Author Archives: IvoryT33yv

California Could Be the Next Saudi Arabia

by IvoryT33yv Posted on November 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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In the early 1980s, Saudi Arabia embarked upon a bold project: It began to transform large swaths of desert landscape into wheat farms.

Now, “desert agriculture” isn’t quite the oxymoron it might sound like. These arid zones offer ample sunlight and cool nights, and harbor few crop-chomping insects, fungal diseases, or weed species. As long as you can strategically add water and fertilizer, you’ll generate bin-busting crops. And that’s exactly what Saudi Arabia did. As this Bloomberg News piece shows, the oil-producing behemoth grew so much wheat for about two decades that “its exports could feed Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman, and Yemen.”

But starting in the mid-2000s, Saudi wheat production began to taper off. Soon after, it plunged. This year and from now on, the country will produce virtually no wheat, and instead rely on global markets for the staple grain. What happened?

In short, to irrigate its wheat-growing binge, the nation tapped aquifers that “haven’t been filled since the last Ice Age,” Bloomberg reports. And in doing so, it essentially drained them dry in the span of two decades.

In an April 2015 piece, the Center for Investigative Reporting’s Nathan Halverson brought more details. He writes that the first sign of Saudi agriculture’s water crisis began in the early 2000s,when long-established desert springs—ones that had “bubbled up for thousands of years from a massive aquifer system that lay underneath Saudi Arabia”—began to dry up. It had been “one of the world’s largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie.” Here’s Halverson:

In the historic town of Tayma, which was built atop a desert oasis mentioned several times in the Old Testament, researchers in 2011 found “most wells exsiccated.” That’s academic speak for “bone dry.” The once-verdant Tayma oasis that had sustained human life for millennia—archaeologists have found stone tablets there dating back 2,500 years—was drained in one generation.

In the meantime, farmers’ wells, too, began to go dry, and they had to drill them ever-deeper to keep the water flowing. By 2012, fully four-fifths of the ancient aquifer had vanished; and the Saudi government had begun to reconsider its make-the-desert-bloom ambitions, which have now turned to dust.

Here in the United States, we’ve followed a similar strategy for fruit, vegetable, and nut production, concentrating it in arid regions of California, irrigated by diverting river water over great distances, and, like the Saudis, tapping massive ancient aquifers. But climate change means less snow to feed rivers and thus to water farms—and more reliance on those underwater reserves. In California’s vast Central Valley, a major site of US food production, fully half of wells are at or below historic lows, according to the US Geological Survey. It’s impossible to know when the region’s aquifers will go dry, because no one has invested in the research required to gauge just how much water is left. But the trend is clear. In large swaths of the region, the land is sinking at rates up to 11 inches per year as underground water vanishes, USGS reports. The raiding of the region’s water reserve is part of a decades-long trend, USGS makes clear, made worse, but not caused, by the current drought.

Two other California regions are significant suppliers to the national food market: the Salinas Valley, known as the “salad bowl of the world”; and the Imperial Valley, which specializes in fresh winter produce. They, too, face severe long-term water trouble.

Unlike their Saudi peers, US policymakers don’t have the luxury of waiting until the water runs out and then simply shifting to a reliance on imports—our population is more than ten times larger. One idea for what to do instead: Enact policies that boost vegetable production in other, more water-rich regions, including the Midwest and South—a process I have dubbed de-Californiacation. To bolster themselves, they may want to ponder what’s scribbled on the ruins of a vanished desert kingdom, as imagined by the Romantic poet Shelley: “My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!”

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California Could Be the Next Saudi Arabia

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Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

by IvoryT33yv Posted on April 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story originally appeared on the Huffington Post and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Tom Steyer’s climate-focused political group is already gearing up for the 2016 presidential race, announcing on Monday a new effort that will focus on putting Republican candidates on the defense when it comes to global warming.

NextGen Climate’s chief strategist, Chris Lehane, said in a call with reporters that the group’s mission heading into 2016 is to “disqualify” candidates who deny that climate change is real or caused by human activity by proving that “they don’t have what it takes to be president.” The effort will be called Hot Seat, and NextGen Climate says it will involve media and on-the-ground campaigns in key electoral states aimed at linking Republican deniers to the Koch brothers and other interests that seek to undermine climate science.

The idea, NextGen says, is to force Republican candidates who are skeptical of climate change to defend their views right out of the gate.

“If you’re in a position that is different from 97 percent of scientists, that does raise basic competency questions in terms of whether people are going to want to give you the keys to the White House,” said Lehane.

Their first target, Lehane said, is Rand Paul, who is expected to announce his candidacy Tuesday in Louisville, Kentucky. The group is planning to hit Paul with a stunt involving a “lie detector test” to force him to go on the record about his views on climate change, and will also follow the candidate to Iowa. Paul has previously questioned the consensus view among scientists that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the climate, but has also tried to moderate his stance somewhat in recent months.

The group intends to portray Republican candidates who deny climate change as being subservient to the will of major donors like the Koch brothers, the conservative fossil-fuel billionaires. “The Kochs have acquired the Republican Party and purposed it,” said Lehane. “Now they have these various Republican candidates saying they don’t believe in the science.”

Through his NextGen Climate project, billionaire investor Steyer spent more than $74 million trying to make climate change a central issue in the 2014 midterm election. The group’s effort had decidedly mixed results: Of the seven races it targeted, NextGen’s endorsed candidates won in only three. But the group has maintained that 2014 was a success, since Republican candidates were forced to go on the record about their views on climate change.

