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May
02, 2023
By
Sammy Roth
Boiling Point: To Idaho and beyond!
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Sunrise at Morley Nelson Snake River Birds of
Prey National Conservation Area, south of Boise, Idaho. (Sammy Roth /
Los Angeles Times)
This
story was originally published in Boiling Point, a newsletter about
climate change and the environment. Sign
up here to
get it in your inbox.
After 10 days in Idaho, I’m grateful to be back home.
But man, did I learn and see some amazing stuff in the Gem State.
Despite its conservative reputation, Idaho has a history of
environmental action. A memorial outside
the state Capitol celebrates the conservation legacy of Gov. Cecil
Andrus, who helped protect tens
of millions of acres in Idaho and across the country.
And as I strolled along the Boise River flowing free
and clear through downtown Boise — and watched
the sun rise over a nearby conservation area — it wasn’t hard to
see that Idahoans love pristine, wild places where they can fish, hunt
and relax.
It also wasn’t hard to see that Idaho is grappling with many of the
same questions as California.
Are hydropower dams a valuable source of climate-friendly energy or
fish-killing monstrosities that should be torn down? What makes a
landscape a good spot for wind turbines versus a place that should be
permanently protected? Is mining a destructive industry that we ought
to relegate to the dustbin of history or a crucial part of our clean
energy future?
I’ll get into those questions — at least with regard to Idaho — in
Part 4 of Repowering
the West, our ongoing series. (Stay tuned for Part 3 soon, all
about southern Nevada.) In the coming weeks, I’ll share
behind-the-scenes stories from my recent road trip in Boiling Point.
We’re back to twice-a-week publication for now, so look for another
newsletter this Thursday.
I also spent a few days at the Society of Environmental Journalists’
annual conference, held this year in Boise. Again, more details to
come. But for now, feel free to watch a panel
discussion I moderated, dealing with the tension between renewable
energy and conservation in the West. One of the panelists was Tracy
Stone-Manning, director of the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.
Stone-Manning’s boss, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, also spoke at
the conference. She touted the Biden administration’s work to get
solar and wind farms built on public lands while also defending her
department’s approval of oil and gas projects.
“We’re not going to turn the faucet off and say we’re not drilling
anymore,” Haaland insisted during a Q&A session, as reported
by the Associated Press’ Matthew Daly. “We’re not going to say
we’re not going to use gas and oil. That’s not reality.”
On that note, let’s get to the news. Here’s what’s happening around
the West:
POLITICAL CLIMATE
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Trucks move cargo out of the ports of Long Beach
and Los Angeles in 2021. (Luis Sinco / Los Angeles Times)
All cargo trucks entering California seaports and rail yards will need
to be zero-emission by 2035 — and that’s just the tip of the iceberg
under new rules approved by state officials. The rules also
dictate that all medium- and heavy-duty trucks sold in California must
be electric
or otherwise zero-emission starting in 2036, The Times’ Tony
Briscoe reports. Smog-belching old trains will need to be retired,
too. In addition to helping address the climate crisis, the
regulations should reduce unhealthful air pollution, which despite
decades of progress is still worse in Southern California and the
Central Valley than anywhere else in the country, as Briscoe notes in
a separate
story. The Biden administration, meanwhile, is gearing up to
require huge
cuts in climate pollution from power plants nationwide, per the
Washington Post’s Timothy Puko.
Some experts see a clear legal path for U.S. cities to keep pushing
all-electric homes, even after a court decision rejecting Berkeley’s
first-in-the-nation gas ban. Details
here from Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci, who writes that Berkeley
officials used a different legal strategy than most of the cities that
have moved to ditch fossil natural gas — although it was the same
strategy that Los Angeles used. The court ruling certainly hasn’t
stopped New York officials from developing plans for a statewide
ban on gas in new homes and other buildings, as the Washington
Post’s Anna Phillips reports. If you’re interested in switching from
gas heating and/or cooking to climate-friendly electric appliances in
your home, my colleague Jon Healey has a how-to
piece breaking down the costs, rebates and tax credits — and how
to figure out if you currently have gas or electric.
