River Diaries, Part 3: Encounters with Civilization

June 5, 2009 Craig Miller

Here are some more journal entries from participants in the Paddle to the Sea project, to raise awareness of river and water supply issues. Two paddlers have pledged to go all the way, from the Sierra to San Francisco Bay. At this point, they’ve descended from the high country and are preparing to traverse California’s Great Valley.

On the tamed lower Tuolumne. Photo: Jesse Raeder

Emilio Martinez: Don Pedro Reservoir & Turlock Lake

After the whitewater thrills of the upper Tuolumne, Don Pedro Reservoir was exciting in the same way that a putting green is exciting: smooth and well-groomed, and so accommodating to the well-mannered sportsman. With the whine of the fishing engine accompanying a distinct lack of visual variety in the blond hills, we boated for two hours towards the Dam, then hiked Bonds Flat Road, then J59 for 2 more hours in the near hundred degree heat, examining road kill for diversion. Besides the houseboats and odd floating trash, there was not a whole lot to feed the river-bound soul.

So it was with a complete sense that all the excitement that the River Tuolumne had to offer had been expended during the upper portion that I stepped awkwardly into my canoe on the 27th of May. I had already complacently decided that the River was something of a “has been” and would be nothing now but a gentle, rolling presence.

What a complete and arrogant assumption of what the River is, without any knowledge of the true meaning of that word as Nature herself uses it.

The River, in short, thrashed both my thesis–and companion Tim and I like the inconsequential beings that we are before the River’s sublime power and majesty: it slapped us upside the head with willow branches drenched in chilling waters, banged our thighs and knees with the fiberglass canoe we haughtily thought we’d master it with: instead, it made us respect it and fear it: precisely because we are mere visitors to its emerald green kingdom, our canoes so much jetsam and flotsam in its consciousness: in short, the Tuolumne did everything it needed to do to show us how we must not underestimate Nature, but rather, protect one’s reverence and humility before it so that one can live and be nurtured by it.

Long live the River!

Owen Segerstrom: Don Pedro Reservoir

Today’s crossing of Don Pedro was an instructive microcosm of the damage that dams cause. While the former Tuolumne River Canyon rests under hundreds of feet of water, the remaining habitat is a virtual biological desert. Turkey vultures, mallards, and hatchery-raised fish are a far cry from the wildlife of an intact river system. What was once a salmon-bearing, thriving ecosystem sequestering untold millions of metric tons of carbon is now a layer of anaerobic matter at the bottom of the reservoir, the decomposition of which releases methane (a greenhouse gas that is orders of magnitude more potent that carbon dioxide) into the atmosphere. [Editor’s note: The figure most quoted by scientists is that methane is about 20 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas. In California, however, livestock and leakage from oil & gas operations are much bigger emitters of methane than natural decomposition from lakebeds].

Upon arrival at the dam, Emilio, Mason (a friend of mine from Kentucky who accompanied us) and I were presented with an interesting conundrum. Despite indications to the contrary from National Geographic’s mapping database, there is no trail from the dam to the Old La Grange bridge. After consulting a local ranger, we determined that the only way to walk this leg of our journey was on the side of Bonds Flat road and eventually J59 (approximately 7 miles). The partially decomposed remains of a fox, whose life was ostensibly claimed by a motorist on the highway, were yet another sobering reminder of the human-caused chasm between a Mt. Lyell-to-the-Pacific river system and the Tuolumne’s current state. We maintained morale by nicknaming this stretch of our sojourn the “great asphalt eddy of the T,” but the experience was nonetheless jarring.

After the experience at Don Pedro, the first section of the Lower Tuolumne was quite literally a breath of fresh air. Heritage oaks, the call of an osprey from its nest along the river bank, and the water’s peaceful meander were a feast for the senses. The integration of community advocacy groups throughout the valley is a hopeful sign for the future of freshwater consciousness, and the results of their efforts are evident.

Though anadromous fish passage beyond the Old La Grange Dam is still impossible, the efforts to address disastrous impacts on salmon populations (an unparalleled gauge of the health of a river ecosystem) between this impasse and the ocean are inspiring. Salmon have been described as the conscience of a watershed, as they represent the lone upstream vector for ocean nutrients that have historically fertilized inland ecosystems. The conscientious cooperation of central valley communities along the Tuolumne represents the utterly necessary prevention of local extinction of Chinook salmon.

