Details: Two-thirds of Americans say extreme weather events in the U.S. have been occurring more frequently than in the past, while only 28% said they’ve been taking place about as often, and just 4% perceiving a dropoff in frequency.
When it comes to extreme weather events in their backyards, 46% of U.S. adults say the area where they live has had an extreme weather event over the past year.
The area with the greatest number of people reporting an extreme weather event was the South Central Census Division. It includes Louisiana, a state hit hard by Hurricane Ida and heavy rainfall events.
Yes, but: Even on perceptions of extreme weather events, there is a partisan split, the survey found, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents more likely to report experiencing extreme weather than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
The survey of 10,371 Americans took place from Sept. 13–19, 2021, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
Kyrsten Sinema. Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock, Library of Congress
The left-leaning group Data For Progress on Thursday released genuinely brutal poll numbers for Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.), whose very public role in holding up President Biden’s agenda is clearly not wearing well with her state’s primary electorate.
The survey of likely voters for her 2024 Democratic Senate primary showed just 25 percent approval for Sinema’s performance in office, as opposed to 85 percent for Arizona’s other Democratic senator, Mark Kelly, and President Biden himself. Tellingly, she trailed all four of her hypothetical primary opponents by 29 points or more.
The brewing revolt of the Arizona Democratic electorate should terrify Sinema — assuming that she has any interest in being re-elected as a member of the Democratic Party. Unlike her partner in obstruction, Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), Sinema is not the only Democrat who could plausibly be elected to statewide office in her state. And her troubles suggest that the stalwart Democrats who vote in primary elections are yearning for the kind of party discipline former President Donald Trump imposed on wavering Republicans.
Sinema’s dreadful numbers, in fact, look a lot like those of former Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake in the 2018 election cycle. One of the most prominent Trump critics in the Senate both before and after Trump’s election, Flake trailed ultraconservative Republican Kelli Ward by 27 points in a hypothetical primary, and boasted the exact same 25 percent approval number among likely GOP primary voters (albeit much closer to Election Day than Sinema is now). Seeing the writing on the wall, Flake chose to retire rather than face a near-certain primary drubbing.
Unlike Flake, a frequent recipient of Trump’s juvenile invective, Sinema has barely received any public criticism from Biden, suggesting Arizona Democrats resent her largely for opposing popular policies like paid family leave and expanded Medicare benefits. And unless she relents and helps craft a social spending bill acceptable to all factions of her party, she’s likely to follow Flake’s path to political oblivion.
What climate change and sea level rise will do to American cities
Ben Adler, Senior Climate Editor October 13, 2021
The space center in Houston surrounded by a moat; the famous beach in Santa Monica, Calif., completely submerged; a former sports stadium in Washington, D.C., turned into a bathtub — these are just some of the startling images of the future in America’s largest cities without action to limit climate change, according to new research by Climate Central, a research and communications nonprofit.
Because of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, average global temperatures have already risen 1.2° Celsius (2.2° Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial era, but as glaciers and polar ice caps melt, there is a decades-long lag for sea level rise. So a team of researchers from Climate Central projected how much the waters will rise if the world reaches only 1.5°C of warming, which is the goal world leaders set forth in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Hover over and click/hold slider for before and after: https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/7520888/embed?auto=1
But even limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C will result in flooding in and around some key sites. Santa Monica, for example, will lose its beach at 1.5°C of warming, once sea level rise has caught up. The projections also show how much more the tide will rise in the heart of some of the world’s largest cities and most famous sites if that warming is doubled, which will happen within 100 years if nations take no action to combat climate change.
“We’re expecting, based on our current warming track, to reach something close to 3°C this century,” said Peter Girard, communications director at Climate Central. “It will take a long time for the seas to rise to match that temperature. It may be centuries in the future, but we can understand with relative precision where it will eventually settle.”
And that place will be unsettling to many. Whether it’s an international landmark like London’s Buckingham Palace or a more obscure site like the Texas Energy Museum being underwater, the images of city streets turned to rivers and once-inhabitable buildings sticking out of the water like piers are a striking warning of what may be to come. https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/7521374/embed?auto=1
Of course, in reality these buildings aren’t even necessarily going to be there if the world breaches 2°C of warming. Long before an area is actually underwater, it will face regular flooding from heavy rainfalls and storm surges — which are also becoming more frequent and severe because of climate change. Buckingham Palace in London and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C., will have to be abandoned due to rising waters unless dramatic action is taken to save them.
Even though the nation’s capital and other U.S. cities such as Philadelphia included in the study aren’t on the coastline, they are connected to the ocean by rivers, and their riverfront areas are projected to face much higher water levels.
The consequences of sea level rise will fall hardest in the developing world, where huge populations live in large coastal cities. According to a paper published on Oct. 11 in the journal Environmental Research Letters by the Climate Central researchers behind the project, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high level and warming reaches 4°C, “50 major cities, mostly in Asia, would need to defend against globally unprecedented levels of exposure, if feasible, or face partial to near-total extant area losses.” https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/7522014/embed?auto=1
A major inflection point in the effort to prevent such catastrophic climate change is approaching when the successor to the Paris agreement is negotiated in early November in Glasgow, Scotland. Currently, nations have not pledged enough emissions cuts or climate finance to avert the warming scenarios that Climate Central explored, but the organization’s hope is to help spur more aggressive action.
“One of the opportunities to make decisions at an international level is coming up in Glasgow, and hopefully this work by visualizing the stakes contributing to a positive outcome,” Girard said.
A half-mile installation just took 20,000 pounds of plastic out of the Pacific – proof that ocean garbage can be cleaned
Aria Bendix October 15, 2021
An offshore Ocean Cleanup crew visiting the new device in the ocean. The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organization, aims to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.
