Category: Sustainable World -Farm Environmental

‘Wither away and die:’ U.S. Pacific Northwest heat wave bakes wheat, fruit crops

‘Wither away and die:’ U.S. Pacific Northwest heat wave bakes wheat, fruit crops

Julie Ingwersen                     

 

FILE PHOTO: A farmer plows a field with a tractor in rural Idaho

CHICAGO (Reuters) – An unprecedented heat wave and ongoing drought in the U.S. Pacific Northwest is damaging white wheat coveted by Asian buyers and forcing fruit farm workers to harvest in the middle of the night to salvage crops and avoid deadly heat.

The extreme weather is another blow to farmers who have struggled with labor shortages and higher transportation costs during the pandemic and may further fuel global food inflation.

Cordell Kress, who farms in southeastern Idaho, expects his winter white wheat to produce about half as many bushels per acre as it does in a normal year when he begins to harvest next week, and he has already destroyed some of his withered canola and safflower oilseed crops.

The Pacific Northwest is the only part of the United States that grows soft white wheat used to make sponge cakes and noodles, and farmers were hoping to capitalize on high grain prices. Other countries including Australia and Canada grow white wheat, but the U.S. variety is especially prized by Asian buyers.

“The general mood among farmers in my area is as dire as I’ve ever seen it,” Kress said. “Something about a drought like this just wears on you. You see your blood, sweat and tears just slowly wither away and die.”

U.S. exports of white wheat in the marketing year that ended May 31 reached a 40-year high of 265 million bushels, driven by unprecedented demand from China.

But farmers may not have as much to sell this year.

“The Washington wheat crop is in pretty rough shape right now,” said Clark Neely, a Washington State University agronomist. The U.S. Agriculture Department this week rated 68% of the state’s spring wheat and 36% of its winter wheat in poor or very poor condition. A year ago, just 2% of the state’s winter wheat and 6% of its spring wheat were rated poor to very poor. [US/WHE]

On top of the expected yield losses, grain buyers worry about quality. Flour millers turn to Pacific Northwest soft white wheat for its low protein content, which is well-suited for pastries and crackers.

But the drought is shriveling wheat kernels and raising protein levels, making the some of the crop less valuable. “The protein is so high that you can’t use (it) for anything but cattle feed,” Kress said.

Low-protein “soft” wheats have lower gluten content than the “hard” wheats used for bread, producing a less-stretchy dough for delicate cakes and crackers.

The Washington State Agriculture Department said it was still too early to estimate lost revenue from crop damage.

The heat peaked in late June, in the thick of the harvest of cherries. Temperatures reached 118 degrees Fahrenheit (48 Celsius) on June 28 at The Dalles, Oregon, along the Washington border, near the heart of cherry country.

Scientists have said the suffocating heat that killed hundreds of people would have been “virtually impossible” without climate change and such events could become more common.

The National Weather Service posted weekend heat advisories for eastern Washington.

NIGHTTIME CHERRY HARVEST; SUN NETS FOR APPLES

On the hottest days last month, laborers who normally start picking cherries at 4 a.m. began at 1 a.m., armed with headlamps and roving spotlights to beat the daytime heat that threatened their safety and made the fruit too soft to harvest.

The region should still produce a roughly average-sized cherry harvest, but not the bumper crop initially expected, said B.J. Thurlby, president of the Northwest Cherry Growers, a grower-funded trade group representing top cherry producer Washington and other Western states.

“We think we probably lost about 20% of the crop,” Thurlby said, adding that growers simply had to abandon a portion of the heat-damaged cherries in their orchards.

The heat wave’s impact on Washington’s $2 billion apple crop – the state’s most valuable agricultural product – is uncertain, as harvest is at least six weeks away. Apple growers are used to sleepless nights as they respond to springtime frosts, but have little experience with sustained heat in June.

“We really don’t know what the effects are. We just have to ride it out,” said Todd Fryhover, president of the Washington Apple Commission.

Growers have been protecting their orchards with expansive nets that protect fruit against sunburn, and by spraying water vapor above the trees. Apples have stopped growing for the time being, Fryhover said, but it is possible the crop may make up for lost time if weather conditions normalize.

The state wine board in Oregon, known for its Pinot Noir, said the timing of the heat spike may have benefited grapes. Last year, late-summer wildfires and wind storms forced some West Coast vineyards to leave damaged grapes unharvested.

Washington’s wine grapes also seem fine so far, one vineyard manager said. “I think wine grapes are situated well to handle high heat in June,” said Sadie Drury, general manager of North Slope Management.

(Reporting by Julie Ingwersen in Chicago; Editing by Caroline Stauffer and Matthew Lewis)

You thought Monday was rainy in South Florida? Well, don’t plan on sunbathing Tuesday

You thought Monday was rainy in South Florida? Well, don’t plan on sunbathing Tuesday

David J. Neal                    

 

Monday’s rains turned your street into the Nile and the tropical storm wind gusts put stomach-flipping drama and delays into your friend’s flight landing at local airports. Once the flight landed, lightning kept the baggage handlers inside to continue arguing Suns-Bucks or Argentina-Brazil.

