Tuesday, November 10, 2009
7:30pm - 9:00pm
550 E. Shaw(Across from Fashion Fair Mall)
Local biologist and professor Rodney Olsen will discuss the avian ecology of oak woodlands. In this exploration, we will discuss the importance of oak woodlands to bird reproduction, feeding, and migration. We will also explore current threats to oak woodland communities and local conservation efforts.
Monday, November 9, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
From the Economist:
California's water wars
Of farms, folks and fish
Oct 22nd 2009 | LOS ANGELES
From The Economist print edition
A truce in California’s long and bitter fight over water at last appears possible
IN 2007 Oliver Wanger, a federal judge in California, ordered the huge pumping stations of the Sacramento Delta, the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, to reduce by a third the water they delivered to two aqueducts that run south to the farms of the San Joaquin Valley and onward to the vast conurbations of southern California. His reason was the delta smelt, a translucent fish less than eight centimetres (three inches) long that lives only in the delta and is considered endangered under federal law. The pumping plants were sucking in the fish and grinding them up. The next year, a “biological opinion” by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service reinforced Judge Wanger’s order. Pumping from the delta remains restricted.
The consequences of these restrictions, which coincided with a drought that is now in its third year, reach far beyond one small population of fish. About two-thirds of Californians get at least some of their water from the delta, so with the stroke of a judicial pen the entire state, the world’s eighth-largest economy and America’s “fruit basket”, entered an economic and political crisis.
Water has divided Californians since Mark Twain remarked that “whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting over.” But this latest conflict comes as America’s largest state is politically gridlocked and holding back a national economic recovery. From Australia to Israel, parched places all over the world are now looking to California to see whether, and how, it solves one of the most intractable problems of thirsty civilisations in dry regions.
The pumping restrictions were a huge victory for environmentalists, who fill the ranks of one of the three armies in California’s perennial water wars. With increasing success since the 1970s, greens have argued that the delta in particular, and California’s dammed rivers and wetlands in general, are on the verge of ecological collapse and must be saved.
For the other two armies, the restrictions amounted to a stinging defeat. One army consists of urban consumers in the dry south, represented by the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to about 19m people, over half the state’s population, and gets 30% of its supply from one of the two delta aqueducts. The authority has had to pay farmers in the Central Valley to give up their allocations and let their fields lie fallow, says Jeffrey Kightlinger, its boss. This year it also had to impose mandatory conservation measures.
The pain has been far worse, however, for the third force: agriculture. The farmers and farm workers who have been hardest hit live in the western San Joaquin Valley, which is supplied by the Westlands Water District, America’s largest irrigation authority. Westlands has contracts to draw water from the other (federally financed) aqueduct. Tom Birmingham, its boss, says that, because of the drought and the pumping restrictions, it is receiving only 10% of its entitlement this year.
The result, says Mr Birmingham, is fallow land, farm workers being laid off and “people standing in food lines for hours”. In some areas unemployment runs at 40%. There are scenes reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, though most of the poor and jobless are not white “Okies”, but Latinos. Just as the “dust bowl” swept across the Great Plains in the 1930s, so in the San Joaquin Valley, fields are reverting to desert and signs read, “Congress created this dust bowl”.
“All my almond trees are going to die,” says Shawn Coburn, a farmer in the area. He began farming in 1992 and has done everything he can to use water more wisely. He has planted fewer tomatoes and melons and more almonds and wine grapes because these crops drink less and yield more. He says he has conserved all he can with technology. Like other farmers, he has also dug wells to tap the shrinking aquifers, even though he knows he is making the entire valley floor sink. In one place, he says, the ground around a telephone pole has dropped by six feet (nearly 2 metres).
The environmentalists are not denying that their victory has cost agricultural jobs. But Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League, a Californian non-profit outfit, thinks that a public-relations firm paid by the farmers has been exaggerating their misery. In any event, he says, the problem is not a court ruling but a system in which the state has pledged eight times as much water to title-holders as exists in nature and therefore cannot, of necessity, give everybody his due.
Bill Metropulos, a lobbyist at the Sierra Club, another environmental group, agrees. “I cannot control a drought,” he says. Westlands’ Mr Birmingham can complain, he says, but, “Why do we have to give him more water?” It so happens that Westlands’ water rights rank below those of other title-holders and “there is simply not enough water to go around.”
Angry and bitter words are thus flying on all sides, which is as it has always been in California. But this time the crisis has become so severe that the state’s legislators in Sacramento, notoriously incapable of agreeing on anything serious, including a punctual budget, appear on the brink of a breakthrough. A complex package of legislation was almost passed in September and failed only because time ran out in that session. The legislators are now talking again. A deal could emerge for a vote within weeks.
Peace among coequals?
Timothy Quinn, director of the Association of California Water Agencies, which represents the suppliers of about 90% of the water consumed in California, credits the pumping restrictions for this progress. He says Judge Wanger forced all sides to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation. His decision was the “equivalent of an earthquake” whose shock was severe enough to shake California’s democracy. Therein lies, perhaps, the opportunity.
The details of the legislation negotiated so far are complex, but its main feature is a phrase, “coequal goals”—though how coequal goals differ from equal ones is not clear. For most of the previous century, says Mr Quinn, California and the entire West had an “extraction mindset” according to which man was meant to subdue and exploit nature. In water matters, this meant ever more dams, reservoirs and aqueducts. However, over the past four decades the environmentalist mentality grew up as an alternative, emphasising “sustainable” use of nature.
California’s water policy in the past has swung “like a pendulum” between these two principles, depending on which lobbyists have won the latest victory, says Lester Snow, the director of California’s water department. Enshrining the objectives of both sides as “coequal” in state law would thus mean progress, by requiring all factions to consider both fish and farms, both nature and the economy, both sustainability and reliability.
“It’s a huge step,” agrees Mr Kightlinger of the Metropolitan Water District. In practice, most water managers in the state already take sustainability seriously, but making equality official would force all sides to “play nicely”, he thinks. The old rivalry between urban and agricultural water use has already faded, he says, and today’s animosity between both of them and the greens may also subside.
Westlands’ Mr Birmingham says that, in practice, water usage has already become equal. Whereas agriculture used to consume 80% of the state’s water supply, today 46% of captured and stored water goes to environmental purposes, such as rebuilding wetlands. Meanwhile 43% goes to farming and 11% to municipal uses.
The environmentalists, as today’s top dogs, are less excited about equal goals. At present the state’s water infrastructure is run with a single goal, which is to protect nature, and this, says Mr Metropulos of the Sierra Club, provides complete clarity of purpose. Equality, he thinks, will only lead to new conflicts and litigation. When the time comes for trade-offs, he asks, “Who’s going to make the decision? It is undefined.” He is lobbying against the legislation, although he is unlikely to prevent it.
