Tag: forestry

Arctic blast threatens negative-50ºF temperatures in New England, while Texas power grid is again sputtering

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Rising temperatures offered some hope Friday for frustrated Texans days after they lost power — and in many cases heat — in a deadly winter storm, while a new wave of frigid weather rolling into the Northeast led communities to close schools and open warming centers.

Wind chills in some higher elevations of the Northeast could punch below minus 50º (minus 45º Celsius) as an Arctic front swept in from Canada, forecasters said.

“Some of the most extreme weather was expected atop New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, the Northeast’s highest peak, where winds gusted to nearly 100 miles per hour and wind chills could reach minus 100º Fahrenheit. ”

In Texas, officials in Austin compared damage from fallen trees and iced-over power lines to tornadoes as they came under criticism for slow repairs and shifting timelines to restore power. More than 240,000 customers across the state lacked power early Friday, down from 430,000 on Thursday, according to PowerOutage.us.

“Our heat source is our fireplace … and we’ve been in bed, snuggled up under like five or six blankets,” Edward Dahlke, of Spring Branch, southwest of Austin, told KSAT-TV. “Just think that our utility companies need to do a better job making sure our infrastructure is maintained properly.”

See: Frustrated Texans endure another icy winter storm with no power, heat

Pauline Frerich, also of Spring Branch, told KSAT that she had no way to prepare a meal without electricity, and that she worries about the cost of replacing hundreds of dollars of spoiled food. As the storm swept over this week, the indoor temperature fell to 29 degrees (-1 Celsius), and the sounds of tree limbs breaking unsettled her.

“And you didn’t know, was it on the roof, was it just in the yard?” Frerich told KSAT. “But it’s very nerve-wracking.”

Power failures were most widespread in Austin. Impatience rose there among nearly 123,000 customers days after the electricity first went out.

Thursday night, officials backtracked on early estimates that power would be fully restored by Friday evening. Damage was worse than originally calculated, they said, and they could no longer provide an estimate.

“The city let its citizens down. The situation is unacceptable to the community, and it’s unacceptable to me,” Austin Mayor Kirk Watson, a Democrat, said at a news conference Friday. “And I’m sorry.”

The outages recalled the 2021 blackouts in Texas, when hundreds of people died after the state’s power grid was pushed to the brink of total failure because of a lack of generation. There have been no reports of deaths from this week’s power outages, though the storm and freeze have been blamed for at least 12 traffic fatalities on slick roads in Texas, Arkansas and Oklahoma.

In New England, temperatures began plunging Friday morning.

“The worst part of the upcoming cold snap is going to be the wind,” which has already topped 80 mph (129 kph) in higher elevations, said National Weather Service lead forecaster Bob Oravec. Frigid wind chills — the combined effect of wind and cold air on exposed skin — are expected Saturday.

The worst wind chills in the populated areas of the Northeast shouldn’t go lower than minus 40º (minus 40º Celsius), he said.

Wind gusts as high as 40 mph raised the prospect of power outages in Maine, and communities began opening warming stations.

Even cold-weather sports were curtailed. Some ski resorts scaled back operations, eliminating night skiing and reducing lift operations. A popular weekend pond hockey tournament was postponed, and the National Toboggan Championship pushed Saturday’s races back by a day.

Schools closed Friday in Boston and in Manchester, New Hampshire’s largest city. “In these conditions, frostbite can develop in as little as 30 minutes,” an announcement on the Manchester district’s website read. “This is simply too cold for students who walk home.”

Some of the most extreme weather was expected atop New Hampshire’s Mount Washington, the Northeast’s highest peak and home to a weather observatory, where winds gusted to nearly 100 mph (160 kph) and wind chills could reach minus 100 (minus 73 Celsius).

The system is expected to move out of the region Sunday.

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February 3, 2023
California floated cutting major Southwest cities off Colorado River water before touching its agriculture supply, sources say | CNN

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CNN
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In a closed-door negotiation last week over the fate of the Colorado River, representatives from California’s powerful water districts proposed modeling what the basin’s future would look like if some of the West’s biggest cities – including Phoenix and Las Vegas – were cut off from the river’s water supply, three people familiar with the talks told CNN.

More than 5 million people in Arizona are served by Colorado River water, which accounts for 40% of Phoenix’s supply. Around 90% of Las Vegas’ water is from the river.

The proposal came in a session between states that was focused on achieving unprecedented water cuts to save the Colorado River – a system that overall provides water and electricity to more than 40 million people in the West. For months, seven states have been trying to come up with cuts to keep the river system from crashing.

As the river shrinks, talks to save it are increasingly pitting the longstanding senior water rights of farmers against explosive metropolitan growth.

California was proposing following the “law of the river,” which gives farmers in major agricultural districts first dibs on water because they have a priority claim established before other districts’ rights – including Californian cities like Los Angeles, which receives around half of its water from the Colorado River.

The eye-popping suggestion was met with strong and immediate pushback from other state officials at the negotiating table, the people familiar with the discussions said.

John Enstminger, the general manager for the Southern Nevada Water Authority who was not present at this particular session, told CNN the proposal was a major concern for public health and safety in Western cities.

“If you want to model cutting off most or all of the water supply of 27 million Americans, you can go through the exercise but implementing that on the ground would have the direst consequence for almost 10% of the country,” Entsminger said.

Arizona’s top water official, Tom Buschatzke, wouldn’t comment on the closed-door discussion. But he told CNN Arizona officials would not contemplate entirely cutting their biggest cities and Native American tribes off Colorado River water.

“I would not, even under a modeling scenario, agree or ask the federal government to model a scenario in which the Central Arizona Project goes to zero,” Buschatzke said. “I will not do that. The implications would be pretty severe if CAP went to zero. Severe for tribes, severe for cities, severe for industries.”

One source familiar with the meeting disputed that California asked to model cutting other agencies and cities all the way to zero but stipulated that if California was to compromise to other states’ demands, it also wanted to see one of the options follow the river’s current strict priority system “as the default baseline.”

US Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton last year called on the basin’s seven states – California, Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming – to figure out how to cut 2 to 4 million acre-feet of usage, or as much as 30% of their river water allocation. She vowed the federal government would step in if an agreement couldn’t be reached.

The question is who bears the brunt of the unprecedented cuts needed to keep Colorado River flowing into America’s largest reservoirs. If the feds take a heavy hand, it could set the stage for a tense legal battle – all while the nation’s largest reservoirs continue to decline.

Arizona’s perspective is that it thinks California will let them “dry up and blow away,” one source familiar with the meeting told CNN. California’s perspective, the source added, is: “We fought for a century to preserve our super-priority, why should we give it up now?”

After six other Colorado River basin states released a proposal for water cuts on Monday, California’s water agencies presented a separate and more modest plan to federal officials on Tuesday.

The state is proposing to conserve 400,000 additional acre-feet of water – around 130 billion gallons – per year from 2023 to 2026, according to the plan. Overall, it is seeking lower basin reductions of around 1 million acre-feet per year, with California contributing 400,000 acre-feet, Arizona contributing 560,000 acre-feet and Nevada contributing 40,000 acre-feet.

It’s nearly identical to the plan the state proposed in October, and is less than 10% of the state’s water allocation. California receives the largest Colorado River allocation out of all the basin states.

‘Genuinely worried’: Why researcher fears Lake Mead could hit dead pool

California’s proposal would kick in if Lake Mead reached an elevation of 1,000 feet and Lake Powell an elevation of 3,500 feet – precariously close to those reservoirs’ “dead pool” levels, when water is so low it will no longer flow through the dams.

California’s proposal mentions “increasing cutbacks” if Lake Mead elevations further decline, but does not specify by how much.

California’s plan “provides a realistic and implementable framework” that builds “on voluntary agreements and past collaborative efforts in order to minimize implementation delays,” JB Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board for the state and an Imperial Irrigation District board member, said in a statement.

Adel Hagekhalil, the general manager of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said in a statement the state was committed to cuts, but in “a way that does not harm half of the people who rely on the river – the 19 million people of Southern California.”

“We must do it in a way that does not devastate our $1.6 trillion economy, an economic engine for the entire United States,” Hagekhalil said. “The proposal presented today by California does all of this by equitably sharing the risk among Basin states without adversely affecting any one agency or state. The plan presented yesterday, which shut out California, does not.”

California’s proposal is less than the plan proposed on Monday by the six other basin states, which maxes out at 3.1 million acre-feet per year. That six-state model also accounted for the water lost to evaporation and leaky river infrastructure.

The six-state plan also proposes being activated if Lake Mead levels are around 1,050 feet. Lake Mead is currently around 1,047 feet and had dropped to as low as 1,040 feet last summer.

Multiple states told CNN that they are going to try to continue to get an agreement everyone can support, while acknowledging talks so far have been difficult.

“We’re committed to continuing to work collectively as seven basin states,” said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission.

Buschatzke, Arizona’s top water official, called the six-state proposal a “very positive outcome” and said he and others would try to keep conversations going with California.

“I’m committed to continuing to work with all seven states,” Buschatzke said, adding additional conversations and negotiations would continue “over the next few months.”

Still, the breakdown in agreement between California and the rest of the Colorado River Basin increases the prospect for federal officials to introduce their own cuts in the coming months. Buschatzke told CNN federal officials have not shared much with the states on what number of cuts they’re targeting.

“They haven’t shared with us any cumulative ballpark,” he said. “I believe it’s imperative we know the ballpark at least, and eventually the specific number, because it will be less of a gap to close on the necessary reductions.”

Correction: This story has been updated to correct the figures in California’s proposal for water cuts.

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February 1, 2023
Faucets in McCarthy’s district are running dry after years of drought. Constituents want him to do more | CNN Politics

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CNN
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Shortly after Benjamin Cuevas and his family moved into their new home three years ago in Tooleville, California, he realized something was horribly wrong.

In the middle of the day, the water pressure would drop completely. Cranking up both hot and cold could only coax a little drip out of the faucet.

Then there was the water itself, contaminated with chemicals from agriculture runoff and treated with so much chlorine that it turned his family’s black clothing gray in the wash. His daughter and her baby live in the house, and Cuevas’s wife only bathes her granddaughter in the bottled water they receive from the county for drinking.

Cuevas is not alone; the entire town of under 300 people faces the same water crisis. In many rural parts of the state, faucets and community wells are running dry after years of drought and heavy agriculture use pulls more water from the same groundwater residents use.

