Joseph J. Romm's Blog, page 148
May 5, 2015
California Farmers Are Watering Their Crops With Oil Wastewater, And No One Knows What’s In It
Chevron’s Kern River oil field in California’s Central Valley.
CREDIT: AP
As California farmers face a fourth year of the state’s historic drought, they’re finding water in unexpected places — like Chevron’s Kern River oil field, which has been selling recycled wastewater from oil production to farmers in California’s Kern County. Each day, Chevron recycles and sells 21 million gallons of wastewater to farmers, which is then applied on about 10 percent of Kern County’s farmland. And while some praise the program as a model for dealing with water shortages, environmental groups are raising concerns about the water’s safety, according to a recent story in the Los Angeles Times.
Tests conducted by Water Defense, an environmental group founded by actor Mark Ruffalo in 2010, have found high levels of acetone and methylene chloride — compounds that can be toxic to humans — in wastewater from Chevron used for irrigation purposes. The tests also found the presence of oil, which is supposed to be removed from the wastewater during recycling.
“All these chemicals of concern are flowing in the irrigation canal,” Scott Smith, chief scientist for Water Defense, told ThinkProgress. “If you were a gas station and were spilling these kinds of chemicals into the water, you would be shut down and fined.”
Chevron, which produces around 70,000 barrels of oil and 760,000 barrels of water each day at the Kern River oil field, has been selling water to farmers in the surrounding area for two decades. But government authorities have never required that water to be tested for chemicals used in oil production — only naturally occurring toxins like salts and arsenic. And even those standards are “decades-old,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Before getting to the Central Valley fields, wastewater from the Kern River oil field is mixed with walnut shells, which helps remove residual oil. The water then passes through a series of treatment ponds before flowing down an eight-mile canal to the Cawelo Water District. While in the canal, the wastewater is sometimes diluted with freshwater — and sometimes not. The water from the Kern River oil field is applied to some 45,000 acres of crops, irrigating everything from nut trees to citrus fruits.
Last year, the California state legislature passed a law requiring oil companies to disclose the chemicals that they use in oil extraction, and in April, California water authorities declared that oil companies would need to start checking to make sure that those same chemicals aren’t making it into recycled water bound for agricultural use. Oil companies have until June 15 to disclose the results of these new tests.
“We need to make sure we fully understand what goes into the wastewater,” Clay Rodgers, assistant executive officer of the Central Valley Water Quality Control Board, told the Los Angeles Times.
To test the recycled wastewater for contaminants, Water Defense’s Smith — who has consulted with the EPA and other government offices on more than 50 oil spills — took samples from 10 different points of varying depth along the Cawelo canal’s eight-mile stretch. Smith compares his testing method to a video, and says the state’s method is more like an instant picture — it looks at the wastewater for a split second, and can miss contaminants. His method, he contends, gives a better holistic picture of the water’s composition. One sample Smith took had levels of methylene chloride — an industrial solvent used to soften crude oil — as high as 56 parts per billion, four times the amount of methylene chloride Smith found in 2013 when he tested parts of an Arkansas river fouled by the 2013 ExxonMobil tar sands pipeline spill.
Chevron is pushing back against claims that the wastewater contains dangerous chemicals, saying in a statement emailed to the Los Angeles Times that “protection of people and the environment is a core value for Chevron, and we take all necessary steps to ensure the protection of our water resources.” Out of an “abundance of caution,” however, both Chevron and the Cawelo Water District will contract with an outside group to test the wastewater. Still, Chevron would not disclose publicly the fluids it uses for drilling or well maintenance.
Blake Sanden, an agriculture extension agent and irrigation water expert with UC Davis, told the Los Angeles Times that farmers can smell the petrochemicals in the water, but most assume that the soil is filtering out any harmful toxins before they can be absorbed by the crops. While soil does filter out some impurities, Sanden says it’s impossible to know for sure whether waste from oil production is making its way from irrigation water into the roots and leaves of crops.
To Smith, that’s just another missing piece of information that needs to be understood before wastewater from oil production is deemed safe for agriculture.
“The state appears to not even be testing for oil in the water,” Smith said. “You’re not going to find chemicals of concern if you don’t look for them.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, monitoring the oil fields has been a “low priority” for California’s Water State Resources Control Board, the state body that regulates wastewater. The burden for testing wastewater falls largely on the oil companies, which in the past have sought to reduce testing and disclosure requirements due to concerns over time and expense.
With the drought placing more attention on water resources, Smith says that it’s important for testing of wastewater to continue.
“We want to work with Chevron, we want to work with the regulators. We want to use multiple methods of testing,” he said. “That’s the best way to figure out what’s in that water and what can be done to solve it.”
The post California Farmers Are Watering Their Crops With Oil Wastewater, And No One Knows What’s In It appeared first on ThinkProgress.
California’s Drought Could Upend America’s Entire Food System
On April 1, California Governor Jerry Brown stood in a field in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, beige grass stretching out across an area that should have been covered with five feet of snow. The Sierra’s snowpack — the frozen well that feeds California’s reservoirs and supplies a third of its water — was just eight percent of its yearly average. That’s a historic low for a state that has become accustomed to breaking drought records.
In the middle of the snowless field, Brown took an unprecedented step, mandating that urban agencies curtail their water use by 25 percent, a move that would save some 500 billion gallons of water by February of 2016 — a seemingly huge amount, until you consider that California’s almond industry, for example, uses more than twice that much water annually. Yet Brown’s mandatory cuts did not touch the state’s agriculture industry.
Agriculture requires water, and large-scale agriculture, like that in California, requires large amounts of water. So when Governor Brown came under fire for exempting farmers from the mandatory cuts — farmers use 80 percent of the state’s available water — he was unmoved.
“They’re not watering their lawn or taking long showers,” he told ABC’s “The Week” the Sunday after he announced the restrictions. “They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world.”
Almonds get a lot of the attention when it comes to California’s agriculture and water, but the state is responsible for a dizzying diversity of produce. Eaten a salad recently? Odds are the lettuce, carrots, and celery came from California. Have a soft spot for stone fruit? California produces 84 percent of the country’s fresh peaches and 94 percent of the country’s fresh plums. It produces 99 percent of the artichokes grown in the United States, and 94 percent of the broccoli. As spring begins to creep in, almost half of asparagus will come from California.
“California is running through its water supply because, for complicated historical and climatological reasons, it has taken on the burden of feeding the rest of the country,” Steven Johnson wrote in Medium, pointing out that California’s water problems are actually a national problem — for better or for worse, the trillions of gallons of water California agriculture uses annually is the price we all pay for supermarket produce aisles stocked with fruits and vegetables.
Up to this point, feats of engineering and underground aquifers have made the drought somewhat bearable for California’s farmers. But if dry conditions become the new normal, how much longer can — and should — California’s fields feed the country? And if they can no longer do so, what should the rest of the country do?
“It’s Not Just A California Drought Problem, It’s A Problem With Our Whole Food System”
In 2014, some 500,000 acres of farmland lay fallow in California, costing the state’s agriculture industry $1.5 billion in revenue and 17,000 seasonal and part time jobs. Experts believe the total acreage of fallowed farmland could double in 2015 — and that news has people across the country thinking about food security.
“When you look at the California drought maps, it’s a scary thing,” Craig Chase, who leads the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative at Iowa State University, told ThinkProgress. “We’re all wondering where the food that we want to eat is going to come from. Is it going to come from another state inside the U.S.? Is it going to come from abroad? Or are we going to grow it ourselves? That’s the question that we need to start asking ourselves.”
The California Central Valley, which stretches 450 miles between the Sierra Nevadas and the California Coast Range, might be the single most productive tract of land in the world. From its soil springs 230 varieties of crops so diverse that their places of botanical origin range from Southeast Asia to Mexico. It produces two thirds of the nation’s produce, and, like Atlas with an almond on his back, 80 percent of the world’s almonds. If you’ve eaten anything made with canned tomatoes, there’s a 94 percent chance that they were planted and picked in the Central Valley.
