Climate Point: Closed-door decisions on pollution, drought can leave public in the dark
Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate, energy and the environment. I’m Janet Wilson from Palm Springs, California.
Communication is on my mind this week, as publicly paid officials from seven states and the federal government continue closed-door meetings on how to slash Colorado River allotments to keep its massive reservoirs and hydroelectric power system functioning.
That's after the U.S. Department of Interior last week, with no reasons given, relaxed an Aug. 16 ultimatum by its Reclamation Commissioner, Camille Touton, to find huge cuts to save the river or face federal mandates.
John Fleck, a University of New Mexico water researcher and professor who has written extensively about the Colorado River, said he and many others are still scratching their heads about the switch, though like others, he said it might have been because the feds realized how much work they as well as the states still need to do to achieve cuts.
Fleck, who was a journalist for decades, said he has come to believe such negotiations need to be secret. It gives officials representing whole states or other large regions critical time to test out big, even rash, ideas that might or might not be implemented, he said, without being scarred politically.
Open negotiations "won't work," Fleck said. "Because the choices that all of these people make are so difficult and unpleasant to water-using constituencies, that they have to be able to ... bat back and forth crazy ideas. But once they become publicly attached to a crazy idea that's really just a 'what if,' then the discussion falls apart."
Meanwhile, a California bill that would have punished oil refineries that illegally pollute the air with toxic chemicals is dead, after industry opposition led to such weakening that its author pulled her support. KQED's Ted Goldberg reports the bill had passed four public committee hearings, but behind closed doors, legislators apparently caved to demands by oil companies and their lobbyists.
Goldberg lays out how that bill and hundreds of others can be decided out of the public eye — and how elected leaders often use the opaque process to kill or change bills that aren’t politically unpalatable.
Overall, although journalism is suffering economically (and it is), and as much as our democracy is fractured (and it is), reporters still perform a vital function, acting as eyes and ears for people whose drinking water, food and air are impacted.
Readers don't always appreciate that when it comes to thorny topics, though, including climate change, as the Arizona Republic's Joan Meiners explains in a first-person story about the vitriolic e-mails she receives weekly. It's worth a read.
Other must reads this week include a saga by the Los Angeles Times' Sammy Roth on an epic road trip along the 700-mile route of big wind turbines and transmission lines that will slice across rural habitat and vistas to deliver clean power to urban areas.
"The transition from fossil fuels to clean energy is desperately needed to confront the wildfires, droughts, heat storms and other deadly consequences of the climate crisis," he writes. "But renewable power is also reshaping landscapes, ecosystems and rural economies — and not always for the better."
And it's not just power lines. The U.S. may need as much as 30,000 miles of new pipeline — more than all the gas pipelines in California, New York and Pennsylvania combined — to affordably ship carbon dioxide that polluting companies say they want to bury underground. HuffPost's Alexander Kaufman has a good explainer on the controversial "sequestration" technique and related building boom that Biden's Inflation Reduction Act could unleash.
The law does have something for everyone, including defining greenhouse gas emissions as air pollution, which the Supreme Court recently ruled Congress had not specifically done. Now they have, reports Lisa Friedman with The New York Times, which gives EPA legal tools to crack down on industries causing climate change.
Read on for other stories about young people leading the fight against climate change, and how GOP counties are fighting the Biden administration's decision to restore sprawling national monuments. There are also fun pieces on corn sweat (it's what you think it is) contributing to humidity, the best state to charge your EV (nope, not California) and how a seaweed chewing cow could help slow climate change.
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