Dealing with the delta
The next layer of legislative proposals will concern the Sacramento Delta, the inland network of streams and rivers, many contained by dykes and levees, that form the hub of California’s water infrastructure. Californians hate rain but love water, so three-quarters of them live in the arid south, spurn the wet north where three-quarters of the rain falls, and expect water to come to them by pipe, canal or aquifer, preferably courtesy of the taxpayer.
The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries, carrying the rain from the north and the melting snowpack from the Sierra Nevada in the east, meet in the delta and flow out through San Francisco’s Golden Gate. The trick has always been to intercept the fresh water in the delta before it gets salty and to send it south as well as west to the San Francisco Bay area.
Those in the south get it through two huge infrastructure networks. The federal Central Valley Project, dating from 1937, uses 20 upstream reservoirs and two pumps to take water to the southern Central Valley, largely for farmers. The State Water Project, begun in 1960 by Pat Brown, a visionary governor, uses another 22 upstream dams and reservoirs and its own pumping plant to send water into the other aqueduct, largely for urban use.
By pumping fresh water south, however, these two projects wreak ecological havoc. Sceptics like to inveigh against the unprepossessing delta smelt, which George Radanovich, a Republican congressman, has called “a worthless little worm that needs to go the way of the dinosaur”. But other fish species such as the Chinook salmon, the steelhead and the longfin smelt are also threatened, and each species is a part of a complex food chain. About 25% of the state’s sporting fish and 80% of its commercial fish live in or migrate through the delta.
Pumps kill, levees leak
The pumps kill fish and other species, and not just by grinding them up. They also change, and occasionally reverse, the water flow of the small rivers in the delta’s vast labyrinth of streams, creeks, sluices, islands and marshes. In natural circumstances, the delta is brackish and its salinity changes with the tides. The pumps, by drawing in river water, keep the delta water artificially fresh. Native species die, invasive species thrive.
Beyond that, the ageing delta’s levees are a human disaster in the making. The delta sits on top of seismic faults that may rupture, and many of the islands that make it up are below sea level. A large earthquake could disrupt the state’s water supply and inundate the delta itself.
The best answer, says Ellen Hanak, a water expert at the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, is to build either a canal or a tunnel around the delta. Fresh water could then be tapped upstream on the Sacramento River and conveyed round the delta to the aqueducts without grinding up fish, reversing river flows or changing the delta’s salinity, which would again fluctuate with the tides. The water going south would be fresher too. A canal would thus “separate the water for the fish from the water for the economy and the people,” says Mr Quinn.
AP
AP
Resuscitation required, just add water
The trouble is that such a peripheral canal is a political hot button. In 1982 Jerry Brown, Pat Brown’s son and California’s governor at the time, put a canal on the ballot but the voters rejected it. Even now, many people are passionately against it. Farmers and residents in the delta itself fear that a bypass would mean that politicians and public money would abandon them amid their disintegrating levees, and others would grab their water. The Sierra Club is against a canal because “it is not going to make new water” and “we want to reduce exports from the delta” rather than reroute its flows, says Mr Metropulos.
The legislation under negotiation is therefore taking a different approach. Instead of decreeing a bypass canal or tunnel outright, it seeks to establish a new authority with the power to take this decision itself. This is sorely needed. Mr Snow at the water department has counted more than 200 entities, from cities and counties to fisheries and reclamation or irrigation districts and even mosquito-abatement boards, that share responsibility in such a way that nobody has any. A new and nimble “Delta Council” would seize authority from all of them and actively manage the delta for the first time. And it could do this by building a canal.
Dam money
One sign of progress by Californian standards is that, if the deal gets stuck, it will be largely over relatively banal issues such as money. The legislation is likely to mandate investment in new dams and reservoirs, which appeal to Republicans, and also in waste-water recycling, desalination and groundwater storage, which are the environmentalists’ and Democrats’ preferred sources of water. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor, has said that he will veto any legislation that does not include billions of dollars in new bonds to pay for these new projects.
State Republicans, allied to farmers, are pushing for “general-obligation” bonds that would be put to the voters on a ballot and, if approved, paid out of general state tax revenues. Democrats are concerned that the interest on such bonds would aggravate California’s continuing budget dispute and come at the expense of education, health care and other things they mind about. They prefer bonds that would be repaid by the users of new dams, ie, the water agencies that can pass costs on to their customers. Water thus trumps ordinary politics. Republicans, who usually claim to be against big government, want taxpayers to pay; Democrats, generally accused of being big spenders, want to match infrastructure costs with water revenues to send the right price signals.
The legislation is likely to encourage water conservation by setting targets for reducing consumption. One guess is that it may call for a cut of 20% per person by 2020. That cannot be a bad idea. On the other hand, little progress is being made on monitoring groundwater levels, even though many aquifers are shrinking. Some of the state’s water districts voluntarily measure groundwater levels, but Republican legislators have opposed making such reporting mandatory on the ground that it would mean trespassing on private property. “California is the last bastion of the Wild West when it comes to groundwater,” says Ms Hanak. It may stay that way.
Whatever happens, the legislation will not deal with the long-term threats to California and its neighbours. Climate change is already showing up “in the data”, says Mr Quinn. The snowpack of the Sierra Nevada, California’s most reliable water-storage system, is shrinking and may stop yielding predictable run-off in the spring and start producing sporadic and unusable, not to mention disastrous, floods. The delta is already below sea level and, as the sea rises, it may be submerged. Even today the south is a desert wherever irrigation does not reach. It will become even drier.
For professional water managers such as Mr Kightlinger, this makes the continuing talks in Sacramento frustrating. “‘I’m for screwdrivers but not for hammers’: that’s how they talk,” he says. But he thinks all the tools are needed if California’s population and economy are to keep growing.
Of those tools, water recycling, a euphemism for cleaning up sewage, is perhaps the most promising. Recycled water is local and does not disappear in a drought. But many consumers continue to struggle with the idea that what they are drinking today someone else restored to the water system yesterday. Desalination, which removes minerals from seawater or, more often, brackish groundwater, is an alternative. But it takes a lot of energy to push water through the dense filters that remove unwanted salts and other molecules. Water markets, which allow those with too much water to trade it easily with those who have too little, could also help.
If there is to be any progress, however, Californians first have to bury their hatchets. If the talks stall, the political fallout will be big. Tom Campbell, the most thoughtful Republican candidate for governor in next year’s election, thinks water is by far the most important issue facing the state. Willie Brown, a former speaker of California’s Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, believes “a political earthquake is rumbling in the Central Valley over water, and it could cause a real tsunami for the Democrats in the 2010 elections if they don’t handle it well,” since Democrats are more associated with environmentalists and several of them face re-election.
A chance to make history
For the same reason, if the negotiations succeed, even a mediocre deal would amount to the most important water legislation since the era of Pat Brown, says Mr Quinn. Westlands’ Mr Birmingham feels that many environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Nature Conservancy, have become “genuinely interested in working with water agencies”, even though others are “using water as a means to limit housing development”.
