Climate Point: Snow drought in the West

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Welcome to Climate Point, your weekly guide to climate change, energy and the environment. I'm Sammy Roth, writing to you from Southern California, where the weather is toasty and there's hardly been any rain all winter. The mountain snowpack is pretty dismal, too. It's hard to say if another drought is underway, but recent conditions sure look like climate change in action, as Ian James reports for The Desert Sun.

A climate-driven trend toward less snow is also bad news for the skiing industry. The Coloradoan's Jacy Marmaduke reports that ski reports are already seeing business decline as the ski season gets shorter.

Here are some other things you might want to know:

MUST-READ STORIES:

What Trump didn't say about climate change: To everyone's surprise, the president didn't talk about climate change in his State of the Union address. In anticipation of that, I wrote my own "state of the climate" story, looking at the most important climate science news of the last year. (The big one: In 2017, we saw with our own eyes how global warming can make extreme weather events even more extreme.) Meanwhile, many Trump administration officials still don't accept the reality of climate change. EPA chief Scott Pruitt told senators he's still considering an all-out legal attack on the scientific basis for regulating planet-warming gases, as Ledyard King reports for Paste BN.

Trump's infrastructure plan could undermine environmental laws: The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin and Michael Laris got hold of a draft version of President Trump's long-awaited infrastructure plan. It turns out part of the plan is exempting roads, bridges, mines and other projects from key provisions of America's bedrock environmental laws. Just to give one example, Eilperin and Laris write that the draft plan would "give the interior secretary the authority to approve rights of way for natural gas pipelines to cross national park lands, a move that currently requires congressional authorization."

ON OUR PUBLIC LANDS:

Trump could open California desert lands to solar, wind farms: In a story that is sure to confuse anyone who hasn't already been following it, the Interior Department will reconsider an Obama-era conservation plan that blocks solar and wind energy projects across millions of acres of federal land in the California desert. Here's my story for The Desert Sun. Renewable energy developers, lo and behold, are happy with the Trump administration. But conservationists are worried. They think the Obama-era plan strikes the right balance between desert protection and renewable energy, and they're worried Trump actually wants to open the desert to mining and off-roading, not solar and wind.

Get ready to stake your claims in Bears Ears and Grand Staircase: In other public lands news, Trump's decision to shrink two national monuments in Utah officially takes effect Friday morning. As Valerie Volcovici reports for Reuters, that means people and companies who want to mine uranium and other metals can — under an 1872 law — run into the former monument areas and stake their claims by hammering poles into the ground. Sounds kind of fun. Hard to know if the reduced monument boundaries will stick, though. The New York Times' Coral Davenport reports that many of the regulatory rollbacks under Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have been done so hastily that they could be vulnerable to court challenges arguing Zinke hasn't followed all legal requirements.

POLITICAL CLIMATE:

Climate change, extreme weather threaten 50% of military sites: I was stunned by a new report from the Department of Defense finding that half of U.S. military sites worldwide have already been affected by floods, wildfires, droughts and other weather extremes that are worsened by global warming. I was so stunned, in fact, that I wrote a story about it. It's fascinating to me that the military continues to take climate change seriously, even as the Trump administration as a whole largely ignores the issue.

New Jersey, I hardly recognize you: Following the election of Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy, who took over for Chris Christie last month, New Jersey has done a 180 on climate policy. This week alone, Murphy directed the state to rejoin a multi-state cap-and-trade program to reduce planet-warming emissions; pulled New Jersey out of a lawsuit challenging President Obama's signature climate initiative, the Clean Power Plan; and ordered his administration to develop an offshore wind plan, which is actually something Christie support before he started angling for president and decided renewable energy wouldn't play well with conservative voters. (Those stories are by Dustin Racioppi, James M. O'Neill and Scott Fallon at The Record in Bergen County.)

AND ANOTHER THING:

One of my favorite climate writers is David Roberts at Vox. This week, he wrote a piece headlined, "Reckoning with climate change will demand ugly tradeoffs from environmentalists — and everyone else." It's a thoughtful, provocative read, examining the opposition of some environmentalists to nuclear power, solar and wind farms in certain locations, and public transit/increased urban density. Here's the key paragraph: 

"Being a climate hawk and an environmentalist at the same time is occasionally challenging, but being a climate hawk and anything else is occasionally challenging. Anyone who really digs in and follows the logic of climate change, who understands both the risks and the extraordinary mobilization required to avoid them, will eventually find that climate concern bangs up against their other values and priorities."

That's all for this week. For more climate, energy and environment news, follow me on Twitter @Sammy_Roth. You can sign up to get Climate Point in your inbox here.