 

Get ready for more Tuesday and Wednesday, according to the National Weather Service.

The hazardous weather outlook says “Peak chances of showers and thunderstorms will be on Tuesday and Wednesday as a tropical wave passes by on Tuesday.”

Also, “the greatest flooding potential will be from Tuesday into Wednesday when there is a marginal risk of excessive rainfall.”

Drivers should avoid plowing through flooded streets if possible.

Rain is projected with gusts as high as 24 mph. On the upside, that’s half the 49 mph gust reported at Miami International Airport at 1:03 p.m. On the downside, that still means on the coasts from Key Biscayne to Miami Beach to Fort Lauderdale to Palm Beach, a high rip current risk stays in effect until 8 p.m. Tuesday.

“Swim near a lifeguard,” the NWS reminds swimmers. “If caught in a rip current, relax and float. Don`t swim against the current. If able, swim in a direction following the shoreline. If unable to escape, face the shore and call or wave for help.”

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Our climate change turning point is right here, right now

Rebecca Solnit                          
<span>Photograph: Kent Porter/AP</span>
Photograph: Kent Porter/AP

 

Human beings crave clarity, immediacy, landmark events. We seek turning points, because our minds are good at recognizing the specific – this time, this place, this sudden event, this tangible change. This is why we were never very good, most of us, at comprehending climate change in the first place. The climate was an overarching, underlying condition of our lives and planet, and the change was incremental and intricate and hard to recognize if you weren’t keeping track of this species or that temperature record. Climate catastrophe is a slow shattering of the stable patterns that governed the weather, the seasons, the species and migrations, all the beautifully orchestrated systems of the holocene era we exited when we manufactured the anthropocene through a couple of centuries of increasingly wanton greenhouse gas emissions and forest destruction.

This spring, when I saw the shockingly low water of Lake Powell, I thought that maybe this summer would be a turning point. At least for the engineering that turned the Southwest’s Colorado River into a sort of plumbing system for human use, with two huge dams that turned stretches of a mighty river into vast pools of stagnant water dubbed Lake Powell, on the eastern Utah/Arizona border, and Lake Mead, in southernmost Nevada. It’s been clear for years that the overconfident planners of the 1950s failed to anticipate that, while they tinkered with the river, industrial civilization was also tinkering with the systems that fed it.

The water they counted on is not there. Lake Powell is at about a third of its capacity this year, and thanks to a brutal drought there was no great spring runoff to replenish it. That’s if “drought” is even the right word for something that might be the new normal, not an exception. The US Bureau of Reclamation is overdue to make a declaration that there is not enough water for two huge desert reservoirs and likely give up on Powell to save Lake Mead.

I got to see the drought up close when I spent a week in June floating down the Green River, the Colorado River’s largest tributary. The skies of southern Utah were full of smoke from the Pack Creek wildfire that had been burning since June 9 near Moab, scorching thousands of acres of desert and forest and incinerating the ranch buildings and archives of the legendary river guide and environmentalist Ken Slight (fictionalized as Seldom Seen Slim in Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang), now 91. Climate chaos destroys the past as well as the future. As of July 6, the fire is still burning.

It wasn’t just the huge plume of smoke that filled us with dread about the adventure to come; the weather forecast of daily temperatures reaching 106 F made living out of doors for a week seem daunting. Water level in the river was far lower than normal and due to drop a lot more; the temperature on our rafts and kayaks just above the water was tolerable – but as soon as you walked any distance from the river’s edge, the heat came at you as though you’d opened an oven door.

We saw an unusual amount of wildlife on the trip too – mustangs, bighorn sheep, a lean black bear and her two cubs pacing the river’s edge – but any sense of wonder was tempered by the likelihood that thirst had driven them down from the drought-scorched stretches beyond the river. We need a new word for that feeling for nature that is love and wonder mingled with dread and sorrow, for when we see those things that are still beautiful, still powerful, but struggling under the burden of our mistakes.

Then came the heat dome over the Northwest, a story that didn’t appear to make the top headlines of many media outlets as it was happening. Much of the early coverage showed people in fountains and sprinklers as though this was just another hot day, rather than something sending people to hospitals in droves, killing hundreds (and likely well over a thousand) in Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia, devastating wildlife, crops, and domestic animals, setting up the conditions for wildfires, and breaking infrastructure designed for the holocene, not the anthropocene. It signified something much larger even than a crisis impacting a vast expanse of the continent: increasingly wild variations from the norm with increasing devastation that can and will happen anywhere. It seemed to get less coverage than the collapse of part of a single building in Florida.

