Tag Archives: california

The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

by MWITeddyzlcxpgq Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Mudslides stranded hundreds of motorists on Southern California’s main north-south highway Thursday evening after severe thunderstorms rocked the area. Cleanup crews worked through the night to plow and scoop up the mud, but meteorologists say that thanks to California’s historic drought, widespread wildfires, and a potentially historic El Niño, this disaster could be just a taste of what’s to come this winter.

The rain was part of a slow-moving storm system that passed through the Los Angeles area Thursday afternoon and battered the mountains to the north of the city in Kern County. The result: flash floods that sent mud and debris flowing down hillsides and onto Interstate 5, as well as onto a smaller state highway. I-5 has been cleared and is waiting final inspection to re-open, but hundreds of cars are still stuck on the state highway.

According to National Weather Service meteorologist Robbie Munroe, it’s too soon to be certain how much we can blame El Niño for the storm—El Niño tends to affect the frequency of storms more than their severity. But if it is the beginning of of a wave of El Niño-linked rainstorms, Californians should start bracing for more flooding and mudslides. There are two reasons for this:

Normally, plants and trees are what hold the soil together, says Munroe. But drought and wildfires have decimated plant life in many areas of California. So when heavy rain flows down slopes, it brings mud and debris along with it.

Second, the drought has dried out and hardened the ground. This can be especially dangerous on hillsides and in canyons like the ones surrounding the highways buried by Thursday’s storm. Instead of being absorbed into the soil, rainwater deflects off of it and continues careening down the hill, picking up velocity and washing out whatever is in its path.

Munroe says there is one potential upside to yesterday’s storm: Rainfall early in the season could loosen the soil and rejuvenate ground cover, hopefully mitigating the destruction caused by the weather that will arrive later this winter.

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The Drought Is Making California Mudslides Even Worse

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Friday Cat Blogging – 16 October 2015

by EstelleGariepy Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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This morning, Hopper was busily scratching her cheek on this handy chair when a tail walked by. What’s a self-respecting cat to do? Snag at it with feline reflexes, of course. Hilbert was not amused. The funny part about this is that Hilbert attacks Hopper’s tail too, but as near as I can tell she never even notices. I think she must lack nerve endings in her tail or something.

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Friday Cat Blogging – 16 October 2015

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A Quick Look at Bush vs. Rubio vs. Cruz

by OmaOxleyih Posted on October 16, 2015

Mother Jones

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Who will be the Republican nominee for president? Beats me. GOP voters are obviously in a weird mood this year. But let’s suppose two things:

The folks who are currently polling below 3-4 percent have no chance.
The non-politicians will eventually fade out or implode. No Trump, no Carson, no Fiorina.

If—if!—those things are true, we’re left with Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Ted Cruz. So how are they doing? I was curious, so I took a look at only those three on HuffPost Pollster. I don’t really have any point to make, so I won’t make one. Just consider this raw data.

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A Quick Look at Bush vs. Rubio vs. Cruz

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The Benghazi Charade Is Finally Melting Away

by DenishaX72 Posted on October 15, 2015

Mother Jones

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Republican congressman Richard Hanna talks about the Benghazi committee today:

This may not be politically correct, but I think that there was a big part of this investigation that was designed to go after people and an individual, Hillary Clinton.

Hanna supports gay rights, so I suppose that basically makes him a Democrat who can be ignored on this subject. Still, the evidence that Republican leaders viewed the committee as mostly a way of making trouble for Hillary Clinton is sure getting tough to dismiss. Greg Sargent comments on how Team Hillary is exploiting this:

It isn’t just that Clinton is using the new GOP quotes to tar it as a partisan exercise and attack its credibility, though that is a key goal….The idea is to turn the ongoing Benghazi battle with Republicans into an emblem of her willingness to fight on in the face of determined opposition — thus playing to one of her strengths, i.e., perceptions of her tenaciousness.