It recently debuted a device it said collected 20,000 pounds from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
But some scientists worry the device still isn’t effective or environmentally friendly enough.
It’s been nearly a decade since Boyan Slat announced at age 18 that he had a plan to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.
Slat, now 27, is a Dutch inventor and the founder of the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.
That goal has often seemed unattainable. The Ocean Cleanup launched its first attempt at a plastic-catching device in 2018, but the prototype broke in the water. A newer model, released in 2019, did a better job of collecting plastic, but the organization estimated that it would need hundreds of those devices to clean the world’s oceans.
What if we paved roads with plastic trash?
Scientists and engineers began to question whether the group could deliver on the tens of millions of dollars it had acquired in funding.
But over the summer, the organization pinned its hopes on a new device, which it nicknamed Jenny. The installation is essentially an artificial floating coastline that catches plastic in its fold like a giant arm, then funnels the garbage into a woven funnel-shaped net. Two vessels tow it through the water at about 1.5 knots (slower than normal walking speed), and the ocean current pushes floating garbage toward the giant net.
In early August, the team launched Jenny in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a trash-filled vortex between Hawaii and California. The garbage patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, encompassing more than 1.8 trillion pieces, according to the Ocean Cleanup’s estimates.
Last week, Jenny faced its final test as the organization sought to determine whether it could bring large amounts of plastic to shore without breaking or malfunctioning. The Ocean Cleanup said the device hauled 9,000 kilograms, or nearly 20,000 pounds, of trash out of the Pacific Ocean – proof that the garbage patch could eventually be cleaned up.
“Holy mother of god,” Slat tweeted that afternoon, adding, “It all worked!!!”
Slat’s ocean-cleaning device has come a long way since the original prototype: a 330-foot-long floating barrier that resembled a long pipe in the water.
The newest version is U-shaped and more flexible, like the lane dividers in a pool. Once its attached net fills with plastic (every few weeks or so), a crew hauls it up out of the water and empties the garbage onto one of the vessels that pull it.
The Ocean Cleanup’s new plastic-catching system, nicknamed Jenny, in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Ocean Cleanup
Once it’s brought to shore, the plastic gets recycled. For now, the Ocean Cleanup is using the plastic to make $200 pairs of sunglasses, funneling the proceeds back into the cleanup efforts. Eventually, the organization hopes to partner with consumer brands to make more recycled products.
Slat estimated that the team would need about 10 Jennys to clean up 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years. A single device can hold 10,000 to 15,000 kilograms of plastic, he tweeted.
Concerns about the ocean-cleaning device linger
Plastic accumulating in a net, or “retention zone.” The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup system collects several types of floating garbage, including large containers, fishing nets, and microplastics just a few millimeters in size. But it captures only plastic floating near the ocean’s surface. A study published last year suggested that there may be upwards of 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the ocean as there is near the surface.
The organization says large pieces of floating plastic will ultimately degrade into microplastics that are much harder to clean up.
The Jenny device, of course, doesn’t prevent plastic from entering oceans to begin with. Researchers have estimated that about 11 million metric tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean each year. By 2040, that figure could rise to 29 million metric tons. Ten Jenny devices would be able to collect 15,000 to 20,000 metric tons a year, according to the Ocean Cleanup.
An Ocean Cleanup member sorting plastic on one of the team’s support vessels. The Ocean Cleanup
What’s more, the boats that pull the Jenny device require fuel, meaning there’s an environmental cost. The device was originally designed to passively collect plastic using the ocean’s current, but that design led to it spilling too much of the trash it had collected. The Ocean Cleanup says it’s purchasing carbon credits to offset the towing vessels’ emissions.
“Once plastic has gotten into the open ocean, it becomes very expensive and fossil-fuel intensive to get it back out again,” Miriam Goldstein, the director of ocean policy at the think tank Center for American Progress, told Reuters last month.
But Slat tweeted on Saturday that there’s still time to address those concerns.
“Lots of things still to iron out,” he wrote of his group’s plastic-cleaning work, “but one thing we now know: deploy a small fleet of these systems, and one *can* clean it up.”
Lake Tahoe water level hits four-year low as drought pummels tourist spot
Dani Anguiano in Los Angeles October 13, 2021
Lake Tahoe’s water level dropped to a four-year low on Tuesday as gusty winds and the impacts of California’s devastating drought hit the popular tourist destination.
After days of high winds increased evaporation rates, water levels fell to the basin’s natural rim for the first time since 2017, the end of the state’s last drought. The lake normally sits above the rim, which allows for water to flow into the Truckee River. Levels will probably continue to drop, receding below the rim this week, sooner than expected.
Though the lake’s water levels have fallen to this point several times in recent years, this week’s drop concerns researchers like Geoffrey Schladow, the director of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.
“It’s a sign of change at the lake,” Schladow said. “Change is very difficult to manage … When we start seeing things we’ve never experienced before at a greater frequency, it’s challenging.”
Officials reported earlier this year that Lake Tahoe was experiencing its third-driest year since 1910. Between June 2020 and June 2021, the lake dropped about 3ft.
Once the lake falls below its natural rim, it will stop flowing into the Truckee River, cutting off a major source of water to the river, and the region will see more algae washing up on beaches. Winter weather will ultimately determine how long the low water levels will last, and the extent of the impacts in the region. Though snow has fallen in the area in the last month, water levels could fall below the rim again by next summer with even an average year of precipitation, Schladow said.
“To me the big danger is next summer,” he said.