[Editor’s Note: Here’s the latest biological opinion on California’s Chinook salmon and how it stands to affect water supplies.]

Turlock Lake to Waterford Park

Today’s paddle began with a conversation about the history of California river advocacy. As our group went through individual introductions, many of the participants recalled the (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to prevent the damming of the Stanislaus River in the late 1970’s, including Mark DuBois chaining himself to a riverside boulder in protest. While the beauty and avian abundance of yesterday’s journey punctuated the beginning of our day, reminders of the need to rekindle Mark’s passion quickly confronted us. The soundscape for our lunch break was provided by an industrial gravel pit, the footprint of which has massively diverted the river channel. As one volunteer pointed out, the beautiful hyacinth blooming in the pond adjacent to the pit were nonetheless a dubious indicator of the river’s ecological health. The day culminated in a rousing gathering of Waterford’s riverfront restoration community at the local park, A group of children enjoying a game based on answering questions about salmon presented hope that somewhere there is a young person who will carry Mark’s torch in defense of the Tuolumne’s continuity.

Our posts are running a bit behind the paddlers’ progress. In real time, they are set to cross San Francisco Bay today and conclude their journey tomorrow, with a celebration at Aquatic Park in San Francisco.

Uncategorized

Global Call for Climate Change Stories

June 5, 2009 Gretchen Weber

Want a trip to Copenhagen to cover this year’s UN climate talks, but not sure how to pay for it?

Internews, an international media development organization, today launched The Earth Journalism Awards, a competition for the world’s best climate change reporting. Applicants can register and submit stories on the EJA website until September 7, 2009, when 14 winners will be selected to be flown to Copenhagen in December to cover the UN talks for their home countries and local media outlets.

“The media has a hugely important role to play in helping to raise awareness about climate change, and environmental issues,” said James Fahn, the director of Internews’ Earth Journalism Network.

Winners will be selected for seven regions: Eurasia, South Asia, East Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and Australia. EJA will make awards for reporting in categories such as Human Voices, Energy, Forests, Nature and Climate Change. Then the non-profit will invite the public to vote online for the best story out of 14 finalists, which will be awarded the Global Public Award.

The competition is open to both professional “citizen” journalists from all over the world, and Fahn says there’s a special emphasis on engaging reporters from developing nations.

“The people and communities most vulnerable to climate change often have the least information about it. It’s the marginalized, poor communities that have the most exposure to the impacts of climate change. They can generally see that climate change is happening but they don’t always know why, or what’s in store for the future. It’s important for us to fill this information gap,” said Fahn.

Fahn says more than 300 journalists from eleven countries have already entered. EJA will fly the winners to Denmark for the next major round of UN climate talks in December.

Climate Watch will feature EJA selected entries on this website.

Government & Business

BK Franchise Serves Up Some “Baloney”

June 3, 2009 Craig Miller 1 Comment

I know: This didn’t happen in California, so why mention it? Well, sometimes stories come in that just seem to crystallize the persistent (some polling would suggest growing) public division over climate change and this is a good example.

When signs on Burger King outlets started opining that “Global warming is baloney,” a Memphis reporter decided to check it out. His exchanges with the local burgermeister and the parent company make for pretty amusing reading.

Interesting that while polls taken within the last year have indicated flagging faith in the prevailing view of climate scientists that the world is warming, a spring poll by the Pew Research Center showed 59% of Americans supporting some kind of cap on carbon emissions. Though still sharply divided along party lines, that could indicate that some kind of reluctant consensus is forming around the issue.

Water

More Adventures “Paddling to the Sea”

June 2, 2009 Craig Miller 1 Comment

Here are some more journal entries from participants in the Paddle to the Sea project, to raise awareness of river and water supply issues. For most, it’s a relay event and they’re taking a leg or two of the voyage from the upper Tuolumne to the San Francisco Bay. But two paddlers have pledged to go all the way. Here are some of their observations.

Facing the froth--and mortality--on the Tuolumne. Photo by Jayne Johnson.