Some crops will always be grown in California. The Napa Valley, where a history of earthquakes has resulted in 14 different microclimates perfect for wine, is a truly unique place for growing grapes. The maligned almond is a great crop for California — it needs brief, cold winters and long, dry summers, and produces more value than it uses water, something rare for crops. Realistically, there aren’t many places in the world better suited to growing almonds than California.
But a lot of the things that California produces in such stunning numbers — tomatoes, lettuce, celery, carrots — can be grown elsewhere. Before the 20th century, the majority of produce consumed in the United States came from small farms that grew a relatively diverse number of crops. Fruit and vegetable production was regional, and varieties were dictated by the climate of those areas.
“There may be reason for the citrus and some of the nuts that are uniquely suited to the Mediterranean climate, but there’s no real reason that you have to produce all the fruits and vegetables. Those were grown other places before California came in,” John Ikerd, professor emeritus of Agricultural & Applied Economics University of Missouri Columbia, told ThinkProgress.
Ikerd, who taught agricultural economics before becoming an advocate for sustainable farming, grew up in rural Missouri, where he estimates that the majority of the food he ate came from within 50 miles of his home. At that time, the Midwest was still covered with small and mid-sized farms growing a diverse portfolio of crops. Ikerd described a tomato cannery in the town where he grew up, built to process the tomatoes grown in the farms from the surrounding area. Orchards, too, were once plentiful throughout the Midwest, growing apples and fruit for markets both local and national.
But the tomato canneries and the orchards that Ikerd remembers have largely disappeared, replaced by fields upon fields of corn and soybeans, commodity crops that government subsidies help make the quickest, fastest way to profit in the Midwest. From 1996 until the most recent version of the Farm Bill, farmers that grew commodity crops like corn and soil were actually prohibited from also growing specialty crops like fruits and vegetables on their land. Anyone who grew a specialty crop on land meant for subsidized commodity crops would have to forfeit their subsidy and pay a penalty equal to the market value of whatever specialty crop they grew, a policy that did little to discourage farmers in the Midwest from becoming large producers of one or two commodity crops. The U.S. government spent almost $84.5 billion dollars subsidizing corn between 1995 and 2012, and a good portion of corn crops does not make it to a plate, instead used as ethanol or feed for livestock.
Of the corn that is intended for consumption, much of it ends up as high fructose corn syrup, which is now so ubiquitous it encourages maximizing the yield of corn at the expense of agricultural diversity. From 2002 to 2012, the amount of land dedicated to growing the nation’s top 25 vegetables fell from 1.9 million acres to 1.8 million. In the same amount of time, corn production grew from 79 million acres to 97 million.
“The deeper people look at it, they’ll see it’s a deeper part of the whole,” Ikerd says. “It’s not just a California drought problem, it’s a problem with our whole food system.”
[image error]
A map showing where various crops are grown across the U.S.
CREDIT: Bill Rankin
In 2010, the Leopold Center at Iowa State University ran some numbers to figure out what would happen if a small stretch of Midwestern farmland — just 270,000 acres — was used to grow vegetables instead of corn or soybeans. They found that diversifying even that small amount of land — basically the amount of cropland in an average Iowa county — across six Midwestern states would yield almost enough produce to supply all the residents of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota for the entire year.
But that conversion is easier said than done, according to Chase. Farming corn requires a completely different infrastructure than farming produce, and he doesn’t see farmers jumping to replace their crops and machinery with California still capable of producing fruits and vegetables. Equipment for corn or soy farming can cost upwards of $100,000, a financial commitment that encourages farmers to grow crops that are easy to plant and harvest with the machinery.
“It’s not a land issue and it’s not a soil quality issue,” Chase said. “A lot of it is an infrastructure issue or a labor issue, particularly with those products that are so extremely labor intensive.”
Matt Kroul, co-owner of Kroul Farms in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, explains that for farmers — stereotypically a stubborn bunch — changing what’s grown can be difficult. Kroul farms 1,200 acres that have been in his family since the 1800s; for decades, his grandfather and grandmother farmed corn and soy, but the farm crisis of 1980 forced Kroul’s father to diversify their enterprise. Today, the farm produces a mix of commodity crops and seasonal produce, which it sells both directly to consumers via markets and a farmstand, and to local restaurants. Kroul feels fortunate that the farm was both small enough to be able to adapt to new crops and well-connected enough within the community to find a consumer base, but he acknowledges that in Iowa, this isn’t the case for everyone.
“You’d love to see it change, you’d love to see consumers drive that market to push more local foods,” Kroul said, but he worries that large-scale commodity farmers won’t want to change what they’ve always done. “Farmers are going to continue to grow what they’ve always grown. It’s a slippery slope in their mind to turn some acres over to vegetable and other growth.”
But Ikerd believes that the system can — and must — adapt to changing conditions. He remembers a time when fruit trees dotted the Midwest, and he also remembers watching as they were steadily replaced by large operations growing corn or soy or both. The system we have now, Ikerd says, was all built in the last 50 years. And he thinks a more sustainable system could be put in place just as quickly.
“This System Was A Fantasy”
Why do we grow so much of our produce in one place? And why California?
“There’s plenty of good soil elsewhere,” Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, told ThinkProgress. “But it’s the ability to put water on [that soil] over a long, dry summer that allows you to get very quick results.”
When it comes to irrigation, California is a powerhouse. Some 9 million acres of farmland are irrigated each year, making California the state with the second-largest amount of irrigated land (behind Nebraska).
But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the early days before California’s modern agriculture — during the mining boom of the mid-1800s — the state’s primary crops were wheat and corn. Farmers grew the grain without irrigation, finding that California’s short, rainy winters, long, hot summers, and nutrient-rich soil created the perfect growing conditions without the need for extra water. By the 1890s, however, the intense grain industry had depleted the soil, and California’s farmers were forced to find another crop.
With a Mediterranean climate, California has always been particularly well-suited to growing produce. Toward the turn of the 20th century, fruit and vegetable production in the state exploded in growth, helped along by the transcontinental railroad, which could carry California’s produce — fresh, frozen, or canned — to East Coast markets where it fetched a handsome price. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, the amount of cropland dedicated to fruits and vegetables increased ten times over — and most of that depended on irrigation.
At first, irrigation projects were small, created by organizations of farmers banding together to build small local dams on small local rivers. By the 1930s, Walker says, all the best, most naturally fertile land had been developed — but demand for dependable year-round produce was only increasing, thanks to the rise of supermarkets and shrewd advertising from California agribusiness. So, farmers turned their eyes to something bigger.
“A water system grew with the rise of the state to economic prominence, from individual projects to irrigation districts and colonies to state-engineered projects,” Steven Stoll, associate professor of history at Fordham University, told ThinkProgress. “Their rising political power ensured that they would get the water they needed — no matter what.”
These big projects — sponsored by both the state and federal government — brought water to unexpected places, like the Westlands, a barren area southwest of Fresno that has historically received around eight inches of rain annually. By most accounts, the Westlands could be classified as a desert. It was instead transformed into farmland by funneling water in from San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta to meet the demands of industry.
“But here is the point — the water existed. It flowed out of the Sierra up and down the Central Valley. It only needed to be captured, stored, and directed,” Stoll says. The Westlands became farmland at a certain point in the history of California agriculture where massive engineering projects were the solution to any problem. As long as water continued to flow from the Sierras, human ingenuity — and water from the Sacramento and Colorado Rivers — was all that was needed to bring that water to the fields.
“Human societies for the last 10,000 years have arisen on that same assumption — climatic stability, the continuation of certain trends indefinitely,” Stoll says. “No one could have known, or only few did, that fossil fuels had the capacity of changing those conditions.”
As Walker sees it, California agribusiness, for a long time, has dealt with problems through engineering. But now — after a century of diverting rivers — there’s simply less surface water to work with.
“It turns out that you can’t overcome all the problems with engineering,” Walker says. “You don’t even need climate change to know that this system was a fantasy.”
Alongside surface water, farmers can access groundwater, natural aquifers that have been soaking up water that falls in California — as rain or as snow — for thousands of years. Within the complicated web of water rules in California, groundwater is a complete free-for-all — anyone who taps it can use it.