Two U.S. senators — Nevada Democrat Catherine Cortez Masto and Idaho
Republican Jim Risch — have introduced a bill that would bolster
companies looking to extract lithium and other minerals necessary for
the clean energy transition, by helping them get around a court ruling
that could otherwise limit their ability to mine on federal lands. The
Associated Press’ Scott Sonner has
the story, which serves as a reminder of the mining industry’s
continued political might. In other D.C. drama, Inside Climate News’
Marianne Lavelle has a fascinating
story about the nation’s largest clean energy lobbying group
allying itself with oil and gas companies to push for permitting
reform that would benefit fossil fuels as well as renewables.
CALIFORNIA WATER
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Recording-breaking snow runoff from the eastern Sierra
Nevada threatens operations to control dust at Owens Lake. (Carolyn
Cole / Los Angeles Times)
The Los Angeles Aqueduct was already breached once this year during
heavy floods — and the worst could be yet to come as melting snow
courses down from the Sierra Nevada. The Times’ Louis Sahagún
wrote about the L.A. Department of Water and Power’s frantic
efforts to shore up the aqueduct, which carries drinking water
from the Eastern Sierra. (It hasn’t been a great few months for the
DWP, which is also facing hard questions from its own board about a failure
to repair dangerous power poles.) Sahagún also wrote about how
California’s epic mountain snowpack might affect wildlife
big and small. The short version: Many mammals and mallards are
probably in luck, but sage grouse and migratory birds, not so much.
L.A.’s largest wastewater treatment plant will probably be slapped
with a record $21.7-million penalty, with regulators saying
operational breakdowns and poor practices continued long after a 2021
sewage spill into Santa Monica Bay. Here’s
the story from my colleague Robert J. Lopez, who writes that the
plant “reported more than 150 violations of its environmental permit,
including failure to comply with ocean monitoring and reporting
requirements after torrents of raw sewage flooded the facility.” In
other water pollution news, a federal judge granted final
approval to a $50-million settlement with Amplify Energy after the
company’s undersea pipeline leaked thousands of gallons of crude oil
into the Pacific Ocean in 2021.
There’s more drama at Central Basin Municipal Water District, which
now has the ACLU on its case for ejecting a member of the public who
wanted to talk about criminal charges against the district’s general
manager at a public meeting. The embattled water agency serves
almost 2 million residents in southeast Los Angeles, as The Times’
Dorany Pineda notes
in her story. There’s another controversy playing out at nearby
West Basin Municipal Water District, where longtime board member
Gloria Gray was recently elected to the City Council in Inglewood —
one of the cities that buy water from West Basin. Some water district
officials see her dual roles as
a conflict of interest, Jason Henry reports for the Los Angeles
Daily News. Gray also serves on the board of the powerful Metropolitan
Water District of Southern California and was previously its chair.
WATER IN THE WEST
The long-term outlook on the Colorado River is still dire — but in the
short term, it’s less grim than it was a few months ago. CNN’s
Ella Nilsen reports that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation plans to
release an
additional 2.5 million acre-feet of water from Lake Powell to Lake
Mead this year, for a total of 9.5 million. Already, federal officials
carried out a first-ever
springtime flood experiment last week, releasing three days of
high flows from Glen Canyon Dam in an effort to improve environmental
conditions in the Grand Canyon and rebuild beaches for Colorado River
rafters, the Arizona Republic’s Shaun McKinnon reports.
San Diego officials are trying to create a few hundred of acres of
marshland to protect the shoreline against rising seas and suck up
carbon — and they’re facing fierce pushback from golfers and tennis
players who don’t want to give up even small amounts of land. Here’s
the story from David Garrick at the San Diego-Union Tribune, which
illustrates the huge potential for climate-resilient natural spaces —
and the difficulty of reimagining our built infrastructure. And if
you’re looking for a more stress-free story about restored wetlands,
check out this
piece about the Bay Area’s Dutch Slough, which stores carbon
dioxide “at a higher rate than nearly all other sites studied around
the world,” the San Francisco Chronicle’s Tara Duggan writes.