Empty chairs stand on the beach with the sky obscured by the smoke of the Caldor fire, in South Lake Tahoe, California, in August. Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/Reuters
Declining lake levels are already affecting the shoreline, drying up coves and boat ramps and forcing tour boat operators to find new ways to get customers on to the water, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“You can’t get within 150 yards of the normal shoreline” in South Lake Tahoe, Kelsey Weist, the owner of Clearly Tahoe, which runs tours around the lake, told the newspaper.
The entire region is grappling with impacts of the drought and the climate crisis. The US Forest Service cancelled Lake Tahoe’s annual fall salmon festival because low water levels meant Kokanee salmon would not spawn in nearby Taylor Creek.
Lake Tahoe saw unusually high water temperatures over the summer, a worrying development as warmer water makes the lake more hospitable to invasive species.
Meanwhile, the Caldor fire imperiled the region, forcing mass evacuations, upending the tourism industry and showering the area – and the lake – in thick ash. Smoke from the fire cooled the water temperature and reduced clarity in the lake, and researchers are still evaluating its impact.
The climate crisis will have major effects on the lake in the coming years, warming water, affecting oxygen levels and potentially increasing wind events that could further diminish water levels.
Schladow said combating climate change largely required action globally, but there were things that could be done locally to help the lake. Decreasing driving in the Tahoe Basin would help reduce the amount of algal growth in the lake, as would using fewer fertilizers on lawns and gardens.
“A lot of what we’ve been advocating is to try to build the resilience of the lake to climate change,” he said. “This is going to keep happening – how can we make the lake better able to withstand it?”
Flooding could shut down a quarter of all critical infrastructure in the U.S.
Andrew Freedman October 11, 2021
About 25%, or 1 in 4 units of critical infrastructure, such as police stations, airports and hospitals, are at risk of being rendered inoperable due to flooding, a comprehensive new report finds. The report points to climate change for heightening risks.
Why it matters: The new national inventory of flood risk during the next thirty years, which takes into account climate change-driven increases in sea levels and heavy precipitation events, is the first of its kind.
The report, from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit flood research and communications group, presents a stark warning to communities of all sizes — the U.S. simply isn’t ready for the climate of today, let alone the extreme weather and climate events that are coming in the next few decades.
Specifically, during the next 30 years as the climate continues to warm, the flood risk situation will grow more dire, the report warns.
By the numbers: Consider these aggregate statistics from the “Infrastructure on the Brink” report:
About 2 million miles of road are currently at risk of becoming “impassable” due to flooding.
Nearly a million commercial properties, 17% of all social infrastructure facilities, and 12.4 million residential properties also have “operational risk,” according to the First Street analysis.
Over the next 30 years, the typical lifetime of a home mortgage, about 1.2 million residential properties, and 2,000 pieces of critical infrastructure (airports, hospitals, fire stations, hazardous waste sites and power plants) will also be at risk of becoming inoperable due to flooding from sea level rise, heavy rainfall, and in some cases a combination of the two, the report finds.
Infrastructure at risk of becoming inundated due to flooding in today’s climate. Courtesy: First Street Foundation
Context: The report comes during a year that has already featured a record 18 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first nine months of the year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
According to the First Street analysis, which uses an open-access flood model that incorporates coastal and inland flooding, the most at risk county in the U.S. for flood risk is tucked into the extreme southwestern corner of Louisiana. Cameron Parish is sparsely populated, with just 5,600 people as of the 2020 Census, but it’s a hotbed of flood risks.
Of note: In Cameron Parish, the report shows that nearly 99% of residential properties, and similarly sky high counts of commercial and critical infrastructure structures, are already at risk of flooding so severe that it would knock them out of service.
Six of the seven top counties for risk are in the New Orleans area, Jeremy Porter, head of research and development at First Street, told Axios.
The communities most at risk are located in Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky and West Virginia, with 17 out of the 20 most at-risk counties in the country located in those states, the analysis concluded.
The city slated to see one of the biggest jumps in vulnerability between now and 2050 is Norfolk, Virginia, which is home to the world’s largest naval base, among other military installations.
How it works: Human-caused climate change is increasing sea levels around the world, but seas are rising especially quickly in the Mid-Atlantic region due largely to peculiarities in ocean currents.
In addition, Warming ocean and air temperatures are also translating into added water vapor in the atmosphere that can fuel stronger storms with heavier downpours.
The most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found increasing evidence tying global warming to more extreme precipitation events.
What they’re saying: “Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” said Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of the First Street Foundation, in a statement.
Little did the 39-year-old Atlanta Democrat know, it was the beginning of her role as one of the country’s earliest opponents of the “Big Lie,” false claims about election fraud.
Nguyen gained national notice last December at a state legislative hearing for a 12-minute takedown of then-President Donald Trump’s campaign lawyers, who sought to overturn the Peach State’s tally.
“Certainly, the alarm bells have been ringing prior to this year,” she told USA TODAY.
Trump tried a more direct approach in January, when he unsuccessfully pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during a phone call to “find” enough votes to change the outcome.
Raffensperger has weathered a backlash from the former president and his allies, namely U.S. Rep. Jody Hice, R-Ga., who spearheads a primary campaign to oust Raffensperger.
That is one reason Nguyen decided to launch her own bid for Georgia’s chief election officer.
“If we do not elect secretaries of state who are unwilling to overturn the results of elections – no matter what those results are – we are in huge trouble,” she said.
In the 2022 midterms, secretaries of state contests are emerging as just as important as who controls governors’ mansions or Congress but with more direct ramifications for overseeing elections – including the 2024 presidential race.
Georgia state Rep. Bee Nguyen speaks to a group of demonstrators gathered in Atlanta to show support for Asian and Pacific Islander communities on March 20, 2021. Demonstrations have taken place across the United States after a series of shootings at three spas, on Tuesday, in the Atlanta area left eight people dead, six of whom were Asian women.