Emilio Martinez: whitewater section, Tuolumne River

Once the green terror subsided and I knew I might not drown, rafting the “T” (river rat lingo) was an absolute blast! Our blue rafts, manned by a crew of four apiece, plus an experienced guide at the helm, put in about ten miles upstream from where the Clavey River and the Tuolumne River meet in a thunderous embrace. And I am not ashamed to tell you that seeing the river run at 7000+ cubic feet per second was exhilarating to the point of terror. Whether due to climate change or pure luck, the Tuolumne was in fine form that weekend: racing down its bed like some aquatic serpentine creature from another dimension, wildly snaking its way through ancient bedrock as it bucked and thrashed, arching into the wind, pummeling its way through narrow confines of rock and tree as only a force of nature unleashed can.

For two days, thirty of us clung to the River, loving it and fearing it, crawling out of our rafts each day, tired and hungry, but somehow spiritually cleansed by the only worldly thing I’ve ever known that I can call sacred.

Unlike my rafting cohorts–who likely must travel some distance to the “T” to pay it homage–as denizens of Modesto’s “Airport District,” we are blessed with the Tuolumne as a constant benevolent feature of our neighborhood (emphasis on hood), which squats on the River’s banks, roughly one square mile of humanity and squalor broiling in the San Joaquin Valley, and whose inhabitants are more known for our deficits than our merits, for our God-fearing ways rather than earth-loving hearts.

My first encounters with the “Tuolumne” were a mix of horror (fear of drowning), awe (Pentecostal baptisms), joy (childhood treasure hunts at the Modesto landfill – now filled up and landscaped into something called the Tuolumne River Regional Park), and food (Mexican fiestas, where beer, barbeque, and corridos mixed nicely).

And, as befits my low-income neighborhood: I am still largely ignorant of the ecology of this gorgeous river.

So, speaking for myself, my trip down the Tuolumne River is something like an awakening to nature in the Garden of Eden, for there is precious little vocabulary in the noisy, backward streets of the Airport District for the marvels of nature that abound on the banks, canyons, and hillside forests that flank the River: though we children of the Airport grow up touching the River almost daily, we are taught almost nothing about its nature or how to address it.

Shame.

Still, I figure (hope) that my vocabulary for its flora and fauna and geology will grow as I flow downstream towards the San Francisco Bay; that I’ll be able to distinguish an oak from alder some day, egret from swallow, poison ivy from blackberry vine, and that my eyes will see “salmon” and not just vague swimming things.

I exaggerate, but not by too much.

Emilio Martinez grew up in the Central Valley and currently lives in Modesto. The rivers are uncharted territory for him and have inspired his poetic side.

Segerstrom and Martinez on the river. Photo by Jayne Johnson.

Owen Segerstrom: whitewater section, Tuolumne River:

It is a privilege to be on the “T” (Tuolumne River) during a peak snow melt flow like the one we experienced over the weekend. My cousin Tom, son of Sierra Mac founder and TRT (Tuolumne River Trust) board member Marty McDonnell, said it was the second highest flow he had ever seen (out of an estimated thirty-five trips).

Our guide, an east coaster working his first season for Sierra Mac, opined that the T would be the national gold standard in whitewater if such flows were a regular occurrence. We took a nasty swim on a 4+ rapid called “Frame Crusher,” a humbling reminder of the river’s power. The excitement of the water conditions was rivaled only by the magnificence of the river canyon itself. As if to remind us not to stay away for too long, a bald eagle swooped above us on an up-canyon trajectory less than a mile before the take-out.

Owen Segerstrom grew up in Sonora, near the upper reaches of the Tuolumne River, and spent his childhood and teenage years exploring the Tuolumne and Clavey swimming holes. He’s also done quite a bit of rafting on the Tuolumne.

Water

Navigating the Urban Water Jungle

May 29, 2009 Gretchen Weber 15 Comments

Follow Gretchen’s radio journey to cut her own water use by 20%. Her story aired May 29 on The California Report weekly magazine.

Saving water when you live in an apartment isn’t as hard as it might seem.

