Stress from heat, drought on fish spurs push to reduce kills

Image Credit: Bob Pennell/The Mail Tribune via AP, File

GRANTS PASS, Ore. (AP) — Drought and record hot weather are producing lethal conditions for salmon and trout in rivers across the West.

A recent survey released Wednesday of the lower reaches of 54 rivers in Oregon, California and Washington by the conservation group Wild Fish Conservancy showed nearly three-quarters had temperatures higher than 70 degrees, considered potentially deadly for salmon and trout.

Low river flows from the record low winter snowpack, which normally feeds rivers through the summer, combined with record hot weather have created a “perfect storm” of bad conditions for salmon and trout, said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service supervisory fisheries biologist Rich Johnson.

“It’s unprecedented, I’d say,” Johnson said.

Oregon Climate Center Associate Director Kathie Dello says the entire West Coast saw record low snowpack last winter, leading to low rivers this summer. All three states had record high temperatures for June, with Oregon breaking the record by 3 degrees, and the three-month outlook from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is for continued warmer and drier-than-normal weather made worse by the ocean-warming condition known as El Nino, she added.

“This is the worst case scenario playing out right now, a warm winter and then a warm and dry summer,” she said.

The Willamette River saw scores of dead salmon in June.

This week, state biologists examined about 50 dead sockeye salmon in the mouth of the Deschutes River. State fisheries biologist Rod French said they appeared to have been infected with a gill rot disease associated with warm water, and had probably left the warm waters of the Columbia River in search of cooler water.

In California, inland fisheries manager Roger Bloom says they are considering emergency fishing closures on several rivers so that fish weakened by the warm water do not die from being played by an angler, even if they are released. They include the lower Merced, the American and the Klamath.

In Washington, two federal fish hatcheries in the Columbia Gorge released 6 million juvenile salmon two weeks early in the Columbia River, in hopes they would have a better chance of reaching the ocean before temperatures got even warmer, said Johnson.

“It’s just a perfect storm of bad weather conditions for salmon,” he said. “Pray for rain and snow.”

River flows are so low, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife is sending out crews to clear out impromptu dams people build with rocks to create a pool to cool off in, so the salmon can swim upstream to spawn, said department drought coordinator Teresa Scott. Rivers are at levels normally not expected until September, and no one knows if they will drop even further.

“This is such a huge magnitude compared to previous droughts,” she said. “Records available from before don’t come close to preparing us for what we are encountering this year.”

In Oregon, deputy fisheries chief Bruce McIntosh says they have imposed closures around cool water areas where salmon seek refuge at the mouths of tributaries flowing into the lower Umpqua River, but he did do not anticipate any more closures unless things get worse.

“Certainly we’ve had significant droughts in the past, such as the late 70’s,” he said. “But the challenge this year has been not only are there drought conditions, we’re having August temperatures in June. That combination we really have not seen before.”

Liz Hamilton of the Northwest Sportfishing Association, said closures are not needed, because when temperatures get too warm, fish go off the bite, and anglers quit fishing anyway.

Read Full Article: AP

Abandoned Golf Courses Are Being Transformed into Solar Farms

Golf is a dying sport, and country club memberships are seen as an elitist relic of the past. But cultural changes are only one reason golf courses are falling out of favor: The chemical-laden, water-guzzling greens are especially irresponsible for areas hit by drought. Here’s an idea from Japan for those sunny green fairways: Use them to generate solar energy instead.

Japan energy giant Kyocera broke ground last week on a 23-megawatt solar farm that’s being installed on an abandoned golf course in the Kyoto Prefecture, making it the largest solar energy array in the region. But that’s not even the only golf-to-solar project in the country. A 92-megawatt solar farm is planned for land in Kagoshima Prefecture that was designated for a golf course, but was never built.

Repurposing golf courses for energy generation makes sense in Japan, where an economic crisis reigned in frivolous expenses and space for solar panels is at a premium (Kyocera is also behind the famous floating solar arrays just off Japan’s coast). But the idea it seems to be catching on in the US as well. According to Quartz, golf courses in New York and Minnesota are also replacing golf courses with solar farms.

These aren’t even the sunniest spots in the country—think of the potential in places that could really use all that water being dumped on golf courses, like Arizona and California. The overdevelopment of golf infrastructure has resulted in a glut of courses in these arid climates that also happen to have lots of sun.

Read Full Article: Gizmodo

California’s Drought Is Part of a Much Bigger Water Crisis

Image Credit: Madison

Why do I keep hearing about the California drought, if it’s the Colorado River that we’re “killing”?
Pretty much every state west of the Rockies has been facing a water shortage of one kind or another in recent years.  California’s is a severe, but relatively short-term, drought. But the Colorado River basin—which provides critical water supplies for seven states including California—is the victim of a slower-burning catastrophe entering its 16th year. Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona and California all share water from the Colorado River, a hugely important water resource that sustains 40 million people in those states, supports 15 percent of the nation’s food supply, and fills two of largest water reserves in the country.

The severe shortages of rain and snowfall have hurt California’s $46 billion agricultural industry and helped raise national awareness of the longer-term shortages that are affecting the entire Colorado River basin. But while the two problems have commonalities and have some effect on one another, they’re not exactly the same thing.

Just how bad is the drought in California right now?
Most of California is experiencing “extreme to exceptional drought,” and the crisis has now entered its fourth year. This month, signaling how serious the current situation is, state officials announced the first cutback to farmers’ water rights since 1977, and ordered cities and towns to cut water use by as much as 36 percent. Those who don’t comply with the cuts will face fines, but some farmers are already ignoring the new rules, or challenging them in court.

The drought shows no sign of letting up any time soon, and the state’s agricultural industry is suffering. A recent study by U.C. Davis researchers projected that the drought would cost California’s economy $2.7 billion in 2015 alone.