“Climate really is playing a significant role in the national election and in battleground states,” said Lehane. He noted that 2014 was the “first time that climate had really been elevated to that level in the election, where folks who believe the science were able to use it offensively, and deniers were on defense.”

In 2014, NextGen’s efforts included major television and online ad buys, as well as in-state spectacles such as following Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown’s campaign around New Hampshire in a truck loaded with oil barrels and rolling a replica of Noah’s Ark into Florida to confront Republican Gov. Rick Scott.

The group thinks that 2016 will be an even bigger year for climate, given the higher turnouts in presidential election years and the role young voters will play in the debate. Polls have found that 80 percent of voters under the age of 35 support the actions the Obama administration has taken to address climate change, and even 52 percent of young Republican voters said they were more inclined to back a candidate who supported those climate efforts.

Lehane was coy about how much Steyer intends to spend this time around, stating only that “he’s made pretty clear he will spend what it takes.” It was strongly implied that the dollar figure would be higher than it was in 2014, as the group believes that 2016 is “the defining election of our time.”

Hot Seat will include an “aggressive, state-of-the-art social media” element as well as “highly targeted” radio, television and online advertising, Lehane said. The group also plans to have a strong presence on college campuses and to engage in targeted outreach to young voters. The effort will be run from a “high-tech war room” in San Francisco.

NextGen is already planning to follow Scott Walker, the Republican governor of Wisconsin and a potential 2016 candidate, as he travels to Europe later this month. Lehane didn’t elaborate on the group’s intentions for Walker’s trip, but said, “I can at the minimum guarantee it will be highly entertaining.”

Originally posted here: 

Tom Steyer Is Taking on the Climate Deniers Running for President

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Are Republicans Really Ready to Embrace Net Neutrality?

by IvoryT33yv Posted on December 19, 2014

Mother Jones

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Well, this is unexpected. Democrats are generally in favor of net neutrality, the principle that all websites should be treated equally by internet service providers. Companies can’t pay extra for faster service and ISPs can’t slow down or block sites they don’t like. Naturally, since Democrats are in favor of this, Republicans are opposed. But maybe not all that opposed:

Republicans in Congress appear likely to introduce legislation next month aimed at preventing Internet providers from speeding up some Web sites over others….Industry officials said they are discussing details of the proposal with several Republican lawmakers, whom they declined to name. The officials also said the proposal is being backed by several large telecommunications companies, which they also declined to name.

One important piece of the proposed legislation would establish a new way for the FCC to regulate broadband providers by creating a separate provision of the Communications Act known as “Title X,” the people said. Title X would enshrine elements of the tough net neutrality principles called for by President Obama last month. For example, it would give FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler the authority to prevent broadband companies from blocking or slowing traffic to Web sites, or charging content companies such as Netflix for faster access to their subscribers — a tactic known as “paid prioritization.”

….“Consensus on this issue is really not that far apart,” said an industry official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the talks were ongoing. “There’s common understanding that rules are needed to protect consumers.”

Huh. I wonder if this is for real? The reported price for supporting this legislation is relatively small: the FCC would be prohibited from regulating the internet as a common carrier under Title II, something that even net neutrality supporters agree is problematic. The problem is that although Title II would indeed enshrine net neutrality, it comes with a ton of baggage that was designed for telephone networks and doesn’t really translate well to the internet. This would require a lot of “regulatory forbearance” from the FCC, which is almost certain to end up being pretty messy. A new net-centric Title X, if it truly implements net neutrality, would be a much better solution. It would also be immune to court challenges.

One possibility for such a law would be a modified version of net neutrality. My sense has always been that the real goal of net neutrality supporters is to make sure that internet providers don’t provide fast lanes for companies willing to pay more, and don’t slow down or block companies they dislike (perhaps because the companies provide services they compete with). At the same time, everyone acknowledges that video requires a lot of bandwidth, and internet providers legitimately need incentives to build out their networks to handle the growing data demands of video. So why not have content-neutral rules that set tariffs based on the type of service provided? Video providers might have to pay more than, say, Joe’s Cafe, but all video providers would pay the same rate based on how much traffic they dump on the net. That rate would be subject to regulatory approval to prevent abuse.

I dunno. Maybe that’s too complicated. Maybe it’s too hard to figure out traffic levels in a consistent way, and too hard to figure out how much video makes you a video provider. Maybe rules like this are too easy to game. In the end, it could be that the best bet is to simply agree on strong net neutrality, and then let ISPs charge their customers for bandwidth. If you watch a ton of Netflix, you’re going to pay more. If you just check email once a day, you’ll get a cheap plan.

In any case, it’s interesting that President Obama’s announcement of support for strong net neutrality has really had an effect. It apparently motivated the FCC to get more serious about Title II regulation, and this in turn has motivated the industry to concede the net neutrality fight as long as they can win congressional approval of a more reasonable set of rules. The devil is in the details, of course, and I have no doubt that industry lobbyists will do their best to craft rules favorable to themselves. Luckily, there’s a limit to how far they can go since it will almost certainly require Democratic support to pass a bill.

Anyway, this is all just rumors and reports of rumors at this point. Stay tuned to see if it actually pans out.

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Are Republicans Really Ready to Embrace Net Neutrality?

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