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More California Oil Industry Wastewater Injection Wells Shut Down Over Fears Of Groundwater Contamination
More California Oil Industry Wastewater Injection Wells Shut Down Over Fears Of Groundwater Contamination
The latest in the ongoing investigation into California regulators’ failure to protect residents from toxic oil industry waste streams has led to the closure of 12 more underground injection wells. The 12 wells that were shut downthis week are all in the Central Valley region, ground zero for oil production in the state.
California has roughly 50,000 underground injection wells. State officials are investigating just over 2,500 of them to determine whether or not they are injecting toxic chemical-laden oil industry wastewater into aquifers containing usable water (or at least potentially usable water) that should have been protected under the Safe Drinking Water Act.
A coalition of environmental, health and public advocacy groups filed a legal petition with Governor Jerry Brown last week in an attempt to force an emergency moratorium on fracking after it was discovered that flowback, a fluid that rises to the top of a fracked well, contains alarmingly high levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals.
Fracking flowback is an increasingly prevalent component of the oil industry wastewater that is being injected into the state’s aquifers, as fracking is now used in up to half of all new wells drilled in California.
Prompted by an inquiry by the federal Environmental Protection Agency in 2011, state officials shut down 11 wastewater injection wells last year over similar concerns that they were polluting badly needed sources of water in a time of prolonged drought. It was later confirmed that 9 of those wells were in fact pumping wastewater into protected aquifers—some 3 billion gallons of wastewater, by one estimate.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Do Warmer Winters Mean Less Fruit?
Do Warmer Winters Mean Less Fruit?
Californians have been enjoying summer weather in the dead of winter, but the downside is that unseasonably warm temperatures could threaten many of our favorite foods. The state experienced its warmest winter on record last year, and according to current reports, this year could shape up to be another record breaker, compounded by a four-year drought.
California produces the vast majority of our country’s fruits and nuts, and farmers are worried because they depend on water and winter chill for their trees to produce.
The drought has been a top concern for Stan Devoto at Devoto Garden & Orchards, who grows nearly 100 heirloom varieties of apples in Sebastopol. Many of his trees are dry-farmed, meaning they receive no irrigation besides what falls from the sky and is stored in the soil. His farm has received about 27 inches of rain this season (compared to the usual 40 to 50).
Right now, though, Stan is more concerned about the lack of cold than he is about the drought. “We don’t anticipate a good crop this year unless we start getting some really cold temperatures,” he says. “During winter we sometimes get down into the mid to low twenties, but this year there’s been no frost on the roofs, no frost on the grass. It’s scary.”
The Big Sleep
Winter chill is a vital part of the annual cycle of most fruit trees, including stone fruit (cherries, apricots, plums, and the like), pome fruit (such as apples and pears), and nuts. To bear fruit each year, the trees must undergo a period of winter dormancy, when the tree essentially goes to sleep, dropping its leaves and slowing its metabolism to conserve energy and protect itself from the cold.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Swimming with the Sharks: Goldman Sachs, School Districts, and Capital Appreciation Bonds
Swimming with the Sharks: Goldman Sachs, School Districts, and Capital Appreciation Bonds
Remember when Goldman Sachs – dubbed by Matt Taibbi the Vampire Squid – sold derivatives to Greece so the government could conceal its debt, then bet against that debt, driving it up? It seems that the ubiquitous investment bank has also put the squeeze on California and its school districts. Not that Goldman was alone in this; but the unscrupulous practices of the bank once called the undisputed king of the municipal bond business epitomize the culture of greed that has ensnared students and future generations in unrepayable debt.
In 2008, after collecting millions of dollars in fees to help California sell its bonds, Goldman urged its bigger clients to place investment bets against those bonds, in order to profit from a financial crisis that was sparked in the first place by irresponsible Wall Street speculation. Alarmed California officials warned that these short sales would jeopardize the state’s bond rating and drive up interest rates. But that result also served Goldman, which had sold credit default swaps on the bonds, since the price of the swaps rose along with the risk of default.
In 2009, the lenders’ lobbying group than proposed and promoted AB1388, a California bill eliminating the debt ceiling requirement on long-term debt for school districts. After it passed, bankers traveled all over the state pushing something called “capital appreciation bonds” (CABs) as a tool to vault over legal debt limits. (Think Greece again.) Also called payday loans for school districts, CABs have now been issued by more than 400 California districts, some with repayment obligations of up to 20 times the principal advanced (or 2000%).
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’
US ‘at risk of mega-drought future’
The American south-west and central plains could be on course for super-droughts the like of which they have not witnessed in over a 1,000 years.