In addition to the economic cost, the drought has subtle and not-so-subtle effects on flora and fauna throughout the region. This current drought may be contributing to the spread of the West Nile virus, and it’s threatening populations of geese, ducks and Joshua trees. Dry, hot periods can exacerbate wildfires, while water shortages are making firefighters’ jobs even harder.

And a little bit of rain won’t help. NOAA scientists say it could take several years of average or above-average rainfall before California’s water supply can return to anything close to normal.

What about a lot of rain? Couldn’t that end the drought in California and across the West?
Not necessarily. A half-decade of torrential rains might bail California out of its crisis, but the larger West’s problems are more structural and systemic.  “Killing the Colorado” has shown that people are entitled to more water from the Colorado than has flowed through it, on average, over the last 110 years. Meanwhile much of the water is lost, overused or wasted, stressing both the Colorado system, and trickling down to California, which depends on the Colorado for a big chunk of its own supply. Explosive urban growth matched with the steady planting of water-thirsty crops – which use the majority of the water – don’t help. Arcane laws actually encourage farmers to take even more water from the Colorado River and from California’s rivers than they actually need, and federal subsidies encourage farmers to plant some of the crops that use the most water. And, as ProPublica has reported, it seems that “the engineering that made settling the West possible may have reached the bounds of its potential”—meaning that even the big dams and canals we built to ferry all this water may now be causing more harm than good.

Water use policies—perhaps more than nature—have caused the water crisis in the West. As the former Arizona governor and U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt told ProPublica: “There is enough water in the West‚ [but] there are all kinds of agriculture efficiencies that have not been put into place.”

While there are mixed views on whether climate change can be blamed for California’s drought, a recent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) report found climate change was not the cause. Global warming has caused excessive heat that may have worsened the drought’s effects, but it isn’t necessarily to blame for the lack of rain. It’s true that recent years have yielded much less rain and snow than previous times in history, the NOAA report explains, but that’s just a result of “natural variance” and not necessarily because of man-made pollution. But in both California and the larger Colorado River basin, mismanagement of the water supply has left the West more vulnerable to both short and long-term changes in climate.

What do you mean by mismanagement?              
When officials divvied up rights to Colorado River water nearly a century ago, it happened to be a wetter period than usual. The result? The states vastly overestimated the river’s annual flow. Today, the river’s reserves are especially low and states are stillclaiming the same amount of water from the Colorado River that they always have — which is 1.4 trillion gallons a year more than the river actually produces. This sort of oversubscription is similar in California, where historic water rights give many farms first rights to California’s streams and rivers, and haven’t been adjusted as the state’s population has increased and its cities have grown.

Wait—don’t we all have equal water rights?
Well, if you believe Steve Yuhas, a resident of affluent Rancho Santa Fe, California, “we’re not all equal when it comes to water.” (Yuhas made the unfortunate mistake of complaining on social media that he and his neighbors deserve more water because they pay more property taxes, and “should not be forced to‚ golf on brown lawns,” and was pilloried by readers of the Washington Post article that drew attention to his comments.) But actually, every state has its own laws about who gets how much water—and it has nothing to do with property taxes.

To the uninitiated, “water law” is arcane and confusing—hence the need for, yes, water lawyers). Sometimes, water law seems to defy common sense. For instance, in Colorado, if you put a barrel in your yard to collect rainwater for your plants, you are technically “stealing” that water right out of the sky; under water law,” nearly every drop is spoken for.”

But the underlying rule of water in the West is that the first people to show up and claim it were the first people to get it, and everyone who came after took a place further back in line. Called “prior appropriation,” this remains the dominant thread in Western water issues, more than 100 years later.

So where is all this water going?
For all of the warnings people in the West get about taking shorter showers and turning off sprinklers, the fact remains that agriculture uses the most water, by far. Farming and agriculture use more than 70 percent of the water that flows from the Colorado River to the seven river basin states.

In addition to those crops, cotton is one of the thirstiest crops a farmer can grow,especially in a desert. As it happens, many of the crops that use less water entitle farmers to fewer federal subsidies, and so farmers don’t have much of an incentive to switch crops. Though cotton production has dropped steeply in California, since 1995, California farmers have gotten $3 billion in federal subsidies to grow it. On top of subsidies, ” Use it or Lose It” clauses in state water laws actually encourage farmers to flood their fields with much more water than they need lest they lose the right to that amount of water in the future.

Urban development is also a big factor. Las Vegas has grown faster than any other city in the West, its footprint doubling in the past 25 years as more and more people have moved there. It is far from the only urban strain on the West’s water supplies, but its approach to growth is emblematic of cities from Phoenix to San Diego. Denver’s metro population hit 2.7 million in 2013, more than three times what it was in 1960. For all its problems, Las Vegas pioneered ways to save water and incentivize efficiency more than a decade ago that Los Angeles is only beginning to adopt today.

What is California doing to address its water problems? Is it working?
Californians do seem to be answering the call to use less water in their daily lives after Gov. Jerry Brown imposed cutbacks in March. The state’s “water czar,” Felicia Marcus, continues to crack down on water waste, and creative ad campaigns are finding varying degrees of success. The state has cut deliveries of water to farmers through the state and federal aqueduct systems, and is now beginning to tackle the tough tasks of reforming water rights and curtailing some of the state’s most senior users.

The federal government is also sending millions of dollars in “drought aid,” and local counties are exploring how to desalinate ocean water to replenish water supplies. Some enterprising individuals are even proposing to revive old plans to tow icebergs or haul water down from Alaska.

