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After a Mother Jones Investigation, Starbucks Says It Will Stop Bottling Water in California

by PhillipR65 Posted on May 8, 2015

Mother Jones

On the heels of a Mother Jones investigation last week that found that Starbucks sources its bottled water from a spring in the heart of California’s drought country, Starbucks announced yesterday that it will phase out use of its California bottling plant for Ethos Water over the next six months. Because of “the serious drought conditions” in California, the company will transition to its Pennsylvania supplier while looking for another source to cover the western United States, Starbucks officials said in a press release.

The California counties from which Starbucks sources and bottles Ethos have been in a drought emergency for years now. Placer County, where Ethos’ spring water is drawn, was already declared a natural disaster area by the USDA because of the drought back in 2012. Reports from more than a year ago noted that the county was already scrambling to deal with the area’s “extreme drought.” Merced county, where the bottling facility is located, declared a local emergency due to drought more than a year ago, as “extremely dry conditions have persisted since 2012.”

Meanwhile, the Pennsylvania county to which Starbucks is now shifting its entire national production of Ethos Water is itself facing drought conditions. While not as catastrophic as California’s historic water emergency, Luzerne County, where Starbucks’ east coast supplier sources and bottles Ethos, was declared to be under Drought Watch by Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection back in March. DEP issued the declaration after below-normal rainfall over the past year has led to low groundwater levels in the region, which the agency noted has the potential to cause well-fed water supplies to go dry. The state is asking local residents to voluntarily reduce water consumption and to “run water only when absolutely necessary.” DEP has put large water users on notice to plan for possible reductions in water supplies.

Nevertheless, Ethos’ Pennsylvania bottler, Nature’s Way Purewater, which bottles a number of other brands at its facility, announced in January that it planned to double production going forward.

This article was reported in partnership with the Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute, with support from the Puffin Foundation.

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After a Mother Jones Investigation, Starbucks Says It Will Stop Bottling Water in California

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The Keystone Pipeline Just Lost Big in a Shocking Canadian Election

by MichaelMaddock Posted on May 7, 2015

Mother Jones

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This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

American environmentalists are frustrated that our adorable neighbor to the north is surprisingly retrograde on climate change. The reason is that Canada has a Conservative government. Right-leaning governments almost always have worse records on environmental protection, but this is especially so in present-day Canada because Prime Minister Stephen Harper hails from, and draws a lot of support in, the interior province of Alberta.

Oil-rich Alberta—home to notorious tar-sands operations—is just north of Idaho, and has the politics to match. The right-leaning party has been in power there for 44 years. But not anymore.

On Tuesday, the lefty New Democratic Party (NDP) won the provincial elections on a platform that promises to diversify Alberta’s fossil fuel-dependent economy. The NDP campaigned on criticism of the Conservatives for being too close to the oil industry and a pledge to tax more oil profits. From The Wall Street Journal:

The longtime ruling party of Canada’s energy-rich Alberta province lost its four-decade hold on power on Tuesday, ushering in a left-leaning government that has pledged to raise corporate taxes and increase oil and gas royalties.

The Alberta New Democratic Party swept enough districts to form a majority, taking most of the seats in both the business center of Calgary and the provincial capital of Edmonton, according to preliminary results from Elections Alberta.

Canada has a multi-party system. The three biggest are the Conservative Party, which is the largest right-of-center party; the Liberal Party, which is center-left and roughly equivalent to mainstream US Democrats; and the NDP, which is like the left wing of the Democratic Party. So this election result is shocking, like Dennis Kucinich being elected governor of Alabama. For historical reasons, the Alberta Conservative Party is oxymoronically known as the Progressive-Conservatives, but this doesn’t mean they are any more moderate than other Conservatives. The Alberta NDP is moderate compared to the NDP of, say, liberal green-minded British Columbia. But the election result is still a paradigm shift with potentially major environmental implications.

The Journal reports:

“We need to start down the road to a diversified and resilient economy. We need finally to end the boom-and-bust roller coaster that we have been riding on for too long,” NDP leader Rachel Notley, who is expected to succeed Jim Prentice as Alberta’s premier, said at a news conference.

The NDP has long been a marginal force in Alberta’s traditionally conservative politics, but recent public opinion polls showed its popularity surging. In the campaign, Ms. Notley attacked Mr. Prentice for reinstating provincial health-care premiums and being too cozy with oil-patch interests.

