Author Archives: LannyCurtiss

Breaking: California Farmers Agree to Water Cuts

Mother Jones

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As California endures its fourth year of grueling drought, officials are getting more serious about mandatory water cuts. Gov. Jerry Brown imposed the state’s first-ever water restrictions last month, ordering cities and towns to cut water by 25 percent. But the vast majority of water in California goes not to homes and businesses but to farms, which so far have suffered minimal cuts.

Today, the state’s Water Board approved a deal with farmers in the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta in which some farmers will voluntarily reduce water use by 25 percent in exchange for assurances that they won’t suffer reductions later in the growing season. “We’re in a drought unprecedented in our times,” said Board Chair Felicia Marcus. “The action we’re announcing today is definitely unusual, but we are in unusual times.”

Here’s a primer on how farms are using water now, who holds rights to it, and what restrictions may come next.

How much water do California farms use?

Farms consume about 80 percent of the state’s water supply, and use it to grow half of the fruits and veggies that are produced in the United States. Almonds and alfalfa (cattle feed) use more than 15 percent of the state’s water.

What are water rights?

Water rights enable individuals, city water agencies, irrigation districts, and corporations to divert water directly from rivers or streams for free. The rights are based on a very old seniority system: “Senior” water rights holders are the first to get water and the last to suffer from cuts. There are two primary types of these senior holders: Those who started using the water before 1914 (when the water permit system was put in place), and “riparians,” who own property directly adjacent to streams or rivers. Water rights often, but don’t always, transfer with property sales.

Who are senior water rights holders?

Senior water rights holders are the corporations, individuals, or entities who either staked out the water before 1914, when the state started requiring permits and applications for water; those who live directly adjacent to a river or stream; or those who have bought property with senior water rights. This system made sense in the era of pioneers settling the Wild West: As the Associated Press recently put it, “Establishing an early right to California water was as simple as going ahead and diverting it. Paperwork came later. San Francisco got the Sierra Nevada water that turned its sand dunes into lush gardens by tacking a handwritten notice to a tree in 1902.” Today, there are thousands of senior water rights holders; most of them are corporations, many of which are farms. The holders include utilities company Pacific Gas and Electric, the San Francisco water agency, a number of rural irrigation districts, and Star Trek actor and rancher William Shatner.

What water cuts were announced today, and what’s coming next?

Today, the Water Board announced that it would accept a voluntary deal in which riparians in the 6,000-acre Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta (shown in the map below) would reduce their water use by 25 percent, or fallow 25 percent of their land. In exchange, the Water Board promised them that they wouldn’t suffer cuts in the coming year. There are about 1,000 water holders in the area who could be candidates for the deal, which will be enforced by a combination of a complaint system, satellite imagery, and spot checks.

In addition, the Board will announce mandatory curtailments to other senior water holders next week for the first time since the 1970s. The Board is still figuring out the location and percentage of these cuts.

So before today’s cuts, farmers were just using as much water as they wanted?

Well, not exactly. Farmers with “junior” (post-1914) rights in the San Joaquin and Sacramento River basins, home of the normally fertile Central Valley, were ordered to stop using the river’s water a month ago. But the regulations are enforced by the honor system and reported complaints; so far, only a fifth of junior water holders in the area have confirmed that they are complying.

The Department of Water Resources has also made substantial cuts to the state’s two major water projects—a system of aqueducts, dams, and canals across the state that distributes water from water-rich Northern California to the water-poor Central Valley. Growers who use water from the Central Valley Water Project are only receiving 20 percent of their allocated water, and farmers of the State Water Project aren’t receiving any at all.

All of this has led more and more farmers to rely almost exclusively on groundwater, but it’s undeniable that the drought has led to less farming overall: Last year, five percent of irrigated cropland went out of production, and officials expect that number to rise this year.

What is groundwater, and how much of it are farmers using?

Groundwater is the water that trickles down through the earth’s surface over the centuries, collecting in large underwater aquifers. It’s a savings account of sorts—good to have when it’s dry but difficult to refill—and it wasn’t regulated until last year, when Gov. Brown ordered local water agencies to come up with management plans. The water agencies are still in the process of implementing those plans, and in the meantime, no one knows exactly how much groundwater is being used. We do know this: Groundwater usually makes up about 40 percent of the state’s total freshwater usage, but lately, the state has been running on it. It made up 65 percent of freshwater use last year, and may make up as much as 75 percent this year. As a result of overpumping, the land is sinking—as much as a foot a year in some areas—and officials are worried that the changing landscape threatens the structural integrity of infrastructure like bridges, roads and train tracks.