One local nonprofit told CNN that about 8,000 people in the San Joaquin Valley need thousands of gallons of hauled water just to keep their taps flowing – and that number is growing.

Newly elected House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has represented Tooleville for the past decade – though the small town is just outside his newly redrawn congressional district. The Republican lawmaker has long represented Kern and Tulare counties, and his redrawn seat adds portions of Fresno County.

Throughout his tenure, this region of California has spent more time than any other part of the country in exceptional drought – the US Drought Monitor’s most severe category – a drought scientists say has been made more intense by human-caused climate change. Recent rainfall has put a dent in the region’s surface drought, though experts have told CNN it will do little to solve the ongoing groundwater shortage.

Tulare, Kern and Fresno counties have endured more than 200 weeks in exceptional drought over the past decade, according to Drought Monitor data.

Multiple people CNN spoke to for this story said McCarthy and his office don’t often engage on this issue in the district, especially compared with neighboring members of Congress. And they wish he would do more with his power in Washington – especially now that he holds the speaker’s gavel.

McCarthy proposed an amendment this past summer to set up a grant program to help connect small towns like Tooleville with larger cities that have better water systems. The measure passed the House but died in the Senate. But as more and more wells go dry, McCarthy has made a point to vote against other bills addressing climate change and drought, including the Inflation Reduction Act and the bipartisan infrastructure law.

“In my experience, he has never engaged with us on any of these kinds of emergencies,” said Jessi Snyder, the director of community development at local nonprofit Self-Help Enterprises, who focuses on getting hauled water to entire communities that have gone dry.

In a statement to CNN, McCarthy’s office said he has been “a staunch advocate on water issues in the Central Valley and California” since he was first elected to the House. McCarthy has joined his colleagues to “introduce broad legislative solutions every Congress related to this topic since our water situation continues to worsen,” his spokesperson Brittany Martinez said.

But McCarthy does not mention climate change when talking about his district’s drought, and his office did not respond to questions from CNN about whether he believes climate change is playing a role. Instead, he often blames the drought on state mismanagement of water and has called for new and larger dams and reservoirs to be built to capture rainwater during wet years.

Water experts in California say that’s missing the new reality.

“Part of what’s happening now is the reality that there is no more new water,” said Peter Gleick, co-founder and senior fellow of California-based water nonprofit Pacific Institute. “The knee-jerk response of politicians has always been build another dam; find more water. There is no new reservoir that’s going to magically solve these problems. It’s now a question of managing demand.”

When a call comes in from yet another community whose well has run dry, it’s a race against time for the staff at Self-Help Enterprises.

The Visalia, California-based nonprofit has a self-imposed deadline of just 24 hours to drive out to the impacted community with emergency tanks to keep water flowing for showers, laundry and cleaning, as well as with five-gallon jugs of higher-quality water for drinking.

“The team goes all hands-on deck,” Tami McVay, Self-Help’s director of emergency services, told CNN. “Everybody knows what their role is, and they just go get it done. And we move forward to the next one.”

These days, there’s always a next one. Snyder said the summer of 2022 marked “a new level of crisis” as entire small communities of 80 to 100 homes started running out of water, in addition to individual homes.

“It’s been a real struggle because it’s hard to provide a backup source of water to a whole community instead of one household,” she said.

More than 1,400 wells were reported dry last year, according to the state of California, a 40% increase over the same period in 2021. Self-Help staff see this in person on the ground. New families are flowing into their hauled water program, but none are leaving. During the dry, warm-weather months, McVay estimates her nonprofit fields around 100 calls a day, dropping down to about 30 per week in the winter months.

The punishing multi-year drought is what Brad Rippey, a meteorologist at the US Department of Agriculture, calls California’s “latest misery.” California has spent eight of the last 11 years in drought, with the last three years being the driest such period on record, state officials said in October. Human-caused climate change – which is raising global temperatures and making much-needed rain and snow less frequent in the West – is contributing to the severity, Rippey said.

“The impacts are multiplying. You have these droughts piling on top of droughts with cumulative impacts,” including wildfires, he added.

To supplement the dwindling groundwater supply in Tooleville, officials in Tulare County and nonprofits like Self-Help deliver five-gallon water jugs to the residents for drinking and 16,000 gallons of hauled water into tanks for washing their clothes, doing dishes and taking showers.

There’s so much demand in the warm months for the hauled water that a 16,000-gallon delivery lasted some communities just a few hours before needing to be refilled, Snyder said.

“We literally cannot pump the water out of the tanker trucks fast enough to fill the storage tanks,” she added. “We can’t ever get ahead of it; physics is against us. It’s nuts and really stressful.”

California’s extreme heat wave this summer pushed water usage even higher as residents watered grass and farms pumped more for crops. In Tooleville, Cuevas watched as the orange and lemon trees in his yard withered and died. Outdoor watering restrictions meant he couldn’t save his trees, even as some of his neighbors flouted the restrictions with noticeably green lawns.

“Everything just perished,” Cuevas said. “It’s not a good feeling to see other people enjoying [the water], while you’re doing your part.”

Seeing the nearby Friant-Kern Canal every day – which carries melted snowpack water from Northern California to Central Valley farms – is a nagging reminder of what his family doesn’t have.

“It’s terrible,” Cuevas told CNN. “Just joking, I’d say I’ll go out there and put a hose [in it] running right back to my house.”

Tooleville resident Maria Olivera has lived in town since 1974.

Olivera cooks with bottled water.

As Cuevas’s own trees died, commercial farms in the area were still producing – although their future is also uncertain. Farms are also having to drill deeper wells to irrigate orange groves and acres of thirsty pecan and pistachio trees.

With this rush on groundwater, shallow residential wells don’t stand a chance. In West Goshen, a small town that sits outside McCarthy’s district in Tulare County, resident Jesus Benitez told CNN he burned through three well pumps – costing $1,200 a piece – during the warmer months when his neighbor, a farmer who grows alfalfa and corn, started irrigating his crops.

“They’ve got the money to go every time deeper and deeper in the ground; we don’t have that luxury,” Benitez said.

Two town wells in nearby Seville nearly ran dry this summer, said Linda Gutierrez, a lifelong resident who sits on the town’s water board. Across the street from the town’s wells is a pistachio farm, and when they start irrigating, the groundwater level plummets, she said.

But she doesn’t blame the farmers. Like many who live in the area, her husband is a farm worker. There’s a lot of pride in the region’s far-reaching agriculture, and many feel it should be sustained.

“You can’t not have farmers because you need food, but we have to have water in order to survive,” Gutierrez said. “There’s a very tricky balance to establish. Right now, if they don’t irrigate, we have water, but also a year from now we have no food.”

As big of a societal problem as drought and water shortages are, they are also intensely personal. Self-Help’s McVay gets emotional when talking about school children in the area getting beat up because they don’t have clean clothes or ready access to a shower.

“They don’t have water in their homes to take baths, or brush their teeth, or have clean laundry, and they’re getting bullied,” she said. “Being made fun of because they’re taking baths at the local gas station bathroom. It’s not fair – the stress that it causes the parents because [they] start to feel like they’re failing as a parent.”

Multiple local and state elected officials and leaders of nonprofits focusing on water delivery in the San Joaquin Valley said McCarthy isn’t engaged enough on what they consider one of his district’s most dire crises.

McVay said outreach from McCarthy’s office on dry residential wells is “slim to none, and I am not saying that to discredit them at all.”

“I have had more conversations, more engagement and just more wanting to know how they can assist from Congressman Valadao and his office than probably any other on the federal side,” McVay added.

Snyder said Rep. David Valadao, a Republican representing neighboring Kings County as well as portions of Tulare and Kern, and his staff “will show up in a community at the time of a crisis” and are actively engaged on how they can support efforts to get people water.

Other members of Congress, including Democratic Rep. Jim Costa and Republican Connie Conway, who left office earlier this month, have also been more accessible and engaged on the issue, Snyder said.

“Kevin McCarthy, no,” Snyder added.

While McCarthy is popular in his district and influential among California and Central Valley Republicans, California state Sen. Melissa Hurtado, a Democrat who represents parts of the San Joaquin Valley plagued by drought, told CNN there are concerns that McCarthy’s ambition for House speaker has superseded his district’s needs.

“He’s focused on that leadership position instead of actually working on issues to address the impacts of his district,” Hurtado told CNN. “Quietly, the word out there is it’s been a while that he’s actually delivered something for the region, given his focus on the leadership position. Maybe that’s part of his greater vision for helping this region out.”

McCarthy’s office did not respond to questions about how he’ll use his position as House speaker to address climate change-fueled droughts in California and around the nation. Nor did it respond to the critiques about his lack of engagement.

“The Leader has consistently worked in a bipartisan, bicameral fashion to deliver this life-giving resource for the families, agriculture producers and workers, and communities in the Central Valley and throughout California, and our Republican congressional delegation heavily relies on his steadfast leadership and decades of expertise when crafting their own pieces of water legislation,” McCarthy’s spokesperson Martinez told CNN in a statement. “When Democrats have held the majority, they time and time again blocked the progress and innovation of their House GOP colleagues.”

In July, McCarthy spoke on the House floor about Tooleville’s plight, seeking to set up a federal grant program to help connect it and other small towns to larger cities’ water supply.

“In our district, the community of Tooleville has run out of water as the groundwater table drops and aging infrastructure fails or becomes obsolete,” McCarthy said at the time. “Tulare County advises me that if California’s droughts continue, more small and rural communities in our district with older infrastructure could meet the exact same fate.”

McCarthy’s measure authorized a grant program but didn’t contain any funding. And even though the bill passed the House, it died in the Senate, and it’s unclear whether it will come up again in the new Congress.

Connecting Tooleville’s water infrastructure with that of nearby Exeter has been a decadeslong pursuit that is finally close to happening thanks to a state mandate and funding. The project will mean more reliable and cleaner water for residents like Cuevas. But it’s expected to take eight years for the two systems to fully merge.

McCarthy is also co-sponsoring a bill with Valadao that would enlarge certain reservoirs and kickstart construction on a new reservoir in the Sacramento Valley. But some nonprofit leaders and local officials say these solutions would prioritize agriculture over residents.

“We need more solutions beyond storage and dams,” said Susana De Anda, executive director of the San Joaquin Valley-based environmental justice nonprofit Community Water Center. “[McCarthy] lacks understanding of the real critical problems we’re experiencing around the drought and our communities.”

Seeking to attract younger voters concerned about climate change to the Republican Party, McCarthy last year convened a Climate, Energy and Conservation Task Force to develop the party’s messaging and policies around the issue. And House Republican delegations have attended the last two United Nations climate summits.