In a move that spooked some energy company executives during the campaign, Ms. Notley raised the specter of increasing royalties levied on oil and gas production, although she said that her party would only consider that once crude-oil prices recovered from recent lows.

She also signaled her party wouldn’t support a proposed Enbridge Inc. crude-oil pipeline, called the Northern Gateway, which would connect Alberta’s oil sands with a planned Pacific coast terminal in British Columbia, telling a local newspaper that “Gateway is not the right decision.”

Notley also doesn’t support plans for Keystone XL, and pledged to stop spending taxpayer dollars to push the pipeline in Washington, DC. (She does support two other tar-sands pipeline projects, though.) And she wants Alberta to get more serious about climate change, as the Globe and Mail reports:

Another focus, according to Ms. Notley’s platform, will be bolstering the province’s reputation on climate change as previous governments have resisted establishing tougher targets for carbon reduction from the oil sands and other industries.

The NDP triumph in Alberta may put political pressure on the Harper government, which is facing a federal election this fall. The province’s voters sent the message that they want more protection for the environment and less pandering to oil interests. This couldn’t happen at a better time, as environmentalists are nervously awaiting Canada’s proposal for carbon emission reductions heading into the UN climate negotiations to be held this December in Paris. Will Harper now make a more significant climate commitment? We’ll all be watching to see.

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The Keystone Pipeline Just Lost Big in a Shocking Canadian Election

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Hillary Clinton Isn’t Ready to Disclose Who’s Funding Her Campaign

by BenedicD53 Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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On the campaign trail, Hillary Clinton has been pushing hard to overhaul of the country’s broken campaign finance system. “We need to fix our dysfunctional political system and get unaccounted money out of it, once and for all, even if that takes a constitutional amendment,” Clinton said during one of her first official speeches in Iowa last month.

Clinton’s campaign finance rhetoric appears to be aimed at super PACs, the quasi-independent organizations that bolster campaigns by buying ads. But when it comes to the major funders behind her own presidential campaign, the Democratic front-runner has yet to answer questions about how transparent she’s willing to be. When Mother Jones questioned the Clinton camp about whether it will disclose the names and fundraising totals of the key supporters—known as “bundlers”—who raise vast sums of cash, a spokesperson declined to provide an answer, saying only that the campaign was still figuring out its plans.

What exactly are bundlers? Donations to campaigns from individuals are capped at $2,700 for the primary election and $2,700 for the general election (meaning donors can give up to $5,400 to a candidate over the entire cycle). In theory, these restrictions limit the amount of influence that individual donors can exert over a campaign. But bundlers get around these caps by raising tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars from their wealthy friends and colleagues and channeling these massive sums to candidates. Even in an era when a few super-rich donors can give as much money as they please to independent super PACs, bundlers are essential to most presidential bids. Super PACs might be able to fund expensive ad buys with million-dollar donations, but it’s large bundled contributions that allow campaigns to hire staff, conduct polls, and carry out the rest of their day-to-day operations.

Because of the outsized role that bundlers play in paying the bills for would-be presidents, advocates for campaign finance reform have long called for a robust system of disclosure. But under current law, it’s up to each candidate to decide whether the names of these fundraisers will ever become public.

The Clinton campaign is initially asking bundlers to collect $27,000 each (that is, 10 donations at the maximum amount of $2,700). Those who reach this goal will earn the designation of “Hillstarter” and score an invitation to a special campaign confab at the end of May. The campaign refused to say whether it will disclose the identities of these Hillstarters—or whether it plans to release information about bundlers who end up raising far more than $27,000 during what is likely to be a billion-dollar campaign.

Lavishing bundlers with perks is standard practice for presidential campaigns. George W. Bush created tiers of bundlers with hokey names such as “Rangers” and “Pioneers.” In June 2012, Mitt Romney invited over 800 people who had bundled at least $50,000 for his campaign to an exclusive retreat in Utah, where they could hobnob with the candidate and his senior campaign staff. Bundlers may also receive more valuable rewards. A 2011 study by the Center for Public Integrity found that 184 of the 556 publicly named bundlers from Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign had landed administration roles for themselves or their spouses. That figure increased to about 80 percent for the top bundlers who raised more than $500,000.

In most cases, there are no rules mandating that candidates release the names of their bundlers. Federal law does require campaigns to list lobbyists who bundle more than $16,000, but even this modest rule is easy to skirt. Large lobbying firms can divvy up the fundraising among various partners to avoid being listed.

