With increased drought coverage from newspapers, water conservation increased in the San Francisco Bay Area during the drought that ended in 2016. That’s according to a new study from Stanford researchers that links real water consumption data with the public attention garnered by California’s recent droughts.
Californians strongly support action by state and federal agencies to ensure that the water in our streams and the water we drink are free of dangerous contaminants, and that our precious wetlands are preserved. Unfortunately, the Trump administration and Congress propose to weaken federal Clean Water Act protections for those essential resources. But California regulatory agencies needn’t and shouldn’t wait for this federal rollback. They should instead take action proactively to use state law to ensure clean water and wetlands protections for all Californians.
The Trump administration said Wednesday that it will not support a massive water project proposed by California, the latest and most serious blow for Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to re-engineer the state’s water system by building two giant water tunnels. “The Trump administration did not fund the project and chose to not move forward with it,” Russell Newell, spokesman for the U.S. Interior Department, said in an email. Asked if that meant the Trump administration did not support California’s tunnels project, Newell said yes.
Should a river have legal rights of its own? Should it be able to thrive, and even evolve naturally, without human interference? Those are the deep questions asked in a precedent-setting federal lawsuit filed in September in which the Colorado River, as an ecosystem, seeks federal legal rights to exist and to flourish. It is the first action of its kind in the United States. The plaintiff in the case is the Colorado River itself, with the organization Deep Green Resistance acting as a “next friend” on its behalf.
California needs to spend another $100 million a year to keep the state’s levee system sound, according to state flood control experts. At a press conference marking flood preparedness week Monday at a levee repair site near Sacramento, Bill Edgar, president of the Central Valley Flood Protection Board said the levees will need a $17 billion to $21 billion investment over the next 30 years to protect the seven million Californians at flood risk. That number includes $130 million a year annually for repairs and maintenance, up from the $30 million currently spent.
The Trump administration pulled support Wednesday from Gov. Jerry Brown’s ambitious plan to build California’s biggest water project in decades, casting the current form of the $16 billion proposal to build two giant tunnels as another unwanted legacy from the Obama era The comments from a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesman marked the first public statements by the Trump administration on the initiative and signaled the latest setback for the project that California’s 79-year-old leader had hoped to see launched before he leaves office next year.
Is the Trump administration opposed to the Delta tunnels, Gov. Jerry Brown’s plan to remake the troubled estuary and improve water deliveries to the southern half of the state? For a while Wednesday, it certainly looked that way. A top spokesman for the U.S. Interior Department, Russell Newell, told The Associated Press that “the Trump administration did not fund the project and chose to not move forward with it.”
For many homeowners in Sonoma and Napa counties, nothing could have been more welcome than the splashing of rain that fell on Northern California last Thursday – the first significant precipitation in about five months. The rain helped put an end to the fires burning in the area, which first ignited on October 8, and have wreaked hellish destruction on Santa Rosa and other communities. However, the recent rain – and the precipitation to come in the months ahead – will bring considerable environmental impacts of their own, especially to the waterways, and even water treatment plants, downstream of destroyed forests and incinerated neighborhoods.
It is by now a familiar story: The storm hits, the cities flood, dramatic rescues ensue to save people from the rising waters, followed by the arduous and expensive cleanup. But chances are you’ve thought less about the deadly and economically destructive consequences of a slower-moving culprit: drought. Repeated droughts around the world are destroying enough farm produce to feed 81 million people for a year and are four times more costly for economies than floods, the World Bank found in a new study.
Five California Democrats in Congress asked Tuesday for a new federal review of funding for Gov. Jerry Brown’s proposed tunnel project. Their request follows a federal audit of Brown’s $16 billion proposal to re-engineer California’s complex north-south water system by building two giant water tunnels. The audit, released by the U.S. Interior Department’s inspector-general in September, found that the Interior Department improperly used federal taxpayer money to help fund planning for the tunnels.