But all indications suggest that addressing human-caused climate change is not going to be a focal point of McCarthy’s now that he has the speaker’s gavel. McCarthy and House Republicans have shown they don’t want to move away from planet-warming fossil fuels, and few in the party are willing to connect global temperature rise to worsening droughts and extreme weather.

McCarthy dissolved Democrats’ Select Committee on the Climate Crisis, and he has vowed to investigate Department of Energy grants for electric vehicle components, as well as alleged “collusion” between environmental groups and China and Russia to “hurt American Energy,” according to a recent statement.

“Our representatives don’t talk about climate change; it’s a real problem,” De Anda said. “Climate change is real. Our communities are the canaries in the coal mine. We get hit first.”

It’s part of the reason Cuevas is hoping to move away in a couple years. He’s hopeful the water situation will improve by connecting Tooleville to a larger town’s water system; otherwise, he’s afraid he won’t be able to entice another buyer due to the water issues.

“I’m happy I had a chance to buy it, but we are planning to move,” Cuevas told CNN. “Right now, if I try, I ain’t going to get nothing, not even what I paid for the home.”

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January 21, 2023
Egg prices exploded 60% higher last year. These food prices surged too | CNN Business

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Minneapolis
CNN
—

Eggs, milk, butter, flour … if you were making pancakes last year, it would have cost you. Food prices surged in 2022.

Grocery prices remain stubbornly high (and nearly double the rate of overall inflation) at 11.8% year over year, according to data released Thursday by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Blame Russia, the weather, disease and a host of other factors.

“Even though we’re seeing inflationary pressures ease, we still have a war in Ukraine,” said Tom Bailey, senior consumer foods analyst with Rabobank. “Fertilizer costs have improved, but they still remain very high. Energy costs have improved, but they still remain relatively high. Labor costs still remain a problem — and the list goes on.”

Weather and disease are heavily affecting certain products’ prices, too – and none have been more rotten than egg prices: They’re up 59.9% year over year, a rate not seen since 1973, when high feed costs, shortages and price freezes caused certain agricultural products to soar in price. Since early last year, a deadly avian flu has devastated poultry flocks, especially turkeys and egg-laying hens. That was compounded by increasing demand and higher input costs, such as feed.

As a result, people like Jim Quinn are shelling out upwards of $6 and $7 for a dozen eggs.

Quinn has run daytime eatery The Hungry Monkey Café in Newport, Rhode Island, with his wife, Kate, since 2009. As a breakfast and lunch joint, it leans heavily on eggs for the majority of dishes on its menu — and especially for the 15-egg King Kong omelet novelty food challenge at the restaurant.

Even though eggs and seemingly every other ingredient have risen in price during the past year, Quinn and The Hungry Monkey have chosen to eat the cost.

“I’m trying to hold the line on the prices without having to increase them,” Quinn said. “It makes it extremely challenging for a mom-and-pop [business].”

He added: “We’re just trying to stay alive and hope that things will come down.”

But there’s good news on the horizon. The cost of food is still hard to swallow, but the latest Consumer Price Index shows that those price increases — by and large — are at least growing at slower rates.

In December, “food at home” prices increased 0.2% from the month before. That’s the smallest monthly increase since March 2021.

The expectations are for food price increases to continue to moderate, Bailey said.

“I suspect over the next 12 months we will see improvements in supply, improvements in the conditions that have been challenging across most of our food categories,” he said, “and we’ll finally start to see prices, at least upstream, really starting to come off. And then maybe it’s 2024 where we could eventually see some deflation for food.”

Here’s a look at how prices are trending across certain food categories in December, according to BLS data:

Eggs: +59.9% annually; +11.1% from November

Butter and margarine: +35.3% annually; +1.7% from November

Lettuce: +24.9% annually; +4% from November

Flour and prepared flour mixes: +23.4% annually; -1% from November

Canned fruits and vegetables: +18.4% annually; +0.3% from November

Bread: +15.9% annually; +0.2% from November

Cereals and cereal products: +15.6% annually; -0.3% from November

Coffee: +14.3% annually; +0% from November

Milk: +12.5% annually; -1% from November

Chicken: +10.9% annually; -0.6% from November

Baby food: +10.7% annually; -0.2% from November

Fresh fruits: +3.4% annually; -1.9% from November

Uncooked ground beef: +0.7% annually; -0.1% from November

Bacon and related products: -3.7% annually; -2.9% from November

Uncooked beef steaks: -5.4% annually; +0.9% from November

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January 13, 2023
Inflation is easing, but the prices of these groceries are expected to soar in 2023 — including one whose price rose nearly 60% in December

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General inflation is easing, but the prices of some food items are not going down anytime soon. And the reasons are largely out of the Federal Reserve’s control.

The consumer price index cooled in December, falling to an annualized 6.5% from the 7.1% annual rate recorded in November, according to government data. Still, the annualized inflation rate in food was 10.4% in December, significantly higher than the overall inflation rate even as it represented a slower rate of increase than November, when food prices were 12% higher than in November 2021.

Inflation running at nearly 40-year highs over the past year has put a squeeze on American wallets. Through a series of jumbo rate hikes, the Federal Reserve has sought to tamp down inflation. Its target interest rate was lifted from a negligible level to a range of 4.25% to 4.50% by the end of 2022.

But a few factors impacting food prices are not going away. War is still ongoing in Ukraine, which affected the prices of fertilizers and animal feeds; the avian flu continues to impact the egg supply; and extreme weather conditions are adding complexities to food production.

The following is a look at how a few popular food items are affected.

Eggs

The price of eggs surged 59.9% on the year in December, up from 49% in November, according to the most government data. That means a carton of Grade A large eggs on average more than doubled in cost with prices reaching $4.25 in December 2022, compared to $1.79 a year earlier. In some parts of the country, consumers could pay up to $8 for a carton of organic eggs.

Avian flu, which has forced millions of chickens to be culled and caused a shortage of eggs, is the main reason behind the price increase. In a change from previous breakouts that faded as summer ended, this time the avian flu lingered into winter.

The holiday season is usually the peak for consumer egg demand, which means that we could see egg prices tick down a little in the new year, experts said.

But it will not be a significant drop given the ongoing flu and high cost of feed. If input costs continue to increase and the bird flu continues to kill large quantities of hens, the costs will most likely be passed on to consumers, said Curt Covington, senior director of partner relations at AgAmerica Lending, a financial services company providing agriculture loans.

Experts, including the biggest egg producer in the country, Cal-Maine, said the avian flu will be hitting egg supplies for the long term. “More than 43 million of the 58 million birds slaughtered over the past year to control the virus have been egg-laying chickens, including some farms with more than a million birds apiece in major egg-producing states like Iowa,” the Associated Press reported this week.

Read more: Cal-Maine says avian flu could continue to hit egg supplies after this year

“I suspect it will take much additional effort to ‘stamp-out’ HPAI this time around and we may very well be dealing with the reality that this will be a year-round issue,” said Brian Earnest, lead economist for animal protein at CoBank, a national cooperative bank serving industries across rural America, in an email to MarketWatch.

The weekly supplies of eggs on hand has also reached a historic low, he told MarketWatch. For the week ended Dec. 19, cases on hand reported by the USDA totaled 1.176 million. That’s a 20% drop year-over-year, and the lowest level for the same week since 2014, he said.

Also see: Why egg prices are sizzling — up 38% on last year

Butter

Butter prices rose by 31.4% on the year in December, up from 27% in November, making the average price for a pound of butter $4.81 nationally. It was $3.47 a year earlier.

Extreme heat and smaller cow herds are the main reasons behind that, experts told MarketWatch. Cows eat less and produce less milk in the heat, and the cost of maintaining milk production skyrocketed last year, making farmers unwilling to expand their herds.

Going forward into 2023, the price of butter could soften, but year-over-year price increases could still stay high, said Tanner Ehmke, lead economist of dairy and specialty crops at CoBank.

Cows are approaching their prime milk-producing season, which usually runs from March through May, although customer demand usually peaks during the recently completed holiday season, he said.

But the increase of supply will not be much, Ehmke said, because costs are staying at record highs for farmers to maintain and expand their herds. Drought in the Western part of the country and the war in Ukraine continue to impact the supply and costs of feed.

“It’s [going to be] a very modest increase,” said Ehmke.

About 58% of the U.S. is at least “abnormally dry,” according to the National Integrated Drought Information System. It’s likely this year will see more drought-inducing La Niña weather conditions, according to National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center.

“If so, the third dry year in a row would signal the worst drought since at least 2011- 2013,” said Rob Fox, director of CoBank’s knowledge-exchange division in a 2023 preview released in December. “But this time it is more concentrated in the Western states, and it would be even more devastating to their already precarious water supplies and desiccated pastures,” he added.

At the same time, butter production is competing with the growing production of and appetite for cheese in the U.S., Ehmke told MarketWatch last September. U.S. cheese consumption per capita is growing around 1% to 2% each year, according to the USDA. U.S. cheese exports also increased, particularly to countries like South Korea and Japan.

Read more: Butter prices hit an all-time high — partly because extreme heat is taking a toll on dairy cows

Vegetable oil and margarine

Margarine, which is largely made of vegetable oil, is also seeing a huge price increase. The price of margarine, the substitute for butter in the old days, rose by 43.8 % in December, down slightly from 47.4% in November compared to a year before.

While soybeans, corn and sunflower oil are among the food items that have been hugely impacted by the war in Ukraine, another dynamic is at play here, analysts suggested: A large quantity of vegetable oil is being used for the production of renewable diesel.

In 2021/2022, 38.4% of soybean-oil supplies were used for biofuel production — biofuel is a broader category than renewable diesel — up from 35.6% the year before, according to USDA data updated in October 2022.

Transitioning to a green economy laid out in the Inflation Reduction Act will require more soybean supply. The expected growth in soybean oil-based renewable diesel will require considerably more soybean bushels for domestic production, wrote Kenneth Scott Zuckerberg, CoBank’s lead economist for grain and farm supply, in a report in September.

At the moment, global grain and oilseed supplies are tight, and the combined global stocks of corn, wheat and soybeans are forecast to decline for the fifth straight year in 2023, according to the CoBank report.

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January 12, 2023
Deere gives farmers long-sought ability to repair their own tractors | CNN Business

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Washington
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—

US farmers will have the right to repair tractors and other agricultural equipment from John Deere without having to use the manufacturer’s own parts and facilities, under an agreement the company signed Sunday with farm industry representatives.