Meanwhile, like any prolonged crisis, the drought is drawing out the best and worst in people. Some people are conscientiously conserving water in their homes in little ways—by not washing their cars or by capturing shower water from inside for their gardens outside, for instance. The drought has also inspired innovation in water conservation for restaurants, pools and lawns. Meanwhile, others have been caught stealing water from their neighbors and drought-shaming campaigns have multiplied online.

To the extent that climate change exacerbates the drought, California’s efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may eventually help. In 2006 the state passed a law mandating that it buy less coal-fired energy. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power is now also selling its stake in the Navajo Generating Station to invest in clean energy alternatives, though the plant (which generates more climate-warming gases than almost any other plant in the nation) will continue pumping Colorado River water to Arizona.

Will California cutbacks alleviate the larger Colorado River problem?
California uses almost one-third of the entire Colorado River flow, having a larger share than any other Colorado River basin state. California gets 16 percent of its surface water—water that comes from snowpack, streams and rivers—from the Colorado River via two huge aqueducts. The California Aqueduct runs beneath mountains into Riverside County and eventually toward Los Angeles, providing a substantial supply for both L.A. and San Diego. The All-American Canal moves water along the tail-end of the Colorado River near the Mexican border, nourishing one of the state’s most valuable agriculture areas, Imperial County, where a large proportion of the nation’s winter fruits and vegetables are grown.

Of the seven basin states, California holds the most senior legal rights to the Colorado, which entitle it to keep drawing water even as Lake Mead runs dry and the rest of the Colorado River states suffer through shortages. That means in the short term, not much that California does will change the situation on the Colorado, unless it were to voluntarily surrender more of its entitlement to the river. But should Colorado River shortages worsen to the point that the states ever re-negotiate that division of water, a reduction of California’s Colorado River water rights could have a brutal impact on California’s remaining supplies. Officials in California, like every other state in the region, are now facing a “new normal,” as nature places new limits on the state’s previously unchecked growth.

I don’t live in California or the West, so why is this my problem?
California grows and exports a majority of the fruits and nuts eaten by the rest of the country, so water shortages there affect food supply everywhere. Calculations by the Pacific Institute indicate that, by eating food grown in California, each American indirectly uses more than 300 gallons of the state’s water each week. Almonds, which require a comparatively huge amount of water to produce, have become the most visible scapegoat for an enormous problem of which they are only one small part. One almond takes almost an entire gallon of water to produce—but so does a tiny slice of cantaloupe, four strawberries, two florets of broccoli, or a fraction of an egg.

In fact, some of the biggest “water hogs,” indirectly, are meat and dairy. Cows and chickens and other animals eat a lot of crops, which in turn require a lot of water. So it takes 86 gallons of water to make just 1.75 ounces of beef. Some research has suggested that the country’s meat industries create such a high demand for water-thirsty feed crops, that if every American ate meat one less day a week, it could save as much water as flows through the Colorado River in an entire year.

Read Full Article: Scientific American

Idaho aquifer decline could hinder radioactive monitoring

Image Credit: Statesman Journal

BOISE, Idaho (AP) — A continued drop in underground water levels could make it more difficult to monitor the movement of radioactive contamination in an aquifer below an eastern Idaho nuclear facility, scientists say.

Researchers with the U.S. Geological Survey in a 36-page report released Monday said the Eastern Snake River Plain Aquifer level has dropped below two wells and about a dozen others are in danger due to ongoing drought.

“We’re starting to have some concern that some of them could go dry,” said Geological Survey scientist Roy Bartholomay.

Practices in past decades at the 890-square-mile U.S. Department of Energy facility that opened in 1949 and is now called the Idaho National Laboratory included pumping radioactive waste underground. Workers in the Cold War era also put radioactive waste in ponds that seeped into the ground.

The Department of Energy in an emailed response to inquiries by The Associated Press said the agency in 1972 discontinued pumping radioactive waste underground from the Test Area North and Test Reactor Area, and in 1984 at the Idaho Nuclear Technology and Engineering Center. The agency said it has also discontinued putting radioactive waste in ponds.

The agency said it completed publicly-reviewed evaluations and, with the agreement of the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, had taken appropriate actions to protect human health and the environment.

“These published evaluations determined that no active treatment is required to remove radioactive contamination from the aquifer,” the agency said in the email sent by spokesman Tim Jackson to the AP. “Natural attenuation and institutional controls were determined to be protective for the radionuclides in the aquifer.”

The U.S. Geological Survey monitors 177 wells, most within the boundaries of the federal site but some on the down-gradient side. Water in the aquifer flows from the northeast to the southwest.

The down-gradient wells can tell scientists “when and where the contamination plume starts to move off the INL and into another part of the aquifer,” said Geological Survey spokesman Tim Merrick.

Bartholomay said scientists track tritium, strontium-90, cesium-137, plutonium-238 and other radioactive elements. A study that looked at well monitoring information from 1981 to 2012 found that tritium and strontium-90 were decreasing or showing no trends.

Bartholomay said radioactivity appears to be staying in some places and overall the aquifer is improving. It’s also believed some of the radioactivity has traveled much deeper in the aquifer.

It takes from 50 to 700 years for water to travel through the aquifer and emerge in springs near Twin Falls. The Geological Survey monitored water in the area until budget cuts in the 2000s, Bartholomay said, and never observed any radioactivity above normal background levels.

He said any radioactivity emanating from the INL would be too diluted to be of danger by the time it reached the Twin Falls area.

The aquifer, the report notes, has dropped some 20 feet in northern portions. One well in about the center of the aquifer and that Bartholomay said offers an overall picture of the aquifer hit an all-time low in October at 594 feet below the surface. That’s down about 12 feet in 20 years.

“We have natural cycles of wet and dry periods,” he said. “Unfortunately, in the last 14 years we haven’t really seen that wet period again.”

And in the last three years there’s been drought.

