As Earth heats up, the growing frequency and intensity of
disasters like catastrophic storms and heat waves are becoming
a mounting problem for the people who grow the planet’s food.
Warming is no longer solely eroding agricultural productivity
and food security in distant nations or arid climates. It’s
throttling production in the United States. Farmers and
ranchers across the country lost at least $20.3 billion in
crops and rangeland to extreme weather last year, according to
a new Farm Bureau report that crowned the 2024 hurricane season
“one of the most destructive in U.S. history” and outlined a
long list of other climate-fueled impacts. … California
endured nearly all the same weather challenges as the
south-central U.S. and the upper Midwest, costing its
agricultural sector $1.4 billion.
… How best to get rid of PFASs is now a multibillion-dollar
question. The EPA estimated that US utilities might have to
spend up to $1.5 billion annually for treatment systems; an
industry group that is suing the agency argues that costs could
be up to $48 billion over the next 5 years. Utilities must have
systems in place by 2029. … And although the EPA has
focused on drinking water, scientists want to stop PFASs from
ever reaching the water by removing them from other
environmental sources. … With looming deadlines,
academic researchers and companies are developing methods to
gather and destroy PFASs from these sources.
A mining company wants to dig hundreds of feet down on a site
along the San Joaquin River. With an environmental review of
the project released, the decision now lands on Fresno County
supervisors to approve or deny — and, if the project gets a
green light, decide how deep to allow the company to dig.
Mexico-based mining company CEMEX wants to dig a 600-foot hole
and blast hard rock from its quarry site about 200 feet from
the banks of the San Joaquin River, according to Fresno
County’s environmental impact report. The company already mines
aggregate at its quarry. A permit to operate expires in July
2026. However, a new California legislative bill may decide the
future of mining on the prime river land, bypassing the
supervisors. Assembly Bill 1425 from Joaquin
Arambula (D-Fresno) would ban dewatering from many sites along
the San Joaquin River — effectively killing the CEMEX proposal.
Were we able to transport ourselves back in time 50 years and
into California’s Capitol, we would find a governor seeking and
enjoying massive attention by national political media as he
eyes some greater office. We’d also find a Legislature dealing
with conflicts among influential interests with heavy financial
impacts. In other words, the Capitol’s dynamics in 1975 were
pretty much what they are today. The resemblance even extends
to specific issues. For instance, then-Gov. Jerry Brown was
touting a “peripheral canal” in 1975 to carry water around the
Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Gavin Newsom was
seven years old then, but now as governor is waging the same
campaign for a tunnel to do the same thing and is facing the
same opposition. –Written by CalMatters columnist Dan Walters
Los Angeles has long funneled masses of tourists to Las Vegas,
providing much of the fuel for the casino-heavy economy here.
But L.A. also has a more permanent foothold in Southern Nevada.
… The Los Angeles Department of Water and
Power runs a hilltop lodge in Boulder City and owns
another facility nearby for DWP crews who work on transmission
lines. It also owns at least 14 acres of land near Henderson’s
Lake Las Vegas community and a 2.5-acre plot next to a housing
tract in Henderson along Interstate 11, property records
indicate. Early last year, Boulder City’s then-City Manager
Taylour Tedder told the Review-Journal that he was aware of the
lodge but not the DWP operations outpost in his city. …
The city of L.A.’s real estate presence in Boulder City may
seem random but is far from it, given Los Angeles’ ties to the
iconic infrastructure project nearby: Hoover Dam.
The Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E) is surrendering
the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) license for the
Potter Valley Project (PVP). PG&E identifies this action as
a business decision because of the project’s failure to produce
revenues that offset its operating costs, even though PG&E
customers pay higher rates for delivered energy than just about
everywhere else in the United States. In our opinion, PG&E
wants to rid itself of the PVP for a different kind of economic
consideration, after determining that the Scott Dam represents
an economic liability that the company cannot afford. A key
factor in this determination is the increased understanding of
the seismic hazards represented by the Bartlett Springs Fault
Zone (BSFZ), which runs through Lake Pillsbury approximately
5000 feet east of Scott Dam. –Written by UC Davis alumni Chad Roberts (Ph.D.,
ecology) and Bob Schneider (B.S., geology)
One unique animal with a large task in the health of our local
creek and river systems. Along the Central Coast and the state,
beavers have become a vital source of assistance in protecting
against some of California’s biggest natural threats. …
Audrey Taub with the SLO Beaver Brigade invited KSBY to see the
work that beavers do right on the Salinas River, showing how
they thrive in riparian areas and ponds created due to the dams
formed by the local beaver population. Thanks to their dams
they help control and disperse the flow of water. Taub says the
rodents create resilient environments that can ward off the
spread of wildfires, decrease drought and in light of recent
storms, manage flooding.