In the absence of legal mandates, it’s up to each campaign to decide whether or not it will reveal its biggest fundraisers. Some candidates choose to disclose some information about bundlers. (Since this disclosure is entirely voluntary, however, there is nothing to stop campaigns from omitting unsavory names.) In 2012, Obama released information on bundlers that was divided into four tiers: those who raised between $50,000 and $100,000; those who raised between $100,000 and $200,000; those who raised between $200,000 and $500,00; and those who raised more than $500,000. Romney, on the other hand, refused to release the names of any bundlers, except for the lobbyist disclosure required by law.

In 2008, Clinton offered minimal information about her bundlers. Donors who bundled more than $100,000 for her campaign earned the title of “HillRaiser,” and their names were released to the public. According to the watchdog group Public Citizen, whose White House For Sale project has tracked bundlers during recent presidential elections, a total of 324 people earned that designation.

But the ’08 Clinton campaign refused to release more specific bundler categories. It remained a mystery which fundraisers just barely crossed the $100,000 threshold, and which ones raised truly massive sums. “‘The problem is that it’s just in large increments, as opposed to an actual number,” says Public Citizen’s Craig Holman. “It needs to be better than this. When all we can say is, ‘At least $100,000,’ it could be $10 million or $20 million, we don’t know. And the individual who is going to bring in millions of dollars is going to be treated differently than someone who just brought in $100,000. We need to know more information.”

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Hillary Clinton Isn’t Ready to Disclose Who’s Funding Her Campaign

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Death for Drug Dealers and Quarantines for AIDS Victims: The Mike Huckabee You May Not Remember

by EdmundHinson Posted on May 6, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Tuesday, Mike Huckabee made it official. The former Republican Arkansas governor and Fox News host launched his second bid for the White House in his hometown of Hope, Arkansas, vowing to stop the “slaughter” of abortion and calling for the protection of the “laws of nature” from the “the false God of judicial supremacy.”

Huckabee is joining a GOP field that’s bigger and more competitive than the one he out-hustled to win the Iowa caucuses seven years ago. The Christian conservatives who flocked to the former Baptist preacher in 2008 can now turn toward other evangelical-minded candidates in the GOP presidential race. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is already in the hunt; former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum and and ex-Texas Gov. Rick Perry are mulling bids. But Huckabee of today is also a far different candidate than the affable ex-gov who once rocked a bass guitar while stumping with Chuck Norris (although Walker, Texas Ranger is officially on board for this campaign, too). Since dropping out of the 2008 race, he’s flaunted a more combative, occasionally conspiratorial brand of politics—flirting with birtherism, advising prospective enlistees to avoid joining the armed forces until President Barack Obama has left office, and, just last month, warning social conservatives that the United States is “moving rapidly toward the criminalization of Christianity.”

By the standards of his political career, 2008 was in many ways an aberration. As he mounts a second run for the nomination, Huckabee is staying true to the kinds of red-meat issues he first entered politics to promote, in a long-shot 1992 bid for Senate against Democratic incumbent Dale Bumpers.

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Death for Drug Dealers and Quarantines for AIDS Victims: The Mike Huckabee You May Not Remember

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Ben Carson Is Running for President. Read These 6 Stories About Him Now.

by FredricBroome Posted on May 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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The doctor is in: Conservative darling Dr. Ben Carson officially announced that he’s running for president on Sunday in interviews with TV stations in Ohio and Florida. On Monday, he’s expected to address supporters in his hometown of Detroit. He will be the fourth Republican to officially enter the race, joining Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), and Rand Paul (R-Ky.).

Carson’s candidacy is the culmination of months of fundraising and advocacy by grassroots activists anxious for him to run for president. Carson, a former head of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University whose unlikely rise was the subject of a cable TV movie, has never before held elected office. He is popular among DC-loathing tea partiers and Christian conservatives, but his political inexperience and past gaffes will likely make it difficult for him to win over the GOP establishment.

Ahead of his announcement, check out some of Mother Jones‘ best coverage of Carson.

Ben Carson has written six books. We read them so you don’t have to.
On immigration and Wall Street, Carson has said some surprisingly liberal things.
On homosexuality, though, not so much—watch Carson claim that prison proves that being gay is a choice.
The story of the Draft Ben Carson PAC began with a quasi-famous birther.
…And how the self-proclaimed “black Jesse Helms” raised millions to support Draft Carson.
Once upon a time, Carson was just a rebellious, train-hopping teenager.

