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CHART: Withering Drought Still Plaguing Half of America

by gorso6 Posted on April 4, 2013

Mother Jones

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Click here for a larger version. James West

The $50 billion drought that bedeviled the country last Summer—the worst since the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s—still has its fingers around half the country. And if predictions are to be believed, it’s only going to get worse for many in the coming months.

Weekly drought figures released Thursday by the US Drought Monitor, a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the USDA and several other government and academic partners, show the situation has worsened slightly from last week, with nearly 52% of the continental US now suffering from a moderate drought or worse. Below-average winter snow pack and rainfall are keeping much of the country in a holding pattern. No measurable precipitation fell on most of central and northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, central and northern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and the Louisiana Bayou last week. Rain that fell in the West did nothing to alleviate the drought there; in fact, parts of western Oregon and southwestern Washington have reported their driest start to a calendar year on record. The forecast for the next two weeks? Dry and dry again.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s climate prediction center warns today that drought is likely to persist for much of the West and expand across northern California and southern Oregon. Although the numbers are more optimistic across eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, with some rain on the way, drought still has a strong grip on much of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona due to low snow-water (around 75% of normal) heading into spring and early summer. That is just the latest in a battery of warning signs that show another brutal summer on its way: California experienced its driest January-February period on record, and average winter temperatures across the contiguous US were 1.9°F above the 20th century average.

These figures come on the back of the spring outlook from NOAA released two weeks ago that point to hotter, drier conditions coming up across much of the US, and with that, flooding.

In many parts of the country, drought in fact never loosened its grip, imperiling the winter wheat crop that sustains much of the US wheat industry.

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CHART: Withering Drought Still Plaguing Half of America

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Two new bills aim to save California farmland from rampant sprawl

by gorso6 Posted on April 3, 2013

Two new bills aim to save California farmland from rampant sprawl

By Susie Cagle

California’s super-productive farmland is being overrun by development projects. Sprawly exurban housing development and even solar projects threaten to gobble up all the Golden State’s arable land. As of 2007, California was home to more than 25 million acres of cropland, but that’s shrinking by more than 1 percent each year, according to the American Farmland Trust.

All’s not lost, though: Two proposed bills could give a boost to California agriculture big and small, and potentially change the way the Golden State develops over the coming years.

First up: The Urban Agriculture Incentive Zone Act, AB 551. This would set up an optional program for counties to give residents breaks on their property taxes so long as they’re using the land to grow food. “One of the biggest obstacles to expanding urban agriculture within California is access to land. This legislation provides an incentive to private landowners to make more land available for urban agriculture, while at the same time enabling them to do so at a lowered cost, which is especially critical for the viability of commercial urban farms,” according to San Francisco based urban think tank SPUR.

For non-city dwellers, the California Farmland Protection Act, AB 823, packs a much bigger punch. The bill would require that developers protect one acre of farmland for every acre they build on, either by buying it themselves or bankrolling the purchase by another entity.

From the bill:

Dependent on land and natural resources, California agriculture is uniquely vulnerable to global warming. Global warming poses a serious threat to California agriculture with rising temperatures, constrained water resources, increases in extreme weather events, reduced winter chilling hours, and rising sea levels.

California agriculture is also uniquely positioned to provide climate benefits by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Research funded by the State Energy Resources Conservation and Development Commission’s Public Interest Energy Research program found that an acre of irrigated cropland emits 70 times fewer greenhouse gas emissions than an acre of urban land.

This bill wouldn’t just protect farms: It’s also an incentive to build more densely in a state that’s had a long history of serious suburb love. Save California farmland and grow its cities, all in one fell swoop? Yes, please.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Two new bills aim to save California farmland from rampant sprawl

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MAPS: Did Your Congressmember Vote Against The Violence Against Women Act?

by gorso6 Posted on March 2, 2013

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On Thursday, the House finally reauthorized the Violence Against Women Act—a full year and a half after it expired. VAWA had been held up by House Republicans in the last Congress after the Senate voted to add new provisions aiding Native American, immigrant, and gay victims of violence.

It looked as if the bill might suffer the same fate in the 113th Congress, after the House GOP leadership refused to schedule a vote on the version of the bill passed by the Senate 78 to 22, and instead pushed a stripped down version without protections for LGBT and Native American women. But in the end Republican lawmakers allowed a vote on the Senate’s legislation, and it passed on Thursday, 286 to 138. Not one Democrat in either chamber voted against it. (Though one representative abstained.)

