Local water leaders on Tuesday formally scorned a state proposal to drastically change river levels, saying it would cripple farms and the economy and threaten people’s drinking water in Modesto, San Francisco and beyond. “To me, this is an outrage,” said Greg Salyer, general manager of the Modesto Irrigation District. “This is probably the worst water threat we’ve ever had at MID.”
Gov. Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 814 into law to crack down on excessive water use during droughts. The law, effective Jan. 1, 2017, penalizes the state’s biggest water wasters and could result in public disclosure of their names.The new law requires retail water suppliers with more than 3,000 customers to put in place rules that define excessive water use and enforce them during drought emergencies. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Jerry Hill, stated, “[SB 814] is the result of a San Mateo resident’s demand for households ignoring water use restrictions to be held accountable.”
Flood control efforts in California’s Central Valley get a boost in sprawling water legislation that reaches the House floor Tuesday. No, it’s not the drought-inspired, California-only bill that has inspired so much wrangling in recent years. That remains stuck. Instead, following the Senate’s lead, the House is taking up its latest version of the Water Resources Development Act. The amended bill authorizes 31 Army Corps of Engineers projects and 29 feasibility studies, among other measures. “This bill is by no means perfect,” said Rep. Bill Shuster, R-Penn., the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, “but it’s a good bill.”
A new study paints a picture of an Earth that is warmer than it has been in about 120,000 years, and is locked into eventually hitting its hottest mark in more than 2 million years. As part of her doctoral dissertation at Stanford University, Carolyn Snyder , now a climate policy official at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, created a continuous 2 million year temperature record, much longer than a previous 22,000 year record. Snyder’s temperature reconstruction, published Monday in the journal Nature , doesn’t estimate temperature for a single year, but averages 5,000-year time periods going back a couple million years.
Farmers in central California are drilling more and deeper wells than ever before to pump water for their fruit orchards and sprawling fields following government imposed limits on surface water. Two years after Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill designed to limit groundwater pumping, new wells are going in faster and deeper than ever, according to an analysis by the Sacramento Bee published Sunday. Farmers dug about 2,500 wells in the San Joaquin Valley last year alone, the highest number on record.
A new law requires that virtually all multiple-family complexes built after Jan. 1, 2018, must have water meters on each unit. “Eighty percent of the 15.6 million Californians living in apartments or other multifamily housing are not billed for their water use, meaning nearly a third of the state’s population doesn’t know how much water they’re using or how much they are charged based on their use,” Sen. Lois Wolk, who authored the bill, said in a statement. Gov. Jerry Brown signed Wolk’s Senate Bill 7 on Monday.
The best guess about the weather forecast for the next several months is that its anybody’s guess. There could be more rain and snow, less rain and snow or a neutral amount of precipitation. Up until a month ago, forecasters thought the state might experience a La Niña weather pattern. Predictions are based upon water temperatures in the Pacific Ocean along the equator. La Niña is a cooler weather pattern that often results in above normal precipitation in the Pacific northwest, dry conditions elsewhere.
In a guest post by Controlled Thermal Resources, the company highlights how they as a developer are well positioned towards the recently announced renewable energy procurement by the federal government in the U.S. The federal government made an announcement on its commitment to the Salton Sea Restoration and to renewable energy at the annual Lake Tahoe Summit on August 31st. Following the announcement, a Request for Information (RFI) was issued by the Department of Energy (DOE) as part of the Federal Energy Management Plan (FEMP) on the deliverability of newly developed geothermal energy from the Salton Sea.
Could capturing California’s stormwater be one way to combat the state’s historic drought? California’s State Water Resources Control Board recently announced it will be providing $9.5 million in grants to 28 different stormwater capture projects. Felicia Marcus, Chairwoman for the Board, called stormwater capture “a smart investment in the future.” “An overdue and welcome shift is occurring in California in how we think about storm water,” said State Water Board Chair Felicia Marcus in a statement to the press.
My neighbors and I received an attention-catching letter this summer about our water rates: Because we’ve done such a great job conserving water in the past year, our water rates are going up. California is experiencing a historic drought, and last year, for the first time in history, Gov. Jerry Brown mandated cities to reduce their water consumption by 25 percent. We all had to do our part by curtailing outdoor use of water, taking shorter showers and letting cars go with less frequent washings.
