In three years, California’s largest utilities could be slashing their use of fossil fuels by swapping homegrown solar energy for Rocky Mountain wind power in a sprawling Western electricity grid. Or a newly expanded grid could provide a profitable market to revive out-of-state coal plants that would otherwise face a harder time complying with California’s aggressive greenhouse-gas-reduction efforts.
In Colorado, rivers flow not only down mountain slopes but beneath them, across them, and through them. Nearly four dozen canals, tunnels, and ditches in the state move water out of natural drainages and into neighboring basins. Some snake across high passes. Others pierce bedrock. All manmade water courses, meant to supply farming, manufacturing, or household use, eventually become so familiar they become part of the landscape. But old infrastructure can come to life in different form.
Global heat, greenhouse gases and sea levels all climbed to record highs last year, making 2015 the worst in modern times across a range of key environmental indicators, international scientists said Tuesday. A dire picture of the Earth’s health is painted in the State of the Climate report, a peer-reviewed 300-page tome that comes out once a year and is compiled by 450 scientists from around the world. The record heat that the planet experienced last year was driven partially by global warming, and was exacerbated by the ocean heating trend known as El Nino, it said.
Californians used 21 percent less water in June than they did in 2013. That wasn’t as much savings as last month or even last year, but state water regulators say they expected conservation to dip. It’s the first month after statewide mandates were eased. Local water agencies now set conservation standards based on supply. Agencies must self-certify that they can provide water for several years. Regulators call it a “stress-test.” But it may be too soon to tell if the dip in June is an indication that the relaxed rules aren’t working.
Freed from stringent statewide drought controls, Californians have begun using more water. Urban consumption grew by 8 percent in June compared to a year earlier, according to figures released Tuesday by the State Water Resources Control Board. June was the first month in which California was operating under significantly relaxed drought regulations, and state regulators said they will monitor conservation going forward. If necessary, they said drought mandates could be reinstated. Californians still managed to reduce water use by 21.5 percent in June, compared with the 2013 baseline established by the state.
Last summer, a revolution occurred in Los Angeles landscaping: Across the city, tens of thousands of homeowners tore up their water-thirsty lawns and replaced them with gravel, turf, decomposed granite and a wide range of drought-tolerant plants at a rate never seen before.
The water-saving benefits of this massive landscape overhaul are undisputed — and that’s important in a region that was facing the worst drought in 1,200 years. Still, some experts warned that Angelenos’ zeal to use less water in the backyard would ultimately make the city warmer.
California officials Tuesday released a detailed environmental blueprint for Gov. Jerry Brown’s controversial Delta tunnels project, saying the $15.5 billion plan “minimizes potential effects” on endangered fish species whose populations have dwindled following decades of water pumping. The Department of Water Resources unveiled its so-called “biological assessment” for the proposed tunnels, which are designed to re-engineer the plumbing of the battered Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in order to improve reliability of water deliveries to the San Joaquin Valley and Southern California.
Dave Edwards has hiked in the Santa Monica Mountains for decades, but the view has changed in the past few years. Hundreds, if not thousands, of trees have died, leaving hillsides with gray and brown patches. Five years of drought has shortchanged trees on water and nutrients. Trees dried out and insects moved in. “It’s not just in the Santa Monica Mountains. It’s all over the state,” said Edwards, a volunteer with the Santa Monica Mountains Trails Council. “I have never seen it like this.”
Water conservation in California dipped slightly during the first month that the state’s mandatory water-savings rules were significantly relaxed, regulators said Tuesday. The 21.5% cut in water use in June compared with the same month in 2013 was less impressive than some officials had hoped, but also came as a relief because the numbers suggest that urban Californians will continue to save water — even when they are not required to do so.
As Philadelphia baked and wildfires roared like the apocalypse in California, Gov. Jerry Brown last week called on the nation to remember the impact this presidential election could have on climate change.
“What America needs today are not deniers, but leaders. Not division, but common purpose. Not bombast, but bold action,” Brown told the Democratic National Convention, lambasting Donald Trump and lauding Hillary Clinton. “Trump says global warming is a hoax. I say Trump is a fraud.”