Places like California are already facing very dry conditions, but these are quite gentle compared with some periods in the 12th and 13th Centuries.
Scientists have now compared these earlier droughts with climate simulations for the coming decades.
The study suggests events unprecedented in the last millennium may lie ahead.
“These mega-droughts during the 1100s and 1200s persisted for 20, 30, 40, 50 years at a time, and they were droughts that no-one in the history of the United States has ever experienced,” said Ben Cook from Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
“The droughts that people do know about like the 1930s ‘dustbowl’ or the 1950s drought or even the ongoing drought in California and the Southwest today – these are all naturally occurring droughts that are expected to last only a few years or perhaps a decade. Imagine instead the current California drought going on for another 20 years.”
Dr Cook’s new study is published in the journal Science Advances, and it has been discussed also at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Global Warming May Spawn More Southeast US Tornadoes
Global Warming May Spawn More Southeast US Tornadoes
The same loopy weather patterns directing California’s ongoing drought and last year’s deep freeze across the East Coast may also change how often tornadoes strike the southeastern United States, a new modeling study finds.
Researchers examined how global warming will affect severe weather during the heart of tornado season — March, April and May. They found that while the yearly tornado total will climb by 2080, the number of tornadoes will also vary wildly from year to year. That’s because sometimes, the weather will get stuck in a pattern that favors tornadoes, and sometimes, conditions will stymie stormy weather, according to the report, published Jan. 15 in the journal Climatic Change.
“We see this trend in a lot of extreme weather,” said lead study author Victor Gensini, a severe storms climatologist at the College of DuPage in Illinois. “Changes in the jet stream are causing the jet to break down and get stuck in these blocking patterns,” Gensini said. “It just so happens it could be in a favorable pattern for tornadoes or a really bad pattern [for tornadoes].” [The Top 5 Deadliest Tornado Years in U.S. History]
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California Regulators Allowed Oil Industry To Drill Hundreds Of Wastewater Injection Wells Into Aquifers With Drinkable Water
California Regulators Allowed Oil Industry To Drill Hundreds Of Wastewater Injection Wells Into Aquifers With Drinkable Water
The fallout from the ongoing review of California’s deeply flawed Underground Injection Control program continues as new documents reveal that state regulators are investigating more than 500 injection wells for potentially dumping oil industry wastewater into aquifers protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act as well as state law.
Last July, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered anemergency shutdown of 11 wastewater injection wells in California. In October, nine of the wells were confirmed to have been illegally dumping wastewater into protected aquifers.
Now a letter from Steve Bohlen, the State Oil and Gas Supervisor for California’s Division of Oil, Gas & Geothermal Resources (DOGGR), sent to the EPA on August 18, 2014 but just revealed via a Freedom of Information Act request, shows that the problem is much more widespread than previously disclosed to the public.
A copy of the letter was shared with DeSmogBlog by the Center for Biological Diversity. “EPA has confirmed to us and to the San Francisco Chronicle that Steve Bohlen’s list shows 532 wells believed to be injecting into protected aquifers,” according to Patrick Sullivan, a spokesperson for the CBD.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Lessons from a California drought
Lessons from a California drought
Rain finally arrived in California this past December with a series of storms dumping deluges across the state. So much rain fell that localised flooding and landslides were a concern. Whether this means that the three-year drought, which stands to be the driest “in over a millennium” is breaking, however, is far from certain.
The drought has devastated California’s agriculture and driven LA residents to rip out their lush green lawns. There has been something apocalyptic in the air as farmers drained the state’s aquifers last year, and vast reservoirs were sucked dry,sparking water wars. As 2015 begins, 99% of the state is rated ‘abnormally dry’.
It has been much debated whether climate change has been at work across California – and the western United States more generally. At a global level, 2014 is now confirmed as the warmest year on record. Noted scientist Peter Gleick argues that the rising temperatures in California along with atmospheric shifts (like the band of high pressure that sat along the Pacific coast in 2013 keeping storms at bay) are the “fingerprints” of human-induced climate change and they’ve been making the drought worse. But the western United States is also naturally arid – early explorers labelled the region the ‘Great American Desert’ on their maps.