Maybe. But I’d say there’s something else at work here. Do you remember Mitt Romney’s big problem back in 2012? He was perceived as too moderate by the base of the Republican Party. He addressed this by endlessly making over-the-top attacks on President Obama. The calculus was simple: the base hated Obama more than they distrusted Romney, so he could gain their trust by showing that he hated Obama more than anyone else.

Hillary is playing a similar game here. The Democratic base distrusts her, but they hate Republicans more than they distrust Hillary. By making it clear that she’s the primary target of Republican attacks, she’s tapping into that. If Republicans hate her more than anyone, she must have something going for her. Plus there’s just the Pavlovian instinct to defend any Democrat against Republican attacks. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Republicans have screwed the pooch on Benghazi. The press can only play along with their faux investigation as long as they maintain plausible deniability about its partisan goals. But now we have (a) Kevin McCarthy spilling the beans, (b) news reports that John Boehner wanted to use the committee to attack Hillary, (c) Richard Hanna agreeing that it was mostly a partisan witch hunt, and (d) no less than the New York Times reporting that the committee has all but given up on Benghazi in favor of holding hearings on Hillary’s email server. We knew all along there was a man behind the curtain, but now he’s actually been exposed. It’s getting harder and harder to play along with the charade.

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The Benghazi Charade Is Finally Melting Away

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This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

by ThelmaPenman Posted on October 14, 2015

Mother Jones

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In California, news of a historically powerful El Niño oceanic warming event is stoking hopes that winter rains will ease the state’s brutal drought. But for farmers in the Central Valley, one of the globe’s most productive agricultural regions, water troubles go much deeper—literally—than the current lack of precipitation.

That’s the message of an eye-popping report from researchers at the US Geological Survey. This chart tells the story:

USGS

To understand it, note that in the arid Central Valley, farmers get water to irrigate their crops in two ways. The first is through massive, government-built projects that deliver melted snow from the Sierra Nevada mountains. The second is by digging wells into the ground and pumping water from the region’s ancient aquifers. In theory, the aquifer water serves as a buffer—it keeps farming humming when (as has happened the last three years) the winter snows don’t come. When the snows return, the theory goes, irrigation water flows anew through canals, and the aquifers are allowed to refill.

But as the chart shows, the Central Valley’s underground water reserves are in a state of decline that predates the current drought by decades. The red line shows the change in underground water storage since the early 1960s; the green bars show how much water entered the Central Valley each year through the irrigation projects. Note how both vary during “wet” and “dry” times.

As you’d expect, underground water storage drops during dry years, as farmers resort to the pump to make up for lost irrigation allotments, and it rises during wet years, when the irrigation projects up their contribution. The problem is, aquifer recharge during wet years never fully replaces all that was taken away during dry times—meaning that the the Central Valley has surrendered a total of 100 cubic kilometers, or 811 million acre-feet, of underground water since 1962. That’s an average of about 1.5 million acre-feet of water annually extracted from finite underground reserves and not replaced by the Central Valley’s farms. By comparison, all of Los Angeles uses about 600,000 acre-feet of water per year. (An acre-foot is the amount needed to cover an acre of land with a foot of water).

The USGS authors note that the region’s farmers have gotten more efficient in their irrigation techniques over the past 20 years—using precisely placed drip tape, for example, instead of old techniques like flooding fields. But that positive step has been more than offset with a factor I’ve discussed many times: “the planting of permanent crops (vineyards and orchards), replacing non-permanent land uses such as rangeland, field crops, or row crops.” This is a reference to the ongoing expansion in acres devoted to almonds and pistachios, highly profitable crops that can’t be fallowed during dry times. To keep them churning out product during drought, orchard farmers revert to the pump.

The major takeaway is that the Valley’s farms can’t maintain business as usual—eventually, the water will run out. No one knows exactly when that point will be, because, as Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Institute of Technology, never tires of pointing out, no one has invested in the research required to measure just how much water is left beneath the Central Valley’s farms. Of course, averting this race to the bottom of the well is exactly why the California legislature voted last year to end the state’s wild-west water-drilling free-for-all and enact legislation requiring stressed watersheds like the Central Valley’s to reach “sustainable yield” by 2040. The downward meandering red line in the above graph, in other words, will have to flatten out pretty soon, and to get there, “dramatic changes will need to be made,” the USGS report states.