In an average year, water from underground aquifers supplies California with 30 to 40 percent of the state’s water supply — in drought years, that number jumps to 60 percent. This year, that number could be as high as 75 percent.
But groundwater takes thousands of years to fill up, and California farmers are being forced to drill deeper and deeper — sometimes thousands of feet into the Earth — to find groundwater for their farms. That deep drilling is beginning to mar the California landscape, lowering water tables and causing the ground to sink. Shallow wells are being sucked dry by those with the resources to drill deeper, and communities are being deprived of their groundwater safety nets. According to the New York Times, the depletion of groundwater has terminally damaged California’s soil, lessening its ability to reabsorb and store water in the future.
Last fall, the California legislature addressed the problem of overpumping groundwater, passing a bill that forces communities to regulate the extraction of water from underground aquifers. It was a big moment, the first time in the state’s history that anyone had dared to place restrictions on groundwater use. But it was also a bill that, in a lot of ways, fell short of actually fixing the problem: communities are given years, decades even, to formulate their plans for replenishing and conserving groundwater, meaning that many of the effects of the bill won’t be felt until 2040.
“There’s no more water in the system,” Walker says. “That’s what they have to realize. Where’s the water you’re going to pump this year? It’s not there.”
Taking Pressure Off California With A Regionalized Food System
In 2013, the USDA published a report looking at the impact of climate change on the United State’s agriculture — a comprehensive overview of available literature meant to serve as an input to the National Climate Assessment. Climate change, the report concluded, would fundamentally alter the way that crops and livestock are raised in this country. Crops that depend on irrigation would be especially vulnerable as both increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns place stress on water resources.
“Some U.S. agricultural systems, such as those currently operating at their southern marginal limit or those that currently depend on irrigation, will have to undergo more transformative changes to remain productive and profitable,” the report read.
California has a finite amount of water to split between a seemingly infinite number of needs: from drinking water to residential lawns, swimming pools to protected streams, almond trees to alfalfa sprouts. For decades, irrigation and ground water have been enough to transform otherwise unsuitable areas into productive farmland. The Midwest could specialize in commodity crops because specialty crops could be — and were — grown easier elsewhere.
Climate change is altering that balance. Though evidence connecting the current drought to climate change is the subject of debate, studies show that man-made climate change certainly won’t help the situation. A recent study out of Stanford found that human emissions increase the probability of the low-precipitation, high-temperature conditions that have made this drought so tough. Another study from NASA also found that if emissions continue to increase, the American Southwest has an 80 percent chance of facing a multi-decade megadrought from 2050 through the end of the century.
Mike Hamm, director of the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems, hopes that those projections — of more frequent and longer-lasting droughts — don’t come true. He hopes that California can still produce as many fruits and vegetables in 30 years as it does now — but he also thinks that, to safeguard our food system, we need to move toward a more regionalized system of production.
“We need California production as long as and as much as it can be contained, and we need to regionalize production of fruit and vegetables as much as we can, in part to take water pressure off of California and in part to take pressure off of developing countries where we get fruits and vegetables from,” Hamm told ThinkProgress. Michigan, Hamm says, is already fairly well-situated for regional, diverse produce. Places like Iowa, that have seen their land consumed by large commodity farms, would face a more difficult transition.
“They neither have the land that is producing it, nor do they have the human capital,” Hamm says. “On the other hand, historically, in a place like Iowa, they had a very diverse agriculture with a lot of fruits and vegetables, which says that they have the climatic and environmental capacity to do it.”
To switch from a single crop to a diverse portfolio might seem daunting, but it’s change that has already begun to happen elsewhere. Thirty years ago, late spring would have signaled the beginning of the growing season for the most predominant crop in western North Carolina: tobacco, which had been grown in the region since the late 1600s. Federal quotas instated as part of the New Deal assured farmers a minimum price for their product in exchange for a set yield, a program that gave small farmers a measure of security for growing a high-value but labor-intensive crop. In 2002, the tobacco industry in North Carolina accounted for $800 million — roughly 12 percent of the state’s agricultural revenue.
That all changed in 2004, when quotas were phased out as part of a President George W. Bush’s American Jobs Creation Act.
“It was a big change, like a hurricane coming through,” Charlie Jackson, executive director of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), told ThinkProgress, explaining that three decades ago, western North Carolina had some 7,000 tobacco farms — according to the 2012 census, that number is down to 94.
But farming didn’t disappear in western North Carolina — instead, it transitioned, diversifying to produce fruits and vegetables for local markets with the help of ASAP. From 2002 to 2012, the number of farms in the area fell from 12,212 to 10,912, but the number of farms selling produce directly to the local community increased from 740 farms to 1,190. Instead of sales dropping with the decline of the tobacco industry, sales to consumers actually grew over $5,000 during that time. According to an ASAP report, by switching from tobacco to produce, farmers in the southern Appalachia’s could provide local communities with almost 40 percent of their yearly fruit and vegetable needs.
If the tobacco quotas had remained in place, Jackson says, the switch to regional produce farming might have been slower. “My guess is that there would still be a lot of farms growing tobacco,” he said.
Western North Carolina, in a way, was already primed for the transition to supplying diverse produce to the region. Because of the area’s mountainous geography, farms were already small, and they occupied different climatic regions, from 1,000 to 5,000 feet in altitude. Farmers in North Carolina hadn’t invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized farming infrastructure, so they were more free, in a sense, to adapt to the changes ushered in by the end of tobacco quotas.
“It’s really an interesting thing, where something that could have been disastrous ends up being transformative,” Jackson said.
So will the California drought be disastrous, or transformative? Ask John Ikerd what he thinks, and he leans toward transformation.
“I’m not really pessimistic. If we decide we want to change agriculture, I think it’s quite conceivable that we can recreate this whole food system,” he said. “We just need to wake up to the fact that we’ve got a problem and start working on it. Once we do that, the solutions are there.”
Update
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The U.S. spent $84.5 billion, not trillion, between 1995 and 2012.
The post California’s Drought Could Upend America’s Entire Food System appeared first on ThinkProgress.
California Grows Almost All Of Our Produce. Will The Drought Change That?
On April 1, California Governor Jerry Brown stood in a field in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, beige grass stretching out across an area that should have been covered with five feet of snow. The Sierra’s snowpack — the frozen well that feeds California’s reservoirs and supplies a third of its water — was just eight percent of its yearly average. That’s a historic low for a state that has become accustomed to breaking drought records.
In the middle of the snowless field, Brown took an unprecedented step, mandating that urban agencies curtail their water use by 25 percent, a move that would save some 500 billion gallons of water by February of 2016 — a seemingly huge amount, until you consider that California’s almond industry, for example, uses more than twice that much water annually. Yet Brown’s mandatory cuts did not touch the state’s agriculture industry.
Agriculture requires water, and large-scale agriculture, like that in California, requires large amounts of water. So when Governor Brown came under fire for exempting farmers from the mandatory cuts — farmers use 80 percent of the state’s available water — he was unmoved.
“They’re not watering their lawn or taking long showers,” he told ABC’s “The Week” the Sunday after he announced the restrictions. “They’re providing most of the fruits and vegetables of America to a significant part of the world.”
Almonds get a lot of the attention when it comes to California’s agriculture and water, but the state is responsible for a dizzying diversity of produce. Eaten a salad recently? Odds are the lettuce, carrots, and celery came from California. Have a soft spot for stone fruit? California produces 84 percent of the country’s fresh peaches and 94 percent of the country’s fresh plums. It produces 99 percent of the artichokes grown in the United States, and 94 percent of the broccoli. As spring begins to creep in, almost half of asparagus will come from California.
“California is running through its water supply because, for complicated historical and climatological reasons, it has taken on the burden of feeding the rest of the country,” Steven Johnson wrote in Medium, pointing out that California’s water problems are actually a national problem — for better or for worse, the trillions of gallons of water California agriculture uses annually is the price we all pay for supermarket produce aisles stocked with fruits and vegetables.