The agreement marks a major victory for farmer and consumer advocacy groups, who have complained for years about the repair limitations Deere has imposed on its products and technology, from software locks to requirements to use official dealers for repairs. The restrictions have inspired multiple lawsuits against the company and created a high-profile public relations headache in which farmers have accused Deere of interfering with their ability to plant and harvest crops on a timely basis.

The memorandum of understanding with the American Farm Bureau Federation (AFBF) gives farmers access to the same Deere documentation, data and diagnostic tools used by the company’s authorized repair shops. Farmers will be able to diagnose and fix broken down equipment on their own or by choosing an independent repair facility, which will also have access to the proprietary tools and data on the same fair and reasonable terms, according to the MOU.

In exchange, AFBF officials agreed not to push for state or federal legislation promoting users’ right to repair products they’ve leased or purchased. Under the MOU, farmers and third-party repair shops may not disable on-board safety features or use their access to Deere’s technology to illegally copy the software controlling their equipment.

The voluntary deal safeguards Deere’s intellectual property while giving farmers more control of their own business, said Zippy Duvall, president of AFBF.

“A piece of equipment is a major investment,” Duvall said in a statement. “Farmers must have the freedom to choose where equipment is repaired, or to repair it themselves, to help control costs.”

John Deere’s SVP of agriculture and turf marketing, David Gilmore, said in a statement that the agreement reflects the “longstanding commitment Deere has made to ensure our customers have the diagnostic tools and information they need to make many repairs to their machines. We look forward to working alongside the American Farm Bureau and our customers in the months and years ahead to ensure farmers continue to have the tools and resources to diagnose, maintain and repair their equipment.”

The MOU aims to resolve longstanding claims that the requirement to use authorized dealerships can interfere with agricultural production, harming farmers and disrupting the food supply chain. Farmers have said having to wait days or weeks for an official repair can undermine planting and harvesting schedules. Some advocacy groups have blamed the delays on consolidation in tractor dealerships, the majority of which are controlled by Deere, according to the US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

“There is one John Deere dealership chain for every 12,018 farms and every 5.3 million acres of American farmland,” the group wrote in a report last year.

The agricultural industry has become a battleground in the wider movement for the so-called right to repair movement, which focuses not only on farm equipment but also on consumer electronics such as smartphones, tablets, computers and even household appliances. A notable target of complaints has been Apple, which is known for shipping ultra-thin devices sealed with special glue or with unremovable components including batteries and memory chips. Apple has said for years that customers should rely on authorized repair facilities, citing potential dangers to users and their devices if they attempt their own maintenance.

The issue has won the attention of the Biden administration: In 2021, a White House executive order called on the Federal Trade Commission to develop new rules to promote the right to repair. In response, the FTC vowed to “root out” illegal repair restrictions. Months later, Apple announced a self-service repair program allowing users to fix their own iPhones and Macs using Apple-made tools and parts.

Last month, New York became the first US state to enact a right-to-repair law. Since 2000, US lawmakers have introduced more than a dozen bills dealing with the right to repair, focusing on automobiles, farm equipment and repairs of medical devices during the Covid-19 pandemic.

With Sunday’s MOU, however, the tension between farmers and Deere has been resolved without the need for regulation or legislation, the agreement said.

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January 9, 2023
Stephen Miller led-group emerges as top legal foe of Biden initiatives | CNN Politics

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CNN
—

A conservative legal group led by former top Trump aide Stephen Miller has emerged as a frequent opponent to several Biden administration initiatives by mounting court challenges, succeeding in blocking policies they say are examples of reverse discrimination.

Miller touts America First Legal as “the long-awaited answer to the (American Civil Liberties Union),” and his group has garnered several legal victories against the Biden administration in the past few weeks and months, most notably on issues of racial discrimination.

The group has aired advertisements criticizing the Biden administration’s policies on LGBTQ rights and has filed a class-action lawsuit against Texas A&M University, claiming the college has “engaged in a discriminatory hiring practice, choosing which candidates to hire based on their race or sex.” That lawsuit is ongoing.

In 2021, America First Legal was also successful in halting some Covid-19 relief funds under the Small Business Administration’s Restaurant Revitalization Fund to women, veterans and minority business owners who could apply for grants during a priority period in its initial rollout, a move Miller argued was an “unconstitutional and racially discriminatory scheme.”

Perhaps most notably, the organization was involved in legal challenges that forced the Biden administration to create a work-around on getting debt relief for farmers of color. An effort passed as part of the Covid-19-related American Rescue Plan in 2021 was challenged in court by a litany of lawsuits by some White farmers who complained that the effort to remedy longstanding inequities by wiping the debt of only farmers of color was itself discriminatory.

America First Legal filed a lawsuit against the effort, representing Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller and a group of White farmers in the state who also argued that the program is unconstitutional because of racial discrimination. The lawsuits led to an injunction that blocked the debt relief payments.

Attorneys argued that the USDA’s definition of “socially disadvantaged farmer and rancher” that excludes Whites is “patently unconstitutional.” They also said the agency was violating the Constitution by “discriminating on the grounds of race, color, and national origin” in the program and that the court should prohibit the clause from being enforced.

Ultimately, the administration abandoned the effort and quietly tucked a couple provisions into the Inflation Reduction Act that passed over the summer to allocate debt relief that is eligible to farmers of all backgrounds, regardless of race.

CNN has reached out to America First Legal for comment.

Several Black farmers and social justice advocates have said Miller’s actions are harmful.

“I want to set the record straight – no one is against White farmers in this country,” John Boyd Jr., 57, a fourth-generation farmer who is founder and president of the National Black Farmers Association, told CNN. He added that what Miller is doing to Black farmers through the legal challenges is “humiliating and the worst thing you can do for race-relations in this country.”

Dorian Spence, a lawyer whose firm represented the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a group of southern cooperatives that has been advocating for Black farmers in litigation brought by White farmers, told CNN that Miller’s group uses “grievance politics through the rule of law to try to exclude people of color broadly, but in certain pockets Black people specifically from areas of opportunity.”

“America First sees an America that is increasingly White, White male-driven,” Spence said.

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December 14, 2022
This 82-year-old retiree makes makes moose calls

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Butch Phillips, an 82-year-old member of the Penobscot Nation, etches 18-inch long moose call horns from birch bark he harvests off tribal land. While some moose calls he gives away to local hunters, others have sold at auction for as much as $3,200 and some sit in museums.

“It’s very exciting calling a moose. You can hear them coming. Snuffing and grunting,” said Phillips, who hunts a moose each year on tribal land, the largest being 940 pounds. He also sometimes calls moose just to watch them and study them.

Based in Milford, Maine, Phillips has been making the moose calls, which are hornlike devices used to attract moose when hunting, for about 30 years with a wooden-handled knife his late wife bought him. He has more orders than he can keep up with, due in part to some local media coverage and word-of-mouth. He hopes to pass down his skills to his grown sons.

Phillips retired 31 years ago from telecommunications jobs with NYMEX and AT&T
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and he’s been filling his time with his etching talents ever since.

“I just can’t imagine being retired with nothing to do. I think I’d go crazy,” Phillips said.

Plus, in the winter, etching gives him something productive to do to pass time.

“There’s not a lot you can do outdoors. It gives me something to do rather than just sitting around. Can you imagine doing that for 31 years?” Phillips said.

Phillips used to make moose calls by peeling a piece of bark off a tree and using it for the day and tossing it aside. Then he started tying spruce roots around the bark to help keep the shape and use it again and again. Hunters started asking for his moose calls and his work spread by word-of-mouth.

Phillips in a 14-foot birch bark canoe that he built.

Credit: Butch Phillips

“Some hunters will use a roadside cone to call a moose. I wanted to do it the traditional way. A large majority of native hunters use a birch bark call,” Phillips said.

He uses a variety of tools, but the knife given to him by his late wife is his most treasured tool.

“The blade’s pretty much worn down. But I treasure it. It’s very special,” Phillips said.

As he became more adept at making moose calls, Phillips started making more permanent models, refining the workmanship and using thicker bark that was suitable for etching.

“I decided to do etching like they did in the old days. Everything they used to make, they carved. My artwork evolved. I try to keep the older designs alive. I’ve taken symbols like the Wabanaki symbol and incorporated them into the art to keep them alive. I use plants and trees as fillers,” Phillips said.

“In most of my art work, I try to combine people, plants and animals. We always memorialize our ancestors. And plants and animals are what we owe gratitude to for keeping us alive,” Phillips said. “In our prayers, we always give thanks to ancestors, plants and animals. There’s a theme.”

Phillips said he writes up explanations of the symbols so each buyer knows what the designs mean. Diamond shapes, for example, represent wigwams, he said. More often these days his buyers are collectors rather than moose hunters.

Phillips is an expert in his materials.

“All bark is not created equal. There’s curly bark, thick, thin, white, dark, gray. I use bark that is thick and pliable and doesn’t separate into layers,” Phillips said.

With winter bark, it’s brown with a thick rind on the inside. He has to take it off the tree carefully and scrape away the rind to make designs. He can approach the etching in two ways – either scraping away the entire background and leaving just a thin image, or carve images onto rind. Summer bark has no rind and is just yellow.

His museum-quality pieces have used winter bark with an elaborate scraping process that leaves thin details for designs. Those are the toughest to do, he said.

Phillips approaches each moose call with an open mind and has no preconceived idea of what the designs will be. The bark just speaks to him.

“I never plan on paper what it’s going to look like. Most of the time I have no idea until it evolves,” Phillips said.

In the center of the device, he often puts an image of a moose or a moose head. For special orders, he might be asked to incorporate an image of a hawk or favorite dog or even a woodpecker, in one case. He adds touches like a flower, acorns or moose tracks to fill in blank areas.

“Each side is balanced because nature is balanced,” Phillips said. “Every design is unique.”

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December 1, 2022
Fire plan would cut 2.4 million New Jersey Pinelands trees

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BASS RIVER TOWNSHIP, N.J. — Up to 2.4 million trees would be cut down as part of a project to prevent major wildfires in a federally protected New Jersey forest heralded as a unique environmental treasure.

New Jersey environmental officials say the plan to kill trees in a section of Bass River State Forest is designed to better protect against catastrophic wildfires, adding it will mostly affect small, scrawny trees — not the towering giants for which the Pinelands National Refuge is known and loved.