Meanwhile, one wet El Niño winter won’t do much to end the the decades-in-the-making drawdown of the Central Valley’s water horde. And people pining for heavy rains should be careful what they wish for—parts of the Central Valley, especially its almond-heavy southern regions, are notoriously vulnerable to disastrous flooding. Then there’s the unhappy fact that El Niño periods are often followed by La Niña events—which are associated with dry winters in California. The region could be “whiplashed from deluge back to drought again” in just one year’s time, Bill Patzert, a climatologist for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, recently told the Los Angeles Times. “Because remember, La Niña is the diva of drought,” he said. The last big El Niño ended in 1998, and as the above chart shows, what followed wasn’t pretty.

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This Devastating Chart Shows Why Even a Powerful El Niño Won’t Fix the Drought

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Here’s Why Sea World in San Diego Can’t Breed Killer Whales Any Longer

by coolmathgamesn Posted on October 9, 2015

Mother Jones

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You may have seen the news that Sea World in San Diego will no longer be allowed to breed killer whales:

After an all-day meeting that drew hundreds of supporters and critics of the park, the California Coastal Commission moved to ban captive whale breeding and drastically restrict the movement of whales in and out of the park.

The California Coastal Commission? Why do they have any say over Sea World’s orca breeding? One of the charmingly idiosyncratic aspects of governance in California is that the Coastal Commission regulates all construction done within about 1000 yards of the coastline. As you can see, Sea World is well within that boundary, and it so happens that they wanted to build a bigger tank for their killer whales. But they could only do this if the Coastal Commission approved it.

Still confused? Well, the initiative that created the Coastal Commission didn’t really put any boundaries on the commission’s power. They can pretty much cut any deal they want, which is why they’re so furiously hated by every gazillionaire who lives near the coast. In this case, their deal was this: you can build the bigger tank, but only if you stop breeding whales and don’t bring any new ones in. And that was that.

This has been today’s California Explainer for all you poor folks who are forced to live in less desirable parts of the country and don’t understand our tribal customs. You’re welcome.

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Here’s Why Sea World in San Diego Can’t Breed Killer Whales Any Longer

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California Is About to Stop People From Pumping So Many Drugs Into Meat

by CCAShanna4037376 Posted on October 8, 2015

Mother Jones

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After decades of ignoring a deadly problem, the Food and Drug Administration finally came out with rules restricting the meat industry’s heavy reliance on antibiotics back in 2012. But the new regime had two major flaws: (1) It was voluntary, relying on the benevolence of two industries (pharmaceuticals and meat) with long records of lobbying hard for their own interests, and (2) it contained a loophole that allowed meat producers to maintain their old antibiotic habit if they so desired.

Enter California, with new legislation—expected to be signed into law by Gov. Jerry Brown any day now—that would retract those regulatory gifts from the state’s teeming livestock farms.

The bill would make California’s regulation of animal antibiotic use more stringent than the federal government’s simply because it’s compulsory and not voluntary, according to Natural Resources Defense Council senior attorney Avinash Kar. But it also snaps shut the infamous “prevention” loophole in the FDA’s policy, he adds.

Antibiotics are used in three ways on factory livestock farms: (1) growth promotion—when animals get small daily doses of the the stuff, they grow faster; (2) disease prevention—animals stuffed together in stressful conditions are prone to infection, they pass diseases among themselves rapidly, and antibiotics provide a kind of pharmaceutical substitute for a natural robust immune system; and (3) disease treatment—an animal comes down with a bug and gets treated with antibiotics.