“I am very optimistic for the long term,” says Mr Birmingham. “The real question is how are we going to survive between now and the time when new conveyance facilities become available,” which could be a decade or more. “If we continue to live under the existing biological opinions, irrigated agriculture in the western San Joaquin Valley cannot be sustained,” he says. For farmers such as Mr Coburn and his 26 Latino workers, never mind his almonds and wine grapes, the help may arrive too late. This is perhaps the only thing they have in common with the delta smelt.
Of farms, folks and fish
Oct 22nd 2009 | LOS ANGELES
From The Economist print edition
A truce in California’s long and bitter fight over water at last appears possible
IN 2007 Oliver Wanger, a federal judge in California, ordered the huge pumping stations of the Sacramento Delta, the largest estuary on the west coast of the Americas, to reduce by a third the water they delivered to two aqueducts that run south to the farms of the San Joaquin Valley and onward to the vast conurbations of southern California. His reason was the delta smelt, a translucent fish less than eight centimetres (three inches) long that lives only in the delta and is considered endangered under federal law. The pumping plants were sucking in the fish and grinding them up. The next year, a “biological opinion” by the federal Fish and Wildlife Service reinforced Judge Wanger’s order. Pumping from the delta remains restricted.
The consequences of these restrictions, which coincided with a drought that is now in its third year, reach far beyond one small population of fish. About two-thirds of Californians get at least some of their water from the delta, so with the stroke of a judicial pen the entire state, the world’s eighth-largest economy and America’s “fruit basket”, entered an economic and political crisis.
Water has divided Californians since Mark Twain remarked that “whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting over.” But this latest conflict comes as America’s largest state is politically gridlocked and holding back a national economic recovery. From Australia to Israel, parched places all over the world are now looking to California to see whether, and how, it solves one of the most intractable problems of thirsty civilisations in dry regions.
The pumping restrictions were a huge victory for environmentalists, who fill the ranks of one of the three armies in California’s perennial water wars. With increasing success since the 1970s, greens have argued that the delta in particular, and California’s dammed rivers and wetlands in general, are on the verge of ecological collapse and must be saved.
For the other two armies, the restrictions amounted to a stinging defeat. One army consists of urban consumers in the dry south, represented by the Metropolitan Water District, which supplies water to about 19m people, over half the state’s population, and gets 30% of its supply from one of the two delta aqueducts. The authority has had to pay farmers in the Central Valley to give up their allocations and let their fields lie fallow, says Jeffrey Kightlinger, its boss. This year it also had to impose mandatory conservation measures.
The pain has been far worse, however, for the third force: agriculture. The farmers and farm workers who have been hardest hit live in the western San Joaquin Valley, which is supplied by the Westlands Water District, America’s largest irrigation authority. Westlands has contracts to draw water from the other (federally financed) aqueduct. Tom Birmingham, its boss, says that, because of the drought and the pumping restrictions, it is receiving only 10% of its entitlement this year.
The result, says Mr Birmingham, is fallow land, farm workers being laid off and “people standing in food lines for hours”. In some areas unemployment runs at 40%. There are scenes reminiscent of John Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath”, though most of the poor and jobless are not white “Okies”, but Latinos. Just as the “dust bowl” swept across the Great Plains in the 1930s, so in the San Joaquin Valley, fields are reverting to desert and signs read, “Congress created this dust bowl”.
“All my almond trees are going to die,” says Shawn Coburn, a farmer in the area. He began farming in 1992 and has done everything he can to use water more wisely. He has planted fewer tomatoes and melons and more almonds and wine grapes because these crops drink less and yield more. He says he has conserved all he can with technology. Like other farmers, he has also dug wells to tap the shrinking aquifers, even though he knows he is making the entire valley floor sink. In one place, he says, the ground around a telephone pole has dropped by six feet (nearly 2 metres).
The environmentalists are not denying that their victory has cost agricultural jobs. But Jonas Minton of the Planning and Conservation League, a Californian non-profit outfit, thinks that a public-relations firm paid by the farmers has been exaggerating their misery. In any event, he says, the problem is not a court ruling but a system in which the state has pledged eight times as much water to title-holders as exists in nature and therefore cannot, of necessity, give everybody his due.
Bill Metropulos, a lobbyist at the Sierra Club, another environmental group, agrees. “I cannot control a drought,” he says. Westlands’ Mr Birmingham can complain, he says, but, “Why do we have to give him more water?” It so happens that Westlands’ water rights rank below those of other title-holders and “there is simply not enough water to go around.”
Angry and bitter words are thus flying on all sides, which is as it has always been in California. But this time the crisis has become so severe that the state’s legislators in Sacramento, notoriously incapable of agreeing on anything serious, including a punctual budget, appear on the brink of a breakthrough. A complex package of legislation was almost passed in September and failed only because time ran out in that session. The legislators are now talking again. A deal could emerge for a vote within weeks.
Peace among coequals?
Timothy Quinn, director of the Association of California Water Agencies, which represents the suppliers of about 90% of the water consumed in California, credits the pumping restrictions for this progress. He says Judge Wanger forced all sides to acknowledge the seriousness of the situation. His decision was the “equivalent of an earthquake” whose shock was severe enough to shake California’s democracy. Therein lies, perhaps, the opportunity.
The details of the legislation negotiated so far are complex, but its main feature is a phrase, “coequal goals”—though how coequal goals differ from equal ones is not clear. For most of the previous century, says Mr Quinn, California and the entire West had an “extraction mindset” according to which man was meant to subdue and exploit nature. In water matters, this meant ever more dams, reservoirs and aqueducts. However, over the past four decades the environmentalist mentality grew up as an alternative, emphasising “sustainable” use of nature.
California’s water policy in the past has swung “like a pendulum” between these two principles, depending on which lobbyists have won the latest victory, says Lester Snow, the director of California’s water department. Enshrining the objectives of both sides as “coequal” in state law would thus mean progress, by requiring all factions to consider both fish and farms, both nature and the economy, both sustainability and reliability.
“It’s a huge step,” agrees Mr Kightlinger of the Metropolitan Water District. In practice, most water managers in the state already take sustainability seriously, but making equality official would force all sides to “play nicely”, he thinks. The old rivalry between urban and agricultural water use has already faded, he says, and today’s animosity between both of them and the greens may also subside.
Westlands’ Mr Birmingham says that, in practice, water usage has already become equal. Whereas agriculture used to consume 80% of the state’s water supply, today 46% of captured and stored water goes to environmental purposes, such as rebuilding wetlands. Meanwhile 43% goes to farming and 11% to municipal uses.
The environmentalists, as today’s top dogs, are less excited about equal goals. At present the state’s water infrastructure is run with a single goal, which is to protect nature, and this, says Mr Metropulos of the Sierra Club, provides complete clarity of purpose. Equality, he thinks, will only lead to new conflicts and litigation. When the time comes for trade-offs, he asks, “Who’s going to make the decision? It is undefined.” He is lobbying against the legislation, although he is unlikely to prevent it.