I know the motivation might not be there to take shorter showers when you see your neighbors watering their lawns in the middle of the day or local restaurants hosing down the sidewalks, but cutting back on your water use (or at least feeling less guilty about those long showers) can be as simple as swapping out your old shower head for a lower-flow model, screwing some aerators onto your faucets, and, for the sufficiently motivated, talking to your landlord about installing higher-efficiency toilets.

For me, the first and last stop was calling my utility company, San Francisco Public Utilities. They sent out a water expert armed with free devices for my flat, and in less than an hour we’d outfitted the kitchen and bathroom to be much more water efficient. Save our H2O, a website sponsored by the California Department of Water Resources, has tons of conservation resources including a rebate finder and a list of the state’s local water agencies.

But since I know not every utility offers free devices to customers, last night I dropped by The Home Depot in Daly City, to see what’s available. I have been inside one of these orange megabox retailers exactly three times in my life and it’s always a bit of sensory overload. There must have been close to 100 shower heads to choose from, but it wasn’t easy finding one with a low-flow (1.5 gallons per minute) rating. No matter the price or the size, every model I picked up was either 2.5 gpm, or I couldn’t find the flow rate on the packaging.

Gretchen Weber

Faucet aerators at The Home Depot

I finally asked a salesman who at first couldn’t find one either. But eventually, he found one tucked in among the others: the Delta Water Amplifying Shower Head, for $12.75. It’s actually 1.6 gpm, and it looked kind of small and cheap, although it may work fine. I felt a little disappointed that this was my only option.

Hoping for better luck, I wandered over to the aerator section one aisle over. There I found aerator aficionado heaven. Once again, the selection was a little overwhelming. There were probably 40 aerators to choose from–aerators, no less. Low-flow, 1.5-gpm models like the kind the SFPU gave me ranged in price from $2.99 to $17.39 for the upscale brushed-nickel variety.

Across from the aerators were the toilets. I scanned the high shelf and saw several low-flow models (1.6 and 1.28 gallons per flush) that were priced between $90 and $128. Taped to the toilet shelf was a sign reading that San Francisco residents may be eligible for a $125 rebate on a low-flow model, which could basically mean a free toilet. Other cities and counties in California have similar rebates.

As I turned to leave the toilet/aerator aisle, I bumped into a large box sitting on the floor. There, far from all the others, was the shower head I’d been looking for: a 1.5 gallon-per-minute WaterPik EcoFlow with five different pressures, including something called “Powerspray.” Touting a 40% water savings, these puppies were on sale for $44.95.

Rick Soerhen, the Deputy Director of Water Use Efficiency for the California Department of Water Resources told me that people living in apartments most likely already get “gold stars” for water conservation because they probably aren’t watering lawns and gardens.

So, flat-dwellers, be proud. But if you really want to be as water efficient as possible, devices like these can make a big difference on your total usage — without requiring three-minute showers.

Government & Business, Power

No Crystal Ball for Fusion Power

May 28, 2009 Craig Miller 1 Comment

Now here’s a guy with some historical perspective: For something north of a half-century, David Perlman has been covering science for the San Francisco Chronicle. On KQED’s Forum program this morning, he noted that “40 years ago, they said ‘in 20 years, we’ll have unlimited energy from fusion’.”

The record will show that we didn’t quite get there–but that hasn’t stopped them from trying. The long quest for bottled fusion will pass another milestone this week, when the US Dept. of Energy formally cuts the ribbon on the National Ignition Facility (NIF) at Lawrence Livermore National Lab.

Comparing the hardware with other titanic undertakings, like the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland, Perlman called the 192-laser assembly “one of the most amazing machines–if it succeeds–and one probably won’t know for the next two, three years.”

That’s the hopeful time frame for creating fusion in a fuel pellet the size of a BB (artistically rendered in the image, above) Will they? Perlman says: “I would not dream of putting a bet on it.”

Nor would sparking some mini-fusion at NIF quickly translate to a national solution for clean, safe energy. Scaling that ignition up to practical size for reactors would likely require decades more.