The first major development in Imperial County’s vaunted but
stalled Lithium Valley may have nothing to do with lithium.
Instead, a massive data server farm could replace hay fields on
a 315-acre patch along Highway 111 at West Sinclair Road, the
“gateway” to the proposed industrial zone in the Southern
California desert. CalETHOS president and chief operating
officer Joel Stone told The Desert Sun that the publicly traded
start-up aims to break ground on a 200,000-square-foot data
center by 2026. … Data centers, the physical backbone of
the Internet, are notorious for using huge amounts of
water and often polluting electricity. That
concerns some in a county dependent on the dwindling
Colorado River for all its water. … But
Stone said they want to build a cutting-edge campus that uses
the geothermal reserve for clean power and will require little
water.
California isn’t recycling nearly enough water, according to a
new report by UCLA researchers, who say the state should treat
and reuse more wastewater to help address the Colorado River’s
chronic shortages. Analyzing data for large sewage treatment
plants in seven states that rely on Colorado River water, the
researchers found California is recycling only 22% of its
treated wastewater. That’s far behind the country’s driest two
states: Nevada, which is recycling 85% of its wastewater, and
Arizona, which is reusing 52%. The report, based on 2022 data,
found other states in the Colorado River Basin are trailing,
with New Mexico recycling 18%, Colorado 3.6%, Wyoming 3.3% and
Utah less than 1%.
A new study finds warming could inflict far more damage to the
global economy than previously assumed. Typically, to
understand how future droughts, heat waves, storms, and floods
will impact the global economy, experts look at the cost of
extreme weather in the past. Using that data, they build models
showing that warming will lead to trillions of dollars in
losses in the decades to come. But this method is
actually too optimistic, Australian scientists say, because it
looks only at the local impact of extreme weather. By rattling
supply chains, future storms and heat waves will also send
ripples throughout the global economy, inflicting costs far
higher than models currently show.
From the southwestern U.S. to Minnesota, Iowa and even parts of
New Jersey, it seemed that winter never materialized. Many
communities marked their driest winters on record, snowpack was
nearly nonexistent in some spots, and vegetation remains tinder
dry — all ingredients for elevated wildfire risks. … A
new wildfire outlook will be released Tuesday. While
California isn’t among those areas facing significant potential
for wildfires at the moment, deadly fires in
January torched more urban area than any other fire in
that state since at least the mid-1980s.
The United States government has paused negotiations with
Canada to finalize the renewal of a long-standing treaty
covering the use of the Columbia River in the wake of President
Donald Trump’s trade war with Canada and threats to annex the
northern neighbor. The United States and Canada last July
reached an agreement in principle to manage the mighty Columbia
River, an economic and environmental powerhouse that starts in
Canada and flows through Washington and Oregon on its journey
to the Pacific Ocean. The two countries negotiated for six
years to update the 60-year-old treaty. But talks to finalize
the treaty are “currently paused” while the Trump
administration reviews all pending international agreements,
said Adrian Dix, head of the British Columbia Ministry of
Energy and Climate Solutions in Canada. Officials for the U.S.
State Department and the White House have not responded to
requests for comment.
A $20 million grant meant to strengthen a Nevada tribe’s poor
access to electric power and clean water has been suspended,
delaying construction timelines. The Environmental Protection
Agency awarded the money to the Nevada Clean Energy
Fund in December — one of 84 projects in that round of
so-called Community Change Grants. With the money, the
nonprofit aimed to work with the Walker River Paiute Tribe in
west-central Nevada on needed infrastructure improvements.
Kristen Stasio, the nonprofit’s CEO, said in an interview last
week that the EPA hasn’t been communicative since she received
notice March 7 that the grant was suspended.
