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Gavin Newsom Talks Climate With Quebec’s Premier As State Braces For Rising Seas

/in , /by /Cal Mattersby Judy Lin

Quebec Premier François Legault will be hosted by Gov. Gavin Newsom in Sacramento to discuss reducing greenhouse gases. Today’s closed-door meeting comes as the Trump administration accuses California of overstepping its bounds by entering into an international emissions agreement. Remind me: California’s cap-and-trade program has been around since 2013 and aims to limit the state’s greenhouse gas emissions. Industries meet their goals by lowering emissions or buying state-auctioned permits that allow them to pollute. The permits can be bought and sold.

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Decades-Long Deal Will Expand Recycled Water to South Bay Communities

/in , /by /Fox 2 KTVUby Jesse Gary

Officials with three different South Bay agencies have reached a historic agreement on the vital resource of water. The decades-long deal will provide more drinkable water for residents, and give more resiliency during drought. The agreement reached on Tuesday will last until the year 2095. Rarely have so many officials and elected leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder toasting with recycled water, the completion of a difficult agreement. “There has never been a 76 year in this field before, number one. Number two, cities have different needs. Number three, water is complex,” said Valley Water board member Gary Kremen, who represents District 7. 

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Black And Brown Muck: Can Overwhelmed S.F. Sewers Ever Stop Flooding?

/in , /by /San Francisco Chronicleby Dominic Fracassa and Anna Bauman

After a weekend storm walloped San Francisco, officials say preventing flood damage from powerful rains in vulnerable areas of the city largely remains a pipe dream.

A storm that inundated San Francisco with more than an inch of rain in a single hour Saturday flooded two Muni light-rail stations, snarled traffic on Highway 101 and forced residents in parts of West Portal to wade through waist-deep water that surged into homes, causing thousands of dollars of damage.

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The World’s Supply Of Fresh Water Is In Trouble As Mountain Ice Vanishes

/in , , /by /National Geographicby Alejandra Borunda

This water will flow thousands of miles, eventually feeding people, farms, and the natural world on the vast, dry Indus plain. Many of the more than 200 million people in the downstream basin rely on water that comes from this stream and others like it.

But climate change is hitting those high mountain regions more brutally than the world on average. That change is putting the “water towers” like this one, and the billions of people that depend on them, in ever more precarious positions. New research published Monday in Nature identifies the most important and vulnerable water towers in the world.

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How PFAS Negotiations Fell Apart

/in , , /by /E&E News by Ariana Figueroa

Before Democrats managed to secure provisions to address a class of toxic chemicals in an annual defense measure, negotiations fell apart at the hands of their own members.

For months, Democrats pushed to attach provisions in the National Defense Authorization Act that would designate a class of 5,000 toxic chemicals, known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), as hazardous.

Doing so would spark federal cleanup standards. Democrats also wanted EPA to set a strong drinking water standard.

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Supreme Court Won’t Review States’ Rights For Water Permits

/in , /by /Bloomberg by Ellen M. Gilmer

The Supreme Court won’t review a long-running legal debate over the extent of states’ water permitting authority for major pipelines, hydroelectric dams, and other projects.

The justices on Dec. 9 declined to take up California Trout v. Hoopa Valley Tribe, a case focused on Section 401 of the Clean Water Act, which calls on states to ensure that proposals that require federal permits meet water quality standards within their borders.

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California Threats Jump From Fires To Floods As Wet Season Hits

/in , , /by /Bloombergby Brian K. Sullivan

California’s climate threats could soon be jumping from wildfires and blackouts to floods and mudslides as the wet season kicks into gear.

About half the water that falls in the state in any given year does so in the 90 days between Dec. 1 and the end of February. Too much rain has at times meant catastrophic floods and dangerous mudslides. Too little threatens agriculture with drought, and potentially creates a tinderbox effect in the year ahead.

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Opinion: Keeping Our Water On When The Power Goes Off

/in , /by /Capitol Weekly by Cynthia Koehler

During last month’s PG&E Public Safety Power Shutoffs, like so many across California, my family lost electricity for four days. We couldn’t turn on the lights, access the internet or charge our phones.

But we didn’t lose water for a moment, thanks to the steps our water provider had taken to prepare for this kind of emergency. I sit on the board of that utility, and am proud to say that, while 95 percent of our customers lost power that week, virtually none lost water.

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Pattern Change to Bring Drier Trend to Most of California Through Mid-December

/in , , /by /AccuWeatherby Courtney Spamer

Several storms have barreled across much of California since before Thanksgiving. But now, a shift in the weather pattern looks to bring calmer weather.

Storm after storm dove across the state over the past several weeks, delivering rain, wind and mountain snow.

The jet stream, which helps to influence the track storm systems take, was a big part of the reason for the recent storminess.

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How a Closed-Door Meeting Shows Farmers are Waking Up on Climate Change

/in , , /by /Politico California by Helena Bottemiller Evich

The meeting last June in a wood-beamed barn in Newburg, Md., an hour due south of Washington, had all the makings of a secret conclave. The guest list was confidential. No press accounts were allowed. The topic was how to pivot American agriculture to help combat climate change — an issue so politically toxic that the current administration routinely shies away from promoting crucial government research on the issue.

But this meeting represented a change. It was hosted by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, a group made up of the heavyweights in American agriculture. It brought together three secretaries of agriculture, including the current one, Sonny Perdue, among an A-list of about 100 leaders that included the president of the American Farm Bureau Federation — a longtime, powerful foe of federal action on climate — and CEOs of major food companies, green groups and anti-hunger advocates.

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