A NIF technician appears to be gazing into a "crystal ball," which is actually used to amplify laser beams--but not much good for predicting the future. Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Lab — A NIF technician appears to be gazing into a "crystal ball." Precision-ground crystals are used to amplify laser beams--but not much good for seeing into the future. Photo: Lawrence Livermore National Lab

Earlier this week, in an interview with NASA scientist James Hansen, I asked him about the potential for nuclear power to make a comeback with new technology. Rather than waiting for fusion, Hansen favors the technology known as “fourth-generation nuclear,” which he says could “burn nearly all of the fuel, where at present, the nuclear technology that we’re using burns only one percent of the energy in the uranium.” From one percent to “nearly all” would represent a drastic reduction in the current radioactive waste problem.

There may be some wishful thinking in that. An early report published in the magazine 21st Century Science & Technology describes these “Generation IV” reactors as “about 50% more efficient than conventional nuclear reactors.”

Other nations have moved ahead with Gen-IV reactors. The French expect to have one under construction by 2020.

Meanwhile, as the US pursues a parallel Gen-IV research program, it will press on toward the Holy Grail of fusion with its Livermore megalaser, described by Perlman as “already a mini-Manhattan Project.” Costs so far have run to nearly triple the original budget of more than a billion dollars. DOE expects to spend $140 million per year to run the NIF. So, it would be–you know–nice if something comes of it.

Uncategorized

Carbon Offsets in the Air

May 22, 2009 Craig Miller 2 Comments

Friday on The California Report’s weekly magazine, Rori Gallagher reports on ways to assuage your carbon guilt with a quick stop at an airport kiosk.

By Rori Gallagher

I first got the idea to do a story on carbon offsets back in December, when San Francisco International Airport announced it was partnering with a private company called 3Degrees to install carbon offset kiosks.

Originally, the kiosks were supposed to be installed sometime “in the spring.” But there seems to be a delay with the contract negotiations. I kept checking in with 3Degrees about a launch date. At first they were saying Earth Day–then it was pushed to May, and now “by the end of June.”

But there are already other options out there. I found that Virgin America, the only major airline based in California, was the first to offer carbon offsets in the sky. Other airlines do offer customers the chance to purchase offsets but Virgin allows you to do it during the flight through the in-flight entertainment system.

Carbon offsets are supposed to stop carbon emissions that would have otherwise taken place. That’s really difficult to substantiate. Projects like wind farms for example, certainly seem good for the environment but likely most of them would be built anyway and produce power without this type of third-party incentive.

Virgin’s program managers say they stringently vetted carbon offset programs, and that theirs are among the most credible out there. But as I point out in my radio story, there is very little regulation of the voluntary carbon offset industry and it’s difficult to know if they’ll do what they say they will.

There are some independent efforts to separate the sheep from the goats, for example the Natural Resources Defense Council has produced a buyer’s guide for carbon offsets.

Trucks line up at an IdleAire terminal, which provides "carbon offsets" for airlines. Photo: Rori Gallagher

Uncategorized

Heat Relief for Coral Reefs?

May 20, 2009 Craig Miller

This post is condensed from a Stanford News Service release. Cassandra Brooks is a science-writing intern at the Woods Institute for the Environment at Stanford.

Stanford scientists find heat-tolerant coral reefs that may resist climate change

By Cassandra Brooks

Some experts say that more than half of the world’s coral reefs could disappear in the next 50 years, in large part because of higher ocean temperatures caused by climate change. But now Stanford University scientists have found evidence that some coral reefs are adapting and may actually survive global warming.

“Corals are certainly threatened by environmental change, but this research has really sparked the notion that corals may be tougher than we thought,” said Stephen Palumbi, a professor of biology and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment.

Palumbi and his team began studying the resiliency of coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean in 2006. “The most exciting thing was discovering live, healthy corals on reefs already as hot as the ocean is likely to get 100 years from now,” said Palumbi, director of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. “How do they do that?”

Coral reefs form the basis for thriving, healthy ecosystems throughout the tropics. They provide homes and nourishment for thousands of species, including schools of fish that feed millions of people across the globe.

Corals rely on partnerships with tiny, single-celled algae called zooxanthellae. The corals provide the algae a home, and, in turn, the algae provide nourishment, forming a symbiotic relationship. But when rising temperatures stress the algae, they stop producing food, and the corals spit them out. Without their algae symbionts, the reefs die and turn stark white, an event referred to as “coral bleaching.”