Up to this point, feats of engineering and underground aquifers have made the drought somewhat bearable for California’s farmers. But if dry conditions become the new normal, how much longer can — and should — California’s fields feed the country? And if they can no longer do so, what should the rest of the country do?
“It’s Not Just A California Drought Problem, It’s A Problem With Our Whole Food System”
In 2014, some 500,000 acres of farmland lay fallow in California, costing the state’s agriculture industry $1.5 billion in revenue and 17,000 seasonal and part time jobs. Experts believe the total acreage of fallowed farmland could double in 2015 — and that news has people across the country thinking about food security.
“When you look at the California drought maps, it’s a scary thing,” Craig Chase, who leads the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture’s Marketing and Food Systems Initiative at Iowa State University, told ThinkProgress. “We’re all wondering where the food that we want to eat is going to come from. Is it going to come from another state inside the U.S.? Is it going to come from abroad? Or are we going to grow it ourselves? That’s the question that we need to start asking ourselves.”
The California Central Valley, which stretches 450 miles between the Sierra Nevadas and the California Coast Range, might be the single most productive tract of land in the world. From its soil springs 230 varieties of crops so diverse that their places of botanical origin range from Southeast Asia to Mexico. It produces two thirds of the nation’s produce, and, like Atlas with an almond on his back, 80 percent of the world’s almonds. If you’ve eaten anything made with canned tomatoes, there’s a 94 percent chance that they were planted and picked in the Central Valley.
Some crops will always be grown in California. The Napa Valley, where a history of earthquakes has resulted in 14 different microclimates perfect for wine, is a truly unique place for growing grapes. The maligned almond is a great crop for California — it needs brief, cold winters and long, dry summers, and produces more value than it uses water, something rare for crops. Realistically, there aren’t many places in the world better suited to growing almonds than California.
But a lot of the things that California produces in such stunning numbers — tomatoes, lettuce, celery, carrots — can be grown elsewhere. Before the 20th century, the majority of produce consumed in the United States came from small farms that grew a relatively diverse number of crops. Fruit and vegetable production was regional, and varieties were dictated by the climate of those areas.
“There may be reason for the citrus and some of the nuts that are uniquely suited to the Mediterranean climate, but there’s no real reason that you have to produce all the fruits and vegetables. Those were grown other places before California came in,” John Ikerd, professor emeritus of Agricultural & Applied Economics University of Missouri Columbia, told ThinkProgress.
Ikerd, who taught agricultural economics before becoming an advocate for sustainable farming, grew up in rural Missouri, where he estimates that the majority of the food he ate came from within 50 miles of his home. At that time, the Midwest was still covered with small and mid-sized farms growing a diverse portfolio of crops. Ikerd described a tomato cannery in the town where he grew up, built to process the tomatoes grown in the farms from the surrounding area. Orchards, too, were once plentiful throughout the Midwest, growing apples and fruit for markets both local and national.
But the tomato canneries and the orchards that Ikerd remembers have largely disappeared, replaced by fields upon fields of corn and soybeans, commodity crops that government subsidies help make the quickest, fastest way to profit in the Midwest. From 1996 until the most recent version of the Farm Bill, farmers that grew commodity crops like corn and soil were actually prohibited from also growing specialty crops like fruits and vegetables on their land. Anyone who grew a specialty crop on land meant for subsidized commodity crops would have to forfeit their subsidy and pay a penalty equal to the market value of whatever specialty crop they grew, a policy that did little to discourage farmers in the Midwest from becoming large producers of one or two commodity crops. The U.S. government spent almost $84.5 trillion dollars subsidizing corn between 1995 and 2012, and a good portion of corn crops does not make it to a plate, instead used as ethanol or feed for livestock.
Of the corn that is intended for consumption, much of it ends up as high fructose corn syrup, which is now so ubiquitous it encourages maximizing the yield of corn at the expense of agricultural diversity. From 2002 to 2012, the amount of land dedicated to growing the nation’s top 25 vegetables fell from 1.9 million acres to 1.8 million. In the same amount of time, corn production grew from 79 million acres to 97 million.
“The deeper people look at it, they’ll see it’s a deeper part of the whole,” Ikerd says. “It’s not just a California drought problem, it’s a problem with our whole food system.”
[image error]
A map showing where various crops are grown across the U.S.
CREDIT: Bill Rankin
In 2010, the Leopold Center at Iowa State University ran some numbers to figure out what would happen if a small stretch of Midwestern farmland — just 270,000 acres — was used to grow vegetables instead of corn or soybeans. They found that diversifying even that small amount of land — basically the amount of cropland in an average Iowa county — across six Midwestern states would yield almost enough produce to supply all the residents of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota for the entire year.
But that conversion is easier said than done, according to Chase. Farming corn requires a completely different infrastructure than farming produce, and he doesn’t see farmers jumping to replace their crops and machinery with California still capable of producing fruits and vegetables. Equipment for corn or soy farming can cost upwards of $100,000, a financial commitment that encourages farmers to grow crops that are easy to plant and harvest with the machinery.
“It’s not a land issue and it’s not a soil quality issue,” Chase said. “A lot of it is an infrastructure issue or a labor issue, particularly with those products that are so extremely labor intensive.”
Matt Kroul, co-owner of Kroul Farms in Mt. Vernon, Iowa, explains that for farmers — stereotypically a stubborn bunch — changing what’s grown can be difficult. Kroul farms 1,200 acres that have been in his family since the 1800s; for decades, his grandfather and grandmother farmed corn and soy, but the farm crisis of 1980 forced Kroul’s father to diversify their enterprise. Today, the farm produces a mix of commodity crops and seasonal produce, which it sells both directly to consumers via markets and a farmstand, and to local restaurants. Kroul feels fortunate that the farm was both small enough to be able to adapt to new crops and well-connected enough within the community to find a consumer base, but he acknowledges that in Iowa, this isn’t the case for everyone.
“You’d love to see it change, you’d love to see consumers drive that market to push more local foods,” Kroul said, but he worries that large-scale commodity farmers won’t want to change what they’ve always done. “Farmers are going to continue to grow what they’ve always grown. It’s a slippery slope in their mind to turn some acres over to vegetable and other growth.”
But Ikerd believes that the system can — and must — adapt to changing conditions. He remembers a time when fruit trees dotted the Midwest, and he also remembers watching as they were steadily replaced by large operations growing corn or soy or both. The system we have now, Ikerd says, was all built in the last 50 years. And he thinks a more sustainable system could be put in place just as quickly.
“This System Was A Fantasy”
Why do we grow so much of our produce in one place? And why California?
“There’s plenty of good soil elsewhere,” Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, told ThinkProgress. “But it’s the ability to put water on [that soil] over a long, dry summer that allows you to get very quick results.”
When it comes to irrigation, California is a powerhouse. Some 9 million acres of farmland are irrigated each year, making California the state with the second-largest amount of irrigated land (behind Nebraska).
But it wasn’t always like that. Back in the early days before California’s modern agriculture — during the mining boom of the mid-1800s — the state’s primary crops were wheat and corn. Farmers grew the grain without irrigation, finding that California’s short, rainy winters, long, hot summers, and nutrient-rich soil created the perfect growing conditions without the need for extra water. By the 1890s, however, the intense grain industry had depleted the soil, and California’s farmers were forced to find another crop.
With a Mediterranean climate, California has always been particularly well-suited to growing produce. Toward the turn of the 20th century, fruit and vegetable production in the state exploded in growth, helped along by the transcontinental railroad, which could carry California’s produce — fresh, frozen, or canned — to East Coast markets where it fetched a handsome price. Between the 1880s and the 1930s, the amount of cropland dedicated to fruits and vegetables increased ten times over — and most of that depended on irrigation.
At first, irrigation projects were small, created by organizations of farmers banding together to build small local dams on small local rivers. By the 1930s, Walker says, all the best, most naturally fertile land had been developed — but demand for dependable year-round produce was only increasing, thanks to the rise of supermarkets and shrewd advertising from California agribusiness. So, farmers turned their eyes to something bigger.