Dealing with the delta
The next layer of legislative proposals will concern the Sacramento Delta, the inland network of streams and rivers, many contained by dykes and levees, that form the hub of California’s water infrastructure. Californians hate rain but love water, so three-quarters of them live in the arid south, spurn the wet north where three-quarters of the rain falls, and expect water to come to them by pipe, canal or aquifer, preferably courtesy of the taxpayer.
The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and their tributaries, carrying the rain from the north and the melting snowpack from the Sierra Nevada in the east, meet in the delta and flow out through San Francisco’s Golden Gate. The trick has always been to intercept the fresh water in the delta before it gets salty and to send it south as well as west to the San Francisco Bay area.
Those in the south get it through two huge infrastructure networks. The federal Central Valley Project, dating from 1937, uses 20 upstream reservoirs and two pumps to take water to the southern Central Valley, largely for farmers. The State Water Project, begun in 1960 by Pat Brown, a visionary governor, uses another 22 upstream dams and reservoirs and its own pumping plant to send water into the other aqueduct, largely for urban use.
By pumping fresh water south, however, these two projects wreak ecological havoc. Sceptics like to inveigh against the unprepossessing delta smelt, which George Radanovich, a Republican congressman, has called “a worthless little worm that needs to go the way of the dinosaur”. But other fish species such as the Chinook salmon, the steelhead and the longfin smelt are also threatened, and each species is a part of a complex food chain. About 25% of the state’s sporting fish and 80% of its commercial fish live in or migrate through the delta.
Pumps kill, levees leak
The pumps kill fish and other species, and not just by grinding them up. They also change, and occasionally reverse, the water flow of the small rivers in the delta’s vast labyrinth of streams, creeks, sluices, islands and marshes. In natural circumstances, the delta is brackish and its salinity changes with the tides. The pumps, by drawing in river water, keep the delta water artificially fresh. Native species die, invasive species thrive.
Beyond that, the ageing delta’s levees are a human disaster in the making. The delta sits on top of seismic faults that may rupture, and many of the islands that make it up are below sea level. A large earthquake could disrupt the state’s water supply and inundate the delta itself.
The best answer, says Ellen Hanak, a water expert at the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California, is to build either a canal or a tunnel around the delta. Fresh water could then be tapped upstream on the Sacramento River and conveyed round the delta to the aqueducts without grinding up fish, reversing river flows or changing the delta’s salinity, which would again fluctuate with the tides. The water going south would be fresher too. A canal would thus “separate the water for the fish from the water for the economy and the people,” says Mr Quinn.
AP
AP
Resuscitation required, just add water
The trouble is that such a peripheral canal is a political hot button. In 1982 Jerry Brown, Pat Brown’s son and California’s governor at the time, put a canal on the ballot but the voters rejected it. Even now, many people are passionately against it. Farmers and residents in the delta itself fear that a bypass would mean that politicians and public money would abandon them amid their disintegrating levees, and others would grab their water. The Sierra Club is against a canal because “it is not going to make new water” and “we want to reduce exports from the delta” rather than reroute its flows, says Mr Metropulos.
The legislation under negotiation is therefore taking a different approach. Instead of decreeing a bypass canal or tunnel outright, it seeks to establish a new authority with the power to take this decision itself. This is sorely needed. Mr Snow at the water department has counted more than 200 entities, from cities and counties to fisheries and reclamation or irrigation districts and even mosquito-abatement boards, that share responsibility in such a way that nobody has any. A new and nimble “Delta Council” would seize authority from all of them and actively manage the delta for the first time. And it could do this by building a canal.
Dam money
One sign of progress by Californian standards is that, if the deal gets stuck, it will be largely over relatively banal issues such as money. The legislation is likely to mandate investment in new dams and reservoirs, which appeal to Republicans, and also in waste-water recycling, desalination and groundwater storage, which are the environmentalists’ and Democrats’ preferred sources of water. But Arnold Schwarzenegger, the Republican governor, has said that he will veto any legislation that does not include billions of dollars in new bonds to pay for these new projects.
State Republicans, allied to farmers, are pushing for “general-obligation” bonds that would be put to the voters on a ballot and, if approved, paid out of general state tax revenues. Democrats are concerned that the interest on such bonds would aggravate California’s continuing budget dispute and come at the expense of education, health care and other things they mind about. They prefer bonds that would be repaid by the users of new dams, ie, the water agencies that can pass costs on to their customers. Water thus trumps ordinary politics. Republicans, who usually claim to be against big government, want taxpayers to pay; Democrats, generally accused of being big spenders, want to match infrastructure costs with water revenues to send the right price signals.
The legislation is likely to encourage water conservation by setting targets for reducing consumption. One guess is that it may call for a cut of 20% per person by 2020. That cannot be a bad idea. On the other hand, little progress is being made on monitoring groundwater levels, even though many aquifers are shrinking. Some of the state’s water districts voluntarily measure groundwater levels, but Republican legislators have opposed making such reporting mandatory on the ground that it would mean trespassing on private property. “California is the last bastion of the Wild West when it comes to groundwater,” says Ms Hanak. It may stay that way.
Whatever happens, the legislation will not deal with the long-term threats to California and its neighbours. Climate change is already showing up “in the data”, says Mr Quinn. The snowpack of the Sierra Nevada, California’s most reliable water-storage system, is shrinking and may stop yielding predictable run-off in the spring and start producing sporadic and unusable, not to mention disastrous, floods. The delta is already below sea level and, as the sea rises, it may be submerged. Even today the south is a desert wherever irrigation does not reach. It will become even drier.
For professional water managers such as Mr Kightlinger, this makes the continuing talks in Sacramento frustrating. “‘I’m for screwdrivers but not for hammers’: that’s how they talk,” he says. But he thinks all the tools are needed if California’s population and economy are to keep growing.
Of those tools, water recycling, a euphemism for cleaning up sewage, is perhaps the most promising. Recycled water is local and does not disappear in a drought. But many consumers continue to struggle with the idea that what they are drinking today someone else restored to the water system yesterday. Desalination, which removes minerals from seawater or, more often, brackish groundwater, is an alternative. But it takes a lot of energy to push water through the dense filters that remove unwanted salts and other molecules. Water markets, which allow those with too much water to trade it easily with those who have too little, could also help.
If there is to be any progress, however, Californians first have to bury their hatchets. If the talks stall, the political fallout will be big. Tom Campbell, the most thoughtful Republican candidate for governor in next year’s election, thinks water is by far the most important issue facing the state. Willie Brown, a former speaker of California’s Assembly and mayor of San Francisco, believes “a political earthquake is rumbling in the Central Valley over water, and it could cause a real tsunami for the Democrats in the 2010 elections if they don’t handle it well,” since Democrats are more associated with environmentalists and several of them face re-election.