The FDA’s policy phases out growth promotion but leaves prevention intact—even though giving animals small daily doses of antibiotics to “prevent” disease is virtually indistinguishable from giving them small daily doses to promote growth. A 2014 Pew analysis found no fewer than 66 antibiotic products that the FDA allows to be used for “disease prevention” at levels that are “fully within the range of growth promotion dosages and with no limit on the duration of treatment.” In other words, you change the language you use to describe the practice and continue giving your herd of 4,000 confined pigs the same old daily dose of antibiotics.

The California bill, too, allows antibiotic use as “prophylaxis to address an elevated risk of contraction of a particular disease or infection,” but it adds an important qualification, Kar points out: The drugs can’t be used “in a regular pattern.” In other words, no more daily, indiscriminate dosing based on some vague notion of “prevention.” “We think this the “regular pattern” language puts serious restraint on the routine use of antibiotics,” Kar said.

The California law won’t have an immediate impact on national policy, Kar said, but he pointed out that the bill’s passage might embolden several other states with significant livestock production, including Oregon and Maryland, that are considering similar legislation. And California itself is a massive producer of dairy, beef, and chicken.

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California Is About to Stop People From Pumping So Many Drugs Into Meat

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We’re Surrounded by Way More Chemicals Than We Thought, and These Doctors Say We’re Screwed

by JosephineE37 Posted on October 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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A team of doctors, researchers, and clinicians from across the globe have teamed up to send a loud message to policymakers: More must be done to protect people from the toxic chemicals that endanger health—and soon.

The International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics (FIGO), a group representing OB-GYNs from 125 countries, released a report detailing the detrimental health effects caused by even small exposure to common chemicals like the ones found in pesticides, plastics, and air pollution. The health problems are even greater for babies exposed in the womb, who face increased risks of cancer, reduced cognitive function, and even miscarriage or stillbirth.

“We are drowning our world in untested and unsafe chemicals,” said lead author Gian Carlo Di Renzo in a statement, “and the price we are paying in terms of our reproductive health is of serious concern.”

The organization cited concerns about the sharp increase over the past four decades in chemical manufacturing, which continues to grow by more than 3 percent every year. Some 30,000 pounds of chemicals were manufactured or imported for every person in the United States in 2012 alone—a whopping 9.5 trillion pounds in total. Annually, the FIGO authors write, chemical manufacturing leads to 7 million deaths and billions in health care costs.

These numbers, they argue, are likely underestimated, and the problem is getting worse—especially in poor communities that often have higher levels of toxic exposure and in developing countries that bear the brunt of the global industrial emissions.

Dr. Tracey Woodruff, an associate professor at the University of California-San Francisco, says while there are ways individuals can limit their exposure—including building better health practices overall and eating a pesticide-free, healthy diet—more needs to be done to protect everyone. “You can do some things to enhance your resiliency to disease or decrease chemical exposures,” she says, “but there are a lot of things that are not in your control.”

That’s why FIGO released the opinion in advance of its world congress, where more than 7,000 health professionals will meet to discuss women’s health issues, to encourage doctors to play a bigger role in supporting policies that curb exposure. The organization is calling on health professionals and legislators to support policies that prevent exposure and offering recommendations that could help mitigate health risks, including increasing access to healthy food and incorporating environmental health into health care.

“The good news,” Woodruff says, “is we can deal with it, we have dealt with it before, and it will be a positive health and economic benefit to do that.”

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We’re Surrounded by Way More Chemicals Than We Thought, and These Doctors Say We’re Screwed

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One Good Thing to Come Out of California’s Drought Is This Luminous Book

by MyraColeso Posted on September 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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What if, contrary to current El Niño predictions, California never again catches a break from drought? Such is the world imagined by Mojave Desert-bred Claire Vaye Watkins in her electrifying debut novel Gold Fame Citrus.

Watkins was born in Bishop, California, a small city in the Sierra Nevada’s eastern foothills, and grew up in parched territory nearby. She first made waves with her short story collection, Battleborn, which won the Dylan Thomas prize and the New York Library Young Lions Fiction Award. Vogue called Watkins “the most captivating voice to come out of the West since Annie Proulx.”