But the plan, adopted Oct. 14 by the New Jersey Pinelands Commission and set to begin in April, has split environmentalists. Some say it is a reasonable and necessary response to the dangers of wildfires, while others say it is an unconscionable waste of trees that would no longer be able to store carbon as climate change imperils the globe.

Foes are also upset about the possible use of herbicides to prevent invasive species regeneration, noting that the Pinelands sits atop an aquifer that contains some of the purest drinking water in the nation.

And some of them fear the plan could be a back door to logging the protected woodlands under the guise of fire protection, despite the state’s denials.

“In order to save the forest, they have to cut down the forest,” said Jeff Tittel, the retired former director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, calling the plan “shameful” and “Orwellian.”

Pinelands Commissioner Mark Lohbauer voted against the plan, calling it ill-advised on many levels. He says it could harm rare snakes, and adds that he has researched forestry tactics from western states and believes that tree-thinning is ineffective in preventing large wildfires.

“We are in an era of climate change; it’s incumbent on us to do our utmost to preserve these trees that are sequestering carbon,” he said. “If we don’t have an absolutely essential reason for cutting down trees, we shouldn’t do it.”

The plan involves about 1,300 acres (526 hectares), a miniscule percentage of the 1.1-million-acre (445,150-hectare) Pinelands preserve, which enjoys federal and state protection, and has been named a unique biosphere by the United Nations.

Most of the trees to be killed are 2 inches (5 centimeters) or less in diameter, the state said. Dense undergrowth of these smaller trees can act as “ladder fuel,” carrying fire from the forest floor up to the treetops, where flames can spread rapidly and wind can intensify to whip up blazes, the state Department of Environmental Protection said in a statement.

A Pinelands commissioner calculated that 2.4 million trees would be removed by using data from the state’s application, multiplying the percentage of tree density reduction by the amount of land affected.

The department would not say whether it believes that number is accurate, nor would it offer a number of its own. But it did say “the total number of trees thinned could be significant.”

“This is like liquid gasoline in the Pinelands,” said Todd Wyckoff, chief of the New Jersey Forest Service, as he touched a scrawny pine tree of the type that will most often be cut during the project. “I see a forest at risk from fire. I look at this as restoring the forest to more of what it should be.”

Tree thinning is an accepted form of forest management in many areas of the country, done in the name of preventing fires from becoming larger than they otherwise might be, and is supported by government foresters as well as timber industry officials. But some conservation groups say thinning does not work.

New Jersey says the cutting will center on the smallest snow-bent pitch pine trees, “and an intact canopy will be maintained across the site.”

The state’s application, however, envisions that canopy cover will be reduced from 68% to 43% on over 1,000 acres (405 hectares), with even larger decreases planned for smaller sections.

And scrawny trees aren’t the only ones that will be cut: Many thick, tall trees on either side of some roads will be cut down to create more of a fire break, where firefighters can defend against a spreading blaze.

The affected area has about 2,000 trees per acre — four times the normal density in the Pinelands, according to the state.

Most of the cut trees will be ground into wood chips that will remain on the forest floor, eventually returning to the soil, the department said, adding, “It is not anticipated that any material of commercial value will be produced because of this project.”

Some environmentalists fear that might not be true, that felled trees could be harvested and sold as cord wood, wood pellets or even used in making glue.

“I’m opposed to the removal of any of that material,” Lohbauer said. “That material belongs in the forest where it will support habitat and eventually be recycled” into the soil. “Even if they use it for wood pellets, which are popular for burning in wood stoves, that releases the carbon.”

John Cecil, an assistant commissioner with the department, said his agency is not looking to make a profit from any wood products that might be removed from the site.

But he said that if some felled trees “could be put to good use and generate revenue for the taxpayers, why wouldn’t we do that? If there’s a way to do this that preserves the essential goals of this plan and brings some revenue back in, that’s not the end of the world. Maybe you could get a couple fence posts out of these trees.”

Created by an act of Congress in 1978, the Pinelands district occupies 22% of New Jersey’s land area, is home to 135 rare plant and animal species, and is the largest body of open space on the mid-Atlantic seaboard between Richmond, Virginia, and Boston. It also includes an aquifer that is the source of 17 trillion gallons (64 trillion liters) of drinking water.

“It is unacceptable to be cutting down trees in a climate emergency, and cutting 2.4 million small trees will severely reduce the future ability to store carbon,” said Bill Wolfe, a former department official who runs an environmental blog.

Carleton Montgomery, executive director of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance, supports the plan.

The group said opponents are using the number of trees to be cut “to (elicit) shock and horror,” saying that by focusing on the number rather than size of trees to be cut, they “are quite literally missing the forest for the trees. The resulting forest will be a healthy native Pine Barrens habitat.”

———

This story corrects the name of agency in paragraph 13 to New Jersey Forest Service, not Forest Fire Service.

———

Follow Wayne Parry on Twitter at www.twitter.com/WayneParryAC

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November 25, 2022
COP27 wins and losses: U.S. on the hook to pay for its pollution; natural gas gets nod as transition fuel

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For the first time ever, rich nations, including a top-polluting U.S., will pay for the climate-change damage inflicted upon poorer nations.

These smaller economies are often the source of the fossil fuels
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minerals
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and other raw materials behind the developed world’s modern conveniences and technologicial advancement, including many practices responsible for the Earth-warming emisisons. And yet the developing world shoulders the worst of the droughts, deadly heat, ruined crops and eroding coastlines that take lives and eat into economic growth.

The deal, called “loss and damage” in summit shorthand, was struck as the U.N.’s Conference of Parties, or COP27, gaveled to a close near dawn Sunday in Egypt. Official talks ended Friday, but negotiations extended into the weekend.

Read: Historic compensation fund approved at U.N. climate talks

It was a big win for poorer nations which have long sought money — sometimes viewed as reparations — because they are often the victims of climate-worsened floods, famines and storms despite contributing little directly to the pollution that heats up the globe. It took last-minute, pre-summit negotiations to even get the topic on the official agenda.

“Three long decades and we have finally delivered climate justice,” said Seve Paeniu, the finance minister of island nation Tuvalu, according to the Associated Press. “We have finally responded to the call of hundreds of millions of people across the world to help them address loss and damage.”

“ ‘Three long decades and we have finally delivered climate justice.’ ”

— Seve Paeniu, finance minister for Tuvalu

Pakistan’s environment minister, Sherry Rehman, said the establishment of the fund “is not about dispensing charity.” Pakistan, hit by devastating drought and more, dominated climate-change headlines this year.

“It is clearly a down payment on the longer investment in our joint futures,” she said, speaking for a coalition of the world’s poorest nations.

According to many conference participants, the U.S. was a late-stage roadblock to establishing this official payout language, though it signed off in the end. U.S. participation was also impacted once chief climate negotiator John Kerry tested positive for COVID-19, although he continued to work from his hotel.

How does COP27 ‘loss and damage’ work? And where’s China?

According to the agreement, the fund would initially draw on contributions from developed countries and other private and public sources such as international financial institutions, including the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

While major emerging economies such as China wouldn’t automatically have to contribute, that option remains on the table. This is a key demand by the European Union and the U.S., who argue that China and other large polluters currently classified as “developing” countries have the financial clout and responsibility to pay their way.

The fund would be largely aimed at the most vulnerable nations, though there would be room for middle-income countries that are severely battered by climate disasters to get aid.

Getting serious about methane

Attention on methane, a more-potent but shorter-lasting greenhouse gas than carbon, was considered a major win at the summit. Some 150 countries have now signed on to the voluntary Global Methane Pledge, an official effort to cap the release of the GHG whose reduction presents perhaps the easiest way to reduce the global warming.

Read more: Natural gas-focused methane pact expands at climate summit, minus China

With the pledge, countries representing 45% of global methane emissions have vowed to reduce their emissions by 30% by 2030. If methane-reduction pledges are met, the result would be equivalent to eliminating the GHG emissions from all of the world’s cars, trucks, buses and all two- and three-wheeled vehicles, according to the International Energy Agency.

China, the world’s largest polluter by some measures, has not signed the deadline-based pledge, but has agreed to reduce methane emissions.

Still largely voluntary

COP27 talks wrapped without concrete progress on the contentious issue of shifting an overall 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature limit from a voluntary marker to an established requirement of nations. Most voluntary pacts among nations and private entities, including a vow by Amazon.com
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Ford Motor
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Apple
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and others signing on to a “First Movers” pledge, loosly use the 1.5-degree limit set in 2015 when talks took place in Paris.

Private banks, insurers and institutional investors representing $130 trillion said they would align their investments with the goal of keeping global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, toward a pledge to net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. Advocacy groups cheer the pledge and its expanding roster but are also keeping up pressure on the signatories to speed up progress toward this goal and to stop undermining the pledge with fossil-fuel investment.

Read: Here’s where the big U.S. banks stand up and fall down on climate change

The Egypt pact was also void of firmer language on emissions cutting and the desire by some officials to target all fossil fuels
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for a phase-down.

Natural gas, which is relatively cheaper to produce than other fossil fuels, has been the major alternative to more-polluting coal in electricity generation. Still, it has its own emissions risk.

In the U.S., for example, electricity is the most common energy source used for cooking — electricity often powered by gas. Still, about 38% of U.S. households use natural gas directly for cooking, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Natural gas providers also own an established pipeline infrastructure that may serve alternative energy, and is pushed by the industry as a viable alternative alongside solar, wind
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and other means. The industry also promotes its efforts to cap methane leaks.

Related: World’s richest nations stick to 1.5-degree climate pledge despite energy crunch

“ ‘It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers.’”

— Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock

With fossil fuels in their sight, the European Union and other nations fought back at what they considered backsliding in the Egyptian presidency’s overarching cover agreement and threatened to scuttle the rest of the process, while advancing their own draft. The package was revised again, removing most of the elements Europeans had objected to but adding none of the heightened ambition they were hoping for, the AP said.

Egypt has played a unique role as host, representative of Africa, which sits at the front lines of those hurt by climate change and yet, remaining loyal to its own fossil-fuel ambitions and those of OPEC nations.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock voiced frustration.

“It is more than frustrating to see overdue steps on mitigation and the phase-out of fossil energies being stonewalled by a number of large emitters and oil producers
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” she said.

The agreement includes a veiled reference to the benefits of natural gas as low- emission energy, despite many nations calling for a phase down of natural gas, which does contribute to climate change.