A chance to make history
For the same reason, if the negotiations succeed, even a mediocre deal would amount to the most important water legislation since the era of Pat Brown, says Mr Quinn. Westlands’ Mr Birmingham feels that many environmental groups, such as the Natural Resources Defence Council and the Nature Conservancy, have become “genuinely interested in working with water agencies”, even though others are “using water as a means to limit housing development”.
“I am very optimistic for the long term,” says Mr Birmingham. “The real question is how are we going to survive between now and the time when new conveyance facilities become available,” which could be a decade or more. “If we continue to live under the existing biological opinions, irrigated agriculture in the western San Joaquin Valley cannot be sustained,” he says. For farmers such as Mr Coburn and his 26 Latino workers, never mind his almonds and wine grapes, the help may arrive too late. This is perhaps the only thing they have in common with the delta smelt.
Wednesday, October 14, 2009
An "Oh, Shit!" Moment on Climate?
Climate Roulette
By Mark Hertsgaard
They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment--an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, groundbreaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, shit" moment.
It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct--and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists--it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so.
Needless to say, this timetable is light-years more demanding than what the world's major governments are talking about in the run-up to Copenhagen. The European Union has pledged 20 percent reductions by 2020, which it will increase to 30 percent if others--like the United States--do the same. Japan's new prime minister likewise has promised 25 percent reductions by 2020 if others do the same. Obama didn't mention a number, but the Waxman-Markey bill, which he supports, would deliver less than 5 percent reductions by 2020. Obama's silence--doubtless a function of the fact that Republicans are implacably opposed to serious emissions cuts--allowed Hu to claim the higher ground at the UN. Hu went further than any Chinese leader has before, pledging to curb greenhouse gas emissions growth by a "notable margin" by 2020. Obama dropped his own bombshell, however, urging that all G-20 governments phase out subsidies for fossil fuels. "The time we have to reverse this tide is running out," Obama declared. Alas, the WBGU study suggests that our time is in fact all but gone.
Obama, like other G-8 leaders, agreed in July to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level at which human civilization developed. Schellnhuber, addressing the Santa Fe conference, joked that the G-8 leaders had agreed to the 2C limit "probably because they don't know what it means." In fact, even the "brutal" timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber cautioned, would not guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so--"worse odds than Russian roulette," he wryly noted. "But it is the best we can do." To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner. Likewise, we could decide to wait another decade or so to halt all greenhouse emissions, but this lowers the odds of hitting the 2C target to fifty-fifty. "And what kind of precautionary principle is that?" Schellnhuber asked.
There is a fundamental political assumption underlying the WBGU study: that the right to emit greenhouse gases is shared equally by all people on earth. Known in diplomatic circles as "the per capita principle," this approach has long been insisted upon by China and most other developing countries and thus is seen as essential to an agreement in Copenhagen, though among G-8 leaders only Merkel has endorsed it. The WBGU study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion people and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per person. That's harsh news for Americans, who emit 20 tons per person annually, and it explains why the US deadline is the most imminent. But China won't welcome this news either. Its combination of high annual emissions and huge population gives it a deadline only a few years later than Europe's and Japan's.
"I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers," Schellnhuber said. He urges governments to agree in Copenhagen to launch "a Green Apollo Project." Like John Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon in ten years, a global Green Apollo Project would aim to put leading economies on a trajectory of zero carbon emissions within ten years. Combined with carbon trading with low-emissions countries, Schellnhuber says, such a "wartime mobilization" might still save us from the worst impacts of climate change. The alternative is more and more "Oh, shit" moments for all of us.
Study
About Mark Hertsgaard
Mark Hertsgaard (markhertsgaard.com), a fellow of The Nation Institute and The Nation's environment correspondent, is the author of five books, which have been translated into sixteen languages. His next book, Living Through the Storm: How We Survive the Next 50 Years of Climate Change, is forthcoming from Houghton-Mifflin.
By Mark Hertsgaard
They say that everyone who finally gets it about climate change has an "Oh, shit" moment--an instant when the full scientific implications become clear and they suddenly realize what a horrifically dangerous situation humanity has created for itself. Listening to the speeches, groundbreaking in their way, that President Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao delivered September 22 at the UN Summit on Climate Change, I was reminded of my most recent "Oh, shit" moment.
It came in July, courtesy of the chief climate adviser to the German government. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, chair of an advisory council known by its German acronym, WBGU, is a physicist whose specialty, fittingly, is chaos theory. Speaking to an invitation-only conference at New Mexico's Santa Fe Institute, Schellnhuber divulged the findings of a study so new he had not yet briefed Chancellor Angela Merkel about it. The study has now been published. If its conclusions are correct--and Schellnhuber ranks among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists--it has monumental implications for the pivotal meeting in December in Copenhagen, where world leaders will try to agree on reversing global warming.
Schellnhuber and his WBGU colleagues go a giant step beyond the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body whose scientific reports are constrained because the world's governments must approve their contents. The IPCC says that rich industrial countries must cut emissions 25 to 40 percent by 2020 (from 1990 levels) if the world is to have a fair chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change. By contrast, the WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050. The study adds that big polluters can delay their day of reckoning by "buying" emissions rights from developing countries, a step the study estimates would extend some countries' deadlines by a decade or so.
Needless to say, this timetable is light-years more demanding than what the world's major governments are talking about in the run-up to Copenhagen. The European Union has pledged 20 percent reductions by 2020, which it will increase to 30 percent if others--like the United States--do the same. Japan's new prime minister likewise has promised 25 percent reductions by 2020 if others do the same. Obama didn't mention a number, but the Waxman-Markey bill, which he supports, would deliver less than 5 percent reductions by 2020. Obama's silence--doubtless a function of the fact that Republicans are implacably opposed to serious emissions cuts--allowed Hu to claim the higher ground at the UN. Hu went further than any Chinese leader has before, pledging to curb greenhouse gas emissions growth by a "notable margin" by 2020. Obama dropped his own bombshell, however, urging that all G-20 governments phase out subsidies for fossil fuels. "The time we have to reverse this tide is running out," Obama declared. Alas, the WBGU study suggests that our time is in fact all but gone.
Obama, like other G-8 leaders, agreed in July to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial level at which human civilization developed. Schellnhuber, addressing the Santa Fe conference, joked that the G-8 leaders had agreed to the 2C limit "probably because they don't know what it means." In fact, even the "brutal" timeline of the WBGU study, Schellnhuber cautioned, would not guarantee staying within the 2C target. It would merely give humanity a two-out-of-three chance of doing so--"worse odds than Russian roulette," he wryly noted. "But it is the best we can do." To have a three-out-of-four chance, countries would have to quit carbon even sooner. Likewise, we could decide to wait another decade or so to halt all greenhouse emissions, but this lowers the odds of hitting the 2C target to fifty-fifty. "And what kind of precautionary principle is that?" Schellnhuber asked.