It’s been almost a year since President Joe Biden won the White House.
Biden won the 2020 presidential race by roughly 7 million votes nationwide in the popular vote and 74 electoral votes.
Yet there remains a persistent belief among many right-leaning voters — dubbed the “Big Lie” by Democratic and Republican critics for those who believe in the conspiracy theories — that the 2020 election was “rigged” against Trump.
That, in turn, has stoked interest in secretary of state roles, which typically oversee election administration and certify the results.
In at least four swing states, GOP candidates whom Trump has either endorsed or supported are coordinating their efforts at the behest of those in the former president’s orbit.
A common thread among those candidates: They have questioned the 2020 voting process, if not outright said the outcome was stolen.
At least three Trump-approved candidates met in Dallas last week to discuss election integrity – a favorite topic among Trump and his allies when they attack, without evidence, the legitimacy of the 2020 results.
For voters, the effort among the Trump faction to corner secretary of state positions means more pressure to understand down-ballot races beyond congressional and gubernatorial races or risk voting in officials who could invalidate citizens’ ballots.
Democrats will face more pressure to hone their messaging, reinforcing the legitimacy of past results as well as ringing the alarm about what’s at stake in the future.
Many liberals contend the focus on state-level roles is part of a larger strategy to undermine or steal the 2024 presidential contest, while others fret it could lead to violent insurrections like the one at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
Supporters of President Donald Trump scale the west wall of the U.S. Capitol in Washington on Jan. 6.
The Big Lie persists
“I will tell you that I do not believe that Joe Biden was legitimately elected,” Boris Epshteyn, a former special assistant to Trump, said in an interview.
Polling this year has shown the belief that the 2020 election was corrupted by fraud is growing, and not just among the GOP.
In a Reuters/Ipsos poll in May, 56% of Republican respondents said they believed the 2020 presidential race was marred by illegal votes. Roughly 25% of all respondents said they held the same belief.
CNN released a survey last month that found 78% of Republicans said Biden did not “legitimately” win enough votes. It showed 36% of Americans saying he did not win.
First-time voter Alexis Gresham, 23, casts her ballot Nov. 3, 2020, at Clarke Central High School in Athens, Ga.
They also fertilized Republican primaries in next year’s midterm elections for a crop of secretary of state candidates in crucial battleground states who are wedded to Trump’s claims about the election.
At least two-thirds of the 15 declared contenders seeking to be the Republican nominee for secretary of state in five crucial battlegrounds – Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin – have either said the 2020 election was stolen or cast doubt on the results, according to a Reuters investigation.
‘America First’ secretaries in 2022
In Arizona, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan, Republican secretary of state candidates are in regular communication and formed a coalition backed by Trump allies to win in 2022.
Those four states total 49 electoral votes among them and would have changed the 2020 outcome had they all gone for Trump.
“We’re trying to get America First secretaries of state elected throughout the country … we’re concentrating in the swing states,” said Jim Marchant, a Republican candidate for Nevada secretary of state.
Voters typically struggle to name who is on the ballot for secretary of state in their backyard, but the country’s debate about election integrity and voting rights has changed much of that before the midterms.
Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the Crystal Ball, a political analysis newsletter at the University of Virginia, said these races are part of the national conversation as much as elections for Congress or governor.
“Election administration in general has become a bigger topic because of Donald Trump’s frankly irresponsible claims about the integrity of the election, but also Democrats and others defending themselves against those claims,” he said.
Marchant told USA TODAY the idea for coordination came from within Trump’s circle.
“When (the Trump people) asked me to run for secretary of state, they asked me to put together this coalition,” he said. “It’s something that would help us fundraise … and then adopt certain policies that we all want to see in secretary of state offices.”
The group supports voter ID laws and “aggressive” poll watchers, he said, who can more closely monitor election counts at the local level.
Poll workers, poll watchers and voters pack the gymnasium to vote during the 2020 presidential race at Denby High School in Detroit on Nov. 3, 2020. COVID-19 did not deter voters.
Marchant declined to name which Trump allies helped herd the candidates into their coalition but indicated they were “people that are pretty, pretty influential,” including individuals who speak to the former president directly.
Common threads among Trump’s picks
Trump spokeswoman Liz Harrington did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the former president’s involvement with the coalition, but Trump’s picks have voiced skepticism about the voting process or the results.
Michigan educator Kristina Karamo is a political activist who gained popularity among right-leaning voters after she alleged she witnessed two instances of illegal voting in Detroit last year. She received the coveted Trump nod last month.
“I would say my goal is to ensure that the election results are 100% the result of legal activities and that legal votes are not nullified by illegal ballots,” she said.
In a statement, Trump promoted Karamo as one of the speakers at a rally scheduled for Tuesday outside the state Capitol, “where Patriots will demand a Forensic Audit of the 2020 Presidential Election Scam.”
Karamo declined to say when asked three times by USA TODAY whether she believes enough voter fraud existed in the 2020 election to have changed the outcome.
“The goal is citizen oversight, so whether or not the fraud that existed changed the outcome or not, that’s a secondary point,” she said. “The primary point is it shouldn’t exist at all in the state.”
In March, Marchant told The Associated Press he believed the 2020 election was “stolen” from Trump. The former Nevada assemblymen said he wouldn’t say “stolen” now, but he asserted there are “enough anomalies” to justify an audit of all 50 states.
“The way I look at it, if Joe Biden won, so be it, God bless him,” Marchant told USA TODAY. “If there’s enough doubt right now, for me anyway, to doubt the election, I don’t know why the other side will not let us do an audit. I mean, if they’re certain about their win, why are they blocking us so vehemently?”
