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California is known for its massive water infrastructure in which
northern reservoirs, which fill up from the Sierra Nevada snowpack,
supply the populous southern and coastal regions of the state. However
going into a third year of dry winter conditions, many of these northern
man-made oases are at precariously low levels, hovering between
one-third and one-half capacity, far less than the average for October.
More than 20 million Californians and many farmers in the state’s
crop-intensive Central Valley depend on northern reservoirs for their
water.
“Both the State Water Project and federal Central Valley Project
heavily depend on the Sierra Nevada snowpack,” Mark Cowin, director of
the state Department of Water Resources, told The Fresno Bee. “We are now facing real trouble if 2014 is dry.”
Cowin said that dwindling reservoirs should be a wake-up call to
Californians, and indicate that it’s time to prepare for additional
water-conservation measures.
Pete Lucero of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, owner of the Central Valley Project, told the Fresno Bee that January through May 2013 were California’s driest in about 90 years of recordkeeping.
Currently the San Luis Reservoir, which gets water from the
Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, is only 22 percent of its historical
average for this time of year.
At a recent workshop that brought together leaders to hear about California’s water challenges, Cowin said that
decades of disagreement among environmentalists, farmers, water
agencies, and other interests in various parts of California has
“resulted in gridlock.” And that with “environmental laws, climate
change, and population growth intensifying the conflict, there’s simply
no time to waste.”
Merrily Mazza, right, asks Lafayette, Colorado
voter Kat Goldberg to support a ballot question that would ban drilling
for oil and gas in the community.
CREDIT: Tom Kenworthy
LAFAYETTE, COLORADO — On a recent Saturday, buoyed by picture-perfect
autumn weather, Merrily Mazza was knocking on doors in her adopted
community on Colorado’s booming Front Range north of Denver. The Chicago
transplant and retired McGraw-Hill executive is running for city
council in next week’s city election and she’s looking for votes.
But her own campaign was not her first priority that day. Her primary
assignment was chasing down potential supporters of a ballot measure
that would establish a “Community Bill of Rights” in Lafayette — and ban oil and gas drilling within city limits.
Mazza and volunteers like her in Lafayette and three other Colorado
cities that will next week determine the fate of ballot initiatives to
block oil and gas drilling are at the forefront of what is fast becoming
an epic battle. At issue is whether communities have the authority to
regulate drilling and fracking within their borders or whether that
power rests solely with the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation
Commission. At
one of Mazza’s first stops, on South Carr Avenue, Kat Goldberg answered
the doorbell. Hearing Mazza’s pitch against the oil and gas extraction
technique known as fracking, Goldberg said: “I’m not keen on it. I have
three kids and I’d like the environment to be sustainable for my kids
and their kids. I don’t think fracking is a good thing to be doing.”
The recent unprecedented flooding in Colorado, which resulted in oil and gas spills
totaling more than 40,000 gallons, has intensified concerns among
residents and activists about the impact of oil and gas drilling and the
state’s ability to safely regulate it.
Less than a year after the Colorado oil and gas industry’s trade association sued
the city of Longmont over a similar ban on fracking, and only a few
months after the state government run by Gov. John Hickenlooper joined
the association in suing
that city, activists in four communities in Colorado are nonetheless
pressing ahead with ballot initiatives that would ban or impose
moratoria on drilling and fracking.
The looming November showdown in those communities reflects mounting concern
over a boom in oil and gas development closing in on suburbs and cities
along Colorado’s Front Range, the heavily populated region that abuts
the foothills of the Rockies stretching from Colorado Springs to Fort
Collins. In Weld County, to the east of the four communities that will
vote on anti-fracking ballot measures, there are now more than 20,000
oil and gas wells, about 40 percent of the state total.
In Britain one child in four lives in poverty, the report says. Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Women and children
in the UK would have longer and healthier lives if they lived in
Cyprus, Italy or Spain, and Britain is facing "a public health
timebomb", according to a study by an expert on inequality and health.
Sir
Michael Marmot, who is known worldwide for his work on the social
determinants of health, says much of the rest of Europe takes better
care of its families. Life expectancy for women and death rates among
the under-fives are worse in the UK, where there is also more child poverty.
The
public health time bomb Marmot describes is caused by the large number
of so-called Neets – young adults who are not in education, employment
or training.
Women in the UK can expect to live to 83, but those
born in a number of other European countries will live to a riper old
age: in Germany and Cyprus, their life expectancy is 84, while in Italy,
France and Spain it is 85.
And while child mortality rates in
global terms are low in the UK, at 5.4 deaths per 1,000 among the
under-fives, many countries do better. Some of those are in eastern
Europe, such as the Czech Republic, with 3.4 deaths per 1,000 births,
and Slovenia with three. Most countries in western Europe do better than
the UK. Greece has four deaths per 1,000 births and Luxembourg has
three. Iceland has the lowest child mortality, at 2.2 deaths per 1,000
live births, and Finland is next best, with 2.9.
‘Neets’
– or young people not in employment, education or training – were
likely to have worse health than their employed counterparts and the
Government needed to act to ensure health inequality does not become
entrenched, the authors of a report by the organization claimed.