Read Full Article: AP

Republicans shift strategy in effort to increase logging

Image Credit: Wikipedia

WASHINGTON (AP) — Drought has killed about 12 million trees in California’s national forests. In the Rocky Mountain region, an epidemic of pine beetles has damaged trees over a stretch of 32 million acres. Altogether, up to 40 percent of the entire national forest system is in need of treatment to reduce the threat of catastrophic wildfire and disease.

As the national forests suffer from drought, density and infestation, House Republicans are resurrecting efforts to thin more quickly millions of acres and take down dead trees.

It’s not a new battle by any means, but this time some of their proposals are winning positive feedback from the Obama administration, even as some environmental groups and House Democrats express concerns.

House Republicans have long sought more aggressive tree removal from national forest lands. Legislation in the last Congress would have required the government to increase significantly the amount of timber it offers for sale each year. The lawmakers say more aggressive timbering would make for a healthier forest and improve rural economies. But such mandates went nowhere in the Senate and prompted a veto threat from the White House.

This year, the Republican-led push is focused on excluding certain projects from an environmental review and by making a lawsuit to stop a project potentially much more expensive to file. The goal is to speed up timber harvests and the removal of underbrush the U.S. Forest Service deemed necessary. The House Natural Resources Committee is expected to vote on the bill on Wednesday.

When the U.S. Forest Service currently wants to undertake major work on a national forest, it talks with stakeholders such as the timber industry, local residents and environmental groups to develop a plan that addresses their concerns and uses the best science available. But, the process often takes too long and ends in a lawsuit, said a memorandum written by Republican staff for the House Natural Resources Committee.

“These policies may be making environmental law firms rich, but they are killing our national forest,” said Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees federal lands issues.

Democrats say they worry the legislation eroded hard-fought protections and will allow major projects to go forward without a proper review on the effect on the environment.

Under the proposed legislation, many projects fewer than 15,000 acres would be excluded from the required environmental review if the projects were designed to reduce hazardous fuel loads and disease, protect watersheds or improve critical habitat. That’s five times the current limit of 3,000 acres.

Also, groups suing the federal government over a thinning project would often have to buy an insurance bond in the event they lose so that the federal government could recoup the expense of defending itself in court.

Tom Tidwell, chief of the U.S. Forest Service, did not take a position on the legislation during a hearing last week, but said he was encouraged by some goals of the bill.

Robert Bonnie, an undersecretary who oversees the Forest Service, told The Associated Press that some of the GOP’s approaches are “interesting and we want to engage in the conversation.”

But both men emphasized that the biggest problems they face are budgetary. Fires are eating up so much of the agency’s budget that it has 39 percent fewer employees than it had nearly two decades ago.

“We’re taking people out of the field that put together the projects to reduce fire in the first place,” Bonnie said. “So even if you give the Forest Service a bunch of new tools and tool boxes, we don’t have enough people on the ground to reach the type of scale we need. So we have to fix the fire budget.”

Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Mass., said that limiting environmental reviews can help in specific situations, “but this bill goes too far.”

Nearly three dozen environmental groups wrote McClintock and Tsongas to oppose the bill, including the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society and Defenders of Wildlife. “Under the pretext of ‘forest health’ and ‘collaboration,’ the bill does the opposite by moving toward analysis-free, high-risk production-based logging on our national forests and reducing collaboration,” the groups wrote.

Kyle Tisdel, an attorney with the Western Environmental Law Center, said groups that end up suing the federal government to stop a project must take part in an extensive public participation process before they can go to court. He said the additional hurdle of requiring an insurance bond would have a substantial chilling effect on the public’s ability to engage the government and take their case to a final arbiter.

“These organizations operate on shoestring budgets for the most part,” Tisdel said.

Read Full Article: AP

Aided by the Sea, Israel Overcomes an Old Foe: Drought

Image Credit: Uriel Sinai for The New York Times

JERUSALEM — At the peak of the drought, Shabi Zvieli, an Israeli gardener, feared for his livelihood.

A hefty tax was placed on excessive household water consumption, penalizing families with lawns, swimming pools or leaky pipes. So many of Mr. Zvieli’s clients went over to synthetic grass and swapped their seasonal blooms for hardy, indigenous plants more suited to a semiarid climate. “I worried about where gardening was going,” said Mr. Zvieli, 56, who has tended people’s yards for about 25 years.

Across the country, Israelis were told to cut their shower time by two minutes. Washing cars with hoses was outlawed and those few wealthy enough to absorb the cost of maintaining a lawn were permitted to water it only at night.

“We were in a situation where we were very, very close to someone opening a tap somewhere in the country and no water would come out,” said Uri Schor, the spokesman and public education director of the government’s Water Authority.

But that was about six years ago. Today, there is plenty of water in Israel. A lighter version of an old “Israel is drying up” campaign has been dusted off to advertise baby diapers. “The fear has gone,” said Mr. Zvieli, whose customers have gone back to planting flowers.

United States grapple with an extreme drought, a revolution has taken place here. A major national effort to desalinate Mediterranean seawater and to recycle wastewater has provided the country with enough water for all its needs, even during severe droughts. More than 50 percent of the water for Israeli households, agriculture and industry is now artificially produced.

During the drought years, farmers at Ramat Rachel, a kibbutz on the southern outskirts of Jerusalem, took water-economizing measures like uprooting old apple orchards a few years before their time. With the new plenty, water allocations for Israeli farmers that had been slashed have been raised again, though the price has also gone up.

“Now there is no problem of water,” said Shaul Ben-Dov, an agronomist at Ramat Rachel. “The price is higher, but we can live a normal life in a country that is half desert.”

With its part-Mediterranean, part-desert climate, Israel had suffered from chronic shortages and exploitation of its natural water resources for decades.