Critical drought has been impacting agriculture around the world. BBC Radio 4’s Shared Planet programme recently reported on the impact of drought in East Africa and the plight of pastoralists in the region, while the drought in Brazil, which is hitting its three most populous regions, is being characterised as “the worst… since 1930”. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has repeatedly warned that drought will increasingly impact food security across the world, and water management must be given greater consideration. This is one area where the water issues of California and the western United States might offer a significant lesson on living in drought.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Crude Contagion: California’s Kern County Declares Fiscal Emergency Due To Plunging Oil Price
Crude Contagion: California’s Kern County Declares Fiscal Emergency Due To Plunging Oil Price
At this point only an act of god, or a sudden Saudi change of heart to cut crude production by 50% (unclear which is more probable) can prevent a recession in Texas. However, one state that few thought would be impaired as a result of the crude plunge, is California. Yet as the LA Times reports, it is precisely California, and specifically Kern County located in the middle of the state and containing the farmer town of Bakersfield and countless oil rigs, that yesterday declared a state of fiscal emergency during the weekly supervisors’ meeting on Tuesday. The reason: predictions of a massive shortfall in property tax revenues because of tanking oil prices.
Oil companies account for about 30% of the county’s property tax revenues, a percentage that has been declining in recent decades but still represents a critical cushion for county departments and school districts.
According to the LA Times, as a result of the plunge in crude prices which is primarily driven by the de-financializaition of crude futures and the collapse in Chinese demand coupled with a relentless and rising production quota by the marginal, junk-bond funded producers (and everyone else) Kern, the heart of oil production in California, is facing what could be a $61-million hole in its budget once its fiscal year starts July 1, according to preliminary calculations from the county’s assessor-recorder office.
“It affects all county departments – every department will be asked to make cuts,” said County Assessor Jon Lifquist in an interview this month. “It just doesn’t bode well.”That, and there’s also demographic issues which have little to do with the crude contagion: soaring pension costs also influenced the fiscal emergency declaration, which allows supervisors to tap county reserves. Operating costs expected at a new jail facility in fiscal 2017 and 2018 factored into the decision as well.
Looking at an operational deficit of nearly $27 million for the 2015-16 fiscal year, supervisors adopted a plan to immediately begin scaling back county spending rather than making deep reductions all at once in July.
The Service Employees International Union Local 521 urged officials in a statement to “not adopt drastic cuts that could cripple vital community services.”
The union said that although temporary wage cuts and hiring freezes “may be an obvious solution,” such tactics “are never the sole answer to economic problems.”
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Remember, no matter how bleak the facts and reality are, just keep whistling past the graveyard and just keep repeating “unambiguously good”, “unambiguously good”, “unambiguously good“…
For California Salmon, Drought And Warm Water Mean Trouble
For California Salmon, Drought And Warm Water Mean Trouble
With record drought and warming waters due to climate change, scientists are concerned that the future for Chinook salmon — a critical part of the state’s fishing industry — is in jeopardy in California.
Gushing downpours finally arrived in California last month, when December rains brought some relief to a landscape parched after three years of severe drought.
But the rain came too late for thousands of Chinook salmon that spawned this summer and fall in the northern Central Valley. The Sacramento River, running lower than usual under the scorching sun, warmed into the low 60s — a temperature range that can be lethal to fertilized Chinook eggs. Millions were destroyed, and almost an entire year-class of both fall-run Chinook, the core of the state’s salmon fishing industry, and winter-run Chinook, an endangered species whose eggs incubate in the summer, was lost.
The disaster comes on the heels of a similar event the previous autumn. It is also reminiscent of ongoing troubles on northern California’s Klamath River, where diversion of water for agriculture has at times left thousands of adult Chinook — the largest species of Pacific salmon — struggling to survive in water too shallow and warm to spawn in.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
LA Imports Nearly 85 Percent of Its Water—Can It Change That by Gathering Rain?
LA Imports Nearly 85 Percent of Its Water—Can It Change That by Gathering Rain?
Walk the glaring streets of Los Angeles’ San Fernando Valley on a sun-soaked afternoon in a drought year, the dry, brush-covered mountains rising behind you, and it can be easy to feel that you’re in arid country. “Beneath this building, beneath every street, there’s a desert,” said the fictional mayor in the Oscar-winning 1974 movie Chinatown. “Without water the dust will rise up and cover us as though we’d never existed!”
It’s an apocryphal idea. L.A. is not the Mojave but, climatically, more like Athens. Artesian springs, fed by rain in the mountains and hills, used to bubble up around Los Angeles, and farmers and Spanish missionaries grew fruit and olives in the Valley starting in the 18th and 19th centuries.