A building collapsing is an ideal specimen of news, sudden and specific in time and place, and in the case of this one on the Florida coast, easy for the media to cover as a spectacle with straightforward causes and consequences. A crisis spread across three states and two Canadian provinces, with many kinds of impact, including untallied deaths, was in many ways its antithesis. There was a case to be made that climate change – in the form of rising saltwater intrusion – was a factor in the Florida building’s collapse, but climate change was far more dramatically present in the Pacific Northwest’s heat records being broken day after day and the consequences of that heat. In Canada the previous highest temperature was broken by eight degrees Fahrenheit, a big lurch into the dangerous new conditions human beings have made, and then most of the town in which that record was set burned down.

Later news stories focused on one aspect or another of the heat dome. A marine biologist at the University of British Columbia reported that the heat wave may have killed more than a billion seashore animals living on the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Lightning strikes in BC, generated by the heat, soared to unprecedented levels – inciting, by one account, 136 forest fires. The heat wave cooked fruit on the trees. It was a catastrophe with many aspects and impacts, as diffuse as it was intense. The sheer scale and impact were underplayed, along with the implications.

Political turning points are as manmade as climate catastrophe: we could have chosen to make turning points out of the western wildfires of the past four years – notably the incineration of the town of Paradise and more than 130 of its residents in 2018, but also last year’s California wildfires that included five of the six largest fires in state history. It could include the deluge that soaked Detroit with more than six inches of rain in a few hours last month or the ice storm in Texas earlier this year or catastrophic flooding in Houston (with 40 inches of rain in three days) and Nebraska in 2019 or the point at which the once-mythical Northwest Passage became real because of summer ice melt in the Arctic or the 118-degree weather in Siberia this summer or the meltwater pouring off the Greenland ice sheet.

A turning point is often something you individually or collectively choose, when you find the status quo unacceptable, when you turn yourself and your goals around. George Floyd’s murder was a turning point for racial justice in the US. Those who have been paying attention, those with expertise or imagination, found their turning points for the climate crisis years and decades back. For some it was Hurricane Sandy or their own home burning down or the permafrost of the far north turning to mush or the IPCC report in 2018 saying we had a decade to do what the planet needs of us. Greta Thunberg had her turning point, and so did the indigenous women leading the Line 3 pipeline protests.

Summarizing the leaked contents of a forthcoming IPCC report, the Agence France-Presse reports: “Climate change will fundamentally reshape life on Earth in the coming decades, even if humans can tame planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions […] Species extinction, more widespread disease, unliveable heat, ecosystem collapse, cities menaced by rising seas – these and other devastating climate impacts are accelerating and bound to become painfully obvious before a child born today turns 30. The choices societies make now will determine whether our species thrives or simply survives as the 21st century unfolds…”

The phrase “the choices societies make” is a clear demand for a turning point, a turning away from fossil fuel and toward protection of the ecosystems that protect us.

Every week I temper the terrible news from catastrophes such as wildfires and from scientists measuring the chaos by trying to put them in the context of positive technological milestones and legislative shifts and their consequences. You could call each of them a turning point: The point last week at which Oregon passed the bill setting the most aggressive clean electricity standards in the US, 100% clean by 2040. The point at which Scotland began getting more electricity from renewables than it could use. The point at which New York State banned fracking. The Paris Climate Treaty in 2015. Of course, as with the climate itself, many of the changes were incremental: the stunning drop in cost and rise in efficiency of solar panels over the past four decades, the myriad solar and wind farms that have been installed worldwide.

The rise in public engagement with the climate crisis is harder to measure. It’s definitely growing, both as an increasingly powerful movement and as a matter of individual consciousness. Yet something about the scale and danger of the crisis still seems to challenge human psychology. Along with the fossil fuel industry, our own habits of mind are something we must overcome.

  • Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is also the author of Men Explain Things to Me and The Mother of All Questions. Her most recent book is Recollections of My Nonexistence

Aerial photos capture the devastation of the California drought that’s shriveling vegetation and drying up reservoirs

Aerial photos capture the devastation of the California drought that’s shriveling vegetation and drying up reservoirs

Avery Hartmans                     

 

Aerial photos capture the devastation of the California drought that’s shriveling vegetation and drying up reservoirs
Aerial view of docks sitting on dry land in California
An aerial view shows former docks on the beach at Salton Sea in California. Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

  • An extreme drought in California is drying up lakes and reservoirs and straining electrical grids.
  • Agriculture and tourism could be severely impacted, and wildfires are likely to rage this summer.
  • Aerial photographs show how much the drought has already devastated California’s landscape.

Boats sit on dry land. Once-lush palm trees are now brown and shriveled. And waterways that were formerly deep and flowing have been reduced to puddles of toxic residue.