The
review also found that children and women would be better off living in
many other European countries, including Eastern European states, than
in the UK.
“Unemployment may be falling in the UK, but
persistent high levels of the number of young people over 18 not in
employment, education or training is storing up a public health time
bomb waiting to explode,” said Professor Sir Michael Marmont, who
chaired the study.
"We are failing too many of our children, women and young people on a grand scale.
WASHINGTON — The electric grid, as government and private experts
describe it, is the glass jaw of American industry. If an adversary
lands a knockout blow, they fear, it could black out vast areas of the
continent for weeks; interrupt supplies of water, gasoline, diesel fuel
and fresh food; shut down communications; and create disruptions of a
scale that was only hinted at by Hurricane Sandy and the attacks of
Sept. 11.
This is why thousands of utility workers, business executives, National
Guard officers, F.B.I. antiterrorism experts and officials from
government agencies in the United States, Canada and Mexico are
preparing for an emergency drill in November that will simulate physical
attacks and cyberattacks that could take down large sections of the
power grid.
They will practice for a crisis unlike anything the real grid has ever
seen, and more than 150 companies and organizations have signed up to
participate.
“This is different from a hurricane that hits X, Y and Z counties in the
Southeast and they have a loss of power for three or four days,” said
the official in charge of the drill, Brian M. Harrell of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation, known as NERC. “We really want to go beyond that.”
One goal of the drill, called GridEx II, is to explore how governments would react as the loss of the grid crippled the supply chain for everyday necessities.
“If we fail at electricity, we’re going to fail miserably,” Curt Hébert,
a former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said at a
recent conference held by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Mr. Harrell said that previous exercises were based on the expectation
that electricity “would be up and running relatively quick” after an
attack.
Now, he said, the goal is to “educate the federal government on what
their expectations should or shouldn’t be.” The industry held a smaller
exercise two years ago in which 75 utilities, companies and agencies
participated, but this one will be vastly expanded and will be carried
out in a more anxious mood.
Most of the participants will join the exercise from their workplaces,
with NERC, in Washington, announcing successive failures. One example,
organizers say, is a substation break-in that officials initially think
is an attempt to steal copper. But instead, the intruder uses a USB
drive to upload a virus into a computer network.
The drill is part of a give-and-take in the past few years between the
government and utilities that has exposed the difficulties of securing
the electric system.
The grid is essential for almost everything, but it is mostly controlled
by investor-owned companies or municipal or regional agencies.
Ninety-nine percent of military facilities rely on commercial power,
according to the White House.
The utilities play down their abilities, in comparison with the
government’s. “They have the intelligence operation, the standing army,
the three-letter agencies,” said Scott Aaronson, senior director of
national security policy at the Edison Electric Institute, the trade
association of investor-owned utilities. “We have the grid operations
expertise.”
Self-defence forces
gather near Buenavista in Michoacan, Mexico, part of a growing movement
of militias taking on the drug cartels. Photograph: ZUMA/REX
With their scuffed shoes, baggy
trousers and single shot hunting guns, the eight men preparing to patrol
their hillside barrio in the southern Mexican town of Tixtla hardly
looked like a disciplined military force. But this motley collection of
construction workers and shopkeepers claim to have protected their
community from Mexico's violent drug cartels in a way the police and military have been unable – or unwilling – to do.
"Since
we got organised, the hit men don't dare come in here," said one young
member of the group, which had gathered at dusk on the town's basketball
court, before heading out on patrol. "Extortions, kidnappings and
disappearances are right down."
Over the past year, vigilante
groups like this have sprung up in towns and villages across Mexico,
especially in the Pacific coast states of Guerrero and Michoacán. They
make no pretence to be interrupting drug trafficking itself but they do
claim to have restored a degree of tranquillity to daily life.
In a
country where the police are commonly felt to commit more crime than
they prevent, the militias have won significant popular support, but
they have also prompted fears that the appearance of more armed groups
can only provoke more violence.
Tensions exploded this weekend
when a march by self-defence groups triggered a gun-battle between
gunmen and federal forces in the city of Apatzingán, followed by attacks
on power stations that left hundreds of thousands without electricity.
Nearly
seven years after the government launched a military-led crackdown on
the cartels, the weekend's events have caused many to ask if the new
government of President Enrique Peña Nieto is presiding over the first
rumblings of an undeclared civil war.
"Perhaps the closest antecedent is the civil wars of central America," said an editorial posted on the widely-read news site Sin Embargo.
The
weekend's violence began on Saturday when a group of militiamen marched
on the city, saying they were responding to calls for support by
residents there who want to set up their own self-defence group. Similar
groups claim to have forced the brutal Knights Templar cartel out of
smaller towns in the region, but Apatzingán, capital of the Tierra Caliente region, has remained largely in the hands of the drug barons.
Troops
allowed the marchers into the city after they had disarmed, but when
they gathered in the central square, they came under attack from gunmen
on the rooftops – including some who were reportedly stationed in the
cathedral belltower. A video shows people running for cover as federal police officers appear to return fire at the attackers.
