Fighting the COVID-19 pandemic requires access to safe, clean water. While some Americans decry their “loss of freedom” by being told to wear a mask in public spaces, others don’t have the freedom to wash their hands with clean water.
California utility regulators on Monday chose to fire their top administrative official in response to several allegedly unethical hiring decisions discussed in a recent personnel audit.
California and 20 other states sued the Trump administration over its plan to curtail environmental regulations in permitting infrastructure projects that can take years to complete and have long-lasting consequences on land and communities. Led by California and Washington, the lawsuit seeks to block changes the administration has proposed to how the 50-year-old National Environmental Policy Act is implemented. It was filed in federal court in San Francisco against the White House Council on Environmental Quality and its chairman, Mary Neumayr.
Safe drinking water is a human right and essential during the COVID-19 crisis. And California must do more to ensure water service during concurrent health and economic emergencies.
In April, Gov. Gavin Newsom issued an executive order placing a moratorium on water shutoffs and requiring reconnections for households disconnected after March 4. But months into a crisis, the state lacks data on the impact of the moratorium.
A coalition of 21 states [including California] sued the Trump administration Friday for rolling back what they say is a “rule that is, at its heart, the gutting” of America’s bedrock environmental law.
The sad reality is that the blackouts rolling across California this week were both predictable and avoidable. The silver lining is that future blackouts across California are avoidable – if we invest in large-scale energy storage projects to provide on-demand power.
A group of residents in a southern Nevada town that sits along the Colorado River are organizing a campaign to oppose a proposed pipeline that would divert billions of gallons of river water to southwest Utah, reflecting intensifying struggles over water in the U.S. West.
California lawmakers voted Sunday to phase out the sale and use of firefighting foam containing toxic chemicals that have been linked to cancer and have contaminated drinking water throughout the state. The measure, put forward by state Sen. Ben Allen (D-Santa Monica), requires municipal fire departments, chemical plants and oil refineries to gradually stop using the foam, replacing it with alternatives that don’t contain perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, a class of chemicals commonly known as PFAS.
Water is central to nearly everything we value in California. Healthy communities, economies, farms, ecosystems and cultural traditions depend on steady supplies of safe water. Those values are increasingly at risk as California confronts more extreme droughts and floods, rising temperatures, overdrafted groundwater basins, aging infrastructure and other challenges magnified by climate change.
Thousands of students returning to the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York this month are being asked to wear masks in public, register their health status online each day and electronically log classroom visits for contact tracing if a coronavirus outbreak occurs. But the most novel effort at the school to measure and limit virus spread will require little effort and come quite naturally.
Students need only use the bathroom.
At more than 15 dormitories and on-campus apartment buildings, sewage is being tested twice weekly for genetic evidence of virus shed in feces. This provides a kind of early-warning system of an outbreak, limiting the need to test every student for Covid-19. If the disease is found in sewage, individual tests can be administered to identify the source.