This is the landscape in parts of California, which is experiencing a historic mega-drought that is expected to strain the state’s electrical grid and dry up water supplies – water levels are 50% lower than normal at more than 1,500 reservoirs statewide, Jay Lund, co-director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at University of California, Davis, told Morning Brew. Given that 25% of the nation’s food is grown in California, extreme droughts could decimate crops like avocados and almonds.

The drought has also made is harder for ranchers to supply water to their livestock, the state’s boating industry is taking a hit, and tourism, which supports roughly 2 million jobs in California, could be severely impacted by the dangerous heat waves.

As of Friday, more than 85% of the state was classified as being in “extreme drought,” according to the National Integrated Drought Information System, and experts say this is only the beginning: The dry conditions make California even more susceptible to deadly wildfires, which burned more than 4 million acres last year.

Read more: Meet the West Coast entrepreneurs founding startups to fight wildfires, combat the effects of climate change, and tap into a market potentially worth billions

“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,” Kathleen Johnson, a paleoclimatologist at the University of California, Irvine, told The Guardian.

On Thursday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom asked residents to cut back on their water usage by 15% by taking shorter showers and running dishwashers and washing machines more sparingly.

Amid the devastating conditions, Reuters photographer Aude Guerrucci captured aerial photos of the impacts of the drought on California’s landscape. Take a look:

Inside Shadow Lake Estates in Indio, California, an artificial lake glistens despite the scorched landscape surrounding it. Reservoirs and lakes are drying up statewide, with some turning completely to dust with no rain expected until later this year.

Lake surrounded by green grass sits in a desert in California
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

Elsewhere, dropping water levels have forced houseboat owners to remove their vessels from the water. These boats are anchored in Laka Oroville, the second-largest reservoir in the state, which is at less than 40% of its normal capacity.

Houseboats sit low in the water in a California reservoir
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: The Weather Channel

This canal in Salton City, California, is almost completely evaporated, leaving being only toxic residue. Salmon that typically swim in rivers and canals like this one between California’s Central Valley and the Pacific Ocean have had to be transported to the ocean via truck as those waterways become shallower and shallower.

Aerial view of evaporated canal with toxic residue at the bottom
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

The dried up bodies of water are visible from space. Here, boat pillars that used to be submerged in the Salton Sea in Southern California are exposed by the receding water levels.

Boat pillars that used to be in water sit on dry land
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

Heat waves are sending temperatures into the triple digits. As another heat wave arrives, the Central Valley could see temperatures as high as 113 degrees Fahrenheit, while Southern California, where this boat became beached, could reach 117 degrees.

An empty boat sits on dry land in California
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: The New York Times

These heat waves are occurring more often, starting earlier, and continuing later into the year now than they did in the 1960s, according to Environmental Protection Agency records. At the Salton Sea, docks sit on dry land, hundreds of feet from the water.

Broken dock with chair at the end sits on dry land
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

The extra-dry, extra-hot conditions are obliterating vegetation like these palm trees, and taxing power grids. As temperatures rise, people tend to turn up air conditioning units, increasing the potential for rolling blackouts.

Dead palm trees near the beach in California
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

In Mecca, California, in the Coachella Valley, agricultural fields reside amid a parched landscape. Agriculture is a roughly $50 billion business in California, and the severe drought could hamper the industry for years to come.

Aerial view of dry California fields with small patch of green
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

The conditions mean this year’s wildfire season could surpass the record-breaking devastation of 2020. “Much of the western United States will continue the trend of hot and dry weather, much like the summer of 2020,” Brandon Buckingham, a meteorologist at AccuWeather, recently told Insider. “Each and every western heat wave throughout the summer will only heighten wildfire risks.”

An &quot;End&quot; street sign sits at front of beach
Aude Guerrucci/Reuters

Source: Insider

A Wildfire Is Pushing California Toward the Brink of Blackouts

A Wildfire Is Pushing California Toward the Brink of Blackouts

Lynn Doan and Naureen S. Malik                       

(Bloomberg) — A wildfire raging uncontrollably across southern Oregon has knocked out three electrical lines so critical to the stability of grids in the western U.S. that California has warned of rotating blackouts and Nevada faced a power emergency.

The fast-moving Bootleg fire crippled a key transmission system known as the California Oregon Intertie that the Golden State has depended on for years for electricity imports.

Making matters worse: The takedown of the intertie has had a knock-on effect on another key import hub known as the Pacific DC Intertie that brings in electricity from the Pacific Northwest, California’s grid operator said in a media briefing Saturday. Power supplies to the area covered by the grid have been reduced by as much as 3,500 megawatts because of the fire.

After days of pushing state residents to limit energy use with the risk of rolling blackouts, Californians got a break Sunday as the grid operator said conditions were expected to be stable. With transmission lines knocked out by the fire still out of service, and high temperatures expected to persist as demand picks up in the new week, another statewide conservation push through a so-called flex alert has been issued for Monday.