Fossil-fuel industry’s presence

At least 636 representatives of the fossil fuel industry registered to attend the summit, a 25% increase over the industry’s presence last year, according to an analysis released by three advocacy groups.

More fossil fuel lobbyists are on the roster than any single national delegation, besides the UAE who has registered 1,070 delegates compared to 176 last year, according to a report from Corporate Accountability, Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) and Global Witness (GW).

Frances Colón, senior director for International Climate Policy at the Center for American Progress, found plenty of fault with this round of talks.

“The final text reflects the outsized and corrupting presence of fossil fuel and big agricultural lobbyists at COP27, compounded by a lack of ambition from key, high-emitting countries,” she said, in a statement. “The agreement makes only a passing reference to the 1.5-degree Celsius warming goal and does not include any new language on phasing down or phasing out all fossil fuels
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— the only way to reach emissions reduction goals and secure a livable future.”

Colón also worried that the official statement did not adequately advance efforts. World leaders failed to reference the twin, interlocking crises of nature loss and climate change, and declined to link COP27 to next month’s U.N. biodiversity summit in Montreal.

“ ‘The agreement makes only a passing reference to the 1.5-degree Celsius warming goal and does not include any new language on phasing down or phasing out all fossil fuels — the only way to reach emissions reduction goals and secure a livable future.’”

— Frances Colón of the Center for American Progress

While the new agreement doesn’t ratchet up calls for reducing emissions, it does retain language to keep alive the voluntary global goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The Egyptian presidency kept offering proposals that harkened back to 2015 Paris language which also mentioned a looser goal of 2 degrees.

This year’s pact also neglected to toughen the main sticking point from the previous COP, in Glasgow last year. At that time, China and India united to dig in unless coal language was softened. Nations this year did not expand on last year’s call to phase down global use of “unabated coal” even though India and other countries pushed to include oil and natural gas in language from Glasgow.

“We joined with many parties to propose a number of measures that would have contributed to this emissions peaking before 2025, as the science tells us is necessary. Not in this text,” the United Kingdom’s Alok Sharma said.

Climate campaigners are concerned that pushing for strong action to end fossil fuel use will be even harder at next year’s meeting, which will be hosted in Dubai, located in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates.

The Associated Press contributed.

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November 20, 2022
Tyson recalls 93,000 pounds of beef contaminated with a ‘mirror-like material’
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Tyson Fresh Meats, a division of Tyson Foods Inc.
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is recalling 93,697 pounds of ground beef over a possible contamination with a “mirror-like material.”

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, the ground beef items were packaged on Nov. 2, and the issue was discovered after several customers found this mirror-like material in their meat after purchasing it from a grocery store.
The products part of the Tyson recall are as follows:

10-pound chubs containing “Hill Country fare ground beef 73% lean/27% fat with best before or freeze by: Nov. 25, 2022.”

5-pound chubs containing “Hill Country fare ground beef 73% lean/27% fat with best before or freeze by: Nov. 25, 2022.”

5-pound chubs containing “H-E-B ground chuck ground beef 80% lean/20% fat.”

The USDA advises individuals who purchased these items to throw them away or return them to the place of purchase immediately. The impacted products were sold in retail grocery stores in Texas.

The specific labels for the ground beef that Tyson is recalling can be found here.

See: Flying with Thanksgiving food? TSA dishes up rules for traveling with foodstuffs this holiday season

It’s been a tough time for meat lovers: Last week, the CDC warned that many people should “not eat meat or cheese from any deli counter” unless it was “steaming hot” due to a listeria outbreak.

But there could be some more meat alternatives on the horizon.

The Tyson recall news came as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced on Thursday that meat grown in a laboratory setting is safe for human consumption.

“Advancements in cell culture technology are enabling food developers to use animal cells obtained from livestock, poultry, and seafood in the production of food, with these products expected to be ready for the U.S. market in the near future.,” the FDA said. To be clear, such products are not yet on the U.S. market, but they have now received this preliminary vote of regulatory confidence.

And earlier this week, the CFO of Tyson Foods apologized to investors during a company earnings call over his arrest early on the morning of Nov. 6 after being found sleeping in a house that wasn’t his.
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November 18, 2022
Biden addresses COP27 on firmer climate footing, but world wants U.S. leadership on pollution

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President Joe Biden addressed the U.N. climate summit Friday with his Democratic party having survived a projected Republican “red wave” in the midterm elections — and in doing so protecting at least the bulk of a landmark climate-change spending law he signed this year.

Biden addressed the U.N.’s Conference of the Parties (COP27) climate summit in Egypt on his way to Bali, Indonesia, for the Group of 20 meeting and a planned sit-down with China’s Xi Jinping.

In August, Biden signed the largest U.S. investment in fighting climate change ever, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). That puts him on stronger footing on the global stage than at last year’s COP26 gathering in Scotland, when American commitments to carbon reduction weren’t backed by law.

Four themes color Biden’s trip: Russia’s war in Ukraine, escalating trade and security tensions with China, the potential for a global recession in the coming months and the existential problem of climate change.

“The climate crisis is about human security, economic security, environmental security, national security and the very life of the planet,” Biden said in his address to the summit.

Biden apologized to the group for the U.S. pulling out of the Paris Climate Accord — and its global-warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (equivalent to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) — which the country did briefly under President Donald Trump. In a remark that garnered speech-pausing applause from the audience, Biden said the U.S. commitment to the global effort, struck in Paris in 2015 and reaffirmed each year, is apparent in the climate-focused IRA.

Biden also highlighted a proposal that would require large federal contractors to develop carbon-reduction targets and disclose their greenhouse gas emissions, by which the administration hopes to use the federal government’s purchasing power to slow the impacts on climate from the private sector and bolster vulnerable supply chains.

“As the world’s largest customer, with more than $650 billion in spending last year, the United States government is putting our money where our mouth is to strengthen accountability for climate risk and resilience,” he said.

Talks with China still loom

Biden’s other task is to convince the summit participants of the U.S. commitment to engage with China, not only on trade and security matters, but also as part of an alliance between the world’s two top polluters to deliver on their carbon-reduction plans and show measurable progress. The U.S. has said it can reach net-zero emissions by 2050; China’s target date is 2060. Both countries have said they can show progress as soon as 2030, but some observers say time may be running out to hit that marker.

Related: China says Pelosi’s Taiwan visit hurt climate talks with U.S.; Biden official says Xi neglects formal engagement

At the start of the COP27 summit, U.N. chief Antonio Guterres called for a historic agreement — or “climate solidarity pact” — between developed and emerging economies. The flagship climate conference runs Nov. 6-18.

The U.S. and China, the world’s two largest economies and top greenhouse-gas emitters, “have a particular responsibility to join efforts to make this pact a reality,” Guterres said earlier this week.

A domestic-policy win

Biden used Democrats’ better-than-projected midterm-election results as an opportunity to reassure the world that the U.S. is committed to doing its part to address threats to the planet as a whole, including climate change.

“If the United States tomorrow were to, quote, withdraw from the world, a lot of things would change around the world. A whole lot would change,” Biden said in remarks at a press conference on Nov. 9, the day after the election.

The IRA’s $375 billion commitment to climate efforts, including manufacturing and purchasing incentives for electric vehicles
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+3.47%

F,
+2.26%,
tax breaks for home solar and a boost to manufacturers who green up their operations, will provide Biden with leverage as he works to convince other countries to strengthen their own efforts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.

Current and former Biden climate officials told the Associated Press that the IRA was crafted in a way that will make it difficult for a future Republican Congress or president to reverse it. That’s in part because of the law’s tax incentives, which are the sort of low-tax strategies normally favored by Republicans, and because much of the advancing green technology would bring jobs to strongly Republican states.

Also read: Some 75% of surveyed Americans would jump at a ‘green’ job in solar, wind or EVs, which tend to pay 21% more

Republicans won’t have a veto-proof majority in the new Congress, even if the GOP ends up with an advantage of a few seats. And even if a Republican wins the White House in 2024, the tax credits will be in place and will already be spurring industry, said Samantha Gross, head of climate and energy studies at the centrist Brookings Institution.

“It’s a lot of tax credits and goodies that make it hard to repeal,” Gross said.

At the climate negotiations in Egypt, Biden’s special climate envoy, John Kerry, said, “Most of what we’re doing cannot be changed by anyone else who comes to Washington, because most of what we do is in the private sector. The marketplace has made its decision to do what we need to do.”

Still, it won’t be all smooth sailing for Biden. Republicans, who as of Friday were close to clinching a modest advantage in the House (control of the Senate will likely hinge on a runoff election in Georgia), have said they will work to repeal parts of the law and advance their own climate and energy bill. They have accused Biden of contributing to rising energy prices by blocking more drilling of U.S. fossil fuels
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Those fossil fuels are the major contributor to climate change.

While Biden may be moving slower than Republicans would like when it comes to permitting, he has in fact called for more oil drilling to help calm energy markets during the Russia-Ukraine crisis and has even chastised profitable oil companies for not releasing more product. It’s a narrow line for the president to walk and in doing so, he has raised the ire of some environmental groups.

Related: Biden tightens methane emissions rule, but still wants more U.S. oil for now

Still, Biden argues there is scope for both near-term emergency energy policies and a long-term commitment to the transition from oil and gas.

“Russia’s war only enhances the urgency of the need to transition the world off its dependence on fossil fuels,” Biden said Friday. “[N]o action can be taken without a nation understanding that it can’t use energy as a weapon and hold the global economy hostage.”

Outside the U.S., there are also concerns that rising energy costs and a looming recession could dampen resolve to transition to cleaner energy. Germany has dipped back into heavy-polluting coal markets to ensure it has enough power for the cold winter ahead.

Methane remains a target

Efforts are under way at the COP27 summit to keep attention on methane, a more intense but shorter-lasting greenhouse gas than carbon emissions.

On Friday, the Biden administration detailed what it calls a “super-emitter response program” that would require oil and natural-gas
NG00,
-4.63%
operators to respond to credible third-party reports of high-volume methane leaks.

With an updated methane initiative, proposed Environmental Protection Agency rules first floated last year now target all drilling sites, including smaller wells.

The EPA estimates that in 2030, the proposal would reduce methane from covered fossil-fuel sources by 87% from 2005 levels.

Related: Jeff Bezos helping fund U.N. effort to tag and alert methane emitters with data from space

The U.S. government also released a new draft report this year about how climate change is affecting America. The report determined that over the past 50 years, the U.S. has warmed 68% faster than the planet as a whole.

