into law by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian, has been updated multiple times since then to expand the definition of what is considered an assault weapon.

Each time, those who owned the firearms before they were prohibited were required to register them. There are an estimated 185,569 such weapons registered with the state, Benitez said.

In response to the ban soon after it was enacted, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals found the 2nd Amendment applied only as a limitation on the federal government, not state governments, Kopel said.

But in 2010, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling saying the 2nd Amendment applies to cities and states, which helped pave the way for this decision, he said.

In the current case, the state attorney general’s office argued that assault weapons are more dangerous than other firearms and are disproportionately used in crimes and mass shootings. Similar restrictions have previously been upheld by six other federal district and appeals courts, the state argued.

But the judge said the firearms targeted by the ban are most commonly used for legal purposes.

“This case is not about extraordinary weapons lying at the outer limits of 2nd Amendment protection,” he wrote. “The banned ‘assault weapons’ are not bazookas, howitzers, or machine guns.”

“In California, murder by knife occurs seven times more often than murder by rifle,” he added.

The state is also appealing two other rulings by Benitez: one from 2017 that overturns a ban on buying and selling magazines that hold more than 10 bullets, and another from April of last year that blocks a 2019 law requiring background checks to buy ammunition.

In the case of the assault weapons ban, the decision will almost certainly be stayed beyond 30 days, pending an appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, and there’s an excellent chance the court will issue a reversal, given its liberal tendencies, Estrich said.

“Ultimately,” she said, “the question may be whether the United States Supreme Court, with its new conservative appointees, sees this as an opportunity to dig into assault weapons bans.”

That could imperil gun control laws that are on the books across the country, Brown said.

“The Supreme Court overturning these kinds of laws that are designed to promote public safety has huge negative implications, not only for assault weapons bans but for every public safety law that we have ever crafted to regulate guns, including the Brady law.” she said, referring to the 1994 requirement that firearm purchasers undergo federal background checks.

“So yes, I’m very concerned about it.”

Opinion: Republican senators managed to outdo themselves in cowardice

Washington Post

Opinion: Republican senators managed to outdo themselves in cowardice

Opinion by George T. Conway III, Contributing columnist June 2, 2021

Image without a caption — Supporters of President Donald Trump fight with members of law enforcement at a door the supporters broke open as they storm the Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6. (Leah Millis/Reuters).

Republican senators have managed to outdo themselves in cowardice — which is quite a feat.

Last week’s Senate vote blocking a national commission to investigate the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol was even more appalling than either of the Senate’s impeachment trial acquittals of former president Donald Trump.

With few exceptions, Senate Republicans shirked their duties at both trials, despite the oaths they took to defend the Constitution, and, in an impeachment trial, to “do impartial justice.” These derelictions were especially apparent in the first impeachment trial. Faced with overwhelming evidence that Trump had used his official powers to try to coerce a foreign nation into aiding his reelection campaign, all but one Republican (Utah’s Mitt Romney) voted to acquit him, even as the senators refused to call witnesses.

They betrayed their oaths again in February, when 43 of the 50 Republican senators voted to acquit Trump of inciting the insurrection, even though he had largely committed his high crime openly, on television and Twitter, and even though the senators themselves were among the victims.

They acquitted him even though they surely recognized, as their own leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Ky.), blisteringly said on the floor on Feb. 13 after voting to acquit, that Trump had engaged in a “disgraceful — disgraceful — dereliction of duty.” Rather than “do his job,” McConnell said, Trump “watched television happily — happily — as the chaos unfolded,” hoping “to either overturn the voters’ decision or else torch our institutions on the way out.”

Trump breached his duties in both cases, and Senate Republicans thus failed to carry out theirs. But at least then the senators had excuses, however feeble.

With the first impeachment, they faced the momentous decision of whether to remove a president from office — something that has never been done. You can’t blame anyone for feeling trepidation at such a prospect.

The second time around, most claimed they couldn’t convict a former president, even though he had been impeached while in office for acts committed while in office. Constitutional text and history refute that proposition, but you could at least understand one underlying motivation: The usual sanction for an impeachment conviction is removal. Trump was already gone, posed no further threat of committing official abuse, had just lost an election by 7 million votes and stood as unpopular as ever. So, at least the theory went, why bother convicting him just to formally disqualify him from ever holding federal offices to which he’d never be elected?

Those may not have been great excuses, but at least the Republicans had them.

There was no excuse — none — for what they did last week.

They weren’t being asked to remove anyone from office; they weren’t being asked to pass judgment of any sort. They were merely being asked to allow a bipartisan commission to look into what happened on, and led to, Jan. 6.