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Ben Carson Is Running for President. Read These 6 Stories About Him Now.

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One Disease Hits Mostly People of Color. One Mostly Whites. Which One Gets Billions In Funding?

by ArlenLassiter82 Posted on May 4, 2015

Mother Jones

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February 12, 2009, was supposed to be a big day for Carlton Haywood Jr.: The newly minted Johns Hopkins professor was set to travel from Baltimore to New York City to make a presentation at an important medical meeting. But the night before he left, a searing pain started to surge through his arms and soon spread to his legs. The next morning, when he boarded the train, his whole body felt like it was on fire. By the time he reached Penn Station, he could barely make it to the emergency room.

The pain was caused by Haywood’s sickle-cell disease, a genetic condition in which misshapen red blood cells build up in the blood vessels and cause infections, strokes, and excruciating episodes of pain. Having lived with sickle cell for 39 years and studied it as a bioethicist, Haywood knew the treatment he needed to stop the episode, so he requested a specific combination of medications. The hematologist, however, refused, implying that Haywood didn’t know what he was talking about. Haywood wound up missing the meeting—and was in the hospital for a week.

For the 100,000 Americans with sickle cell—it’s the most common life-shortening genetic disease in the United States—insults like that are routine. “We know what works best for us and what does not work so well for us,” Haywood says. “But doctors often don’t listen.” His research has found that when sickle-cell patients ask for medication—especially opioids to control their pain—they are routinely dismissed as pill seekers, even though they are no more likely to be addicted to painkillers than the general population. Sickle-cell patients in acute pain also face longer ER waits than other patients in acute pain.

So what’s unique about sickle-cell patients? Well, about 90 percent are African American. (The trait is thought to have originated in Africa as an adaptive response to malaria.) Many researchers believe that racial discrimination plays a major role in the care that sickle-cell patients get.

Consider, for comparison, the experience of people with another life-shortening genetic illness, cystic fibrosis, a respiratory and digestive condition. Like sickle cell, it gets worse with age, requires strict daily drug regimens, and often results in hospitalization. And like sickle cell, it dramatically shortens patients’ life spans—to a median of 37 years for cystic fibrosis, compared to 40 to 45 years for sickle-cell disease.

But here’s one key difference: Cystic fibrosis affects mostly Caucasians. And that, suspects John Strouse, a Johns Hopkins hematologist who has compared data about the two diseases, is one reason why funding for cystic fibrosis research, drug development, and patient advocacy dwarfs that for sickle-cell disease. In 2011, the most recent year for which his data is available, spending on cystic fibrosis totaled $254 million—nearly four times the $66 million that was spent on sickle cell, even though the latter affects three times as many people.

In part, that’s because cystic fibrosis’ primary dedicated charity—the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation—is far wealthier than the dozens of sickle-cell organizations combined. In 2011, the foundation spent $176 million on cystic fibrosis—compared to the $1.1 million spent by the Sickle Cell Disease Association of America, the largest of the advocacy groups.

Yet the disparity isn’t limited to these private funds. The National Institutes of Health spends nearly four times as much per patient on cystic fibrosis research as it does on sickle cell. From 2009 to 2011, researchers published twice as many papers on cystic fibrosis as they did on sickle cell.

“You have this kind of feedback loop,” Strouse says. The sickle-cell community has fewer wealthy, powerful advocates, so there’s less interest in research. “In order to draw attention to a disease, you need affluent people promoting it. And then, once the disease gets the attention, more people want to devote money to it”—which then leads to more research.

Case in point: In 2000, the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation invested in a pharmaceutical company that ended up developing a breakthrough treatment. When the foundation sold the rights to the drug royalties for $3.3 billion last November, it became the richest rare-disease advocacy group in history. Even though the new drug only works for a handful of patients, the windfall will support further pharmaceutical research that may one day lead to a cure for all. “We will convene the best minds in science and medicine to cure cystic fibrosis at its most fundamental level,” the head of the foundation wrote in a letter to supporters.

The deal, experts say, could set a precedent for other rare diseases. But if patients with big bucks bankroll research for their own conditions, Strouse wonders, then who will support the likes of sickle-cell disease? Poor parents, he notes, have fewer opportunities to be “out there raising awareness and buzz about your kid’s disease. You’re struggling just to get by, just to get your child to the doctor’s office while holding down your job.”