“A water system grew with the rise of the state to economic prominence, from individual projects to irrigation districts and colonies to state-engineered projects,” Steven Stoll, associate professor of history at Fordham University, told ThinkProgress. “Their rising political power ensured that they would get the water they needed — no matter what.”
These big projects — sponsored by both the state and federal government — brought water to unexpected places, like the Westlands, a barren area southwest of Fresno that has historically received around eight inches of rain annually. By most accounts, the Westlands could be classified as a desert. It was instead transformed into farmland by funneling water in from San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta to meet the demands of industry.
“But here is the point — the water existed. It flowed out of the Sierra up and down the Central Valley. It only needed to be captured, stored, and directed,” Stoll says. The Westlands became farmland at a certain point in the history of California agriculture where massive engineering projects were the solution to any problem. As long as water continued to flow from the Sierras, human ingenuity — and water from the Sacramento and Colorado Rivers — was all that was needed to bring that water to the fields.
“Human societies for the last 10,000 years have arisen on that same assumption — climatic stability, the continuation of certain trends indefinitely,” Stoll says. “No one could have known, or only few did, that fossil fuels had the capacity of changing those conditions.”
As Walker sees it, California agribusiness, for a long time, has dealt with problems through engineering. But now — after a century of diverting rivers — there’s simply less surface water to work with.
“It turns out that you can’t overcome all the problems with engineering,” Walker says. “You don’t even need climate change to know that this system was a fantasy.”
Alongside surface water, farmers can access groundwater, natural aquifers that have been soaking up water that falls in California — as rain or as snow — for thousands of years. Within the complicated web of water rules in California, groundwater is a complete free-for-all — anyone who taps it can use it.
In an average year, water from underground aquifers supplies California with 30 to 40 percent of the state’s water supply — in drought years, that number jumps to 60 percent. This year, that number could be as high as 75 percent.
But groundwater takes thousands of years to fill up, and California farmers are being forced to drill deeper and deeper — sometimes thousands of feet into the Earth — to find groundwater for their farms. That deep drilling is beginning to mar the California landscape, lowering water tables and causing the ground to sink. Shallow wells are being sucked dry by those with the resources to drill deeper, and communities are being deprived of their groundwater safety nets. According to the New York Times, the depletion of groundwater has terminally damaged California’s soil, lessening its ability to reabsorb and store water in the future.
Last fall, the California legislature addressed the problem of overpumping groundwater, passing a bill that forces communities to regulate the extraction of water from underground aquifers. It was a big moment, the first time in the state’s history that anyone had dared to place restrictions on groundwater use. But it was also a bill that, in a lot of ways, fell short of actually fixing the problem: communities are given years, decades even, to formulate their plans for replenishing and conserving groundwater, meaning that many of the effects of the bill won’t be felt until 2040.
“There’s no more water in the system,” Walker says. “That’s what they have to realize. Where’s the water you’re going to pump this year? It’s not there.”
Taking Pressure Off California With A Regionalized Food System
In 2013, the USDA published a report looking at the impact of climate change on the United State’s agriculture — a comprehensive overview of available literature meant to serve as an input to the National Climate Assessment. Climate change, the report concluded, would fundamentally alter the way that crops and livestock are raised in this country. Crops that depend on irrigation would be especially vulnerable as both increasing temperatures and changing precipitation patterns place stress on water resources.
“Some U.S. agricultural systems, such as those currently operating at their southern marginal limit or those that currently depend on irrigation, will have to undergo more transformative changes to remain productive and profitable,” the report read.
California has a finite amount of water to split between a seemingly infinite number of needs: from drinking water to residential lawns, swimming pools to protected streams, almond trees to alfalfa sprouts. For decades, irrigation and ground water have been enough to transform otherwise unsuitable areas into productive farmland. The Midwest could specialize in commodity crops because specialty crops could be — and were — grown easier elsewhere.
Climate change is altering that balance. Though evidence connecting the current drought to climate change is the subject of debate, studies show that man-made climate change certainly won’t help the situation. A recent study out of Stanford found that human emissions increase the probability of the low-precipitation, high-temperature conditions that have made this drought so tough. Another study from NASA also found that if emissions continue to increase, the American Southwest has an 80 percent chance of facing a multi-decade megadrought from 2050 through the end of the century.
Mike Hamm, director of the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems, hopes that those projections — of more frequent and longer-lasting droughts — don’t come true. He hopes that California can still produce as many fruits and vegetables in 30 years as it does now — but he also thinks that, to safeguard our food system, we need to move toward a more regionalized system of production.
“We need California production as long as and as much as it can be contained, and we need to regionalize production of fruit and vegetables as much as we can, in part to take water pressure off of California and in part to take pressure off of developing countries where we get fruits and vegetables from,” Hamm told ThinkProgress. Michigan, Hamm says, is already fairly well-situated for regional, diverse produce. Places like Iowa, that have seen their land consumed by large commodity farms, would face a more difficult transition.
“They neither have the land that is producing it, nor do they have the human capital,” Hamm says. “On the other hand, historically, in a place like Iowa, they had a very diverse agriculture with a lot of fruits and vegetables, which says that they have the climatic and environmental capacity to do it.”
To switch from a single crop to a diverse portfolio might seem daunting, but it’s change that has already begun to happen elsewhere. Thirty years ago, late spring would have signaled the beginning of the growing season for the most predominant crop in western North Carolina: tobacco, which had been grown in the region since the late 1600s. Federal quotas instated as part of the New Deal assured farmers a minimum price for their product in exchange for a set yield, a program that gave small farmers a measure of security for growing a high-value but labor-intensive crop. In 2002, the tobacco industry in North Carolina accounted for $800 million — roughly 12 percent of the state’s agricultural revenue.
That all changed in 2004, when quotas were phased out as part of a President George W. Bush’s American Jobs Creation Act.
“It was a big change, like a hurricane coming through,” Charlie Jackson, executive director of the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project (ASAP), told ThinkProgress, explaining that three decades ago, western North Carolina had some 7,000 tobacco farms — according to the 2012 census, that number is down to 94.
But farming didn’t disappear in western North Carolina — instead, it transitioned, diversifying to produce fruits and vegetables for local markets with the help of ASAP. From 2002 to 2012, the number of farms in the area fell from 12,212 to 10,912, but the number of farms selling produce directly to the local community increased from 740 farms to 1,190. Instead of sales dropping with the decline of the tobacco industry, sales to consumers actually grew over $5,000 during that time. According to an ASAP report, by switching from tobacco to produce, farmers in the southern Appalachia’s could provide local communities with almost 40 percent of their yearly fruit and vegetable needs.
If the tobacco quotas had remained in place, Jackson says, the switch to regional produce farming might have been slower. “My guess is that there would still be a lot of farms growing tobacco,” he said.
Western North Carolina, in a way, was already primed for the transition to supplying diverse produce to the region. Because of the area’s mountainous geography, farms were already small, and they occupied different climatic regions, from 1,000 to 5,000 feet in altitude. Farmers in North Carolina hadn’t invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in specialized farming infrastructure, so they were more free, in a sense, to adapt to the changes ushered in by the end of tobacco quotas.
“It’s really an interesting thing, where something that could have been disastrous ends up being transformative,” Jackson said.
So will the California drought be disastrous, or transformative? Ask John Ikerd what he thinks, and he leans toward transformation.
“I’m not really pessimistic. If we decide we want to change agriculture, I think it’s quite conceivable that we can recreate this whole food system,” he said. “We just need to wake up to the fact that we’ve got a problem and start working on it. Once we do that, the solutions are there.”
The post California Grows Almost All Of Our Produce. Will The Drought Change That? appeared first on ThinkProgress.
May 4, 2015
In Kansas, Renewable Energy Could Soon Be A Goal, Not A Requirement
Supporters say rolling back the RPS won’t damage Kansas’ wind industry.
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback (R), along with representatives from the wind energy industry, legislative leadership, and conservative and business groups, announced a deal Monday to make the state’s renewable portfolio standard (RPS) optional, rather than a mandate.
The agreement is the culmination of several attempts to roll back the RPS, which requires utilities to get 20 percent of their energy from renewable sources, such as wind and solar. Last year, Brownback urged wind energy and conservative business groups to come to a compromise on the issue.