During particularly warm years, bleaching has accounted for the deaths of large numbers of corals. In the Caribbean in 2005, a heat surge caused more than 50 percent of corals to bleach, and many still have not recovered, according to the Global Coral Reef Monitoring Network, an international collaboration of government officials, policymakers and marine scientists, including Palumbi.

Havens of healthy reefs

In recent years, scientists discovered that some corals resist bleaching by hosting types of algae that can handle the heat, while others swap out the heat-stressed algae for tougher, heat-resistant strains. Palumbi’s team set out to investigate how widely dispersed these heat-tolerant coral reefs are across the globe and to learn more about the biological processes that allow them to adapt to higher temperatures.

In 2006, Palumbi and graduate student Tom Oliver, now a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford, traveled to Ofu Island in American Samoa. Ofu, a tropical coral reef marine reserve, has remained healthy despite gradually warming waters.

The island offered the perfect laboratory setting, Oliver said, with numerous corals hosting the most common heat-sensitive and heat-resistant algae symbionts. Ofu also has pools of varying temperatures that allowed the research team to test under what conditions the symbionts formed associations with corals.

In cooler lagoons, Oliver found only a handful of corals that host heat-resistant algae exclusively. But in hotter pools, he observed a direct increase in the proportion of heat-resistant symbionts, suggesting that some corals had swapped out the heat-sensitive algae for more robust types. These results, combined with regional data from other sites in the tropical Pacific, were published in the journal Marine Ecology Progress Series in March 2009.

Global pattern

To see if this pattern exists on a global scale, the researchers turned to Kevin Arrigo, an associate professor of environmental Earth system science at Stanford and an expert on remote satellite sensing of marine microalgae. Arrigo gathered worldwide oceanographic data on a variety of environmental variables, including ocean acidity, the frequency of weather events and sea-surface temperature.

Oliver then compiled dozens of coral reef studies from across the tropics and compared them to Arrigo’s environmental data. The results revealed the same pattern: In regions where annual maximum ocean temperatures were above 84 to 88 degrees Fahrenheit (29 to 31 degrees Celsius), corals were avoiding bleaching by hosting higher proportions of the heat-resistant symbionts.

Most corals bleach when temperatures rise 1.8 F (1 C) above the long-term normal highs. But heat-tolerant symbionts might allow a reef to handle temperatures up to 2.6 F (1.5 C) beyond the bleaching threshold. That might be enough to help get them through the end of the century, Oliver said, depending on the severity of global warming.

A 2007 report by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change concluded that the average surface temperature of the Earth is likely to increase 3.6 to 8.1 F (2 to 4.5 C) by 2100. In this scenario, the symbiont switch alone may not be enough to help corals survive through the end of the century. But with the help of other adaptive mechanisms, including natural selection for heat-tolerant corals, there is still hope, Oliver said.

Heat-resistant corals also turn out to be more tolerant of increases in ocean acidity, which occurs when the ocean absorbs excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere–another potential threat to coral reefs. This finding suggests that corals worldwide are adapting to increases in acidity as well as heat, Oliver said, and that across the tropics, corals with the ability to switch symbionts will do so to survive.

“Although we are doing things to the planet we have never done before, it’s hard to imagine that these corals, which have existed for a quarter of a billion years, only have 50 years left,” Palumbi said. “And part of our job might be to figure out where the tougher ones live and protect those places.”

For more on this story:

MICRODOCS: BRINGING THE LAB TO THE REEF

MICRODOCS: EXPERIMENTING WITH GLOBAL WARMING

Government & Business, Power

New Tailpipe Regs are an “Alternate Reality”

May 19, 2009 Amy Standen 4 Comments

Amy Standen specializes in science and environmental reporting for Quest. She’s among the guests today on KQED’s Forum program. Listen to the archived program here.

Yesterday afternoon, as I started working on my news spot about the new federal standard for tailpipe emissions, I dug up my notes from over a year ago, the last time I covered this story in any depth.