“If demand still outstrips supply after a Flex Alert is in effect, the ISO could take the infrequent step of ordering California utilities to spread power outages of relatively short duration to effectively extend available electricity as much as possible,” it said in a statement Sunday.

The fact that a single wildfire has brought America’s most populous and affluent state to the brink of blackouts is among the most powerful demonstrations yet of how vulnerable the world’s power grids have become to the effects of climate change.

Read: Heat Scorches U.S. West as Records Fall Across the Region

Extreme heat, drought and dry conditions globally have shrunk hydropower reserves, driven up electricity demand to record levels and touched off some of the worst wildfire seasons in modern history.

Climate change is “forcing us to do things we never imagined” at this time of the year, said Elliot Mainzer, who took over as chief executive officer of grid manager California Independent System Operator nine months ago. The agency is “anticipating what could be a very long and hot summer,” he said.

California has emerged as the epicenter of climate disasters in the U.S. Wildfires burned an unprecedented 4.3 million acres across the state last year, killing 33 people and scorching nearly 10,500 structures.

Read More: Drought Indicators Across Western U.S. Warn of the ‘Big One’

Last August California suffered its first rolling blackouts since the U.S. West energy crisis two decades ago because of extremely hot weather. And in a foreshadowing of what was to come: Days before this year’s summer officially began, high temperatures forced the California ISO to make an unusually early call for conservation, allowing the region to duck another round of rotating outages.

“Bottom line is we took everything we learned from last summer, and we still came into this summer thinking our issues were going to primarily be associated with August and September,” Mainzer said, but “we had the first major heat wave four days before the official beginning of summer.”

On Friday evening, the grid operator took the rare step of ordering a Stage 2 emergency — one step away from rotating blackouts — to cope with the loss of import capacity. Energy conservation helped the state avert a crisis. But as temperatures rose yet again and supplies fell off the grid Saturday, Mainzer said, “We’re going to need more. Honestly, I think we are going to need more response than we saw last night.”

The grid operator issued an all-clear late Saturday after issuing a flex alert. Earlier in the day, Governor Gavin Newsom also signed an order to free up more energy capacity to help alleviate the supply crunch.

California wasn’t the only state facing power woes. Nevada’s power system was among those in the region that also faced emergency levels on Friday evening, said Mark Rothleder, California’s ISO’s chief operating officer. On top of managing California’s grid, the agency serves as a reliability coordinator and is responsible for monitoring conditions across the western region.

Nevada utility NV Energy Inc. said it wasn’t forced to resort to blackouts, but the company was calling for customers to conserve over the weekend.

Exactly when the Bootleg fire would subside enough to re-energize the California Oregon Intertie remains to be seen.

The Bootleg fire had burned through 143,607 acres of southern Oregon and still zero percent of it was contained as of Sunday, forcing evacuations in Klamath County and shutting sections of a national forest, according to an update from the U.S. Fire Service.

Temperatures across California were forecast to remain high into Monday. After hitting 102 degrees Fahrenheit (39 degrees Celsius) Sunday, Sacramento is expected to slip to a high of 94 degrees on Monday.

(Updates with grid operator’s comment in fifth paragraph.)

California Orders Grid Emergency, Power Shortfalls Loom

California Orders Grid Emergency, Power Shortfalls Loom

David R. Baker, Will Wade and Mark Chediak               

 

(Bloomberg) — California ordered a stage-2 power-grid emergency — one step away from rolling blackouts — as a searing heat wave drives temperatures into triple-digits and sends demand for electricity soaring.

The state’s grid operator called for the measure as wildfires — including the Bootleg Fire in south-central Oregon — threaten transmission lines bringing power into California. It comes as a historic drought grips the Western U.S. and temperatures reach record levels in parts of the region.

The threat of blackouts underscore the power grid’s increasing vulnerability as climate change disrupts weather patterns and signal that shortfalls may continue this summer. Last August, California suffered its first rolling outages in almost two decades after hot weather sent electricity demand soaring beyond supplies. Parts of Washington and Idaho recently lost power as all-time high temperatures battered the electricity system.

Excessive heat warnings cover most of California and parts of Nevada, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Arizona. The California Independent System Operator, the state’s power grid manager, on Friday issued a statewide alert asking consumers to voluntarily cut back on power use. The state on Thursday asked businesses, farms and residents to voluntarily cut water use by 15% as drought emergency declarations cover 50 of 58 counties.

Power imports to the state, meanwhile, have been squeezed. The Oregon-based Bonneville Power Administration said it had to reduce capacity on a key transmission line, the Northwest AC Intertie, by 90% because of the Bootleg fire, a spokesman said.

Temperatures hit 107 degrees Fahrenheit (42 Celsius) Friday in Sacramento and 112 Saturday, according to the National Weather Service.