The natural fresh water at Israel’s disposal in an average year does not cover its total use of roughly 525 billion gallons. The demand for potable water is projected to rise to 515 billion gallons by 2030, from 317 billion gallons this year.

The turnaround came with a seven-year drought, one of the most severe to hit modern Israel, that began in 2005 and peaked in the winter of 2008 to 2009. The country’s main natural water sources — the Sea of Galilee in the north and the mountain and coastal aquifers — were severely depleted, threatening a potentially irreversible deterioration of the water quality.

Measures to increase the supply and reduce the demand were accelerated, overseen by the Water Authority, a powerful interministerial agency established in 2007.

Desalination emerged as one focus of the government’s efforts, with four major plants going into operation over the past decade. A fifth one should be ready to operate within months. Together, they will produce a total of more than 130 billion gallons of potable water a year, with a goal of 200 billion gallons by 2020.

Israel has, in the meantime, become the world leader in recycling and reusing wastewater for agriculture. It treats 86 percent of its domestic wastewater and recycles it for agricultural use — about 55 percent of the total water used for agriculture. Spain is second to Israel, recycling 17 percent of its effluent, while the United States recycles just 1 percent, according to Water Authority data.

Before the establishment of the Water Authority, various ministries were responsible for different aspects of the water issue, each with its own interests and lobbies.

“There was a lot of hydro-politics,” said Eli Feinerman of the faculty of agriculture, food and environment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, who served for years as a public representative on the authority’s council. “The right hand did not know what the left was doing.”

The Israeli government began by making huge cuts in the annual water quotas for farmers, ending decades of extravagant overuse of heavily subsidized water for agriculture.

The tax for surplus household use was dropped at the end of 2009 and a two-tiered tariff system was introduced. Regular household water use is now subsidized by a slightly higher rate paid by those who consume more than the basic allotment.

Read Full Article: The New York Times

5 Tips for Conserving Water at Home

Image Credit: The Huffington Post

Here in dry, dusty Southern California, dealing with the worst drought in state history has become the “new normal.” In my home, we’ve cut back on showers and watering the lawn.

Banners declaring “Be Water Wise!” stretch above streets. Gov. Jerry Brown recently ordered mandatory restrictions to cut urban water use across California by 25 percent.

Other western states, including Oregon, Nevada and Arizona, also have been plunged into extreme drought conditions.

For those wondering how to conserve water and lower water bills, here are five simple ways to slash home water use:

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1. UNDERSTAND YOUR WATER METER

Madeline Ward, acting water conservation coordinator in Santa Barbara, suggests becoming familiar with your water meter, which is often located outside the house in a metal or concrete box.

Reading your meter — which looks similar to an odometer in a car — is not only a way to gauge water usage; it also can tell you if you have a leak.

“When you’re leaving for work in the morning, read it,” said Ward. “When you come back from work, read it again.” It it’s moved, there could be a leak.

Weekly meter readings are helpful for comparing usage week-to-week, added Forrest Arthur, general manager of a residential community in Carmel, the Santa Lucia Preserve, which relies on its own water supply. It cut 40 million gallons of water last year.

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2. REPLACE YOUR GRASS LAWN WITH DROUGHT-TOLERANT PLANTS AND MATERIALS

Landscaping and turf watering generally account for a hefty 60 percent to 80 percent of home water use, according to Arthur and Ward, so one way to conserve water is to literally rip out your lawn.

As an incentive, water districts across many states, including California and Arizona, have been offering conservation rebates to residents who remove their lawn grass and replace it with drought-tolerant native plants, mulch, bark, gravel and drip-irrigation systems, which target plants at their roots.

“I have definitely seen an uptick in residential clients just in the last year, with all of them contacting me to take advantage of rebates,” said Lupe Perez, owner of the Pasadena-based Green Splendor Landscaping.

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3. MONITOR SPRINKLERS AND DON’T WATER DURING THE DAY

If you do keep your lawn, monitor automatic sprinklers closely to check for leaks or runoff, and make sure they’re not on when it rains or during the day. Water is more likely to evaporate when the sun is at full strength.

Watering by hand is best, Ward added.

“You should water either when the sun goes down or before it comes up,” said Arthur. “It really makes a big difference.”

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4. CHECK FOR TOILET LEAKS

Growing up in California, I always heard the flush-saving phrase, “if it’s yellow, let it mellow.”

While most toilets these days are low-flow and use 1.6 gallons of water per flush, according to Ward, a toilet leak can waste about 200 gallons of water a day. A DAY. These leaks are huge and silent.

One way to identify a leak, Ward said, is to do a dye test. Drop a food-color tablet from a plumbing or other store into the toilet tank. Wait 10 to 15 minutes without flushing, and then look in the toilet bowl.

If there’s color in it, that means there’s a leak from the tank into the bowl, and you need to replace the tank’s rubber flapper that lets water through. Rubber flappers can warp or erode over time.

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5. USE LESS WATER WASHING DISHES, CLOTHES, YOURSELF

No more long, hot showers or running water while flossing your teeth.

Instead, take five-minute showers. Showers usually use 1.5 to 2 gallons of water per minute, according to Ward. Turn off the water when you’re lathering and shaving, and also at the sink when you lather your hands.

For baths, don’t fill them more than halfway.

As for washing dishes, make sure the water isn’t running when you’re not using it. If you wash dishes by hand, dunk them in a basin with soapy water so you’re just using extra water for rinsing. For dishwashers, always run a full load versus a half load, Ward said.

Likewise, in washing machines, always run full loads of laundry.

Read Full Article: ABC News

Desalination: the quest to quench the world’s thirst for water

Image Credit: Gregory Bull/AP

The average Briton uses 150 litres of water a day; the average American gets through 570 litres of the stuff. The world is getting thirstier and the global demand for fresh water is rising by 640bn litres a year.