But the city has a history of treating its own raindrops and rivers as if they were more problematic than valuable. The L.A. River was prone to catastrophic floods in heavy rains, and, in the 20th century, engineers buried, straightened, and paved sections of the riverbed, flushing the water through concrete drainage channels to the Pacific Ocean. Then, to quench the thirst of its growing population, Los Angeles undertook a series of engineering feats that pumped water from the eastern Sierra Nevada Mountains, Northern California, and the Colorado River via hundreds of miles of pipes and reservoirs. Now the city typically imports more than 85 percent of its water from afar. And it’s as if the waters of Los Angeles disappeared from the consciousness of locals: Many Angelenos will tell you, mistakenly, that they live in a desert.
Now that story is changing again.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Doug Parker: The Status Of The Drought In The U.S. West | Peak Prosperity
Doug Parker: The Status Of The Drought In The U.S. West | Peak Prosperity.
2014 saw the extension of a historic drought across the US West. Croplands withered or were fully abandoned. Water rationing was enforced. Well tables dropped. The price of many vegetables and meats have skyrocketed.
But the past month has seen a welcome set of rain systems arrive along the Pacific coast. As a result, some regions like northern California are currently at 140% of rainfall vs the typical year. To drive home why this is such an important topic for everyone to follow, the table below shows how critical California’s agricultural output is to feeding the rest of America:
(Source)
So is an end to the drought in sight?
The short answer is ‘no’. And were not close to it (yet). Much will depend on the rainfall levels over the next three months, and how much of that accumulates as snow pack.
Protesters chain themselves to Oakland police station doors | Reuters
Protesters chain themselves to Oakland police station doors | Reuters.
(Reuters) – Protesters chained themselves to the doors of the police headquarters in Oakland, California, on Monday, prompting several arrests, and one demonstrator scaled a flagpole to hang a “Black Lives Matter” banner in front of the building.
Oakland and neighboring Berkeley have been the site of demonstrations for more than a week over decisions by grand juries not to charge white police officers in the killings of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri and New York City.
Scores of people have been arrested as police in riot gear face off with protesters, some of whom have thrown rocks at the officers and looted businesses.
Most of the confrontations have happened after dark, but on Monday morning more than two dozen demonstrators used PVC tubes, ropes and locks to chain their arms together and block entrances to the Oakland Police Department.
BBC News – Storm pounds northern California
BBC News – Storm pounds northern California.
More than 220,000 people are without power after heavy rains and high winds slammed northern California.
The storm brought rainfall of more than an inch an hour in San Francisco and winds gusts of 140mph (225km/h) in the Sierra Nevada mountains.
Flooding has already closed two major motorways in the area, delayed public transport, cancelled 240 flights and shut ferry services.
The rain is much needed in the drought-hit state but mudslides are a concern.
Power cuts were widespread, from the suburban area south of San Francisco to Humboldt, near the Oregon border.
“It’s a two-pronged punch – it’s wind and rain,” National Weather Service forecaster Diana Henderson said. “Once the ground gets saturated and the winds are howling, there’s a bigger chance of trees going down on power lines.”
There were multiple vehicle accidents but no series injuries.
Rain and floods also led to rare weather-related school closures for students in San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, and Santa Cruz County.
Some 240 flights at San Francisco’s airport were cancelled and delays averaged two hours, said a spokesman.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
A Coming California Earthquake? | Armstrong Economics
A Coming California Earthquake? | Armstrong Economics.
California’s Drought Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years. The flooding that is taking place warns of something else. The major earthquakes correlate to these periods of extreme drought and then extreme rainfall. That may place added street on the fault lines. We warned last April that there is a rising trend in magnitude. Our models correlate everything and as such this correlation between earthquakes, drought, and excessive rain fall is something that warrants much more study. As the Economic Confidence Model turns down, we should be aware that it appears the ECM includes nature. 
The 1906 San Francisco Earthquake disrupted the capital flows and send capital rushing from East to West. This resulted in bank weakness in NYC and eventually failures in 1907. That set in motion an investigation and the the birth of the Federal Reserve with 12 independent branches to manage the capital flows.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years – Bloomberg
California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years – Bloomberg.
Record rains fell in California this week. They’re not enough to change the course of what scientists are now calling the region’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years.
Just how bad has California’s drought been? Modern measurements already showed it’s been drier than the 1930s dustbowl, worse than the historic droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s not all. New research going back further than the Viking conquests in Europe still can’t find a drought as bad as this one.
To go back that far, scientists consulted one of the longest records available: tree rings. Tighter rings mean drier years, and by working with California’s exceptionally old trees, researchers from University of Minnesota and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute were able to reconstruct a chronology of drought in southern and central California. They identified 37 droughts that lasted three years or more, going back to the year 800.
None were as extreme as the conditions we’re seeing now.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