One major change to VAWA that drew objections from House Republicans were steps to give tribal courts greater jurisdiction over domestic violence committed by non-native men on Native American lands. The National Congress of American Indians defines congressional districts as having a “high concentration” of Native Americans when the community makes up .3 to 23 percent of the population. (Only a few such districts are in the higher range; most are in the low single digits, according to NCAI.) Here is how members of Congress from those districts voted:

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The VAWA reauthorization also provides more access to services for immigrant victims of violence, and also helps them get special visas to stay in the US if they are victims of a serious crime. Here’s how representatives from districts where Latinos make up over 25 percent of the population voted (Source: Proximity):

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And here’s the full breakdown of Republican votes in the House and Senate against reauthorizing VAWA:

And finally, here’s a chart detailing how many of the Republican legislators voting against the bill were men, and how many were women:

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MAPS: Did Your Congressmember Vote Against The Violence Against Women Act?

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In South Dakota, Women Can’t Think on Weekends

by gorso6 Posted on March 1, 2013

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On Thursday, South Dakota lawmakers approved a bill that will make its waiting period for abortions—already the most restrictive in the country—even more cumbersome. As we have reported here previously, the state already has a 72-hour waiting period for women seeking an abortion, but this new bill will exclude weekends and holidays from that time period—since, you know, women are not capable of thinking about their abortion adequately on a Saturday or Sunday.

Current law already requires a woman to consult with her doctor, then visit an anti-abortion organization called a crisis pregnancy center, and then wait 72 hours before she can actually have an abortion. This new law, which passed in the Senate on Thursday by a 24 to 9 vote, will mean that a woman who goes in for her initial consultation for an abortion on a Wednesday would have to wait five days before she can have actually have the procedure—six if she goes in before a long weekend. The governor is expected to sign the bill into law.

South Dakota has only one abortion provider, a Planned Parenthood clinic in Sioux Falls, and its doctors fly in from out of state. Women already travel from as far as six hours away to reach the clinic. While the clinic has said that has been able to find a way to make the 72-hour waiting period work, it thinks this new law will make it next to impossible for many women to access an abortion.

“It could mean that abortion is virtually inaccessible for many women, if not all women,” Alisha Sedor, executive director of NARAL Pro-Choice South Dakota, told Mother Jones. “It doesn’t matter if abortion is legal in South Dakota if de facto women can’t access services.”

South Dakota voters have twice rejected a ban on abortion at the polls, in 2006 and 2008. But lawmakers have continued to chip away at access over the past few years. “South Dakotans have spoken on this issue and they do not want politicians interfering with the personal medical decision-making,” said Sarah Stoesz, president of Planned Parenthood Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota.

The new law’s critics have been having some fun on bill sponsor Jon Hansen’s Facebook page, asking him for advice about weekend decisions since their tiny woman brains obviously can’t handle them. Here are a few gems:

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In South Dakota, Women Can’t Think on Weekends

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Chart: Generational Attitudes on Sushi and Gay Marriage Correlate Almost Perfectly

by gorso6 Posted on February 27, 2013

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The younger you are, the more likely you are to support gay marriage. But what if there’s another dimension to this generational shift—the sushi gap? Raw data from a new survey of Americans’ food preferences shows that age-based unwillingness to put delicious uncooked fish in your mouth correlates nearly perfectly with existing data about who disapproves of marriage equality.

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Chart: Generational Attitudes on Sushi and Gay Marriage Correlate Almost Perfectly

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Boehner Did Not Rule Out Tax Revenues to Prevent Sequestration

by gorso6 Posted on February 25, 2013

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In recent days, as $1.2 trillion in automatic spending cuts—a.k.a. sequestration—have neared, Republicans have tried mightily to depict this indiscriminate slashing as President Barack Obama’s doing (while also accusing Obama of fear-mongering regarding the cuts’ recessionary impacts). They have gleefully asserted that it was the White House that first suggested sequestration as a means to resolve the debt ceiling impasse created by GOPers in 2011. But their accusation has been undermined by a fact recently highlighted in multiple media accounts: When they passed the sequestration bill, House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, the top GOPers in Congress, each accepted sequestration as it was designed—that is, as a legislative doomsday machine that would force a so-called congressional supercommittee to come up with a deficit reduction plan to supplant these deep across-the-board cuts in defense and nondefense spending.

But there is a GOP fallback claim: The sequestration-defusing plan cooked up by the supercommittee was not supposed to have any tax revenue hikes in it. Consequently, the Republicans maintain, Obama is disingenuous now to call for side-stepping the sequestration with a “balanced” approach that includes spending cuts and revenues. Indeed, Boehner and other GOPers crowed at the time that the debt ceiling deal did not include any tax hikes. Yet the deal Boehner approved did nothing to limit the supercommittee to considering only cuts for a sequestration-ducking plan. The legislation did allow for the possibility of revenue boosts. In a fact sheet, the White House was explicit on this point, noting the supercommittee would ponder “both entitlement reform and revenue-raising tax reform.” And Boehner essentially acknowledged that at the time.

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Boehner Did Not Rule Out Tax Revenues to Prevent Sequestration

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