The contrast in tone between then and now amazed me. Back then, I was describing accusations of outright lying, government actions that California enviros called “completely illegal,” and California officials “sharpening their knives” as they marched into battle with EPA former Administrator Stephen Johnson. It was September, 2007, and Democratic lawmakers, led by Henry Waxman (D-CA), were accusing the White House of strong-arming the EPA into denying California its “waiver,” or permission to regulate auto tailpipe emissions. The mood between California environmentalists, many of the state’s elected officials, and the Bush administration couldn’t have been more hostile.

Today, it’s as if we’ve landed in an alternate reality. Not only has California been given its more fuel-efficient cars, but those same laws are taking effect nationwide. The new rules actually exceed anything that California–traditionally the most ambitious state in the union, when it comes to greenhouse gas regulation–could have asked for.

Instead of knives being sharpened, California enviros are singing the praises of “an historic blueprint to carry out rigorous greenhouse gas emission standards,” to quote one email I received today. Another group told the New York Times: “This is the single biggest step the American government has ever taken to cut greenhouse gas emissions.” Compared to the fall of ’07–actually make that since ’05, when California first asked for the waiver and the EPA first started stalling–it’s like night and day.

Still, listening in to the White House background press briefing on Monday afternoon, you could hear the seeds of criticism taking root in a few reporters’ questions.

Sure, American automakers will be making more fuel-efficient cars, one reporter asked, but what is the White House doing to encourage consumers to buy them? (in addition to restricting tailpipe emissions, the new rules also substantially increase fuel efficiency standards for manufacturers’ fleets–SUVs and trucks will still be available; they’ll be more fuel efficient than before, but less efficient than smaller cars.) The question takes on new relevance as the federal government finds itself a major stockholder in auto companies.

President Obama says the new regs will have the equivalent impact of taking 177 million cars off the road.

Water

Paddling to the Sea

May 18, 2009 Craig Miller 3 Comments

Jessie Raeder is Bay Area Organizer for the Tuolumne River Trust. More than 200 paddlers are expected to take to the river between now and June 7, for this river awareness relay. Raeder offers this dispatch from the starting line, near the headwaters in Yosemite National Park.

By Jessie Raeder

Paddle to the Sea got off to a roaring start over the weekend. Melting snow caused by an early heat wave in the Sierras had the river pumping at much higher flows than rafters typically face. The Tuolumne is usually rated Class 4–but goes to Class 5 when flows get over 4000 cubic feet per second. This weekend saw the river flowing at 7000 cfs! For a while it looked like we might have to cancel all the whitewater trips due to safety concerns, but in the end one trip did go on and needless to say it was an epic journey for our Paddle-to-the-Sea team.

A paddler takes on the Clavey. Photo: Patrick Koepele, Tuolumne River Trust

Meanwhile, an international team of 12 hotshot kayakers ran the Clavey River, a tributary of the Tuolumne and one of only three remaining free-flowing rivers in the Sierra. The Clavey is a class 5+ river that’s rarely run and only by experts.

Paddle to the Sea is a three-week festival to foster stewardship of the Tuolumne River. Hundreds are joining in this epic journey from the Sierra to the Sea. Kayakers and rafters will begin on the upper stretches of the Clavey and Tuolumne Rivers, travel through the Central Valley where canoers take the lead, pass through the confluence of the Tuolumne and San Joaquin Rivers, and sea kayakers will finish the trip in San Francisco Bay.

A changing and increasingly unpredictable water supply will be the first way that most people in California experience climate change affecting their own lives. Here in the Bay Area, tap water for 2.5 million people comes from the Tuolumne River, whose headwaters start with melting snow from the Lyell Glacier (picture attached). That glacier is on the retreat, and more frequent droughts are expected throughout the Sierra.

Paddle to the Sea is meant to demonstrate that issues that affect one section of the river ripple up and down the watershed. Bay Area water users share this resource with farmers in Modesto, anglers in Yosemite, the commercial salmon industry on the Pacific, and a host of native fish, plant, and wildlife species, many of which are endangered.

As population and demand for water continues to grow, California will be faced with many questions about how we use water, and where it will come from. The Tuolumne River Trust is working to ensure that we turn to water efficiency and water recycling as much as possible–alternatives which are far more sustainable and renewable than continuing to take additional water from the Tuolumne River, which has been the solution most turned to in the past.