Gathering in Dallas
Marchant, Karamo and Finchem trekked to Dallas last week as part of an election integrity summit where the candidates discussed, among other policy ideas, advocating for traceable ballots to be used in elections.
A spokeswoman in Hice’s office said the congressman did not attend.
The trio visited Authentix, a Dallas-based anti-counterfeiting company that has offices in Saudi Arabia, Ghana, Singapore and the U.K., according to its website.
In a tweet Oct. 6, Finchem and other Arizona state officials stood outside Authenix’s offices saying they were interested in “establishing a ballot audit trail and use of currency grade fraud countermeasures on all future ballots.”
Trump said he’s considering another presidential run and flirts with the idea by holding rallies in states such as Iowa. Aides have discouraged Trump from announcing another White House bid before the midterms, according to The Washington Post.
Trump and his allies understand the importance of having friendlier ears in the offices that oversee elections.
“If we have honest people like Mark Finchem and Jody Hice, who are the secretaries of state, you can rest easy and believe that they will do the right thing, they will do it by the law and will do it by the Constitution,” Epshteyn, the former Trump aide, said.
“That’s what we need in this country,” he said, “those who follow the rules and procedures and do not try to rig the election for their party, which is what Democrats have been doing for way too long.”
Dems fret 2024 steal – or worse
In 36 states, secretaries of state are elected by the voters and hold varying degrees of power. They mostly are responsible for maintaining registration rolls and statewide voter databases and certifying election results.
In Hawaii and Alaska, there is no secretary of state position. Other states appoint the positions, and some give the responsibility to the lieutenant governor or a state board of elections.
Sarah Walker, executive director of Secure Democracy, a nonprofit group that works to improve election integrity, said that is alarming in the context of 2020, when secretaries of state, including Republicans, were a bulwark against pressure from Trump and his allies.
“If (Brad Raffensperger) loses in Georgia, it could send a chilling message through the GOP that if you are to uphold democratic norms that you could be ousted by your own party,” she said.
Walker said voting rights advocates fear conspiracy theorists are in the driver’s seat among far-right groups before 2022, which could result in abuses of power.
In Arizona, a six-month election audit led by Republican legislators reaffirmed Biden won the state’s largest county by more votes than originally counted.
Contractors examine and recount ballots from the 2020 general election at Veterans Memorial Coliseum on May 1 in Phoenix. The Maricopa County ballot recount comes after two election audits found no evidence of widespread fraud.
Another proposal would allow the Arizona Legislature to revoke the secretary of state’s certification and select its own slate of presidential electors.
A heavier burden on voters
Walker said the past two years exposed critical weaknesses in U.S. election administration.
“Rather than restoring our system of checks and balances and strengthening accountability and transparency, what this is going to do is drive more disinformation and undermine voter trust,” she said.
Democrats hope to increase their fundraising reach into the 26 states holding elections for secretary of state.
The Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, the political arm for incumbents and candidates, reported raising $1.1 million in June.
Officials with the group aim to double that amount by the end of this year. The association has a $10 million goal during the entire cycle.
Democratic Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson of Michigan, who seeks reelection in 2022, said Republicans are trying to chew away at the credibility of elections by attacking administrative officials such as herself.
“Part of that strategy is the attempt at putting people in places of authority who if called upon may utilize the office and the power that comes with it to stand in the way of the voters’ voices,” Benson said.
She said Democrats must have a message that repeats the truth about the 2020 outcome and raises a “code red” about what’s at stake.
“I really welcome the additional attention on secretary of state races this year,” she said. “The big question to me, however, is what are voters going to do?”
Others running to stop Trump-aligned candidates from seizing election administration seats said there’s a bigger threat.
Federal prosecutors have charged more than 600 Americans in more than 40 states with participating in the riot, and arrests continue almost daily.
There have been reports about dozens of death threats aimed at election officials fueled largely by the “Big Lie”.
“The writing is on the wall. This is a point of inflection for our country,” said Nguyen, the Georgia Democrat, who said her life has been threatened. “The decisions that we make now, they are going to determine the future of our democracy indefinitely, and I don’t know how many chances we are going to have.”
Why the American west’s ‘wildfire season’ is a thing of the past – visualized
Gabrielle Canon and Rashida Kamal – October 11, 2021
It’s only October, and 2021 has already been a horrendous year for wildfires in the American west. The Dixie fire leveled the town of Greenville. The Caldor fire forced the evacuation of tens of thousands in Lake Tahoe. Some fires sent plumes so high into the atmosphere that the toxic air reached the east coast thousands of miles away.
Fire is an important part of life in the American west and essential for the health of the landscape, but as the climate has changed so have wildfires in the region.
What the US Forest Service once characterized as a four-month-long fire season starting in late summer and early autumn now stretches into six to eight months of the year. Wildfires are starting earlier, burning more intensely and scorching swaths of land larger than ever before. Risks for large, catastrophic fires like the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise in 2018 are rising. Area charts showing the acres burned by wildfires in California since 2010.
Firefighters can still recall a time when battling a so-called megafire – a blaze that torches more than 100,000 acres – was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. These days, it’s far more common for fires to stretch across enormous spans of land.
More than half of the 20 largest fires in California history burned in just the last four years. Eight of the top 20 fires in Oregon occurred in that time frame too. Last year, Arizona saw the most acres burned in its history. California’s August Complex fire, which consumed more than 1m acres alone, became the first-ever giga-fire in 2020. The Dixie fire this year came close to becoming the second, burning through more than 963,200 acres.
It’s hard to know what the past few years of exceptional blazes will mean in the long term, said Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist and professor at the University of Nevada. But the changes point to the dominant role of heat and a warming climate, he said.
