Hello, and welcome to another episode of our environmental policy podcast, Parts Per Billion. This is where we chat with reporters and newsmakers to bring you the stories behind our stories.
Today we bring you the first of a two-part conversation between George Hawkins, head of the local water utility here in Washington, and Bloomberg BNA water policy reporter Amena Saiyid.
There are now 66 million dead trees in California’s forests due to several years of drought and native bark beetles, creating a “catastrophic” wildfire threat – or so claims U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. While Vilsack’s assertion may resonate with many in the general public because it makes intuitive sense, it simply isn’t true.
Among scientists, there is an overwhelming consensus that weather (hot, dry, windy conditions) determines how wildland fires behave, not the density of dead trees or “snags.”
After weeks of uncertainty and pressure from members of Congress, federal officials on Wednesday announced a plan for managing water releases from California’s largest reservoir this summer in a manner that will not involve cutbacks in farm water deliveries – at least if all goes as hoped.
For more than a month, federal agencies have battled behind the scenes over how to balance the needs of California farms and two endangered fish species whose populations have been decimated by years of drought and environmental decline.
Having made the desert bloom and become the world leader in water management, Israel is now helping parched California solve its water problems.
The Israel-California Water Conference, taking place Wednesday at Los Angeles’s Marina Del Rey, with an additional event on Thursday in San Diego, is the brainchild of the Economy Ministry’s Israel NewTech program, the Israel Economic Mission to the West Coast, and the Israel Export Institute. The conference will introduce Californian public officials, business leaders, policy makers and researchers to 24 Israeli companies that offer water storage, management, treatment, recycling and leak detection solutions.
There’s a vast amount of untapped water in California, but whether it can make any difference for the drought-stricken state remains unclear. A new Stanford study indicates California’s groundwater supply is three times greater than previous estimates and could represent a potential “water windfall,” its authors say.
“There’s far more fresh water and usable water than we expected,” said Robert Jackson, co-author of the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Given the history of California’s water wars, it is not surprising that when a judge issued a ruling last week to clarify a decision he made last month, both sides immediately disagreed what the latest ruling meant.
So much for clarity. What Sacramento Superior Court Judge Michael Kenny did seems pretty unambiguous: He declared the Delta Plan “invalid.” That apparently means either “it’s dead,” or “there are a couple of minor flaws we have to fix.” The Delta Plan is the latest of a string of efforts launched to repair the collapsing ecosystem of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.
California has a lot more usable groundwater than previously thought — but that water might already be in danger from oil and gas extraction in the state.
A study released this week by Stanford scientists shows that there is nearly three times more groundwater in California’s Central Valley than earlier surveys had indicated. “It’s not often that you find a ‘water windfall,’ but we just did,” study co-author Robert Jackson, the Michelle and Kevin Douglas Provostial Professor at Stanford, said in the study’s release. “There’s far more fresh water and usable water than we expected.”
California’s famous moniker – the Golden State – is becoming all too accurate as the state enters the fifth year of drought and the summer heat begins to dry out its rolling hillsides. A lackluster El Niño failed to deliver a promised deluge of rain and ultimately brought only an average amount of precipitation – far from what was needed to make up for several years of record low rains and snow packs.
California’s natural drought cycles are made worse by ineffective water management policies – policies that drown water managers in top-down, command and control regulations.
Relief may be coming soon for many Mountain Area homeowners left with dead trees in their yards after they were cut down by companies contracted with Pacific Gas and Electric Company.
The trees, killed by bark beetle infestations, were cut down for safety reasons and to protect power lines, but disposing of the trees, in some cases a massive and expensive undertaking, was left to homeowners.
A new map created with measurements from an airborne instrument developed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, reveals the devastating effect of California’s ongoing drought on Sierra Nevada conifer forests.
After several years of extreme drought, the highly stressed conifers (trees that produce cones and are usually green year-round) of the Sierra Nevada are now more susceptible to bark beetles (Dendroctonus spp.). While bark beetles killing trees in the Sierra Nevada is a natural phenomenon, the scale of mortality in the last couple of years is far greater than previously observed.