“This gets us to stable policy atmosphere,” Gov. Brownback said Monday during a press conference. “I want to see the industry keep growing.”
Last year, wind provided 21.7 percent of all the electricity generated in Kansas, more than the 20 percent mandated under the RPS. The 2,967 megawatts (MW) of wind in the state — with another 827 MW under construction — has led to 12,000 jobs and $8 billion in investment, according to the Wind Coalition, an industry group involved in the negotiations.
In addition to removing the mandate, the agreement removes the perpetual property tax exemption for wind power production and replaces it with a 10-year exemption, which lawmakers said was in line with other energy sources. A previously proposed excise tax on wind was not included in the bill reflecting the compromise, introduced Monday afternoon in the House Energy and Utilities Committee.
“What the industry needs is a stable environment,” Wind Coalition spokesperson Kimberly Svaty said at the press conference.
She praised the RPS, though, saying it was a “strong reminder” of how state policies can foster economic development without using state funds.
“The RPS has been an economic engine for the state of Kansas since it was enacted five years ago,” she said. “Let’s surge past our goal and double our jobs and investment.”
Negotiated by state House and Senate leadership, the new bill is expected to pass easily. If does end up being enacted, the law would mean that utilities no longer have to invest in keeping their portfolios balanced with renewable energy sources.
But environmental groups expressed concern about the plan. Zack Pistoria, spokesman for the Kansas Sierra Club, told the Wichita Eagle the bill was “a backroom deal” that did not represent Kansans’ position on renewable energy.
A poll last year, funded in part by the Wind Coalition, along with several environmental groups, found that 75 percent of Kansas voters supported the RPS. More than 90 percent of respondents supported using renewable energy.
Industry insiders dispute the assertion that Kansas’ action is part of a larger trend, but in recent months several states, including Texas and North Carolina, have seen legislative challenges to their Renewable Portfolio Standards.
The challenges have largely been backed by business groups and Americans for Prosperity, a Koch Brothers-funded lobbying group. American For Prosperity’s Kansas chapter spent $383,000 from January through April 2014 on advertising to build support for repealing the RPS while two pro-wind groups spent about $57,000, according to the AP.
The RPS was signed into law in 2009 by former Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, a Democrat who left Kansas government later that year to serve as Secretary for Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration.
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The EPA’s Power Plant Rule Would Prevent Thousands Of Deaths And Hospitalizations
CREDIT: shutterstock
The Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed power plant rule is aimed at reducing carbon emissions that cause climate change. But it would also come with major health benefits, a new study confirmed Monday.
The study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, found that the EPA’s carbon rule could prevent 3,500 premature deaths each year, in addition to 1,000 hospitalizations and about 220 heart attacks. That’s because the rule, which aims to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants by 25 percent from 2005 levels by 2020 and 30 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, will also result in reductions of pollutants like particulates, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxides — emissions that contribute to smog and which can harm human health when breathed in regularly.
The study also mapped out what states would see the most health benefits from the Clean Power Plan. According to the study, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Ohio, would benefit most from the rule, with 230 to 330 premature deaths avoided each year. Some of these states are also among the most opposed to the Clean Power Plan: Ohio is one of 12 states — all of which are either large producers or consumers of coal — suing the EPA over the proposed rule.
Charles Driscoll, lead author of the study and professor of environmental systems engineering at Syracuse University, told ThinkProgress that this dichotomy makes sense. Many of the states that stand to gain the most benefits from the Clean Power Plan rely fairly heavily on coal for their energy, so tackling emissions from power plants within those states would more likely result in a noticeable difference in air quality than in states that don’t rely heavily on coal.
“Every state has some degree of benefits, but the benefits are greatest in states that have air quality challenges,” he said.
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CREDIT: Nature Climate Change
Driscoll, who along with other Harvard and Syracuse researchers has been working on quantifying the health benefits of the EPA’s Clean Power Plan — and other potential carbon-reducing policies — for about a year, said he and his team have been talking to these states about how the Clean Power Plan would affect the health of their residents. He said these discussions will continue now that the study has been released. In coal-heavy states, Driscoll and his team are trying to “turn the conversation” on the Clean Power Plan, to get people to view the proposed rule as a positive thing, rather than just something that will kill jobs and harm the economy.
“I think people don’t think about this when they think about carbon reductions,” Driscoll said. “They don’t think about other aspects and pollutants associated with it.”
Driscoll said that though some of these states’ leadership hasn’t been supportive of the rule, some residents have been.
“We’ve had a lot of conversations with local people in states that have poor air quality … and there’s been a lot of positive reception in these states,” he said. “States aren’t homogeneous, and they need to have intelligent conversations, think about options, and think about doing something in a way to maximize local benefits.”
The study’s results on the health benefits of the Clean Power plan confirm those of a study Driscoll and the other researchers released in September, and Driscoll said the team isn’t done looking into the proposed rule’s impacts. Once the public commenting period is over and the rule is finalized — a move expected this summer — the researchers are planning on doing an analysis on the health benefits of the final rule.
The study also confirms what other research has found about the health benefits of reducing carbon emissions — and reducing the co-pollutants that often come along with carbon. A 2012 report from the Economics for Equity and the Environment Network found that emission-reduction policies such as cap-and-trade are helpful in reducing pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides. A 2013 study published in Nature Climate Change found that up to 3 million premature deaths could be avoided each year globally by 2100 if the world aggressively cuts emissions, again because these carbon cuts will also reduce co-pollutants. Air pollution has been tied to 7 million deaths annually, according to the World Health Organization, and has also been tied to kidney damage, heart disease, stroke, and other ailments.
This kind of worldwide data is important, Driscoll said, because it means that the Clean Power Plan could serve as a model for countries around the world — some of which have far worse air pollution problems than the U.S. And, in the lead-up to the international climate talks in Paris this November, knowing the health benefits of carbon reductions could help counties make decisions about how to achieve reductions and how much they should cut.
Overall, Driscoll said, the study moves the conversation about climate change in the right direction.
“We need to move away from ‘does it exist’ towards ‘what are smart solutions,’ and I think this is an example of that,” he said.
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The U.S. Is Getting Serious About Oil Train Explosions. Here’s How It Plans To Stop Them.
A cyclist rides by train tank cars with placards indicating petroleum crude oil standing idle on the tracks, in Philadelphia in April, 2015.
CREDIT: AP/Matt Rourke
Oil is a global commodity, traversing vast distances by pipeline, tanker, and recently in the United States by rail car. A resurgence in domestic crude oil production due to technological advances in drilling has led to a transportation bottleneck between landlocked oil fields and coastal refineries and ports, and that bottleneck has opened up the door for more oil shipment via rail.
But increased shipment by rail has also led to an increase in accidents, and on Friday, the U.S. Department of Transportation released long-awaited safety standards for train cars carrying oil and other flammable materials following a series of dangerous derailments.
The standards, which were criticized by the oil industry over costs and time frames as well as by environmental groups and lawmakers, who demanded even stricter reforms, aim to improve overall safety and prevent catastrophic accidents and explosions. They do so through a number of measures, including updated braking systems for trains, a new maximum speed of 50 miles per hour, new operational protocols such as routing procedures and information sharing, and better classification of materials. The 50 mph speed limit comes in addition to a recently introduced 40 mph limit for trains travelling through certain urban areas.
The final rule comes as pressure mounted to address the issue due to a series of deadly crashes over the last few years, including a July 2013 derailment and explosion that killed 47 people in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec. So far in 2015 there have been five oil train explosions and spills in North America — four in the U.S. and one in Canada. While this represents only a minuscule fraction of the nearly 500,000 rail-car loads of flammable material last year — a figure up from 9,500 seven years ago — it just takes one incident to incite a disaster.
“The truth is, 99.9 percent of these shipments reached their destination safely,” U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said Friday during a press conference announcing the rules. “The accidents involving crude and ethanol that have occurred, though, have shown us that 99.9 percent isn’t enough. We have to strive for perfection.”