Since 1970, the continental U.S. has experienced 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, well above the average for the planet, according to a draft of the National Climate Assessment, which is the U.S. government’s definitive report on the effects of climate change and represents a range of federal agencies.

The effects of human-caused climate change on the United States “are already far-reaching and worsening,” the draft report says, but every added amount of warming that can be avoided or delayed will reduce harmful effects.

The Associated Press contributed.

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November 11, 2022
Live Q&A: Ask us about the midterm election results, and what comes next

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MarketWatch readers: Ask our Washington bureau chief Robert Schroeder about the results of Tuesday’s midterm elections — and what comes next — during a live, dynamic session beginning at 11 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday.

Before the Q&A starts, please start leaving your questions and comments here and let us know what’s on your mind.

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November 9, 2022
Wells are running dry in drought-weary Southwest as foreign-owned farms guzzle water to feed cattle overseas | CNN

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La Paz County, Arizona
CNN
—

Workers with the water district in Wenden, Arizona, saw something remarkable last year as they slowly lowered a camera into the drought-stricken town’s well: The water was moving.

But the aquifer which sits below the small desert town in the southwestern part of the state is not a river; it’s a massive, underground reservoir which stores water built up over thousands of years. And that water is almost always still.

Gary Saiter, a longtime resident and head of the Wenden Water Improvement District, said the water was moving because it was being pumped rapidly out of the ground by a neighboring well belonging to Al Dahra, a United Arab Emirates-based company farming alfalfa in the Southwest.

Al Dahra did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.

“The well guys and I have never seen anything like this before,” Saiter told CNN. The farm was “pumping and it was sucking the water through the aquifer.”

Groundwater is the lifeblood of the rural Southwest, but just as the Colorado River Basin is in crisis, aquifers are rapidly depleting from decades of overuse, worsening drought and rampant agricultural growth.

Residents and farms pull water from the same underground pools, and as the water table declines, the thing determining how long a well lasts is how deeply it was drilled.

Now frustration is growing in Arizona’s La Paz County, as shallower wells run dry amid the Southwest’s worst drought in 1,200 years. Much of the frustration is pointed at the area’s huge, foreign-owned farms growing thirsty crops like alfalfa, which ultimately get shipped to feed cattle and other livestock overseas.

“You can’t take water and export it out of the state, there’s laws about that,” said Arizona geohydrologist Marvin Glotfelty, a well-drilling expert. “But you can take ‘virtual’ water and export it; alfalfa, cotton, electricity or anything created in part from the use of water.”

Residents and local officials say lax groundwater laws give agriculture the upper hand, allowing farms to pump unlimited water as long as they own or lease the property to drill wells into. In around 80% of the state, Arizona has no laws overseeing how much water corporate megafarms are using, nor is there any way for the state to track it.

But rural communities in La Paz County know the water is disappearing beneath their feet.

Shallow, residential wells in the county started drying up in 2015, local officials say, and deeper municipal well levels have steadily declined. In Salome, local water utility owner Bill Farr told CNN his well – which supplies water to more than 200 customers, including the local schools – is “nearing the end of its useful life.”

And in Wenden, water in the town well has been plummeting. Saiter told CNN the depth-to-water – how deep below the surface the top of the water table is – has dropped from about 100 feet in the late 1950s to about 540 feet in 2022, already far beyond what an average residential well can reach. Saiter is anxious the farms’ rapid water use could push the water table too low for the town well to draw safe water from.

La Paz County supervisor Holly Irwin told CNN getting the state to act on – or even acknowledge – the region’s dwindling water supply has been a “frustrating” yearslong battle which has left her community feeling “forgotten.”

Middle East agriculture companies “have depleted their [water], that’s why they are here,” Irwin said. “That’s what angers people the most. We should be taking care of our own, and we just allow them to come in, purchase property and continue to punch holes in the ground.”

In 2018, Saudi Arabia finalized a ban on growing thirsty crops like alfalfa and hay to feed livestock and cattle. The reason was simple: the arid Middle East – also struggling with climate change-fueled drought – is running out of water, and agriculture is a huge consumer.

But vast dairy operations are a point of national pride in the Middle East, according to Eckart Woertz, director of the Germany-based GIGA Institute for Middle East Studies. So, they needed to find water somewhere else.

“They have all their cows there and they need feeding. That feedstock comes from abroad,” Woertz told CNN.

Valued at $14.3 billion, the Almarai Company – which owns about 10,000 acres of farmland in Arizona under its subsidiary, Fondomonte – is one of the biggest players in the Middle East’s dairy supply. The company also owns about 3,500 acres in agriculture-heavy Southern California, according to public land records, where they use Colorado River water to irrigate crops.

Woertz said while most of the company’s cattle feed is purchased on the open market, Alamarai took the extra step of buying farmland abroad, as part of a growing trend in foreign-owned farmland in the US. Foreign-owned farmland in the West increased from around 1.25 million acres in 2010 to nearly three million acres in 2020, according to data from the US Department of Agriculture. In the Midwest, foreign-owned farmland has nearly quadrupled.

“It gives you that sense you’re closer to the source,” Woertz added. “The sense that you own land or lease land somewhere else and have direct bilateral access [to water] gives you a sense of maybe false security.”

In the high desert of Arizona, emerald-green fields stretch for miles alongside dry tumbleweeds and Saguaro cactus.

The Fondomonte-owned Vicksburg Ranch near Salome is massive. The company spent $47.5 million to buy nearly 10,000 acres of land there in 2014, and it leases additional farmland from the state.

Huge storage facilities were erected to hold the harvests. Rows of small houses were built for the farm’s workers, all surrounded by flowering desert shrubs. Tractor trailers filled with bales of alfalfa hay rumble down the highway, which local officials told CNN they had to repair because of the increased agricultural traffic.

The alfalfa on the trucks is eventually shipped to feed cattle in Saudi Arabia.

“They’ve definitely increased production,” Irwin said. “They’ve grown so much since they’ve been here.”

Almarai was transparent about why it wanted the land, according to an article on the purchase from Arab News: The transaction was part of “continuous efforts to improve and secure its supply of the highest quality alfalfa hay from outside the Kingdom to support its dairy business.”

“It is also in line with the Saudi government direction toward conserving local resources,” Arab News added.

Representatives of Fondomonte declined an interview request for this story, but Jordan Rose, the company’s Arizona attorney, provided a statement: “Fondomonte decided to invest in the southwest United States just as hundreds of other agricultural businesses have because of the high-quality soils, and climatic conditions that allow growth of some of the finest quality alfalfa in the world.”

Rose added the farm installed “the most technologically advanced conservation oriented watering systems available on the market.”

Indeed, there is nothing illegal about foreign-owned farming in the US. And many American farmers use the West’s water to grow crops which are eventually exported around the globe.

But amid the worst drought in centuries, residents and officials have questioned the merit of allowing countries, which themselves are running out of water, unlimited access to a resource as good as gold in the Southwest.

Cynthia Campbell, water resources management adviser for the city of Phoenix, has been watching the La Paz County water situation with frustration.

Phoenix currently gets most of its water from local rivers and the Central Arizona Project, which diverts Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. But it could use rural groundwater as a safety net in the coming years if the city’s primary sources are further restricted.

That is, if there is any groundwater left by then.

“We are literally exporting our economy overseas,” Campbell said. “I’m sorry, but there’s no Saudi Arabian milk coming back to Southern California or Arizona. The value of that agricultural output is not coming through in value to the US.”

Despite the ever-looming water crisis, people are still drawn to small Southwest towns like Wenden and Salome because of the low home prices and the freedom of desert living.

While housing costs in the country rocket upward, rural Arizona has remained a stubbornly affordable place to live. Homes cost between $30,000 and $40,000, and residential taxes paid to the county are below $300 per year, Saiter, the head of Wenden’s water district and a longtime resident, told CNN.

“People are able to afford to live here, versus Phoenix,” Gary’s wife, De Vona Saiter, told CNN. Median incomes in the county are low, “but you can still have a beautiful life.”

The Saiters’ house and rental properties around town – as well as De Vona’s mother Gloria Kaisor’s home down the street – are decorated with hand-drawn art, gardens and antiques.

Kaisor is a longtime resident who first moved to Wenden with her family in the 1960s. After living in Phoenix for years, she gravitated back to the rural area.

“This is home,” Kaisor said. “You don’t hear a noise. It’s quiet. I don’t want to be around a lot of people. You can do whatever you want.”

Yet the impacts of living near a corporate farm are starting to pile up.

Kaisor’s home was inundated with silty, wet mud this summer. Rainfall runoff from a recent monsoon flood carried it from the farm right into Wenden. Gary Saiter believes Al Dahra farm staff have rerouted natural waterways, forcing the rainfall into town rather than out into the desert washes.

Kaisor and her neighbors’ fences are reinforced with sheet metal to try to stop mud and water from coming into their houses, but Kaisor was trapped in her house during a storm earlier this year.

“The whole property was full of mud,” De Vona Saiter said.

Al Dahra did not respond to CNN’s questions for this story, including questions about its water usage, the uptick in residential flooding and potential rerouting of natural waterways.

The company did provide a statement to the Arizona Republic for a story published in 2019: “Water resources in Arizona must be managed wisely in order to preserve our quality of life and to protect the state’s economic health,” Al Dahra said. “The company is fully committed to Arizona and plans to remain here for the long-term.”

Living near the Al Dahra farm also brings more frequent and alarming drought-related impacts.

When it gets windy, a “dirt wall” of soil and dust whips up from the alfalfa fields, exacerbating the Saiters’ allergies. And most noticeably, the ground is literally sinking as the water below the surface gets pumped out.

The floor in De Vona’s shop has sunk a couple inches, she said, and the ground around one well casing has sunk about a foot; so much the wellhead needed to be cut and resized.

With all of this, Gary Saiter doesn’t care if the farm is owned by a company overseas. The way he sees it, it doesn’t make much of a difference who owns the farm; he just wishes they were better neighbors.

“I am kind of ambivalent about the Saudis,” Saiter said. “You can’t control where people sell stuff, and it’s going to go somewhere.”

“I just don’t like the crops they’re growing and the water they’re pumping,” he added.

Kari Avila, superintendent and athletics director for Salome High School, believes the farms are providing local economic benefits. Rose, Fondomonte’s Arizona attorney, told CNN in an email the company is the fourth-largest employer in the county.

“They employ a lot of people,” Avila told CNN. “If they weren’t farming it, someone else would be. A lot of people are upset it’s not Americans farming.”