Gold Fame Citrus opens with young couple Luz and Ray eking out an existence in a vacant mansion in what was once Los Angeles, during a “drought of droughts,” under the “ever-beaming, ever-heating, ever-evaporating sun.” Bronzed Luz, wafer-thin and grimy, traipses around the mansion in a starlet’s old robes, dodging rats and scorpions and living as “basically another woman’s ghost,” while Ray, usually shirtless with long, unbound curls, attempts to turn the villa into a survival bunker.

In this vision of the not-so-distant future, the West has run dry. Its citizens, who had once crowded California in search of “gold, fame, citrus,” are now referred to as Mojavs and are all mostly banned from the more lush parts of the country. Water is rationed in paltry jugs at precise points of the day.

While attending a demented raindance festival, Luz and Ray encounter a strange girl they call “Ig,” who clings to the couple and soon thrusts herself into their lives. Afraid of the vagabonds who might come looking for Ig, the improvised family flees Southern California in a search for more fertile territory, passing nomads, forest graveyards, and anthropomorphized sand dunes along the way.

Watkins’ prose sizzles, her pen morphing sentences into glimmering new arrangements. While surrealist fiction is often striking for the fantastical scenery it conjures, Gold Fame Citrus haunted me with its references to objects I now take for granted. In a passage describing the only fruit still available in Luz and Ray’s world, Watkins writes:

Hard sour strawberries and blackberries filled with dust. Flaccid carrots, ashen spinach, cracked olives, bruised hundred-dollar mangos, all-pith oranges, shriveled lemons, boozy tangerines, raspberries with gassed aphids curled in their hearts, an avocado whose crumbling taupe innards once made you weep.

Just as she turns a familiar landscape into a mysterious and foreboding geography, Watkins breathes new life into words we thought we knew well. Gold Fame Citrus will hypnotize you like a dream, and make you want to take a big swig of the water we have left.

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One Good Thing to Come Out of California’s Drought Is This Luminous Book

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It’s Getting Harder for Oil Companies to Make Money. Here’s Why.

by WendiU62wzrbajc Posted on September 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Fossil fuels Illustration by Johnny Sampson

One morning in May, Danielle Fugere tried to convince America’s second-largest oil company to get out of the oil exploration business. Standing before a room full of Chevron shareholders in San Ramon, California, she warned that climate change and rapidly shifting oil markets were threatening to erode the corporation’s profits.

Fugere, president of the shareholder activist group As You Sow, pointed out that Chevron—the world’s largest corporate source of carbon dioxide emissions—has spent billions of dollars searching for new, often remote sources of oil that will take years to tap. How, she wondered, can the company remain profitable when it faces plummeting crude oil prices and looming restrictions on fossil fuel use? Rather than funding long-term projects that might never pay off, she argued, Chevron could return the money as dividends or steer it into less risky ventures like renewable energy. “Oil that stays in the ground is valueless,” she said.

The proposal garnered less than 4 percent of Chevron’s shareholder votes. But warnings about oil’s uncertain future are no longer just coming from climate activists. From Wall Street analysts to Middle Eastern bankers, some of Big Oil’s former cheerleaders are starting to sound the alarm, questioning whether the industry can stay on its current course and remain in the black. “They’re in a vise,” says Mark Lewis, chief energy economist at the international financial consulting firm Kepler Cheuvreux. “You have economics and technology on one side of the vise. And you have politics, the push for climate action, on the other side.”

Start with the tumbling price of oil. Finding new sources of petroleum, especially when they’re deep beneath the sea or buried in layers of shale, is extremely expensive, so energy companies need prices to stay reliably high. In 2014, Goldman Sachs cautioned investors that the largest new drilling projects needed to earn at least $90 per barrel to break even. The World Bank says one-third of current oil production and two-thirds of future reserves could be uneconomical even at $60 per barrel. In August, the price dipped below $40, the lowest in more than six years.