Foxx presented the new safety standards alongside Canada’s Minister of Transport, Lisa Raitt, since the regulations were coordinated with Canada. Raitt said that together the two countries had “developed a harmonized solution for North America’s tank car fleet.”
Many of the oil trains, which can total up to 120 cars, originate from the Bakken oil fields, located primarily in North Dakota but stretching into Montana and up towards the Canadian border. Total crude-by-rail in the U.S. and Canada averaged more than one million barrels of oil per day in 2014, up from 55,000 bpd in 2010, with the large majority of this oil coming from the Bakken region. Trains depart from these fields carrying oil to ports and refineries, such as those found along the Pacific Northwest coastline.
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For the first time, EIA is providing monthly data on rail movements of crude oil, which have significantly increased over the past five years.
CREDIT: U.S. Energy Information Administration
Senators from Oregon and Washington, states which have been bombarded by these trains and which have dealt with companies wanting to keep routes for oil trains secret, were unsatisfied with new safety standards.
In response to the new rules, Oregon Senators Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley released a statement saying the “rule includes meaningful steps on rail safety, but does not do enough, or move quickly enough to secure Oregon communities from the risks of flammable oil trains.”
They took specific issue with the fact that the rule does not expand on the amount of public information available on these train routes, saying “first responders need more information about dangerous materials moving through their communities.”
In fact, as Oregon Public Media reported, the new standards actually rescind a requirement that the DOT issued last year in which railroads were compelled to notify states regarding flammable crude shipments, providing information on volume and frequency. Instead, starting in 2016 railroads will only be required to provide states with contact information for officials with access to this information.
“Instead of providing first responders more details about oil shipments, railroads will simply be required to give our firefighters a phone number,” said Merkley and Wyden.
Senator Maria Cantwell, (D-WA), had even harsher words for the new rule, remarking that it is the equivalent of saying “let the oil trains roll.”
“It does nothing to address explosive volatility, very little to reduce the threat of rail car punctures, and is too slow on the removal of the most dangerous cars,” she said in a statement.
Merkley and Wyden are part of a group of senators from six states that last week proposed a special fee on railroad tank cars shipping oil, ethanol or other flammable liquids. The government charge, which would start at $175 and increase to $1,400 per car by 2018, would both incentivize upgrading to new railcars as well as raise money that could be used to clean up spills, relocate tracks away from population centers, and better equip first responders.
“The idea is to speed up the phase-out of older tank cars,” Wyden said. “It allows us to move in a much faster and more aggressive fashion to make oil by rail transportation safer.”
Environmental groups and lawmakers expressed concern over the extended timeline of the implementation of the new rules, which would phase out older rail cars, DOT-111s, by 2018 and require newer cars, known as CPC-1232s, to be retired or retrofitted by 2020. All cars built after October 2015 will adhere to DOT-117 standards, which require thicker shells, shields along the front and backs of the cars, increased thermal protections, and improved valve functions for releasing pressure or fluid.
Democratic Senator Charles Schumer from New York, another state experiencing a major increase in oil by rail, said the DOT’s announcement gives railroads too much time to adapt.
“The good news is that the standards are predictable, but the bad news is that the phaseout time is too lenient,” Schumer said.
The rules will also require train cars to use an electronic braking system, which could cost around $9,665 per tank car to install. While industry leaders criticized the new braking system as being unhelpful in preventing derailments and overly financially burdensome, the overall pushback from the industry was likely muted by a general slowdown in oil shipments recently. With pipeline infrastructure severally lacking, fossil fuel companies were until recently very concerned that the new rail car regulations would curtail their ability to bring oil to the market. However, with plummeting oil prices impacting the rate of the industry’s growth, these same parties now have other issues to deal with.
“Oil producers have more to worry about than new rail regulations,” Cleo Zagrean, a transportation analyst with Macquarie Securities, recently told Reuters.
The post The U.S. Is Getting Serious About Oil Train Explosions. Here’s How It Plans To Stop Them. appeared first on ThinkProgress.
An Ancient Megadrought Turned An African Lake Into A Deadly ‘Fecal Cocktail’
Present-day Mauritius, post-fecal cocktail swamp.
CREDIT: Shutterstock
Around 4,200 years ago, a once-pristine lake on the African island of Mauritius began transforming into a deadly swamp of poisonous algae and animal feces. The swamp had once been a source of freshwater for the island’s native species, so when it turned into a vat of poison algae and poop, it wound up entombing and killing many of the island’s dodo birds and giant tortoises.
This week, scientists discovered that horrible transformation from nice lake to deadly “fecal cocktail” was caused by a really, really intense drought.
The discovery was published this week in the May issue of The Holocene. In it, researchers from the Netherlands, Germany, and Canada analyzed fossil-rich sediment cores from beneath the area where the swamp once stood. Those cores and fossils contain scores of data that can help scientists reconstruct what an ecosystem was like in the past, said Erik de Boer, a scientist from the University of Amsterdam and one of the study’s authors.
In a blog post, de Boer explained that the megadrought on the island was triggered by the onset of an El Niño, a climactic phase that causes unusually warm conditions.
“The drought regionally induced fires on Mauritius and limited freshwater sources … by decreasing local water levels [and] increasing salt levels,” he wrote. “The excrements of the vertebrates produced hypertrophic conditions that, combined with salinization and high temperatures, created a suitable environment for toxic cyanobacteria, of which the pigments were found.”
“These factors led to a deadly cocktail, resulting in the death of 100,000s of vertebrates by intoxication, dehydration, trampling and miring,” he added.
While the drought and subsequent toxic water source wound up killing thousands of dodos and giant tortoises, however, the study noted that wasn’t the ultimate factor in their total extinction. Populations of the animals did indeed crash due to a lack of available drinking water, but as de Boer explained in an e-mail, “freshwater can always be found somewhere on the island … that would allow the island-level population to rebound when precipitation levels went back to ‘normal’.”
In other words, dodos and giant tortoises were resilient creatures, and likely could have rebounded when the El Nino passed and conditions went back to normal.
So why did the dodos and tortoises really go extinct? That honor, de Boer said, belongs to humans.
“[A]s soon as humans arrive on the island, the dodo and many of its contemporaries quickly went extinct,” he told ThinkProgress. In his blog post, he explained further: “The introduction of rats, pigs, hunting, and large-scale destruction of forest provided tough challenges that almost all of the native fauna were not prepared for.”
While the fecal cocktail swamp event was certainly unique in Mauritius, bodies of water across the world are increasingly likely to contain toxic cyanobacteria — also known as toxic algal blooms — as global climate change accelerates. According to research published in the journal Water Research, global warming and persistent droughts can “strongly affect cyanobacterial growth and bloom potentials in freshwater and marine ecosystems.” The United States is no stranger to the increase in toxic algal blooms.
But the real lesson the study provides, according to de Boer, is Mauritius-specific. As the island responds to current global warming, he said, it’s important to let current species on the extremely biodiverse island have space to respond to climactic changes, away from humans.
“I think it should be high on the political agenda, and a challenge for scientist, to find out how we can provide the threatened biodiversity of Mauritius enough space to survive the next generations,” he said.
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May 3, 2015
Michigan Hit With Its Second-Largest Earthquake Ever Recorded
The star marks the epicenter of Saturday’s earthquake — the second-biggest in Michigan’s history — which was felt in at least four states.
CREDIT: USGS.gov
Michigan was hit with a 4.2 magnitude earthquake on Saturday, the second-strongest in the state’s recorded history, the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) reported.
There have been no reports of damage or injuries, though the earthquake was big enough that it was reportedly felt in parts of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. A 4.2 quake is not terribly large — people indoors are expected to feel to movement, and hanging objects might swing back on forth.
Still, the event was decidedly unexpected. Michigan is rarely ever affected by seismic activity. According to the USGS, the area where Saturday’s quake occurred has just a 6 to 10 percent chance of any seismic activity in the next 50 years. And if Michigan is impacted by an earthquake, it’s not expected to be very strong — the state’s strongest recorded event was in August 1947, a 4.6 magnitude in almost the exact same location.