Even worse: They actually weren’t voting on whether to create a commission; they were voting on cloture — on whether even to allow a vote on the issue. Using the filibuster, a Republican minority refused to allow a majority (which would have included seven Republicans) to hold that vote.

And they did so out of raw political fear, this time without fig leaves. McConnell’s own leadership colleague, minority whip Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), actually admitted that Republicans feared that the commission’s findings “could be weaponized politically and drug into next year,” a midterm election year.

As for McConnell, he pulled out all the stops. Virtually echoing British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s notorious call to partisanship in the decisive 1940 parliamentary debate over his handling of Nazi aggression — “I have friends in the House” — McConnell shamelessly asked his colleagues to kill the commission bill as “a personal favor” to him.

With that, the Republicans’ policy of appeasing Trump prevailed once again. But if Republicans are worried about what would happen if the public learned more of the truth about Jan. 6, they have only themselves to blame.

After all, they were the ones who acquitted Trump in the first impeachment trial and let him remain in office. They were the ones who stood mute before Jan. 6 as Trump propagated the “big lie” after the election. They were the ones who left open the horrifying prospect of letting Trump hold office again. They are the ones who continue to wish his wrongs away.

They quiver in fear of the man who cost them the presidency and both houses of Congress. As they continue to quake, the “big lie’s” cancer upon democracy grows, with spurious election audits in pursuit of fantasies of fraud, and with some insanely claiming — reportedly including Trump himself — that he’ll be “reinstated” in due course.

Four years of Trump have led to the Republican Party becoming a threat to democracy, a declining sect dominated by crackpots, charlatans and cowards. Of these, it’s the cowards, including the senators who killed last week’s legislation, who bear the most blame.

Study: California fire killed 10% of world’s giant sequoias

Associated Press

Study: California fire killed 10% of world’s giant sequoias

June 2, 2021

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California Wildfires Redwoods Killed

FILE – In this April 22, 2021, file photo, provided by the National Park Service, shows a smoldering tree in Sequoia National Park, Calif. The giant sequoia was found smoldering and smoking in an area of the park burned by the 2020 Castle Fire. At least a tenth of the world’s mature giant sequoias were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service. (Tony Caprio/National Park Service via AP, File)

SEQUOIA NATIONAL PARK, Calif. (AP) — At least a tenth of the world’s mature giant sequoia trees were destroyed by a single California wildfire that tore through the southern Sierra Nevada last year, according to a draft report prepared by scientists with the National Park Service.

The Visalia Times-Delta newspaper obtained a copy of the report that describes catastrophic destruction from the Castle Fire, which charred 273 square miles (707 square km) of timber in Sequoia National Park.

Researchers used satellite imagery and modeling from previous fires to determine that between 7,500 and 10,000 of the towering species perished in the fire. That equates to 10% to 14% of the world’s mature giant sequoia population, the newspaper said.

“I cannot overemphasize how mind-blowing this is for all of us. These trees have lived for thousands of years. They’ve survived dozens of wildfires already,” said Christy Brigham, chief of resources management and science at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks.

The consequences of losing large numbers of giant sequoias could be felt for decades, forest managers said. Redwood and sequoia forests are among the world’s most efficient at removing and storing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The groves also provide critical habitat for native wildlife and help protect the watershed that supplies farms and communities on the San Joaquin Valley floor.

Brigham, the study’s lead author, cautioned that the numbers are preliminary and the research paper has yet to be peer reviewed. Beginning next week, teams of scientists will hike to the groves that experienced the most fire damage for the first time since the ashes settled.

“I have a vain hope that once we get out on the ground the situation won’t be as bad, but that’s hope — that’s not science,” she said.

The newspaper said the extent of the damage to one of the world’s most treasured trees is noteworthy because the sequoias themselves are incredibly well adapted to fire. The old-growth trees — some of which are more than 2,000 years old and 250 feet (76 meters) tall — require fire to burst their pine cones and reproduce.

“One-hundred years of fire suppression, combined with climate change-driven hotter droughts, have changed how fires burn in the southern Sierra and that change has been very bad for sequoia,” Brigham said.

Sequoia and Kings Canyon have conducted controlled burns since the 1960s, about a thousand acres a year on average. Brigham estimates that the park will need to burn around 30 times that number to get the forest back to a healthy state.

The Castle Fire erupted on Aug. 19 in the Golden Trout Wilderness amid a flurry of lightning strikes. The Shotgun Fire, a much smaller blaze burning nearby, was discovered shortly afterward, and the two were renamed the Sequoia Complex.

The headline of this story has been corrected to say the fire destroyed 10% of all giant sequoias, not 10% of all redwoods.