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One Disease Hits Mostly People of Color. One Mostly Whites. Which One Gets Billions In Funding?

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Want an Abortion This Year? Get Ready to Wait

by e0ebri1z Posted on May 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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For women seeking an abortion, 2015 is shaping up to be the year of the long wait.

Since the beginning of the year, six states have proposed or passed laws that would require a woman to wait days before she has an abortion—laws that critics say place an especially harsh burden on poor and rural women.

Conservative lawmakers in Arkansas and Tennessee have passed bills forcing women seeking abortions to attend an initial appointment and then wait 48 hours before the actual procedure. The Florida Legislature has passed a measure, which GOP Gov. Rick Scott promises to sign, creating a 24-hour waiting period between two appointments. A bill that died in Kentucky, which already requires women to receive counseling 24 hours before an abortion, would have forced women to receive that counseling in person.

And Oklahoma and North Carolina are poised to pass bills that would institute the longest waiting periods in the county: 72 hours between mandatory counseling and an abortion. The North Carolina proposal passed the Republican-dominated House on Thursday, and Oklahoma’s measure is awaiting the signature of Republican Gov. Mary Fallin. If the states approve the measures, Oklahoma and North Carolina will join Missouri, South Dakota, and Utah as the only other states with three-day waiting periods.

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Want an Abortion This Year? Get Ready to Wait

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Sen. Bernie Sanders Is Running for President. Here’s a Sampling of His Greatest Hits

by Eusebia29W Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) officially announced today that’s he’s running for president. The self-described socialist faces long odds in the Democratic primary, but chances are good that he’ll at least force a discussion on issues dear to liberals. Here are some highlights of the best of Mother Jones coverage of Sanders:

Sanders visited our office earlier this month to discuss income inequality, trade, and his motivations for running for prez.
“Why don’t we make Election Day a holiday?” Sanders asks. Yes, why?
Sanders goes on Bill Moyers to perfectly predict big money’s domination of the 2014 elections.
Sanders asks the NSA whether it is spying on members of Congress. The NSA won’t say.
Sanders’ list of America’s top 10 tax avoiders.
The greatest hits from Filibernie, Sanders’ eight-and-a-half hour filibuster in protest of the 2010 extension of tax cuts for the rich.
Sanders lambastes Obama for giving loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry.
Sanders has some ideas for reforming Wall Street.
“A Socialist in the Millionaire’s Club“: a 2006 Mother Jones interview with Sanders, shortly after he was elected to the Senate.
During a 1998 Congressional hearing, Sanders excoriates Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin for supporting General Suharto, “a cruel, authoritarian dictator whose family is worth between $40 and $50 billion.”
And then there’s this Sanders blurb from a November 1989 Mother Jones roundup of promising third parties:

The Progressive Coalition obviously never went national in the way Sanders had envisioned. But in 1991, a year after he was elected to Congress, he founded something more enduring: the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Since then, Sanders’ view of third parties has evolved: “No matter what I do,” he told Mother Jones last month, “I will not play the role of a spoiler who ends up helping to elect a right-wing Republican.”

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Sen. Bernie Sanders Is Running for President. Here’s a Sampling of His Greatest Hits

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Why You Should Be Skeptical About the New Police Narrative on Freddie Gray’s Death

by JoeannTobias Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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On a relatively quiet night in Baltimore, the Washington Post dropped a bombshell. According to a sealed court document, a witness alleged that Freddie Gray—whose April death has triggered days of protests in the city—may have been deliberately attempting to injure himself while in police custody:

A prisoner sharing a police transport van with Freddie Gray told investigators that he could hear Gray “banging against the walls” of the vehicle and believed that he “was intentionally trying to injure himself,” according to a police document obtained by The Washington Post.

The prisoner, who is currently in jail, was separated from Gray by a metal partition and could not see him. His statement is contained in an application for a search warrant, which is sealed by the court. The Post was given the document under the condition that the prisoner not be named because the person who provided it feared for the inmate’s safety.

It’s easy to see how a sealed document like that, drafted by a police investigator, might have leaked to the press in spite of the court order, and in spite of the police department’s general aura of secrecy. If Gray’s injuries were self-inflicted, the police department is off the hook.