“It’s lengthening fire season. It’s giving us more days that are burning at higher intensity. And the result of that is massive fires. They’re more intense, and they’re producing more extreme fire weather,” Lareau said.
Why this is happening
The conditions that set the stage for a staggering escalation in wildfire activity in the American west are layered and complicated, but the climate emergency is a leading culprit.
The climate crisis has amplified drought and heat, two factors that have always been natural parts of western landscape, but play crucial roles in driving bigger blazes.
As early as spring this year, when the landscape is typically still lush from winter rains, there were signs of the historic drought settling in across the region. Hillsides had already started to brown, shrubbery was shriveling, and the dense layer of duff, the damp vegetation that collects and decomposes on the forest floor, was quickly drying. The landscape was prone to burn much earlier than in typical years, increasing the risks that small ignitions could quickly turn into infernos.
Then came the heat. With the landscape already drying rapidly, devastatinglyhottemperatures baked even more moisture out of the environment and helped summer deliver on the dire warnings: thousands of fires burned hot and fast.
Fueled by the desiccation and heat, the blazes behaved erratically, shooting sparks and embers over miles of containment lines and crossing terrain once believed less burnable.
Firefighters experienced conditions they had never encountered before, making the fires harder to fight and in some cases nearly impossible to stop.
“We have crossed some thresholds where fire is increasingly hard to control,” said Eric Knapp, a research ecologist for the US Forest Service fires and fuels program. “It is kind of controlling us at this point.”
In the first nine months of 2021, the US has already recorded 11 wildfires reaching more than 100,000 acres in size.
The combination of drought, ample fuel, and wind conditions have made these fires harder to control, leading them to burn longer and cover more ground.
Some of the fires performed never-before-seen feats. The Dixie and Caldor fires crossed the granite ridges in the Sierra Nevada, traveling over one side of the mountainous range to the other.
Some burned so hot they formed pyrocumulus clouds, enormous cloud formations visible from space. In the Bootleg fire, the volatile atmospheric conditions produced a “fire tornado” that reached as high as 30,000 to 40,000ft and was powerful enough to tear the pavement off roads, according to Lareau.
While global heating exacerbated the conditions that helped create the bigger blazes, it didn’t act alone. Decades of mismanagement, with limited prescribed burns and thinning of the overgrowth has also played a role. Forests are now littered with too many dead and dying trees, old stumps and dried underbrush that act as tinder to spark fires faster and farther.
Meanwhile, the early start of the fire season means the window for proven fire mitigation efforts is shorter and shorter. “The fall prescribed burning window doesn’t exist in some years,” said Knapp.
What’s ahead
The summer has already been brutal, but the highest danger for fire may not yet have passed.
More than 95% of the west remains mired in drought, with more than half of the region classified in extreme or exceptional conditions. It’s the most “expansive and intense” drought seen in this century, according to the US Drought Monitor.
Higher than normal fire threats also remain in Oregon and Washington, in the Great Basin, and Rocky Mountain areas according to the National Interagency Fire Center. While the Pacific north-west could see some relief in the coming months, problems in California are sure to mount.
As southern California braces for hot, dry, gusty winds typical in autumn, researchers fear that the rains needed to replenish the parched landscapes won’t come. Moisture levels are so low, even a strong storm won’t be enough to quell the flames of tomorrow.
“We are really concerned about what the fall is going to look like,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist, Johnathan Porter. “It is hard to imagine it being any drier than it is now in southern California – it is a real extreme.”
Strong dry winds are expected to continue episodically over the next three months. And the rains that once signalled the end of the season are more and more erratic.
“The precipitation that used to end the fire season is becoming more variable and less reliable,” said LeRoy Westerling, a professor at University of California Merced who studies how the climate crisis affects wildfires.
Bigger blazes are increasing the burdens carried by firefighters, who are experiencing higher rates of suicide, depression and fatigue. Firefighters are leaving the force in large numbers, adding to the crunch. At the start of this summer the USFS reported that 725 vacant firefighting positions went unfilled.
There are still solutions and mitigations that could slow the shift in intensity – but researchers say that window is closing.
“The trends that are driving this increase in fire risk, fire size, fire severity over time are continuing – that’s climate change.”
The first visualization in this story has been corrected to reflect that at least 4 million acres burned in last year’s wildfire season in California, and that the Camp fire started in November 2018 and not the summer of 2018.
America’s big cities are turning into housing catastrophes. If we want to fix this mess, we should try and copy Tokyo.
Jairaj Devadiga – October 9, 2021
A view of residential houses in Tokyo, Japan. Getty
In major cities around the world, housing is becoming less and less affordable.
Tokyo, Japan, is a notable exception, with prices barely rising since 1995.
The US has restrictive, often absurd regulations, and should instead mirror Tokyo.
Jairaj Devadiga is an economist specializing in public policy and economic history.
This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
In major cities around the world, housing prices have spiraled out of control.
In California’s Bay Area, the median house price is $1.3 million. In Vancouver, the average household must save for 34 years to make a down payment on a house, and put aside 85% of its pre-tax income for mortgage payments. In Sydney, a decrepit house without any toilet facilities sells for $3.5 million.
In this sea of craziness, Tokyo has been an island of sanity. Its housing prices have barely risen since 1995. This is not due to deflation either.
While the population of Japan as a whole has been shrinking, Tokyo has been growing. Between 1995 and 2019, the population of Tokyo grew by 2.17 million, or just above 90,000 per year on average. To accommodate all these new people, lots of housing had to be built. Over the same time period, there was an average of 153,000 housing starts annually.