California has pushed hard to switch to solar and wind power while closing older gas-burning plants, but that’s left it vulnerable in evenings when solar production fades. California Independent System Operator Chief Executive Officer Elliot Mainzer said Friday that consumer conservation to avoid outages may be needed for years.

“We recognize these are transitional days and months and years for the California grid,” he said on a conference call with reporters.

Heat waves across the U.S. this year have put utilities on notice that their grids may not be adequate. California had to urge people to conserve power last month to avoid a repeat of last year’s outages, and New York City averted widespread blackouts last week after issuing its own rare emergency call for conservation. Texas also avoided a similar fate in June as unexpected plant outages cut capacity as temperatures spiked.

Read More: A Hotter World Means Keeping the Lights On Is Harder Than Ever

California officials are bracing for a difficult summer. The usual winter rains that water supplies depend on were largely absent. The drought stretching from West Texas to the California coast and north to the Canadian border is already testing power grids as hydro generation dries up just as homes blast air conditioners.

The grid manager has delayed planned retirements of several old, gas-fired power plants along the coast and tweaked electricity market rules to encourage more imports during peak-demand periods. In addition, power companies are installing large-scale batteries to store solar power during the day and supply the grid at night.

The state estimates that doing so will boost capacity by about 2,000 megawatts — roughly the output of two nuclear reactors — by August, and some are already running. Officials forecast demand Friday will peak at about 43,000 megawatts. Demand load typically peaks hours after solar output reaches its maximum.

Also See: California Summer of Heat, Power and Fire Woes Arrives Early

However, while the state can often avoid power shortages by importing power from neighbors, capacity across the west has been unusually stretched amid waves of extreme heat.

The re-opening of offices and other facilities has also added to elevated power use. Electricity generation nationwide increased by 5.9% in April from a year earlier as a result of the country returning to normal levels of electricity demand following pandemic-related shutdowns, according to a June 24 report from the U.S. Energy Information Administration that gives the most recent data available.

(Adds tweet, details of fire in fifth paragraph.)

Handful of cities driving urban greenhouse gas emissions – study

Handful of cities driving urban greenhouse gas emissions – study

Emma Rumney and Isla Binnie                     

 

Woman wearing a mask walks past buildings on a polluted day in Hebei.

 

LONDON/MADRID (Reuters) – Just 25 big cities – almost all of them in China – accounted for more than half of the climate-warming gases pumped out by a sample of 167 urban hubs around the world, an analysis of emissions trends showed on Monday.

In per capita terms, however, emissions from cities in the richest parts of the world are still generally higher than those from urban centres in developing countries, researchers found in the study https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/frsc.2021.696381/full published in the open access journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities.

The study compared greenhouse gas emissions reported by 167 cities in 53 countries, and found that 23 Chinese cities – among them Shanghai, Beijing and Handan – along with Moscow and Tokyo accounted for 52% of the total.

It included more cities from China, India, the United states and the European Union because of their larger contribution to global emissions and significance to the climate debate.

The findings highlighted the significant role cities play in reducing emissions, said study co-author Shaoqing Chen, an environmental scientist at Sun Yat-sen University in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou.

“It is simple, logical,” he said. “If you don’t act, eventually you will suffer from (climate change),” he said.

Average global temperatures have already risen by more than 1 degree Celsius compared to the pre-industrial baseline and are still on track to exceed the 1.5-2 degree limit set by the Paris Agreement.

Chen and other scientists cautioned, however, that some of the data available for use in their study was patchy, with some cities reporting numbers from as far back as 2005.

A lack of consistency in how cities report emissions also makes comparisons tricky, they added.

‘LAST BIG PUSH’

Research published in 2018 in the Environmental Research Letters journal analyzed a much larger sample of 13,000 cities, big and small, finding 100 cities containing 11% of the world’s population drove 18% of its carbon footprint.

Still, the new analysis “contributes to the growing literature and our understanding of urban emissions”, said Yale University Geography and Urban Science professor Karen Seto, who co-authored the 2018 paper.

“It’s really difficult to compare apples to apples on city greenhouse gas emissions but you have to try, and the paper makes a pretty good effort,” added Dan Hoornweg, a professor at Ontario Tech University and former adviser to the World Bank on sustainable cities and climate change.

Chen said the new analysis was the first to look at megacity emissions reduction targets and progress in cutting back.

Sixty-eight of the cities – mostly in developed nations – had set absolute emissions reduction targets.

But only 30 of the 42 cities where progress was tracked in the study had shown a reduction. Most of them were in the United States and Europe.

The analysis confirms scientists’ expectations that whereas in China, cities with high per capita emissions are generally major manufacturing hubs, those in developed nations with the highest per capita rates tend to have strong levels of consumption.

While more developed economies in Europe and elsewhere can now grow without increasing emissions, the world is moving at different speeds, Hoornweg said.