Over the past year, ExxonMobil and Chevron‘s earnings have slumped by more than 50 percent; their stock prices (as well as those of Shell, ConocoPhillips, and BP) dropped by as much as one-third in the first eight months of 2015. In July, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Shell’s credit rating, partly in response to the company’s controversial efforts to drill in the Arctic and other pricey endeavors. On Monday, Shell announced that it would halt its Arctic exploration “for the foreseeable future.” The company cited the project’s enormous costs and “disappointing” outcome, as well as the “challenging and unpredictable federal regulatory environment in offshore Alaska.”

Kepler Cheuvreux reports that the industry’s expenditures on developing new oil sources have increased 120 percent since 2000, while supplies of crude have increased just 11 percent. Investing $100 billion in solar or wind power, the firm’s analysts conclude, would produce far more energy in the long term than an equivalent investment in oil. “The rules of the game for upstream oil and gas companies have changed,” says Lewis. “Every year they have to replace cheaper legacy barrels with more expensive barrels.”

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One explanation for falling prices is the glut of cheap domestic oil from the fracking boom. But the industry is also confronting what Bloomberg energy analysts have characterized as a “demand shock.” California’s new regulations on fuels’ carbon intensity and the Obama administration’s aggressive fuel efficiency standards, scheduled to take effect in 2025, are steering carmakers toward designs that use less gasoline. “We’re on the opposite side of the oil companies in the battle over the low-carbon fuel standard,” says General Motors spokesman Shad Balch. “The first company with a no-gas car wins.” Citi’s commodity research team predicts these factors, combined with the rising use of natural gas, will cause the rate of US oil consumption to peak by 2030. In August, the Interior Department reported an almost unprecedented lack of interest in purchasing leases for new wells in the Gulf of Mexico. And the National Bank of Abu Dhabi recently concluded that developing wind or solar capacity in the Middle East would be cheaper than building a new oil-fired power plant, even if the price of oil drops to $30 per barrel.

Oil companies will also be in a quandary if prices at the pump go back up. Higher prices could make hybrids, electric vehicles, and mass transit more attractive than conventional cars. According to a Bloomberg analysis, even if the cost of gasoline averaged just $2.09 per gallon, electric vehicles’ penetration of the US car market would rise from 1 percent to 6 percent by 2020; at $3.34 per gallon, it would jump to 9 percent. (In the first eight months of 2015, the average price of a gallon of regular gas nationwide was $2.53.)

And it’s becoming more expensive to burn fossil fuels. The European Union, California, and several other states have all imposed some sort of direct price on carbon emissions. Last week, China pledged to create a nationwide cap-and-trade system. Rising pressure from the public as well as climate negotiators preparing to gather in Paris in December suggest these policies will continue to spread. If the cost of greenhouse gas emissions rises high enough, fossil fuel reserves could turn into so-called “stranded assets,” meaning it would no longer make financial sense to exploit them. ExxonMobil and other American oil companies have already started integrating hypothetical carbon costs into their internal accounting, preparing for the inevitable drop in demand that will kick in if policymakers can agree on a universal price tag.

The new realities facing the energy sector are reflected in Bloomberg’s 2013 decision to display companies’ fossil-fuel-­related risks on the omnipresent terminals that deliver financial data to investors. Such liabilities, however, do not have to be reported in public financial statements. In 2010, the Securities and Exchange Commission asked publicly traded companies to voluntarily report their financial risks from climate change. So far, not even 15 percent of S&P 500 companies have bothered to do so.

Meanwhile, overseas investors have had more success in prodding the industry to make changes that it has thus far been able to dodge in the United States. In January, Royal Dutch Shell shareholders enlisted management support for unprecedented emissions disclosures and a suggestion that executive compensation be linked with planning for a carbon-constrained energy market. In April, just before Chevron stockholders ignored Fugere, BP’s shareholders agreed to similar policies.

So while the oil industry isn’t going away anytime soon, the barrel it is over is increasingly hard to ignore.

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It’s Getting Harder for Oil Companies to Make Money. Here’s Why.

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