It’s difficult to pinpoint the cause of an earthquake so soon after it has occurred, and the USGS has indicated that they believe Saturday’s quake happened naturally and was not the result of fracking or wastewater injection.
But the event occurred amid very recent warnings from scientists and the U.S. government about the increasing likelihood of earthquakes across the central and eastern United States, due in large part to oil and gas operations. Just last week, the USGS reported that earthquakes caused by oil and gas activity — specifically, the practice of injecting wastewater underground — “are occurring at a higher rate than ever before and pose a much greater risk to people living nearby.”
Those human-induced earthquakes are expected to get stronger as the process of wastewater injection continues to increase alongside oil and gas drilling. The popular but controversial process of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, produces significantly more wastewater than conventional drilling, which results in more underground injections.
Michigan itself does have fracking, but most of its operations are in the northern part of the state, away from where Saturday’s quake occurred.
Right now, seismologists have said the more notable thing about Saturday’s quake is that it may point to previously undiscovered faults in the state. That is important for general hazard planning, but also could be important for future planning of oil and gas operations in Michigan.
As the link between wastewater injection and earthquakes has become stronger, states have been urged to be more careful when drillers are operating near known faults. Ohio’s government has been relatively proactive about this, requiring oil and gas companies to install earthquake monitors before drilling within three miles of a known fault line, or in any area that has ever experienced an earthquake greater than a 2.0 magnitude.
Recently, Oklahoma has been forced to take this into consideration as well, as human-induced quakes there have rapidly increased. Though it has not laid out requirements for oil and gas companies drilling near faults, Oklahoma’s government announced last week that it would officially embrace that large body of scientific research connecting its seismic activity to wastewater injection, and start figuring out how to deal with it.
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This article has been updated to reflect the correct date of the earthquake. It was Saturday, not Friday.
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May 1, 2015
Solar Gets A Win In North Carolina, But Not For Homeowners
North Carolina’s booming utility-scale solar development has been bolstered by the state’s tax incentive, which was extended Thursday.
CREDIT: AP Photo/Bob Leverone
North Carolina Governor Patrick McCrory signed an extension for the state’s renewable tax credit into law Thursday, but environmental groups are still planning to rally next week against the anti-solar policies of the state’s largest utility.
It may seem counterintuitive to rally about solar just days after a key policy is extended, but not all solar policies are created equally. The tax law does nothing to address North Carolina’s restrictions on residential solar, which are the subject of Monday’s rally.
Extending the tax credit will encourage solar investment by creating additional market certainty for solar developers in North Carolina, but meanwhile Duke Energy — which provides half of North Carolina’s electricity — is stifling homeowners’ freedom to choose solar and halting development of a residential solar market, some environmental and solar advocates say.
While North Carolina does allow net metering, it does not allow third-party energy sales — which means homeowners have to buy solar installations outright and can’t use leasing options that are driving residential solar in other states.
“North Carolina has some of the most regressive policies in terms of access to solar energy,” said Monica Embrey, a campaigner with Greenpeace. North Carolina is only one of four states that doesn’t allow third-party sales, she said.
Greenpeace is one organizer for demonstrations next week, including a rally outside Duke Energy’s annual shareholders’ meeting on Thursday.
The claim that North Carolina is preventing residential solar development is held up by the numbers. The state has unquestionably experienced a boom in solar installations. It is now fourth in the nation for installed solar capacity, and there was nearly 13 times as much solar installed in 2014 than in 2010, according to Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA). But most of that boom has come in the utility market, which moved from 26 megawatts (MW) of capacity installed in 2010 to 390 MW installed in 2014. Comparatively, the residential market has languished, going from 0.3 to 4.3 MW during that time period.
Nationally, the residential solar sector was about a third of the size of the utility-scale sector in 2014, SEIA says.
There is currently a bill, the Energy Freedom Act, being considered in the House that could expand access to residential solar.
Still, extending the tax credit, formerly set to expire on Jan. 1, 2016, and now set for a year later, should help the state economy — an analysis done for the North Carolina Sustainable Energy Association found that $1.93 has been returned to state and local governments for each dollar spent on the Renewable Energy Investment Tax Credit.
“Renewable energy is an important part of an all-of-the-above energy policy that produces clean power, creates jobs, and generates revenue in communities that need it most,” McCrory said in a statement Thursday.
The McCrory administration has been criticized for its close ties to Duke Energy, where the governor worked for nearly 30 years before entering office.
So, while Duke Energy continues its investment in renewable energy, supporters are left wondering when they will be able to cash in on the sun.
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Church Of England Divests From Coal And Tar Sands, Citing ‘Moral Responsibility’
CREDIT: AP Photo/Matt Dunham
The official Church of England announced Thursday that it had divested its holdings of all investments in tar sands and thermal coal companies.
The mother church of the world’s Anglican Communion divested a total of $18.42 million in coal and tar sands investments from its holdings, a move that the church said is part of a larger goal of helping the globe make the transition to a lower-carbon economy. From now on, the church — which counts about 26 million baptized English residents as its members — will not invest in companies that generate more than 10 percent of their revenue from thermal coal or tar sands.
“Climate change is already a reality,” Reverend Canon Professor Richard Burridge, deputy chair of the church’s Ethical Investment Advisory Group, said in a statement. “The Church has a moral responsibility to speak and act on both environmental stewardship and justice for the world’s poor who are most vulnerable to climate change.”
The church’s investment portfolio totals about $12.1 billion. According to the Guardian, if the church divested its portfolio of all fossil fuel stock, including oil and gas companies, it would be the largest institution in the world to do so.
Bishop Nick Holtam, the Church of England’s lead Bishop on the environment, said in a statement that climate change “is the most pressing moral issue in our world.”
“Change is happening rapidly, I therefore particularly welcome the commitment to regularly review the policy recommendations in the light of our knowledge and experience,” he said.
This isn’t the first strong statement the Church of England has made on climate change. In 2014, when the church was deliberating over whether or not to divest its holdings, it said that it would stop investing in companies that fail to fight the “great demon” of climate change. The church also made clear, however, that it believed divestment was a “final option,” and that ultimately, humans must examine their way of life, which relies on “plentiful, cheap energy,” if climate change is to be addressed.
The church said last year that it sees tackling climate change as a way to engage with younger generations.
“At the moment, the church is perceived by most young people as supremely irrelevant,” Canon Giles Goddard said. “This is a significant opportunity for churches to engage with a new constituency, and it’s important that we take it.”
Though the church has divested its holdings from some fossil fuel sources, at least one of its prominent members has ties to the oil industry. Justin Welby, who worked for 11 years in the oil industry, became the Archbishop of Canterbury in 2013. In that role, Welby serves as the Anglican church’s spiritual leader and is also the senior bishop in the Church of England.
The Church of England’s announcement comes during a week of focus on climate change by the Catholic Church. On Tuesday, scientists, policy-makers, religious leaders, and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki Moon held a summit on climate change. The summit was held in the lead-up to Pope Francis’ encyclical on climate change, an influential church document that’s expected to be released this summer.
At the end of the summit, leaders released a statement emphasizing that “human-induced climate change is a scientific reality” and “its decisive mitigation is a moral and religious imperative for humanity.” It also warned that the November U.N. climate talks in Paris may be the world’s last chance to negotiate a deal to limit climate change to 2°C.
“In this core moral space, the world’s religions play a very vital role,” the document states. “These traditions all affirm the inherent dignity of every individual linked to the common good of all humanity. They affirm the beauty, wonder, and inherent goodness of the natural world, and appreciate that it is a precious gift entrusted to our common care, making it our moral duty to respect rather than ravage the garden that is our home.”
Other religious institutions have made commitments in recent years to tackle climate change. The World Council of Churches, a global coalition of 345 churches including the Church of England, announced last year that it would pull investments of all fossil fuels. Union Theological Seminary in New York also announced it would be divesting from fossil fuels last year, becoming the first seminary to do so.
Some Evangelicals, too, want to see more action on climate change: the Evangelical Environmental Network emphasizes that, because God created the Earth and its creatures, humans have a duty to look after that creation — and action on climate change is part of that care.
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