Other federal water and weather project funding news:
Fluoridated drinking water has been hailed as one of the top 10
public health achievements of the 20th century by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But it’s also a
practice that new health secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. has
said should be halted. This week, Utah appeared to heed
his warnings, as Republican Gov. Spencer Cox signed legislation
late Thursday that banned fluoride in public drinking water
across the state, making it the first state to do so. “We
don’t need fluoride in our water. It’s a very bad way to
deliver it into our systems,” Kennedy had asserted the day
after the November election to NPR on Morning
Edition. Below, a primer on fluoride in drinking water,
its history of controversy, and what the science says.
Santa Rosa residents could see their monthly water and sewer
bills increase by an average of $11 starting in July as the
city looks to invest in improvements to its aging utility
system. Rates are expected to go up by a combined 6.5% under
the first year of a proposed five-year rate schedule, followed
by increases of 5.4% to 5.8% over the next four years. The
Santa Rosa City Council will consider the proposed increases on
Tuesday. Santa Rosa Water is responsible for about $5 billion
in infrastructure, including about 1,200 miles of water and
sewer lines and the regional Laguna Wastewater Treatment Plant.
It serves about 54,000 water customers and 52,000 wastewater
customers.
President Donald Trump and EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin have
made big promises to roll back environmental regulations — and
they’ve stacked the agency with appointees with prior
experience fighting a range of rules, including ones to rein in
chemical exposure. Several top EPA officials have spent the
past four years leading legal challenges or lobbying against
landmark environmental and public health regulations finalized
during the Biden administration. Among them is the agency’s ban
on cancer-causing chrysotile asbestos and a rule putting
polluters on the hook for “forever chemicals” cleanup costs. A
rundown of the Trump administration’s appointees in EPA’s
legal, chemicals, land and water offices could signal which
rules are most vulnerable to rollbacks.
As the possibility of legal battles on the Colorado River
grows, competing states could use water data to back up their
arguments, including claims that Arizona should bear the most
water cuts in future shortages The Upper Colorado River
Commission — a body that represents the four states in the
upper Colorado River basin — is in its third year beefing up
the measurement of stream flows, water consumption by
crops, and water diversions that its states use to regulate
their water use. Though the Trump administration is reviewing
the federal funding designated for the projects, the commission
says it has continued its work. … The new data will help
the Upper Basin fine-tune its water management, but it could
also play a role in lawsuits between Colorado River states if
ongoing negotiations break down.
A combination of water management practices has contributed to
notable groundwater gains in Central Arizona despite the region
dealing with long-term water stress, according to a study led
by researchers at The University of Texas at Austin and
collaborators in Arizona and Colorado. … Some of the state’s
policies incentivize farmers to use surface water from the
river rather than tap into groundwater. Other policies channel
the river water directly to aquifer recharge zones, where it
can seep down to the groundwater. According to the study, which
was published in Communications Earth & Environment, these
policies have helped bank a total of 10.5 cubic kilometers of
groundwater water from 1989–2019 in the Phoenix, Tucson and
Pinal active management areas, where these policies are in
place.
Significant snow falling in the Sierra Nevada over the next few
days could be the region’s last big snow dump of the season,
showcasing a dramatic rebound for the snowpack that provides a
significant portion of California’s water
reserves through the rest of the year. Snow started
falling in the Sierra Nevada, the California mountain range
that straddles the state’s border with Nevada, on Sunday, and
plenty more is expected through Tuesday. Elevations above 4,000
feet are expected to record one to four feet of snow, while the
highest peaks over 8,000 feet could pick up five feet.
Amid rising concerns about California’s water future, the fifth
largest reservoir in the state is primed for expansion. A
coalition of water agencies, from Silicon Valley to Fresno, has
agreed to partner with the federal government to raise the
382-foot-tall dam at San Luis Reservoir, the giant holding pool
that looms as a small sea along Highway 152 in the hills
between Gilroy and Los Banos. The dam’s enlargement would allow
the federally owned reservoir to take in 130,000 acre-feet of
additional water, equal to the annual use of more than 260,000
households. … While the proposed expansion hasn’t faced
significant opposition — no small feat for such a large
undertaking — a sticking point has emerged: a plan to move the
nearby highway, accounting for nearly half of the cost of the
$1 billion project.