There is a fundamental political assumption underlying the WBGU study: that the right to emit greenhouse gases is shared equally by all people on earth. Known in diplomatic circles as "the per capita principle," this approach has long been insisted upon by China and most other developing countries and thus is seen as essential to an agreement in Copenhagen, though among G-8 leaders only Merkel has endorsed it. The WBGU study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion people and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per person. That's harsh news for Americans, who emit 20 tons per person annually, and it explains why the US deadline is the most imminent. But China won't welcome this news either. Its combination of high annual emissions and huge population gives it a deadline only a few years later than Europe's and Japan's.
"I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers," Schellnhuber said. He urges governments to agree in Copenhagen to launch "a Green Apollo Project." Like John Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon in ten years, a global Green Apollo Project would aim to put leading economies on a trajectory of zero carbon emissions within ten years. Combined with carbon trading with low-emissions countries, Schellnhuber says, such a "wartime mobilization" might still save us from the worst impacts of climate change. The alternative is more and more "Oh, shit" moments for all of us.
Study
About Mark Hertsgaard
Mark Hertsgaard (markhertsgaard.com), a fellow of The Nation Institute and The Nation's environment correspondent, is the author of five books, which have been translated into sixteen languages. His next book, Living Through the Storm: How We Survive the Next 50 Years of Climate Change, is forthcoming from Houghton-Mifflin.
Population and water
By Peter Gleick, President of the Pacific Institute
Population discussions raise lots of hackles. And they bring the crazies out of the woodwork like termites when the Orkin Man appears. But I hope to post a series of pieces on population and water because we must stop ignoring the role of population in our environmental and water problems.
The amount of water on Earth is fixed. We're not losing it to space and we're not getting more (with negligible exceptions). The amount of water in a river basin or watershed is fixed. It goes up and down with natural variability, and it may change over time due to climate changes, but water is a renewable resources and our use of it does not affect the amount we get next year.
But population is not fixed. It is growing, and growing rapidly in some places. As a result, the amount of water available per person ("per capita") is declining. Here is a simple example: assume that the average flow of water in a river basin is 10 million acre-feet per year and the population using that water is 20 million people. Then on average, the water available for use is around 450 gallons per person per day, if you could use it all (which would, of course, destroy the river ecosystem, but that's another topic). If the population of the basin doubles to 40 million, the water availability per person drops in half, to around 225 gallons per person per day. If the population doubles again, water availability drops to just over 100 gallons per person per day. The math is easy, but the consequences can be severe: abundance can become shortage. In simple terms, addressing water problems in the face of population growth come down to three choices: (1) increase the water supply, (2) decrease the water demand per person, or (3) change the number of people. Water policy in the past century focused only on increasing supply. Most of the work of the Pacific Institute has focused on the second because we believe the options for new supply in most places are increasingly limited, expensive, and environmentally damaging, and we see enormous potential for reducing demand. Almost no discussion, anywhere, focuses on the third choice. But the failure to address population in the long run will be disastrous. And the "long-run" is no longer so far away.
Water (Population) Numbers: While total water availability remains fixed, the population of the United States has grown from around 150 million in 1950 to over 305 million today. The population of California in 1950 was 10.5 million; today it is around 37 million. The population of the state of Georgia in 1950 was under 4 million; today it is approaching 10 million. The population of Jordan in 1960 was around a million; today it is 6 million. The population of Israel in 1960 was just over 2 million; today it exceeds 7 million. The population of Iraq in 1960 was around 7.3 million; today it exceeds 31 million.
Is it any wonder that California's, or Georgia's, or the Middle East's water problems have worsened?
In a recent paper, Richard Seager of Columbia and his colleagues analyzed the recent drought in the southeastern United States. This drought led to water use restrictions, depleted flows in the major river basins of the region, and growing political tensions over water sharing between Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. The authors of this paper concluded that the recent drought in the Southeast was not climatologically different from past droughts, but was felt more severely largely due to the growth in population in the region. In July, a Federal judge ruled that Atlanta had to fundamentally change the way it obtains its water, and noted that
"Too often, state, local, and even national government actors do not consider the long-term consequences of their decisions. Local governments allow unchecked growth because it increases tax revenue, but these same governments do not sufficiently plan for the resources such unchecked growth will require. Nor do individual citizens consider frequently enough their consumption of our scarce resources, absent a crisis situation such as that experienced in the ACF basin in the last few years. The problems faced in the ACF basin will continue to be repeated throughout this country, as the population grows and more undeveloped land is developed. Only by cooperating, planning, and conserving can we avoid the situations that gave rise to this litigation." (emphasis added)
Climate change is going to cause serious impacts on water resources, but even without it, we are running up against water constraints that will worsen if we continue to ignore the population elephant in the room.
More to come.
Peter Gleick
Restoring an Ailing River in California
By Jeremy Miller
For the first time in 60 years, water will flow through two long stretches of the San Joaquin River in California, a waterway that has been transformed — and often run dry — by engineering and agricultural, industrial and urban development.
This month, water surges were released from Friant Dam, near Fresno, into the San Joaquin River’s main channel. The releases come after nearly two decades of negotiations between the Natural Resources Defense Council, the federal Bureau of Reclamation and the Friant Water Users Authority, a group representing agricultural water users in the area.
Local farmers are troubled at the loss of water from the Friant-Kern and Madera canal systems, especially in light of a three-year drought that has ravaged the Central Valley’s croplands. But environmentalists say the releases are a vital first step in an immense restoration plan for the San Joaquin — one with the potential to stimulate the regional economy.
“The restoration effort will create construction-related jobs, help revive the commercial salmon fishing industry and bring a vital public resource back to life for future generations to enjoy,” said Monty Schmitt, a scientist for the council, in a statement.
In March, $400 million in funds for restoration and flood control work on the San Joaquin were made available with the passage by Congress of the Omnibus Public Lands Management Act, which also added 2 million acres of land in nine states to the nation’s wilderness areas.
The decline of the San Joaquin began in the late 1930s with the state’s huge Central Valley Project, which resulted in dozens of dams and hydroelectric plants, and hundreds of miles of aqueducts and canals on the valley’s two major watersheds –- the San Joaquin and the Sacramento.
According to Tina Swanson, the executive director of the Bay Institute, this will be the largest river restoration project in the country and will focus on a 150-mile stretch between Friant Dam and its former confluence with the Merced River.
In two reaches totaling 63 miles, the river runs completely dry; in sections where water remains, it is often badly polluted with pesticides and other agricultural chemicals (PDF).
“The project is unprecedented,” Ms. Swanson said. “In essence we are bringing a dead river back to life.”
Environmentalists say that restoring flow to the entire length of the San Joaquin will not only flush out polluted stretches and potentially rejuvenate the region’s historic salmon runs, but will also help stabilize water conditions in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta, the river’s natural endpoint and origin of the California Aqueduct, which brings drinking water 450 miles to 22 million residents in Southern California.
