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Heavy Water Users in California Could Face Penalties, $500 Fines If Drought Persists

Locked in a multi-year drought, California’s urban water suppliers have, for the most part, happily enforced rules that prohibit specific wasteful water practices, such as hosing down driveways and over-watering lawns.

But far fewer agencies have been willing to go beyond state mandates and penalize customers simply for using profligate volumes of water. The names of those heavy users have been mostly kept secret under California public records law. That’s about to change.

Fading Salton Sea Thirsting For Water

Tom Anderson stands on an overlook on the southern edge of the shallow lake. Red Rock Hill rises up near the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge, where Anderson is a deputy project manager. Anderson works to reclaim habitat for shore birds that come here to forage and feed. Agricultural runoff and evaporation team up to concentrate the salt in this land-locked lake, according to Anderson. That leaves the lake significantly saltier than the Pacific Ocean. The Salton Sea is also getting smaller.

OPINION: Finally, Progress Towards a Sustainable Salton Sea

As California’s two largest inland bodies of water go, Lake Tahoe is the stereotypical beauty queen — classically stunning, endlessly photogenic, fragile. Frankly, quite chilly yet eternally inspiring to legions of admirers. The Salton Sea is the neighbor tucked away at the far end of the street and often forgotten. Stark, spare, somewhat homely, beloved by only a select and discriminating community of devotees. The result of an accident. Unkempt. Sometimes — let’s be honest here — a little smelly.

OPINION: Water Relief Is on The Way – If Congress Works Together

A recent study by UC Davis confirmed that the Central Valley continues to suffer the brunt of the drought, to the tune of $630 million this year and $5.5 billion over the past three years. Farmers have fallowed more than 1 million acres of land, and 42,000 people have lost their jobs. But we need to look beyond the numbers. Small farms have gone bankrupt. Generations of farmers have lost their livelihoods, including a cantaloupe farmer I recently met with who lost the farm his grandfather started. He and his father had worked that land side-by-side for decades.

Can San Diego’s Ambitious Environmental Plan Make it a Test Case For Green Urbanism?

When San Diego passed a far-reaching Climate Action Plan last December, there was real reason to celebrate. The nation’s eighth-largest city, a poster child for Southern California suburbia, had passed a far-reaching, progressive environmental policy (with a Republican mayor in charge) that not only advocated for important goals, such as slashing carbon emissions in half by 2035, but made them legally binding. It was a bound promise suggesting a level of civic engagement and vision that would make the city a trailblazer for others, hitting benchmarks that perhaps have never been hit by any other city.

OPINION: Wastewater Recycling and Conservation Aren’t Enough — That’s Where Desal Comes In

The same old arguments against desalination keep getting resurrected: It’s too expensive, too energy intensive, plus wastewater recycling and conservation by themselves can solve the drought problem. When put in the context of climate change, imported water and perpetual drought, none of these arguments make sense. Climate scientists are unequivocally telling Southern Californians to prepare for drought as the “new normal” (we are now experiencing the hottest year on record in the midst of the fifth year of punishing drought).

BLOG: Debunking the West’s Biggest Water Myths

You don’t have to look too far to find disheartening stories about water in the American West. In general, it seems, we’re running out. We have droughts and climate change impacts. There are “water wars” between states or stakeholders. John Fleck, a journalist first in Southern California and then later for 25 years in Albuquerque, New Mexico, knew this narrative well. “I started as a journalist looking for that trouble” he said. “And you can find trouble in water when you look for it; there’s plenty to go around.”

 

Could the ‘Most Powerful Geothermal Reservoirs in the World’ Save the Colorado River?

President Obama made a historic announcement Wednesday, saying that the federal government is considering investing in the geothermal power in the rock formations under the Salton Sea in Southern California. Considered to be “the most powerful geothermal reservoirs in the world,” the Salton Sea announcement could play a critical role in the future management of the Colorado River. Fifty years ago, Glen Canyon Dam was built above the Grand Canyon, and the Colorado River was enslaved to generate electricity to feed the hunger of the booming southwestern cities and suburbs.

OPINION: Huntington Beach Desalination Plant Can Be More Than a Water Supply Project

This week marks the 10-year anniversary of the man-made opening of the Bolsa Chica wetlands to the Pacific Ocean. Wetlands are an essential part of coastal ecosystems. They improve water quality by filtering sediment, nutrients and pesticides, recharge groundwater, protect shorelines by increasing resistance to erosion, provide bird flyways and most importantly are incubators for a wide variety of fish. California has lost 91 percent of its wetlands, more than any other state.

California and National Drought Summary for August 30, 2016

This U.S. Drought Monitor week saw a swath of above normal precipitation stretching from western Texas northeastward through parts of western Oklahoma, much of Kansas, northwest Missouri and into northern Illinois. A combination of moisture flowing in from the Southwest and Southeast along with a stalled frontal boundary brought abundant precipitation to areas of Texas and New Mexico. The heaviest rains during the period fell in western Texas and southeast New Mexico where at least 5 inches were measured. Approximately 5 inches of rain also fell in northwest Missouri and northeast Iowa.