There is no evidence supporting the author’s claim that the San Joaquin Valley’s water supply challenges are linked to California’s food security or the rise in foreign produce imports.
Two bipartisan draft water infrastructure bills unveiled this week by the Senate environment committee are a good start but will need even more funding in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, water agencies and other groups said Wednesday.
Among the many disruptions to working life wrought by the spread of coronavirus has been the outsized pressure put on the world’s essential services. For those ensuring that Americans continue to enjoy clean water in their homes, that has meant living at their places of work.
Across the country, drinking water utility workers have been sleeping at treatment facilities to minimize their exposure to COVID-19 and maintain services as many other Americans self-isolate in their homes.
Utilities responding to the challenges of COVID-19 have adapted practices developed for past emergency situations, but physical distancing requirements of the pandemic response in some instances have forced entirely new ways of approaching safety measures.
Consolidated Edison has been utilizing two sets of command and support staff in separate locations, as more than 350 of its employees have tested positive for COVID-19 and eight have died. In the future, more will be done in advance to determine which employees are essential and to ensure remote-work capabilities, according to Anthony Natale, a member of ConEd’s emergency preparedness team.
For municipal utilities, grid operations have become tightly enmeshed with other critical services like police, fire and health providers, according to Lincoln Bleveans, assistant general manager for power supply at Burbank Water & Power.
California’s largest water suppliers will have to report their monthly use and conservation efforts under a measure approved Tuesday by state regulators.
California wants a federal judge to stop how the Trump administration is managing water supplies in the Golden State, saying protected species like trout and Delta smelt risk imminent and irreparable harm.
There is a 75 percent chance 2020 will set a record for the warmest year since instrument records began in 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is projecting, beating out 2016 for the distinction.
This is somewhat unexpected, since there is no declared El Niño event in the tropical Pacific Ocean, which tends to provide a natural boost to global temperatures that are already elevated due to the human-caused buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
The NOAA projection, made late last week, is based on statistical modeling now that the first quarter of 2020 is off to a near-record warm start, coming in as the second-warmest January through March period since instrument records began in 1880.
As our leaders in Washington look to create a jobs program focused on national infrastructure investments to sustain the U.S. economy, their decisions will significantly impact our economic future, including the industries that will — and will not — receive a lifeline through federal stimulus dollars.
For decades, scientists have thought that changes in snowmelt due to climate change could negatively impact agriculture. Now, a new study reveals the risks to agriculture around the world from changes in snowmelt, finding that farmers in parts of the western United States who rely on snowmelt to help irrigate crops will be among the hardest hit in the world by climate change.
In a study published April 20 in Nature Climate Change, an interdisciplinary team of researchers analyzed monthly irrigation water demand with snowmelt runoff across global basins from 1985 to 2015. The goal was to determine where irrigated agriculture has depended on snowmelt runoff in the past and how that might change with a warming climate.
Californians tend to regard our droughts in seasonal and annual terms: The winter storms fill reservoirs with rain and mountains with snow, or they don’t, or sometimes, like this year, they do so in the spring. But a new study proposes a broader perspective in which recent years’ shifts from dry to wet to weird are just minor variations within a longer and more extraordinary period of widespread parching.