At
the end of the day, the marchers withdrew after the army agreed to step
up patrols and include observers from the self-defence groups. But the
movement's leader, José Mirales, warned reporters that the fight was not
over. "We are going to make sure that organised crime is expelled from
Apatzingán," he said. "They will try to respond."
That
response came just hours later, when, shortly after midnight, nine
electricity substations were firebombed in a string of almost
simultaneous attacks. More than 400,000 people were left without
electricity. At least four petrol stations were also torched.
In a
statement, Mexico's interior ministry promised that: "The actions of
the criminals will not stop the actions of the government to protect the
population."
But while the government claimed order had been
restored to Aptazingán, the tension continued into Sunday when a second
group of civilians marched on the local army base. The Knights Templar
were widely believed to be behind this second march that demanded
federal forces withdraw their protection from the self-defence groups.
Also on Sunday, five bodies were reportedly found on the outskirts of
the city, all wearing t-shirts identifying them as members of the
self-defence groups.
By GUSTAVO RUIZ and MARK STEVENSON Associated Press
Clashes in which self-described "self-defense" forces sought to oust the
Knights Templar drug cartel from the western Mexico state of Michoacan
left at least five men dead and hundreds of thousands of people without
electricity.
The weekend confrontations followed a daring march by a self-defense
force into the city of Apatzingan, the central stronghold of the
pseudo-religious Knights Templar cartel that for years has dominated
Michoacan, a state that sends a steady stream of avocados and migrants
to the United States.
State Interior Secretary Jaime Mares said soldiers and federal police
had taken over security in Apatzingan following the clashes.
Since rising up in February against systematic extortion by the Knights
Templar, residents of a half dozen towns that formed self-defense
patrols have lived without access to Apatzingan, a commercial and road
hub that is home to the region's main hospital and markets.
Self-defense leaders said they finally grew tired of the cartel blocking
services and commerce in an attempt to strangle their uprising and
showed up Friday on Apatzingan's outskirts, armed and ready to
"liberate" the city. They were turned back by soldiers who said they
couldn't enter with weapons.
A convoy of hundreds of unarmed self-defense patrol members returned on
Saturday and successfully entered the city, where they were met by
gunfire, presumably from the Knights Templar.
Ice on Lake Michigan is a major concern for those exploring
wind turbines on the Great Lakes as this winter scene from Muskegon
shows.
(Chronicle file photo)
on October 22, 2013 at 6:45 AM, updated October 22, 2013 at 7:27 AM
MUSKEGON, MI – Ice on Lake Michigan is apparently not a “show
stopper” for those exploring wind turbine farms on the Great Lakes.
That
is the initial conclusion of University of Michigan marine engineer
Dale G. Karr based upon his work for the U.S. Department of Energy
studying Great Lakes ice and its impact on wind turbine towers.
“I have not found ice to be a show stopper but our research will be
useful in determining that question,” Karr told a lecture audience
Monday, Oct. 21 at the Grand Valley State University Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center in Muskegon.
That is not to say that lake ice isn’t an issue, far from it.
University
of Michigan Professor Dale G. Karr makes a point Monday, Oct. 21 at a
lecture on Great Lakes ice and wind turbines at the Grand Valley State
University Michigan Alternative and Renewable Energy Center in Muskegon.Dave Alexander
“The
Department of Energy is supporting this research to see if there is a
show stopper,” Karr said. “Ice is a major issue if not the major issue
for wind energy on the Great Lakes. The answer will start to emerge next
spring when we will determine the designs and costs.”
Already
offshore wind production is three times the cost of onshore wind farms
such as the Consumers Energy Lake Winds Energy Park now producing
electricity in Mason County south of Ludington, according to MAREC
Director Arn Boezaart. Factoring in the cost of engineering wind tower
protection against the ice is just one more reason that Great Lakes wind
farms are likely more than a decade away, if the political will for
such installations ever materializes, he said.
Karr said that the
United States has taken an economic and technological back seat to
Europe – especially Germany – and now both China and Japan in exploring,
developing and deploying offshore wind. With the controversy of
offshore wind in the United States for more than a decade, no offshore
wind turbine has been installed although seven test projects are
underway with federal funding.
“Europe is ahead of us probably a
decade or so,” Karr said of offshore wind. “The German government is
making offshore wind development the equivalent of our 1960s moon
program. We are not the world leaders (in offshore wind) but now playing
catch up.”
As the University of Michigan’s world-renowned
department of marine engineering and naval architecture decided several
years ago to delve into offshore wind technology questions, Karr began
to study the effects of ice – an expertise he has obtained through
studying oil and natural gas rigs in Arctic waters.
“We always get the question, why put wind turbines in the Great Lakes when there is ice?” Karr said of his research.
on
October 31, 2013 at 10:08 am
At
one of Mazza’s first stops, on South Carr Avenue, Kat Goldberg answered
the doorbell. Hearing Mazza’s pitch against the oil and gas extraction
technique known as fracking, Goldberg said: “I’m not keen on it. I have
three kids and I’d like the environment to be sustainable for my kids
and their kids. I don’t think fracking is a good thing to be doing.”