“They generated a tonne of emissions on the way to get there and China is in that stage now. We know India is getting there at some point and the last big push in all of this will be Africa,” he said.

(Additional reporting by Kanupriya Kapoor in Singapore; Editing by Katy Daigle and Helen Popper)

California wildfire grows by 20,000 acres, destroys 20 homes

California wildfire grows by 20,000 acres, destroys 20 homes

Dennis Romero                  

 

California’s largest wildfire burning amid a scorching summer heat wave consumed more than 20,000 more acres Sunday and destroyed about 20 homes, authorities said.

The fire, called the Beckwourth Complex, has expanded to Nevada, where it jumped a popular highway along the Sierra Nevada mountain range and forced evacuations in Washoe County.

“I know the dry conditions and the winds have been a factor,” said U.S. Forest Service incident spokeswoman Kimberly Kaschalk. “That’s been a challenge since Day One.”

The Doyle Fire Protection District in Doyle, about 50 miles north of Reno, Nevada, estimated in a statement Sunday that 20 homes had been lost to the expanding blaze.

The California Transportation Department said Sunday afternoon that part of Highway 395 was closed in Lassen County, and the sheriff’s office said the mandatory evacuation zone had been expanded.

The 83,926-acre blaze was 8 percent contained Sunday. Federal fire officials reported some progress in holding the fire on the south and southwestern flanks.

Forecasters were optimistic.

“Good news!” the National Weather Service in Reno tweeted Sunday. “Temperatures finally start to cool mid to late week.”

Federal forecasters said overnight lows in some Sierra Nevada valleys could dip into the 40s by midweek.

Editorial: Welcome, Republicans, to the real, warming world

Editorial: Welcome, Republicans, to the real, warming world

The Times Editorial Board             
BAKERSFIELD, CA - MARCH 13, 2013: Oil rig pump jacks work the oil fields near the town of Maricopa located in the oil rich hills West of Bakersfield between Maricopa and Taft on March 13, 2013. The area is prime for oil development in the Monterey shale formation as is expressed by Canary, LLC an oil services company that bought a local Bakersfield firm to get in on the ground floor of what could be a huge gush of oil. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)
Oil rig pump jacks work near the town of Maricopa, west of Bakersfield. (Al Seib / Los Angeles Times)

 

Faced with polls showing not only that most Americans want more done about climate change, but that a majority of Republicans feel the same way, a substantial number of GOP lawmakers are sounding a conciliatory note on the issue.

Sixty House Republicans have now joined a Conservative Climate Caucus, formed by Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah), that is willing at least to acknowledge the problem instead of labeling it a hoax, as President Trump did early on, or pretending that it’s temporary and that human actions haven’t contributed. Among its members are three Californians: Reps. David Valadao of Hanford, Michelle Steel of Seal Beach and Jay Obernolte of Big Bear Lake.

Republicans in both chambers appear ready to start talking — and go a little bit further. The Senate recently voted 92 to 8 for the Growing Climate Solutions Act, which was supported by the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. If it passes the House as expected and is signed by President Biden, it would ease the way for farmers and ranchers to earn and sell credits for reducing or mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s progress, as is the less divisive approach. But in truth, the climate caucus and its somewhat more solutions-oriented tone are far too little, coming this late in the game.

Curtis talks about how he has spent a lot of time trying to understand the science; he and other Republicans needed to be quicker studies because the world is running out of time to avert the worst effects of climate change. Worse, the caucus’ public statements indicate that its members won’t support reining in the use of fossil fuels in serious ways, as climate scientists insist we must do. Instead, the caucus calls those sources of greenhouse gases part of the solution to the need for stable sources of energy.

The caucus’ other areas of interest — safe nuclear energy and carbon sequestration — are more promising, with caveats. If Republicans can somehow come up with a truly safe nuclear path, the nation will be all ears. Right now, however, “safe nuclear” rings a little bit like the oxymoron “clean coal.” And before any thought of expanding nuclear energy can occur, the country would first have to identify a place to store spent fuel rods and then figure out a foolproof way to transport them there.

The most stable forms of energy are the nearly infinite ones, such as solar and wind, not fuels that will eventually be tapped out (and that cause other environmental harms in their extraction). Nor does this country need to rely on foreign sources to maintain a steady supply of the sun.

It will be important for Republicans not to use this as a shield to convince America that they really do care about climate change and the increasingly frequent droughts, wildfires and extreme weather events, when in fact they aren’t willing to take tough steps to soften future blows. Any discussion of environmental reform that excludes a drastic reduction in the use of fossil fuels is just happy talk, not reality.

Nor is it helpful to complain, as Curtis does, that nothing we do will matter much as long as China emits more carbon than the United States. On a per capita basis, this country still produces more greenhouse gas emissions, and China has been making major strides toward clean energy.