A study by the Fraser Institute illustrates what happens when housing supply fails to keep up with demand. Between 2015 and 2019, 120,000 new jobs were created in Vancouver and Toronto. In the same time period, there were only 57,000 housing starts every year. Since demand was growing more than twice as fast as supply, prices skyrocketed. The same story played out in almost every major city. Lots of new jobs being created, lots of people wanting to move, and not enough homes being built for all of them.
There are numerous bad policies which prevent the construction of more housing. Chief among them are restrictive zoning laws. In most cities with expensive housing, vast swathes of residential land are reserved exclusively for single family homes. Until very recently, the worst of the bunch was San Jose, with 94% of the land being off limits for apartment buildings. No wonder it is the least affordable city in America.
Not only does this make housing costlier for middle and low income folks, but also subsidizes mansions for the rich. The land on which a mansion sits would be worth a lot more if an apartment building could be built on it. The developer would make a profit even if they sold each apartment at an affordable price.
However, because that’s not allowed, developers won’t bid for that land, thus driving down its price.
While Tokyo does have low density zones, these do not prohibit multi-family buildings. Thus it is not uncommon to see a three story apartment building right next to a single family home.
Apart from zoning, cities dictate minimum lot sizes and maximum floor area ratios (how much of the plot is covered by the building itself), which further stifle construction. In much of Mumbai, for instance, the floor area ratio was capped at 1.33 until 2018.
This had the disastrous result of pushing poor people into slums, as they could not compete with affluent families for the limited housing. In 1971, 22% of Mumbai’s population lived in slums. By 2010, this had risen to 62%. By contrast, Tokyo allows floor area ratios as high as 13, and even higher with government permission.
In some cases, cities prevent development even when the historical monument itself would be untouched. For instance, last year, a historic preservation board in Seattle rejected a proposal for a 200-unit apartment building because it would be taller than nearby historical monuments. While Tokyo has historic buildings, its criteria for preservation are much stricter and thus don’t get in the way of affordable housing.
Another important factor in raising housing prices is over-regulation. A recent report by the National Association of Home Builders estimates that regulations add almost $94,000 to the price of new homes. The vast majority of these regulations are purely aesthetic, such as mandating certain types of landscaping and architectural styles, or banning vinyl sidings.
This is not exclusive to American cities. A study on India’s Ahmedabad shows that unnecessary regulations add 34% to the cost of housing. By contrast, Tokyo has very few common sense regulations; mainly to protect against the frequent earthquakes. As long as developers follow these and the very liberal zoning laws, they are free to build as they please.
At this point, you might wonder why these restrictive rules persist if they are so obviously bad. Why is liberal city-planning the exception, rather than the norm? To answer this, we must examine the policy making process itself, to understand the motivations of all participants.
Consider San Jose, with its 94% single-family zoning. The politicians in San Jose were catering to the wishes of their constituents; the people already living in San Jose. Those voters wanted high prices. To them, their house is an investment, which would lose value if more housing were built in their neighborhood. It would also result in new neighbors bringing in a different culture from what the residents are used to.
People who wanted to move to San Jose, but couldn’t due to high prices, would benefit from more liberal planning. They might live in different parts of California, or even in other states. Obviously they don’t get to vote in San Jose elections, thus local politicians have no incentive to help them.
The same process plays out across every city, resulting in sky-high prices.
At the state or national level, though, the political calculus changes completely. People in a particular city might want to restrict housing development, but everyone else wants more. Thus state and national politicians have an incentive to liberalize.
This is exactly what happened in Japan. It too had local governments choking the housing market, resulting in a massive housing bubble in the 1980s. This prompted the national government to enact a series of reforms to rein in housing prices.
The national government formulates building codes, zoning laws, and other city-planning regulations for the entire country, giving very little leeway to local governments.
Recently, governor Gavin Newsom did something similar in California, by finally abolishing single-family zoning statewide, and also loosening some other restrictions.
To win elections, local politicians must necessarily keep down the supply of new housing. It is up to state and national governments to deny them that power, and quickly. Otherwise, home-ownership will remain a pipe-dream for most people.
Column: Up to 1 million gallons of water … a night? That’s par for some desert golf courses
Steve Lopez – October 9, 2021
Ecologists Robin Kobaly and Doug Thompson are concerned about the amount of water used to irrigate golf courses in the Coachella Valley. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Doug Thompson couldn’t believe what he’d just been told. His wife, a botanist, was advising a Coachella Valley country club on drought-resistant landscaping, and Thompson, who got to talking with the groundskeeper, asked how much water it takes to irrigate a golf course.
“He proudly said they had just computerized their system and they were down to 1.2 million gallons a night,” recalls Thompson, an ecologist who leads natural history expeditions. “I thought I didn’t hear him correctly, so about 30 minutes later I asked again, and he said the same thing.”
That conversation took place a few years ago. But in the midst of a prolonged drought that has prompted a first-ever federal declaration of a water shortage in the Colorado River Basin and brought calls for greater conservation throughout California, Thompson and his wife, Robin Kobaly, became more keenly aware of all the lush green golf courses set against the parched landscape of the Coachella Valley.
How many golf courses?
About 120, many of them shoulder to shoulder across the desert floor, complete with decorative ponds, fountains and streams. It’s one of the highest concentrations of golf courses in the world.
“From the homework we have done … the smaller courses use at least several hundred thousand gallons a night, but the larger courses are in the 1-million-gallon range or more,” Thompson said.
“It’s not only an outrage,” he added, “but many months of the year, it’s too hot to play golf in the desert, yet the watering continues.”