“I want to show that we are capable of doing the hard things that are
necessary for us to be able to achieve this change, whether it’s
running 200 marathons or solving the global water crisis.” My
colleague Ian James wrote an inspiring
story about Mina Guli, a 52-year-old Australian activist who over
the last year has run marathons in 32 countries — including in
California — to call attention to global water issues, including
drought, floods and pollution. “Climate change is water change,” Guli
told James. “We just need to do things better and smarter. We need to
wake up to the challenge that we’ve got in front of us.”
AROUND THE WEST
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City Nature Challenge co-founder Alison
Young, right, and Arya Natarajan search a tide pool during a BioBlitz
event at Pillar Point in Half Moon Bay. (Gayle Laird / California
Academy of Sciences)Conservationists
and a Northern California tribe want President Biden to protect Molok
Luyuk — a remarkably biodiverse ridge once eyed for wind energy
development — by expanding Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument.
“You hear the botanists freaking out about this place? It’s a mecca
for them,” one activist told the Sacramento Bee’s Ari Plachta, who
writes that Molok Luyuk is home to 7% of the state’s native flora. If
you care about wildlife, you’ll also want to look out for the results
of the City Nature Challenge, which took place over the weekend. In
California and around the world, urban wildlife watchers used the
iNaturalist app to log sightings of lizards, squirrels, wildflowers
and more. The Times’ Sean Greene explained how the “World Series of
urban nature” got started, and made some cool data visualizations
charting past results.
“These are the last crumbs of a much larger ecosystem.” A developer is
preparing to start construction of a luxury housing development in the
Verdugo Mountains in Los Angeles — based on a nearly 20-year-old city
approval and environmental report. Critics say the development site is
not only valuable wildlife habitat, it’s also a dangerous fire zone,
my colleague Hayley Smith reports. In other wildfire news, David
Sherfinski at the Thomson Reuters Foundation has an important story
about fire dispatchers, who say they suffer from much of the same
trauma as their firefighting colleagues in the field and are working
overtime to make ends meet. The Times’ Noah Bierman, meanwhile, wrote
about a new competition — targeted at millionaires and billionaires —
that aims to encourage the development of technologies to detect and
stop wildfires.
Has documentarian Ken Burns done enough to center Native American
perspectives in his films about the West, including the upcoming “The
American Buffalo”? High Country News journalist Nick Martin pressed
Burns on that question in this recent interview, and the result is a
nuanced, thought-provoking conversation. “I’ve spent nearly 50 years
making films about the U.S., but I also make films about the lowercase
‘us,’ ” Burns said. “Whatever exigencies of the present moment,
whatever pressures and sort of movements of the present moment come,
they’re leaning against an open door.”
ONE MORE THING
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A project called Move Culver City created dedicated
bicycle lanes in each direction of a 1.3-mile downtown corridor,
buffered by bus-only lanes. (Citizens of the Planet / UCG / Universal
Images Group via Getty Images)
I live not far from downtown
Culver City, and I’ve occasionally been annoyed, driving through the
area, by how long the red lights last — and how quickly the few lanes
dedicated to cars can back up, slowing down traffic. So it’s easy for
me to understand why city officials voted last week to add back car
lanes, undoing a pilot project that created protected bike lanes and
led to more people cycling, riding the bus and scooting through
downtown. Details here from my colleague Ryan Fonseca.
The City Council vote followed vocal displeasure from drivers. But the
straightforward reality is that confronting the climate crisis — and
making our air more breathable — will require redesigning streets and
neighborhoods to be less conducive to cars and more conducive to other
ways of getting around. The Culver City pilot program was
accomplishing that. And now it’s kaput.
At the same time, climate-friendly transit projects still deserve
public scrutiny.
Exhibit A: an aerial gondola that would carry fans from L.A.’s Union
Station to Dodger Stadium, which has been backed by much-maligned
former Dodgers owner Frank McCourt. The Times’ Bill Shaikin wrote
about the proposed gondola, trying to determine whether McCourt is
angling for further development of the stadium parking lots after it’s
built. Fonseca, meanwhile, pointed to research questioning how much
difference the gondola would make in reducing traffic and climate
pollution.
Personally, I’m a fan of parking at Union Station and taking the free
bus to the ballpark.
We’ll be back in your inbox on Thursday. To view this newsletter in
your Web browser, click
here.
And for more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on
Twitter.
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