But as WBAL’s Jayne Miller noted, the new exculpatory allegation appears to be at odds with the police department’s earlier narrative, as well as the timeline of events:

And there’s another reason to be skeptical. Information that comes out of jails is notoriously unreliable, for the simple reason that anyone in jail has a real incentive to get out; cooperating with the people who determine when they get out is an obvious way to score points. This report from the Pew Charitable Trust walks through the conflicts in detail. According to the Innocence Project, 15 percent of wrongful convictions that are eventually overturned by DNA testing originally rested on information from a jailhouse informant. Two years ago in California, for instance, a federal court overturned the conviction of an alleged serial killer known as the “Skid Row Stabber” because the conviction rested on information from an inmate dismissed as a “habitual liar.”

Or maybe the witness in Baltimore is right—that happens too!—and what we thought we knew about the Freddie Gray case was wrong. But the department isn’t doing much to quiet the skeptics. It announced Wednesday that it will not make public the full results of its investigation into Gray’s death, “because if there is a decision to charge in any event by the state’s attorney’s office, the integrity of that investigation has to be protected.”

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Why You Should Be Skeptical About the New Police Narrative on Freddie Gray’s Death

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California’s Fire Season Is Shaping Up to Be a "Disaster"

by EricPlayfair Posted on April 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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On Monday, 200 firefighters evacuated an upscale residential neighborhood in Los Angeles as they responded to a wildfire that had just broken out in the nearby hills. Ninety minutes later, the fire was out, with no damage done. But if that battle was a relatively easy win, it belied a much more difficult war ahead for a state devastated by drought.

California is in the midst of one of its worst droughts on record, so bad that earlier this month Gov. Jerry Brown took the unprecedented step of ordering mandatory water restrictions. Snowpack in the Sierra Nevada is currently the lowest on record for this time of year. And the outlook for the rest of the year is bleak: The latest federal projections suggest the drought could get even worse this summer across the entire state (as well as many of its neighbors):

NOAA

That’s a very bad sign for California’s wildfire season. After several years of super-dry conditions, the state is literally a tinderbox. “The outlook in California is pretty dire,” said Wally Covington, a leading fire ecologist at Northern Arizona University. “It’s pretty much a recipe for disaster.”

To date this year, the overall national tally of wildfires has actually been below average: 14,213 fires across 309,369 acres, compared to the 10-year average of 20,166 fires across 691,776 acres, according to federal data. After a peak in 2006, early year wildfire activity in the last few years has been somewhat stable:

But in California, the trend looks very different. The tally of fires so far this year is 967—that’s 38 percent higher than the average for this date since 2005. The number of acres burned is up to 4,083, nearly double the count at this time last year and 81 percent above the average since 2005:

And here again, the outlook for the rest of the summer is grim. Just look at the overlap between the map above and the map below, which shows that most of California is at above-average risk for fires this summer:

NIFC

This is all costing California taxpayers a lot of money. According to Climate Central, California typically spends more money fighting wildfires than the other 10 Western states combined, totaling roughly $4 billion over the last decade. That’s partly due to the state’s size and vulnerability to big wildfires, and also to the close proximity of high-value urban development to easily ignited forests and grasslands. (Wildfires in the Alaskan wilderness, by comparison, can grow much bigger but cost much less, because without homes or towns nearby, they’re often allowed to simply burn out.)

California burned through its $209 million firefighting budget in just a few months of this fiscal year; back in September, Brown had to pull an additional $70 million from a state emergency fund. A spokesperson for the state’s department of finance said the wildfire budget has since been increased to $423 million. (Running way over budget on wildfires isn’t unique to California; the federal government routinely underestimates how much wildfires will cost and ends up having to fight fires with funds that are meant to be spent preventing them.)

Scientists have long predicted that an increase in both the frequency and severity of wildfires is a likely outcome of global warming. The Obama administration’s National Climate Assessment last year cited wildfires as one of the key threats posed to the United States by climate change. Longer periods of drought mean wildfire “fuels” like grass and trees will be drier and easier to burn; at the same time, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means these same fuels will accumulate more quickly. And there’s a feedback loop at play: Deforestation caused by wildfires contributes to greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that the increasing threat of wildfires will make climate change worse.

When it comes to wildfires, Covington said, “with increased climate change, there’s a train wreck coming our way.”

For a more detailed explanation of the link between climate change and wildfires, watch the original Climate Desk video below:

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California’s Fire Season Is Shaping Up to Be a "Disaster"

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