Population growth is one factor, not only the need for drinking water and sanitation but also the need to produce more food. Agriculture accounts for 70% of water use.

Even the push for biofuels to reduce consumption of fossil fuels has an unexpected consequence: between 1,000 and 4,000 litres of water are needed to produce just one litre of biofuel.

While reducing consumption is one way of helping to address the water crisis on an individual level, it is far from the complete solution. Something on a larger scale is also needed: desalination.

As climate change makes rainfall less predictable and droughts more common, a growing number of countries are turning to desalination. The term is used to refer to removing salt from both seawater and subterranean “brackish” water, as well as the treatment of waste water (aka sewerage) to make it drinkable.

Some environmentalists have long opposed desalination because of the energy the process demands, as well as other considerations such as the impact of sucking in large quantities of seawater from the ocean.

Huntington Lake in the High Sierra, California, has run dry following the four-year drought in the state. Photograph: Lucy Nicholson/Reuters

But technological advances in recent years have altered the equation. The most common form of desalination is reverse osmosis; it involves forcing water through cartridges that contain thin-film composite polyamide membranes, which trap salt and other impurities but allow the fresh water through.

Randy Truby, comptroller of the International Desalination Association, says that advances in manufacturing processes have allowed 450 sq ft of membrane to be crammed into each cartridge, compared with 300 sq ft when they first came on the market. But treating seawater still requires pressure of about 80 bar, some 40 times more than car tyres. That is why treating seawater is more energy-intensive than brackish or waste water, which require less force.

The location of a seawater desalination plant also makes a difference, Truby adds: while the salt content of water off the coast of California is about 34,000 parts per million, the figure in the Middle East is more like 40,000.

No alternative
Saudi Arabia is the country that relies most on desalination – mostly of seawater. The US is in second place. It uses mainly brackish and waste water although later this year it will open one of the world’s largest seawater desalination plants in Carlsbad, San Diego.

Truby says: “In many places there is no alternative – certainly the Middle East and places like Singapore, the Canary Islands and the Caribbean have to look to the sea. Those that have a choice, like Europe and the US, China, Japan, will try conservation and re-use and brackish treatment and use [seawater] desalination as a way to top-up and provide some drought-proofing.”

The desalination plant in Carlsbad will use the reverse osmosis process to produce fresh water. Photograph: Gregory Bull/AP

Desalination remains about twice as expensive as treating rainwater or waste water, at about $3 (£1.95) per cubic metre, but the economics depend on a number of variables, explains Professor Raphael Semiat of Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, in Haifa.

He says 3.5 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity are needed to desalinate 1 cubic metre of seawater – 1.3kWh to pump seawater to the plant and 2.2kWh for the reverse osmosis process.

Pumping a cubic metre of fresh water distances of more than 200km requires more energy than desalinating the same amount of seawater, according to Semiat. In addition, many plants produce the bulk of their water at night when there is less demand for electricity, and thus utilise power that would otherwise go to waste.

Read Full Article: The Guardian

Taxing organic products could solve California water problem, experts say

Image Credit: REUTERS/Robert Galbraith

California is currently experiencing its fourth year of extreme drought, and in response Governor Jerry Brown has mandated a reduction of the state’s water use by 25%, proposing reductions in lawn acreages, rebates for replacing old toilets, and forbidding homeowners from using potable water for irrigation. However, environmental experts Terry L. Anderson, and Henry I. Miller, both fellows at Stanford University, claim to have a better idea. In their proposal “How Taxing Organic Products Could Solve California’s Water Shortage,” published last week on National Review Online, Anderson and Miller state the need for a revenue–neutral tax on all organic products (which would diminish their demand), while outlining how organic agriculture is less efficient and more wasteful than conventional and genetically engineered agriculture.

One can almost hear the all-natural crowd banging their drum circle bongos in protest.

According to studies cited in the proposal, organic agriculture uses more labor, land, and water than conventional agriculture while producing much lower yields and wasting H2O. One of the studies cited was a 2008 Organic Production Survey of all 14,450 organic U.S. farms by the United States Department of Agriculture, which reported that organic corn, rice, spring wheat, and lettuce yields were, respectively 30 percent, 41 percent, 53 percent, and 70 percent lower than conventional yields. In addition to this, a study by Alex Avery at the Hudson Institute’s Center for Global Food Issues found that conventional agriculture beat organic in “total system yields,” nitrogen efficiency, and labor by 30 percent, 60 percent, and 35 percent respectively. Avery’s analysis was based on research performed by none other than the Rodale Institute, whose slogan reads “organic pioneers since 1947.”

Even better than conventional agriculture are genetically engineered crops, which not only offer higher yields, but– according to Henry Miller– are, on average, safer as well. “The high precision and predictability of the newer molecular techniques make plant breeding surer and safer; in fact, they are actually being used to remove common and dangerous allergens from foods such as peanuts,” he told FoxNews.com. “In addition, the use of the newer techniques reduces dramatically the likelihood of mishaps, such as the ill-fated Lenape potato, seen with older methods of plant breeding.”

And while some might find some types of fungi “groovy,” there’s no disputing the fact that contamination of grains by fumonism (a toxin produced by fungi in corn grain)  is a definite bummer. “Fungus growth (and the levels of harmful fungal toxins) are higher in conventional crops than genetically engineered ones, and higher still in organically grown grains,” Miller said.

Genetically engineered crops are also resistant to pests, disease, and– get ready for it– drought. In the National Review article Anderson and Miller describe organic agriculture as “particularly insidious, because it bans the cultivation of crop varieties crafted with molecular genetic-modification techniques, which are particularly relevant during droughts.” Genetically engineered crops, they added, offer higher yields with less use of insecticides and can be crafted to withstand droughts, and to be irrigable with lower-quality, for example, brackish water.