For now, incremental change is better than none at all. The reality is that support from both parties will be needed to pass important new climate change laws, and so the help of Republicans is welcome in accomplishing that — as long as they don’t demand concessions on the move to clean, sustainable energy in exchange for supporting tree-planting. With the mounting evidence all around us, the GOP should not have to be dragged kicking and screaming into admitting that there is a climate crisis and that it will require serious and sometimes uncomfortable commitments from the nation.

Opinion: Think Los Angeles is a desert? You need to see it from the San Gabriel Mountains

Los Angeles Times

Opinion: Think Los Angeles is a desert? You need to see it from the San Gabriel Mountains

Paul Thornton                       
ANGELES NATIONAL FOREST, CALIF. -- THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2020: Low clouds drift into the mountains and valleys in a view along the road to Mt. Disappointment, a peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, in the Angeles National Forest, Calif., on Feb. 6, 2020. A group of surveyors climbed the peak in 1875 thinking it was the highest in the area, but when they reached the top they realized that the next peak over (now known as San Gabriel Peak) was even higher. (Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)
Low clouds drift into the mountains and valleys of the San Gabriels in 2020. (Los Angeles Times)

 

There are a few things wrong with the libelous statement “Los Angeles is in a desert.” First, it is factually inaccurate (but maybe not for much longer), as explained by The Times Editorial Board recently. Second, even if it were true, it wouldn’t explain the whole story. A trip into our local mountains can help explain why.

From sea level or thereabouts, much of Los Angeles feels flat and dry — like a desert. But take a steep hike to one of the looming peaks in the San Gabriel Mountains, and you’re rewarded with views that are both visually stunning and educational. Perched a mile above the city, you see vast alluvial fans and washes emanating from the mountains that are graded, dammed up and otherwise “controlled” in ways that shunt water to the ocean and make urbanization possible. Prior to the area’s buildup, this water was left to find its own way to the sea or fan out over the basins that would eventually be paved over and turned into tidy street grids. Even if precipitation over what would become Los Angeles wasn’t plentiful, the water that flowed from the San Gabriels and San Bernardinos was much more so, percolating into the aquifers beneath us and creating a wetter, vastly more complex landscape than we can imagine today. There’s a reason one of our major streets is called “La Cienega.”

The letters here were written in response to the previously mentioned editorial. As we discuss yet another water emergency in California and climate change’s role in it, perhaps it’s worth remembering how our alteration of the landscape to make the area “habitable” may have made it less so.

To the editor: Every time I read an article about how we don’t have enough water and all the ways we should preserve what we have, I think about the thousands of new houses and apartments we are building in and around Los Angeles without sufficiently considering how that affects our water use.

Why is it that water usage is not considered more thoroughly when building all these new units? It should be the first consideration. I also rarely read about how much traffic density will change with all this unlimited growth in Southern California.

When I look at the photos that The Times has been running of Lake Mead, I think of the phenomenal growth of Las Vegas and am not surprised that the reservoir, the largest in the United States, is running out of water.

We have to look at the whole picture when we decide to build, build, build. That is not happening now.

Marie Gamboa, Los Angeles

..

To the editor: Once again, kudos to The Times for its unwavering persistence in keeping at the forefront the very real and threatening effects of climate change to those of us right here, right now in California.

Unlike those past civilizations that were not able to adapt to the reduction in water resources, I’d like to think many of us want to answer the call and support whatever measures are deemed necessary to meet the current challenges.

So, L.A. Times, please write another editorial outlining how we can support or demand from our water resource officials the historic actions necessary to meet the moment.

In the interim, can we all agree a monumental next step would be for all of us to demand passage of pending legislation in Congress to attach a fee to carbon production and fossil fuels? This would reduce carbon emissions and provide funding for the kind of necessary innovation mentioned above.

Wayne Bass, Mission Viejo

..

To the editor: Right — we are not yet living in a desert, but the California landscape is a charred husk as fire crews put out yet more blazes up and down the state. And it’s almost beside the point to bolster water infrastructure without addressing the imperative to sharply reduce emissions and sequester carbon.

We will have more fires, more drought, more lake and reservoir loss and more sea level rise until we face this climate Armageddon.

Elizabeth Fenner, Los Angeles

..

To the editor: Your editorial was a well-written piece about the state of the local area and the western United States as a whole with respect to our water supply.

In listening to all the discussion of President Biden’s infrastructure plan, why do I hear no mention of desalination plants for the western United States? Global warming is making oceans rise, so there is abundant supply.

This truly would be an infrastructure project and would help alleviate the Achilles’ heel of living in an arid climate.

Frank Perri, Claremont

..

To the editor: Part of the solution — which would help solve two problems — is covering the surface-level aqueducts that bring water to urban areas with solar panels.

A great deal of water is lost to evaporation. Covering these aqueducts would reduce that as well as provide vast amounts of electricity while not putting open land at risk of destruction.

Herb Adelman, Del Mar