Chinook salmon, said Ms. Swanson, are planned for reintroduction to the river in 2013.
“The true measure of success will be the ecosystems,” she said. “If we can bring back a self-sustaining, spawning population of fish, we will have done our job.”
Tuesday, October 13, 2009
Cleansing the Air at the Expense of Waterways
MASONTOWN, Pa. — For years, residents here complained about the yellow smoke pouring from the tall chimneys of the nearby coal-fired power plant, which left a film on their cars and pebbles of coal waste in their yards. Five states — including New York and New Jersey — sued the plant’s owner, Allegheny Energy, claiming the air pollution was causing respiratory diseases and acid rain.
So three years ago, when Allegheny Energy decided to install scrubbers to clean the plant’s air emissions, environmentalists were overjoyed. The technology would spray water and chemicals through the plant’s chimneys, trapping more than 150,000 tons of pollutants each year before they escaped into the sky.
But the cleaner air has come at a cost. Each day since the equipment was switched on in June, the company has dumped tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater containing chemicals from the scrubbing process into the Monongahela River, which provides drinking water to 350,000 people and flows into Pittsburgh, 40 miles to the north.
“It’s like they decided to spare us having to breathe in these poisons, but now we have to drink them instead,” said Philip Coleman, who lives about 15 miles from the plant and has asked a state judge to toughen the facility’s pollution regulations. “We can’t escape.”
Even as a growing number of coal-burning power plants around the nation have moved to reduce their air emissions, many of them are creating another problem: water pollution. Power plants are the nation’s biggest producer of toxic waste, surpassing industries like plastic and paint manufacturing and chemical plants, according to a New York Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data.
Much power plant waste once went into the sky, but because of toughened air pollution laws, it now often goes into lakes and rivers, or into landfills that have leaked into nearby groundwater, say regulators and environmentalists.
Officials at the plant here in southwest Pennsylvania — named Hatfield’s Ferry — say it does not pose any health or environmental risks because they have installed equipment to limit the toxins the facility releases into the Monongahela River and elsewhere.
But as the number of scrubbers around the nation increases, environmentalists — including those in Pennsylvania — have become worried. The Environmental Protection Agency projects that by next year, roughly 50 percent of coal-generated electricity in the United States will come from plants that use scrubbers or similar technologies, creating vast new sources of wastewater.
Yet no federal regulations specifically govern the disposal of power plant discharges into waterways or landfills. Some regulators have used laws like the Clean Water Act to combat such pollution. But those laws can prove inadequate, say regulators, because they do not mandate limits on the most dangerous chemicals in power plant waste, like arsenic and lead.
For instance, only one in 43 power plants and other electric utilities across the nation must limit how much barium they dump into nearby waterways, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. records. Barium, which is commonly found in power plant waste and scrubber wastewater, has been linked to heart problems and diseases in other organs.
Even when power plant emissions are regulated by the Clean Water Act, plants have often violated that law without paying fines or facing other penalties. Ninety percent of 313 coal-fired power plants that have violated the Clean Water Act since 2004 were not fined or otherwise sanctioned by federal or state regulators, according to a Times analysis of Environmental Protection Agency records. (An interactive database of power plant violations around the nation is available at www.nytimes.com/coalplants.)
Fines for Plants Modest
Other plants have paid only modest fines. For instance, Hatfield’s Ferry has violated the Clean Water Act 33 times since 2006. For those violations, the company paid less than $26,000. During that same period, the plant’s parent company earned $1.1 billion.
“We know that coal waste is so dangerous that we don’t want it in the air, and that’s why we’ve told power plants they have to install scrubbers,” said Senator Barbara Boxer, the California Democrat who is chairwoman of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. “So why are they dumping the same waste into people’s water?”
Though the Environmental Protection Agency promised earlier this decade to consider new regulations on power plant waste — and reiterated that pledge after a Tennessee dam break sent 1.1 billion gallons of coal waste into farms and homes last year — federal regulators have yet to issue any major new rules.
One reason is that some state governments have long fought new federal regulations, often at the behest of energy executives, say environmentalists and regulators.
The counties surrounding Hatfield’s Ferry, which are home to multiple universities, are an example of what hangs in the balance as this debate plays out.
Last year, when Hatfield’s Ferry asked the state for permission to dump scrubber wastewater into the Monongahela River, the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection approved the request with proposed limits on some chemicals.
But state officials placed no limits on water discharges of arsenic, aluminum, boron, chromium, manganese, nickel or other chemicals that have been linked to health risks, all of which have been detected in the plant’s wastewater samples, according to state documents.
Records show, and company officials concede, that Hatfield’s Ferry is already dumping scrubber wastewater into the Monongahela that violates the state’s few proposed pollution rules. Moreover, those rules have been suspended until a judge decides on the plant’s appeal of the proposed limits.
“You can get used to the plant, and the noise and soot on your cars,” said Father Rodney Torbic, the priest at the St. George Serbian Orthodox Church, across the road from Hatfield’s Ferry. “But I see people suffering every day because of this pollution.”
Officials at Hatfield’s Ferry say there is no reason for residents to be concerned. They say that lawsuits against the plant are without merit, and that they have installed a $25 million water treatment plant that removes many of the toxic particles and solids from scrubber wastewater. The solids are put into a 106-acre landfill that contains a synthetic liner to prevent leaks.
Officials say that the plant’s pollution does not pose any risk. Limits on arsenic, aluminum, barium, boron, cadmium, chromium, manganese and nickel are not appropriate, the company wrote in a statement, because the plant’s wastewater is not likely to cause the Monongahela River to exceed safety levels for those contaminants.
“Allegheny has installed state-of-the-art scrubbers, state-of-the-art wastewater treatment, and state-of-the-art synthetic liners,” the company wrote in a statement. “We operate to be in compliance with all environmental laws and will continue to do so.”
The plant’s water treatment facility, however, does not remove all dissolved metals and chemicals, many of which go into the river, executives concede. An analysis of records from other plants with scrubbers indicates that such wastewater often contains high concentrations of dissolved arsenic, barium, boron, iron, manganese, cadmium, magnesium and other heavy metals that have been shown to contribute to cancer, organ failures and other diseases. Company officials say the emissions by the plant will not pose health risks, because they will be diluted in the river.
Though synthetic liners are generally considered effective at preventing leaks, environmentalists note that the Hatfield’s Ferry landfill is less than a mile uphill from the river, and that over time, other types of liners have proven less reliable than initially hoped.
The Environmental Protection Agency, in a statement last month, said it planned to revise standards for water discharges from coal-fired power plants like Hatfield’s Ferry. Agency studies have concluded that “current regulations, which were issued in 1982, have not kept pace with changes that have occurred in the electric power industry,” officials wrote.