So why didn’t California tax organic products in the first place? “Probably never thought of it,” Miller opined. “And if they had, they’d encounter resistance from the powerful, well-funded organic lobby.  (And if you doubt there is such a thing, recall Prop 37 in 2012, which would have required labeling of genetically engineered foods.)”

Read Full Article: Fox News

You Can Help Save The Planet. Here’s How.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

In cooperation with our longstanding partner Crowdrise, The Huffington Post is celebrating its 10 year anniversary by focusing on the promise of the next 10 years. We’re highlighting causes that are near and dear to our ethos — causes where we believe meaningful progress can be made in the coming decade — and empowering readers to act and take part. Join us!

Let’s face it: Humanity is screwing up the planet. Deforestation has leveled swaths of the Amazon rainforest. Bees and monarch butterfliesare dying in record numbers. Carbon dioxide levels are soaring.

Yikes.

And yet there are plenty of real, tangible ways to push back against this gloomy narrative. You want to help the bees? Planting some wildflowers is a good first step. What about tackling the ongoing drought in California? Replace that water-guzzling lawn with some succulents.

Here are five ways you, yes you, can combat the depressing headlines that have dominated environmental news for far too long. Because, in the words of legendary biologist E.O. Wilson: “You are capable of more than you know.”

Plant a vegetable garden and eat vegetarian at least once a week.

Nearly a third of all food produced worldwide is dependent on pollinators like bees, flies and moths; grocery stores would be sad places without them. Sadly, many of their populations are in decline — witness colony collapse disorder and the plummeting population of monarch butterflies. But there’s a simple solution: Plant wildflowers, which are natural food for bees and other pollinators, and opt for buying organic produce to cut back on insect-killing pesticides.

“It seems like an overly simplistic solution, but it really is the most significant step that all of us can take, whether you’re a farmer with a field or you live in New York City and your only garden is a flowerpot,” Eric Mader, the pollinator program co-director for The Xerces Society, told The Huffington Post.

Swap out your lawn for stones and drought-resistant plants.

California Gov. Jerry Brown (D) announced sweeping water cutbacks in March to combat the state’s ongoing drought. Green lawns were at the top of the casualty list. New rules have been enacted that ban excessive watering after rainfall and cut back on the number of days per week homeowners are allowed to water their lawns.

But some locals are taking a more active approach to the water shortage by getting rid of their grass altogether and replacing it with succulents and stones. Landscaping companies have even offered to rip out lawns for free, charging only for the new drought-tolerant landscaping. “There’s a heightened sense of what’s going on, and people are genuinely concerned — they’re not just trying to save a few dollars on water,” said Paul Helen, general manager of Modesto Landscapes in Modesto, California.

Recycle and compost kitchen scraps.

Americans are horrible recyclers. We create almost 4.4 pounds of waste per person every day and recycle a little more than a third of that. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates up to 75 percent of all our trash could be diverted to recycling centers or compost bins.

In addition to being able to start a recycling program in your own neighborhood, it’s surprisingly easy to compost kitchen scraps in your backyard, with or without worms.

Install renewables in your home, or buy green energy credits.

Solar costs have plummeted in recent years, from around $150 per watt in 1970 to less than 60 cents per watt today. Despite some efforts to block at-home installation, the technology is finally catching on and the solar industry is booming.

All photos via Getty and The Associated Press.

Read Full Article: The Huffington Post

Turning to Bacteria to Fight the Effects of Climate Change

Image Credit: Esther Ngumbi

Recently the United Nations warned that the world could suffer a 40 percent shortfall in water by 2030 unless countries dramatically cut consumption. Since 70 percent of the world’s fresh water goes to agriculture, this means changing the way people farm.  The need is ubiquitous. In California’s Central Valley, farmers drilling for water are now tapping stores 30,000 years old. In Kenya, which is facing the worst drought since 2000, farmers are hand-digging wells to reach the receding water table, even as one-in-ten Kenyans are hungry.

But in both regions, a game-changing solution could come from an overlooked resource: billions of beneficial bacteria that teem in the soil near the roots of plants. Such bacteria are found in soil everywhere: from the hard-hit Kenyan coast, where my family grows tomato, peppers and watermelon, to the experimental greenhouses in Alabama where I now work to unearth the secrets of these soil microbiomes.

A fluorescent microscope image of the plant root cell with the red fluorescent particles representing beneficial microbes attached to the cell. (Image courtesy of Yoav and Luz Bashan)

Indeed, scientists across five continents are digging in to generate evidence of the beneficial associations among microbes and crops such as corn, cotton, tomato and peppers. Plants normally exude a carbon-rich liquid that feeds the microbes. They also exude various chemicals in response to a range of stressors, including insect attacks and water stress. Soil bacteria sense these messages, and secrete chemicals of their own that can activate complex plant defenses.

For example, studies have shown that a combination of beneficial microbes applied directly to seeds is as effective as commercial pesticides in combatting the rice leaf-folder, which wraps itself in and then eats the leaves of young plants. Other studies demonstrate that some soil microbes significantly increase growth and yield of important crops. In Germany, a 10-year field study showed that beneficial microbes increase maize plant growth and the availability of phosphorous—and essential plant nutrient—in the soil. In Colombia, microbiologists have mass-produced bacteria that colonize cassava plants and increase yield by 20 percent.

For farmers struggling to adapt to climate change, especially small-scale farmers with limited resources, an increase in yield can open fresh opportunities for the simple reason that crop sales generate cash, including money that can be invested in a range of “climate-smart” farming techniques that further conserve water and soil, and sustainably increase production on small plots of land.

Most recently, studies point to a direct role for soil bacteria in shielding crops from drought; improving their growth and ability to absorb nutrients; and enhancing their tolerance of flooding, high temperatures, low temperatures and many other challenges of a changing global climate.