When I met with Thompson and Kobaly in the desert, they told me they’re not trying to shut down the golf industry, and I’m with them on that. There’d be no Palm Springs without golf, just as there would have been no Rat Pack without Sinatra. The industry employs several thousand people, drawing hordes of snowbirds and pumping as much as $1 billion into the local economy.
But the planet now spins on a rotisserie, roasted and toasted in ways that are transforming landscapes and forcing us to adapt. Thompson and Kobaly wonder why golf courses aren’t doing more to conserve.
“This water crisis is huge,” Thompson said. “They’ll ask us to do things like don’t leave the water running when you brush your teeth, and it’s illegal to wash your car unless you turn off the valve on the hose. That might save 10 gallons of water, and meanwhile a million gallons a night are being used on every golf course in the Coachella Valley.”
When I put these observations to Craig Kessler, director of governmental affairs for the Southern California Golf Assn., he was more than happy to respond, as well as to share his considerable knowledge of state water policy.
And he threw me a curve.
Kessler said Coachella Valley golf courses are in much better shape in terms of water supplies than golf courses in California’s wetter climates. That’s because the desert, which had less than an inch of rain in the last season, has much more water to draw from, including a vast aquifer that sits beneath the desert floor.
“It’s complicated and counterintuitive,” Kessler said, but many coastal golf courses that rely on the state’s melted snowpack and rain have been harder hit by the drought than those in the desert.
The Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD), which serves 105 of the golf courses, draws from the California Water Project, the Colorado River and the aquifer. Kessler, who heads up the Coachella Valley Golf and Water Task Force, said much of the water used to irrigate golf courses is non-potable.
And yet, those 120 golf courses do indeed use massive amounts of precious, increasingly scarce water. Kessler said the valley has less than 1% of Southern California’s population, but 28.6% of its golf courses. Golf, he said, consumes less than 1% of all water used in California, but nearly 25% of Coachella Valley water.
So what are they doing about it? A lot, Kessler said, and the conservation effort goes back several years. Golf courses have been removing turf, narrowing fairways, installing more sophisticated irrigation systems, researching less thirsty grasses and scaling back on the practice of “overseeding,” which has kept courses green in winter months, when Bermuda grass goes dormant.
Jim Schmid, director of operations at Palm Desert’s Lakes Country Club, told me he has a weather station on site to help manage and reduce irrigation. And much of the water he uses, Schmidt said, is recycled water the “district needs to get rid of because they haven’t treated it to a standard where it can be used for potable purposes.”
Josh Tanner, general manager of Ironwood Country Club in Palm Desert, said Ironwood pumps its water out of the ground and pays a fee to the water agency to replenish the aquifer with imported water. The club has reduced its water consumption by 20% in recent years, Tanner said, largely by replacing turf with native landscaping.
But it doesn’t appear that every golf course is pulling its weight. And the CVWD, as Doug Thompson told me, doesn’t provide data on water use by individual golf courses. When I asked why, Katie Evans, CVWD’s director of communications and conservation, told me the district does not share information about individual customers. In fact, the water agency was sued for release of the information, but prevailed in court.
Pro golfers walk past a water feature at the Pete Dye Stadium Course at PGA West in La Quinta in January. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)
The Desert Sun reported in 2018 that the golf industry had not met its own goal — set in 2014 — of reducing water use by 10% below 2010 levels. Kessler told me that golf courses used 9% less water in 2020 than in 2013 when using a complicated calculation that takes evaporation into account, but just 5.6% less in total volume.
In the Coachella Valley, years of growth severely depleted the aquifer, just as agricultural irrigation has drained Central Valley water tables to the point where the ground is sinking. Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation in 2014 requiring communities to develop groundwater sustainability strategies, and the CVWD has touted its progress in stabilizing and increasing underground water levels.
But that’s partly because the valley is able to recharge the aquifer with water from the Colorado River and the water pumped down from Northern California. However, current allotments won’t last if drought trend lines continue and water wars escalate.
One of Thompson and Kobaly’s pet peeves is that residential water bills are based on a tiered pricing system that encourages conservation, but golf and agriculture pay flat rates.
They have an ally in Mark Johnson, former director of engineering for the CVWD and a frequent critic of the agency. The retired Johnson said residential users have conserved far more than agriculture, which uses roughly half the district’s water, and significantly more than the golf industry, which uses short of 25%.
“Absolutely, there is an inequity,” said Johnson, and that, in effect, residential users “subsidize the infrastructure used to get water to golf courses.” Johnson, a golfer, said he used to play at a La Quinta course where “they were irrigating areas that weren’t even in play,” and watering sand traps, as well.
So why not institute tiered pricing for golf and ag, same as for residential users?
The CVWD’s Evans said such pricing is prohibited by the state water code, but it might be possible to implement “a different pricing structure” in the future.
I’ll be watching to see how that goes, but it’s worth noting that three of the five members of the agency’s board of directors are in the agriculture industry. Water and oil don’t mix, but in California, water and politics always do.
“I agree that more can be done to conserve,” Evans said. “At this time, we are pushing out new conservation advertisements and continuing to offer a broad range of programs. … To be sustainable, we need to be water wise.”
Kessler, despite defending golf’s record on conservation, said that if drought and higher temperatures continue, maintaining the recent rate of conservation “won’t be enough moving 10-25 years forward.”
Unless it starts raining again like it used to, everyone in California is going to have to get by with less water in the very near future, not 10 or 25 years down the road.
Thompson and Kobaly, who aren’t golfers, have a suggestion. They’ve been looking into links-style golf courses, which are common in other countries and use far less water. You tee off on a patch of green and you putt on a patch of green, but most of the area in between is natural and not irrigated.
“I’ve got nothing against golf,” Thompson said. “But they’ve got to find a different way of doing it.”
