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The Dam Truth: The 91,000 Dams In the US Earned A “D” For Safety

/in , /by /Mother Jones ( San Francisco )by Jacques Leslie

It is a telling illustration of the precarious state of United States dams that the near-collapse in February 2017 of Oroville Dam, the nation’s tallest, occurred in California, considered one of the nation’s leading states in dam safety management.

The Oroville incident forced the evacuation of nearly 190,000 people and cost the state $1.1 billion in repairs. It took its place as a seminal event in the history of US dam safety, ranking just below the failures in the 1970s of two dams—Teton Dam in Idaho and Kelly Barnes in Georgia—that killed 14 and 39 people, respectively, and ushered in the modern dam safety era.

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The USDA Didn’t Publish Its Plan To Help Farmers Adapt To Climate Change. Here’s Where They Need It The Most.

/in , , /by /Mother Jones (San Francisco)by Tom Philpott

The Trump administration’s department of agriculture has apparently settled on its strategy for preparing the food system for an uncertain future: ignore climate change.  This wasn’t always the agency’s tactic. Back in 2017, as Politico’s Helena Bottemiller Evich recently reported, the USDA was set to release a big plan on how to “help the agriculture industry understand and adapt to climate change.” But “top officials chose not to release the report, and told staff it should be kept for internal use only,” Bottemiller Evich wrote. Weeks before, Bottemiller Evich reported about how the USDA’s top decision makers have systematically “refused to publicize” its own scientists’ research on the impact of climate change on farming.

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Like Fruit, Vegetables, and Almonds? Scientists Have Bad News.

/in , /by /Mother Jonesby Tom Philpott

So far, this winter has brought ample snows to the Sierra Nevada, the spine of mountains that runs along California’s eastern flank. That’s good news for Californians, because the range’s melted snow provides 60 percent of the state’s water supply. Anyone in the United States who likes fruit, vegetables, and nuts should rejoice, too, because water flowing from the Sierra’s streams and rivers is the main irrigation source for farms in the arid Central Valley, which churns out nearly a quarter of the food consumed here.

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40 Million Americans Depend On The Colorado River. It’s Drying Up.

/in , /by /Mother Jones (San Francisco)by Eric Holthaus

Prompted by years of drought and mismanagement, a series of urgent multi-state meetings are currently underway in Las Vegas to renegotiate the use of the Colorado River. Seven states and the federal government are close to a deal, with a powerful group of farmers in Arizona being the lone holdouts. The stakes are almost impossibly high: The Colorado River provides water to 1 in 8 Americans, and irrigates 15 percent of the country’s agricultural products. The nearly 40 million people who depend on it live in cities from Los Angeles to Denver.

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The Great California Laundry And Shower Meme, Explained

/in , /by /Mother Jones (San Francisco)by Kevin Drum

Last night I received the following peculiar tweet: Off-topic, but do you know if a new California law prohibits taking a shower and doing laundry on the same day? A lot of conservative sites are claiming that, but they’re not known for their factual accuracy. It just so happens that on Monday I took a shower and did a load of laundry. I’m pretty sure this is still legal, even here in the Golden State. But, um, what brought this up?

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