Benefits of soil microbes. (Images courtesy of Esther Ngumbi)

In one study, scientists reported that peppers cultivated in arid desert-like conditions act as “resource islands” attracting bacteria that sustain plant development when water is scarce. Another study identified soil bacteria that prompt plants to temporarily close the pores on their leaves. This not only prevents disease-causing bacteria from entering the plant, but also prevents the escape of moisture, preserving the plant’s water.

I can see this in my research labs, where several running experiments dramatically illustrate the role of soil microbes in protecting against water stress. Cotton, corn and tomato plants grown in soil that is infused with certain bacteria have root sizes that are triple the size of plants grown in untreated soil after water has been withheld for just five days. The treated plants stand tall and robust; the untreated wilt and wither. The difference is tremendous.

Although companies such as Nozozymes, Monsanto and Bayer Crop Sciences are exploring the potential commercialization of soil bacteria, and several start-up companies are working around the clock to commercialize microbial cocktails, overall, research into this area has barely begun.

The United Nations designated 2015 as the International Year of Soil, and governments, funders and researchers are taking a hard look at the role of healthy soil in achieving food security as population grows and climate change lowers yields of important food crops. But rarely do their initiatives consider the potential of the communities of beneficial bacteria, billions strong, and adapted through millennia to aid plants in their battle for survival.

Read Full article: Scientific American

Almonds get roasted in debate over California water use

Image Credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) – California almonds are becoming one of the world’s favorite snacks and creating a multibillion-dollar bonanza for agricultural investors. But the crop extracts a staggering price from the land, consuming more water than all the showering, dish-washing and other indoor household water use of California’s 39 million people.

As California enters its fourth year of drought and imposes the first mandatory statewide water cutbacks on cities and towns, the $6.5 billion almond crop is helping drive a sharp debate about water use, agricultural interests and how both affect the state’s giant economy.

Almonds have claimed the spotlight as “the poster child of all things bad in water,” almond grower Bob Weimer said.

People around the world are eating over 1,000 percent more California almonds than they did just a decade ago, and last year almonds became the top export crop in the nation’s top agriculture state. China’s booming middle class is driving much of the demand.

That strong Asia market is producing up to 30 percent returns for investors, prompting agri-businesses to expand almond planting in the state by two-thirds in the past decade. The crop has come to be dominated by global corporations and investment funds.

Rows of almond trees now cover nearly 1 million acres in California, many of them on previously virgin hillsides or in pastures or desert with little rain or local water. Since each tiny nut requires a gallon of water, almonds are consuming 1.07 trillion gallons annually in the state, one-fifth more than California families use indoors.

So when Gov. Jerry Brown ordered cities and towns this month to cut their water consumption by 25 percent but exempted farms, almonds got toasted in the public heat that followed.

“Drought villains?” the Los Angeles Times asked this month. A Sacramento TV station referred to “almond-shaming.” National Public Radio called almond farms “a rogue’s gallery” of water users.

Now almond farmers and investors are on the defensive.

“The tomato growers use a lot more water than we do. You should go after those guys,” said Ryon Paton, a global real-estate developer and principal of Trinitas Partners.

Paton’s online literature tells investors to think of his newly planted almond orchards in Stanislaus County as “the classic Silicon Valley startup, except we have nothing to do with technology.”

He regularly has to deny rumors – including from fellow almond farmers – that celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and Condoleezza Rice are among the investors drawn to his almond fund.

California growers provide 80 percent of the global supply of almonds. In China, where the number of middle-class households has doubled since 2006, consumers see almonds as a healthy snack and regard American food in general as less contaminated than products from elsewhere.

California almonds are a popular bagged treat in China’s convenience stores and supermarkets and a must-have item in holiday gift baskets.

As big a global money-maker as California’s agriculture is, though, it’s little more than a blip in the state’s economy. And that’s driving the debate on water use.

In all, agriculture uses 80 percent of the water that Californians draw from groundwater and surface supplies but produces just 1.5 percent of the state’s gross domestic product, noted Christopher Thornberg, an economist who has served as an economic adviser to state agencies.

Other top almond producers include Stewart and Lynda Resnik, the politically influential Beverly Hills billionaires behind Fiji bottled water, Pom pomegranate juice and a Central Valley almond and pistachio operation that they say is one of the world’s largest.

The TIAA-CREF retirement fund also boasts of its California almond operation as one of the world’s biggest.

Smaller almond farmers view the newer, bigger almond investors skeptically.

“They shouldn’t be growing almonds or walnuts in those areas,” including parts of the state that are naturally too dry and too cold for almond trees, said Paul Wenger, head of the state Farm Bureau and an almond and walnut grower on land near Modesto that’s been in his family for a century.

Almonds aren’t even the biggest sponges when it comes to water-thirsty crops in semi-arid California – that would be the state’s million acres of alfalfa, which go to feed livestock.

Unlike the row crops they’re displacing, the new almond trees require water year round.

The big almond growers “are saying you’ve got to deliver us water. We don’t care about this. We don’t care about that,” said Weimer, the Merced County grower of almonds and other crops. His wells have gone from 40 feet deep in 1977 to 90 or 100 feet this year, as farmers and other users draw from the underground reservoirs.

“We’ve crossed an interesting boundary here,” Weimer said.

Continuing strong prices have some California growers rushing to plant still more trees. In a U.S. Department of Agriculture survey for 2014, 77 percent of state almond farmers polled said they intended to put in new almond acreage despite the drought.

The governor and his cabinet secretaries defend almonds as a high-value crop.

“We’re going to try to maximize all beneficial uses, not pick one we like better than the others,” said Felicia Marcus, head of the state Water Resources Control Board.

Read Full Article: AP