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Breaking: California Farmers Agree to Water Cuts

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Garage Insulation: The Surprising Energy Saver

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Garage Insulation: The Surprising Energy Saver

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A Quick Note About the Future

Mother Jones

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Jus a quick note before I move on to another subject this morning. A fair number of comments to my list of predictions yesterday suggested that it made for pretty depressing reading. But I suspect that might have been due to my tone more than the actual content of the predictions themselves. There’s a bit of fuzziness here, but here’s how I’d classify them:

Basically positive: 1, 2, 5, 9, 11, 13
Neutral-ish: 4, 8, 10, 14
Basically negative: 3, 6, 7, 12, 15, 16

Obviously there’s room for debate here. For example, I count the development of artificial intelligence (#1) as a positive development, but I do concede that it will either “transform or destroy” the world. (The case for destroying the world is here.) On the neutralish side, you might think that super social media (#8) sounds great, not neutral, and if you’re Russian or Chinese you won’t think much of #14. On the negative side, the stagnation of manned space travel (#12) might strike you as a yawn, and although any kind of biological attack is bad (#16), I pretty much think we’ll be able to contain this threat.

In any case, you can argue about my categories. Still, I think by any fair measure I ended up with a roughly an even mix of good and bad, and that’s just the way the world is. If you made a similar list for 1900-1950 but did it in hindsight, you’d get electrification, mass-produced cars, and penicillin, but you’d also get the Great Depression, two massive world wars, the start of the Cold War, and the invention of nuclear bombs. It was hardly all roses.

I suspect that for most of us alive today, our attitudes are skewed by growing up in the period from 1950-2000. But this is the anomaly: obviously there was some bad stuff during this era, but the good far outweighed it. On a broad scale, it was almost certainly the most progressive and innovative half-century in human history. After all, we might have been bristling with nuclear weapons, but we never ended up using them, did we? And we made massive material and social progress around the globe, but didn’t yet have any big worries about climate change or terrorism. In hindsight, most of our fears turned out to be modest, while our progress was unprecedented. It’s possible that the period from 2000-2050 will repeat that, but at the very least I think the dangers of the next few decades are both real and deserve consideration.

For what it’s worth, though, virtually everything hinges on two things: the development of benign artificial intelligence and the development of clean, abundant energy. If we manage those two things, the world will be bright indeed.

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A Quick Note About the Future

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Westerners Are Flocking to Iraq’s Top Terror Group—and There Seems to Be Very Little We Can Do About It

Mother Jones

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In May, Moner Mohammed Abusalha, a 22-year-old American who had joined Jabhat al-Nusra, an Al-Qaeda-allied group in Syria, drove a bomb-laden truck into a restaurant in the northern province of Idlib, killing dozens.* Before carrying out this suicide bombing, the New York Times reported last week, Abusalha had briefly returned home to his native Florida. Abusalha’s story underscores a mounting concern among Western national security officials, for though he detonated his truck bomb in Syria he could have easily struck within the US. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Islamic State, the Sunni extremist group that has seized control of a swath of territory in Syria and northern Iraq, has enlisted thousands of fundamentalist volunteers from Germany, France, the Netherlands, Australia, the US, and elsewhere. Counterterrorism officials fear that jihadists like Abusalha, holding European Union or US passports, can all too easily return to their home countries and possibly import terrorism. US officials, says former New Jersey Gov. Tom Kean, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, are “scared, really scared.” FBI Director James Comey recently told reporters that the threat of Westerners with European Union and US passports joining the Islamic State “keeps me up at night” and that he believes another wave of September 11-style attacks are a possibility. Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News, “in some ways, it’s more frightening than anything I’ve seen as attorney general.”

Recruits have flocked to Baghdadi’s cause from places such as Austria, where in April, two girls, 15 and 16 years old, left their homes in Vienna and flew to Adana, Turkey, leaving notes saying they had “chosen the right path”—that is, they were likely trying to join up with the Islamic State. A month earlier, a young Austrian man, now a foot soldier in Baghdadi’s crusade, posted footage online of Islamic State fighters obliterating a Shia mosque in the Syrian city of Raqqa, according to Der Standard. All told, about 100 young Austrians have left the country to answer Baghdadi’s call for jihadist recruits.

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Westerners Are Flocking to Iraq’s Top Terror Group—and There Seems to Be Very Little We Can Do About It

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