But some environmentalists and lawmakers say that such rules will not be enough, and that new laws are needed that force plants to use more expensive technologies that essentially eliminate toxic discharges.
Cleaning Up Pollution
“It’s really important to set a precedent that tells power plants that they need to genuinely clean up pollution, rather than just shift it from the air to the water,” said Abigail Dillen, a lawyer with the law firm Earthjustice, which represents two advocacy organizations, the Environmental Integrity Project and the Citizens Coal Council, in asking a Pennsylvania court to toughen regulations on Hatfield’s Ferry.
Ms. Dillen, like other environmentalists, has urged courts and lawmakers to force plants to adopt “zero discharge” treatment facilities, which are more expensive but can eliminate most pollution.
State officials say they have established appropriate water pollution limits for Hatfield’s Ferry, and have strict standards for landfill disposal.
“We asked the plant for estimates on how much of various pollutants they are likely to emit, and based on those estimates, we set limits that are protective of the Monongahela,” said Ron Schwartz, a state environmental official. “We have asked them to monitor some chemicals, including arsenic, and if levels grow too high, we may intervene.”
However, environmental groups have argued in court documents and interviews that Hatfield’s Ferry probably will emit dangerous chemicals, and that they fear the state is unlikely to intervene.
Similar problems have emerged elsewhere. Twenty-one power plants in 10 states, including Alabama, Kentucky, North Carolina and Ohio, have dumped arsenic into rivers or other waters at concentrations as much as 18 times the federal drinking water standard, according to a Times analysis of E.P.A. data.
In Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Maryland, North Carolina, Ohio, Wisconsin and elsewhere, power plants have dumped other chemicals at dangerous concentrations. Few of those plants have ever been sanctioned for those emissions, nor were their discharge permits altered to prevent future pollution.
Records indicate that power plant landfills and other disposal practices have polluted groundwater in more than a dozen states, contaminating the water in some towns with toxic chemicals. A 2007 report published by the E.P.A. suggested that people living near some power plant landfills faced a cancer risk 2,000 times higher than federal health standards.
Lobbyists Block Controls
In 2000, Environmental Protection Agency officials tried to issue stricter controls on power plant waste. But a lobbying campaign by the coal and power industries, as well as public officials in 13 states, blocked the effort. In 2008 alone, according to campaign finance reports, power companies donated $20 million to the political campaigns of federal lawmakers, almost evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.
In interviews, E.P.A. officials said that toughening pollution rules for power plants was among their top priorities. Last month, the agency announced it was moving forward on new rules regulating greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of power plants and other large industrial facilities. Lisa P. Jackson, who was confirmed to head the agency in January, has said she would determine by the end of the year whether certain power plant byproducts should be treated as hazardous waste, which would subject them to tougher regulations.
But for now, there are no new rules on power plant waste. And many states are trying to dissuade Ms. Jackson from creating new regulations, according to state and federal regulators, because they worry that new rules will burden overworked regulators, and because power plants have pressured local politicians to fight greater regulation.
For instance, Pennsylvania has opposed designating the waste from Hatfield’s Ferry and other power plants as hazardous. In a statement, the Department of Environmental Protection said the state had “sufficient state and federal laws and regulations at our disposal to control wastewater discharges at levels protective of the environment and public health.”
But residents living near power plants disagree.
“Americans want cheap electricity, but those of us who live around power plants are the ones who have to pay for it,” Mr. Coleman said. “It’s like being in the third world.”
Thursday, October 8, 2009
Mountain deserves saving
The Choinumni have a name for the rocky mountain at the base of the Sierra. They call it Wahahlish, meaning "someone cried."
Once the mountain -- and its wildflowers, burrowing owls, coyotes, rattlesnakes and native artifacts -- belonged to the Choinumni, a Yokut tribe whose members lived in villages near the Kings River but also looked for food in the adjoining foothills.
Now Jesse Morrow Mountain belongs to Cemex, which wants to mine and process aggregate there -- an operation that would consume about 40% of the acreage, spoil the views, foul the air and overload local roads.
But, while the global cement company holds title to the land, the mountain really belongs to everybody who has -- or might yet -- admire its beauty.
Yes, this humble mountain belongs to the thousands of tourists motoring along Highway 180 to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National parks. It's the first peak they see as they climb into the Sierra.
It also belongs to the folks who follow the Blossom Trail each spring. And to the people in the bed-and-breakfast stops who soak up the sight of rows of wine grapes finally giving way to the mountain.
Now, nearly a decade after another sand-and-gravel company bought the mountain and its 2,000 acres for $2 million from a cattle rancher, Cemex wants to cash in.
The time to preserve Jesse Morrow Mountain and to stop all who would ruin it is now. Fresno County released the draft environmental impact report for the proposed project Friday, and you have until Dec. 1 to voice your opinions on the county's findings.
Tonight the county will pass out information from the report and accept written citizen comments in a 90-minute meeting that will start at 6 o'clock in the Sanger High School multipurpose room.
Four county planners and two consultants will be available to answer questions one on one, but county planning officials aren't planning a mass discussion of concerns.
"It's peculiar we have a process that minimizes public engagement," Fresno County Supervisor Henry R. Perea says. "It didn't work well for the dairy ordinance" passed by the supervisors in 2007. "The strategy was not to let the people speak. That didn't work; it's not going to work now."
The report, which totals more than 700 pages, has been in the making for several years. It talks a lot about steps Cemex could take to lessen the destruction.
But it concludes that there would be "significant and unavoidable impacts" to the mountain's topography and vegetation. There also would be substantial harm to air, traffic and Choinumni cultural resources.
And while berms would hide some of the mining work while it's in progress, the end result would be a carved-up mountain.
In the report is a snapshot of a proposed deal between the mine operators and the Choinumni: the company would lease 40 acres on the mountain's north side to the tribe for $1 a year for a cultural preservation center and give $40,000 for the first 400,000 metric tons of aggregate shipped from the site. When the mine has all of its permits, the tribe would receive title to the 40 acres.
Grass-roots opposition to mining the mountain emerged when the project was announced in 2002. But volunteer efforts often are no match for corporations with deep pockets, expert lawyers -- and the support of elected officials who've accepted their campaign donations.
Supporters of the mining operation say that there is a shortage of aggregate in Fresno County. They claim that without this mine, building costs will go up. The operation would also create jobs and provide work for haulers.
But what about agricultural tourism, a job cluster that the Board of Supervisors claims to support? With spoiled views and more traffic, the mine might cost more jobs than it produces.
Besides, what price can you put on the sight of this mountain, its green slopes alive with the promise of all that is right with the world on a spring day? Why must Fresno County always cave to the wishes of the profiteers?
Once in awhile, we must protect what is ours. This is such a time. Jesse Morrow Mountain belongs to all of us.
The columnist can be reached at bmcewen@fresnobee.com or (559) 441-6632. His blog is at fresnobeehive.com.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