Avila praised the farms for their internship programs and career fairs. Last year, Al Dahra donated an irrigation pump and generator to water Salome’s high school fields, which had been drying up. Avila said the pump installation for the field was fast and took just a few weeks.

But even as the companies are trying to invest in the area, many still question whether those benefits are worth it as water disappears.

“It’s great,” Irwin, the La Paz County supervisor said, “but if you can’t turn your faucet on in five years, that sh*t’s not going to matter.”

The reason some rural residents feel powerless about the fate of their groundwater is because they say Arizona’s state lawmakers have thus far not acted to protect it.

The last time the state passed regulations around groundwater was in 1980, with a law creating certain zones in mostly urban areas, where officials had to ensure they were replenishing underground aquifers and not pumping them dry.

The laws governing the so-called active management areas, or AMAs, are strong compared to groundwater laws in other Southwest states, said Kathleen Ferris, a former top state water official and senior researcher at Arizona State University’s Kyl Center for Water Policy.

But “outside of the AMAs, not so much,” Ferris told CNN.

About 80% of the state falls outside the active management areas, with no restrictions on how much groundwater can be pumped and no way to monitor it.

“It can’t get any worse” than Arizona’s lack of regulation on rural groundwater, Ferris said. “Let’s put it that way.”

Water officials can measure whether water levels in the aquifers are going up or down, but because groundwater is so lightly regulated in rural areas, they don’t have enough data to answer a crucial question: Exactly how much water is left?

“That is one of the challenges of our state; you can’t manage what you don’t measure,” said top Arizona water official Tom Buschatzke, the director of the state’s Department of Water Resources. “We do the best we can with the data and estimated data that we have, but it really begs questions about how much benefit we can really provide.”

As the West’s water crisis grows more intense, groundwater reform has become a flashpoint in this year’s election campaigns.

Arizona attorney general candidate Kris Mayes, a Democrat, has seized on the state’s practice of leasing public land to corporate farms, including more than 6,000 acres leased to Fondomonte, according to the state land department.

A recent investigation by the Arizona Republic found Fondomonte – the second-largest agricultural lessor of Arizona land – is paying the state a heavily discounted rate which does not take their water usage into account.

Mayes said she thinks the leases violate the state constitution and has vowed to cancel them if she’s elected.

“It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” Mayes told Irwin in September, standing outside Fondomonte’s farm. “We can get these leases canceled, and we should. We are essentially giving our water away for free to a Saudi corporation, and that has to come to an end.”

The Arizona State Land Department is studying the state’s water resources in western Arizona, department spokesman Bill Fathauer told CNN. But he added it does not have the authority to implement additional groundwater restrictions.

“The comprehensive data determined from these studies will allow the Department to make an informed decision about not only future land use in these areas but also help determine what the future value of the land is as well,” Fathauer said in an email.

The kind of sweeping water reforms Arizona needs must ultimately come from the state legislature, says outgoing state House member Regina Cobb, a Republican.

For years, Cobb tried to advance bills to allow local officials to regulate their aquifers. The bills never got a committee hearing, Cobb said, never mind making it to the floor for a vote. CNN reached out to Gov. Doug Ducey and top Arizona lawmakers in the state House and Senate for comment; none responded.

As the Colorado River shrinks and Arizona’s share of the water continues to be cut, Cobb told CNN the state’s approach to groundwater has been unthinkable.

“Why are we allowing a foreign company to come into Arizona – which is drought-stricken right now – and have a sweetheart deal [on leases], when we are trying to conserve as much water as we can?” she asked.

“It boggles my mind.”

Read more:

The Colorado River provides drinking water and electricity to 40 million people. As its supply dwindles, a crisis looms

As California’s big cities fail to rein in their water use, rural communities are already tapped out

The West’s historic drought is threatening hydropower at Hoover Dam

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November 5, 2022
A robot is killing weeds by zapping them with electricity | CNN Business

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London
CNN Business
—

On a field in England, three robots have been given a mission: to find and zap weeds with electricity before planting seeds in the cleared soil.

The robots — named Tom, Dick and Harry — were developed by Small Robot Company to rid land of unwanted weeds with minimal use of chemicals and heavy machinery.

The startup has been working on its autonomous weed killers since 2017, and this April launched Tom, its first commercial robot which is now operational on three UK farms. The other robots are still in the prototype stage, undergoing testing.

Small Robot says robot Tom can scan 20 hectares (49 acres) a day, collecting data which is then used by Dick, a “crop-care” robot, to zap weeds. Then it’s robot Harry’s turn to plant seeds in the weed-free soil.

Using the full system, once it is up and running, farmers could reduce costs by 40% and chemical usage by up to 95%, the company says.

According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization six million metric tons of pesticides were traded globally in 2018, valued at $38 billion.

“Our system allows farmers to wean their depleted, damaged soils off a diet of chemicals,” says Ben Scott-Robinson, Small Robot’s co-founder and CEO.

Small Robot says it has raised over £7 million ($9.9 million). Scott-Robinson says the company hopes to launch its full system of robots by 2023, which will be offered as a service at a rate of around £400 ($568) per hectare. The monitoring robot is placed at a farm first and the weeding and planting robots delivered only when the data shows they’re needed.

To develop the zapping technology, Small Robot partnered with another UK-based startup, RootWave.

“It creates a current that goes through the roots of the plant through the soil and then back up, which completely destroys the weed,” says Scott-Robinson. “We can go to each individual plant that is threatening the crop plants and take it out.”

“It’s not as fast as it would be if you went out to spray the entire field,” he says. “But you have to bear in mind we only have to go into the parts of the field where the weeds are.” Plants that are neutral or beneficial to the crops are left untouched.

Small Robot calls this “per plant farming” — a type of precise agriculture where every plant is accounted for and monitored.

For Kit Franklin, an agricultural engineering lecturer from Harper Adams University, efficiency remains a hurdle.

“There is no doubt in my mind that the electrical system works,” he tells CNN Business. “But you can cover hundreds of hectares a day with a large-scale sprayer … If we want to go into this really precise weed killing system, we have to realize that there is an output reduction that is very hard to overcome.”

But Franklin believes farmers will adopt the technology if they can see a business case.

“There’s a realization that farming in an environmentally friendly way is also a way of farming in an efficient way,” he says. “Using less inputs, where and when we need them, is going to save us money and it’s going to be good for the environment and the perception of farmers.”

As well as reducing the use of chemicals, Small Robot wants to improve soil quality and biodiversity.

“If you treat a living environment like an industrial process, then you are ignoring the complexity of it,” Scott-Robinson says. “We have to change farming now, otherwise there won’t be anything to farm.”

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October 20, 2022
Billions of snow crabs have disappeared from the waters around Alaska. Scientists say overfishing is not the cause | CNN

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CNN
—

The Alaska snow crab harvest has been canceled for the first time ever after billions of the crustaceans have disappeared from the cold, treacherous waters of the Bering Sea in recent years.

The Alaska Board of Fisheries and North Pacific Fishery Management Council announced last week that the population of snow crab in the Bering Sea fell below the regulatory threshold to open up the fishery.

But the actual numbers behind that decision are shocking: The snow crab population shrank from around 8 billion in 2018 to 1 billion in 2021, according to Benjamin Daly, a researcher with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

“Snow crab is by far the most abundant of all the Bering Sea crab species that is caught commercially,” Daly told CNN. “So the shock and awe of many billions missing from the population is worth noting – and that includes all the females and babies.”

The Bristol Bay red king crab harvest will also be closed for the second year in a row, the agencies announced.

Officials cited overfishing as their rationale for canceling the seasons. Mark Stichert, the groundfish and shellfish fisheries management coordinator with the state’s fish and game department, said that more crab were being fished out of the oceans than could be naturally replaced.

“So there were more removals from the population than there were inputs,” Stichert explained at Thursday’s meeting.

Between the surveys conducted in 2021 and 2022, he said, mature male snow crabs declined about 40%, with an estimated 45 million pounds left in the entire Bering Sea.

“It’s a scary number, just to be clear,” Stichert said.

But calling the Bering Sea crab population “overfished” – a technical definition that triggers conservation measures – says nothing about the cause of its collapse.

“We call it overfishing because of the size level,” Michael Litzow, the Kodiak lab director for NOAA Fisheries, told CNN. “But it wasn’t overfishing that caused the collapse, that much is clear.”

Litzow says human-caused climate change is a significant factor in the crabs’ alarming disappearance.

Snow crabs are cold-water species and found overwhelmingly in areas where water temperatures are below 2 degrees Celsius, Litzow says. As oceans warm and sea ice disappears, the ocean around Alaska is becoming inhospitable for the species.

“There have been a number of attribution studies that have looked at specific temperatures in the Bering Sea or Bering Sea ice cover in 2018, and in those attribution studies, they’ve concluded that those temperatures and low-ice conditions in the Bering sea are a consequence of global warming,” Litzow said.

Temperatures around the Arctic have warmed four times faster than the rest of the planet, scientists have reported. Climate change has triggered a rapid loss in sea ice in the Arctic region, particularly in Alaska’s Bering Sea, which in turn has amplified global warming.

“Closing the fisheries due to low abundance and continuing research are the primary efforts to restore the populations at this point,” Ethan Nichols, an assistant area management biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, told CNN.

Stichert also said that there might be some “optimism for the future” as a few, small juvenile snow crabs are starting to appear in the system. But it could be at least three to four more years before they hit maturity and contribute to the regrowth of the population.

“It is a glimmer of optimism,” Litzow said. “That’s better than not seeing them, for sure. We get a little bit warmer every year and that variability is higher in Arctic ecosystems and high latitude ecosystems, and so if we can get a cooler period that would be good news for snow crab.”

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October 16, 2022
Food prices are still surging — here’s what’s getting more expensive | CNN Business

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New York
CNN Business
—

Prices at the grocery store continued to soar last month, adding even more pressure to shoppers’ wallets.

The food at home index, a proxy for grocery store prices, increased 0.7% in September from the month prior and a stunning 13% over the last year, according to new government data released Thursday.

Just about everything got more expensive in September.

Fruits and vegetables surged 1.6% for the month, while cereals and bakery products rose 0.9%. Other groceries increased 0.5% in September, following a 1.1% increase in August.

Meats, poultry, fish and eggs rose 0.4% over the month and beverages increased 0.6%.

Prices on many of these items are up double digits annually.

A number of factors have contributed to the surge in prices. Producers say they’re paying more for labor and packaging materials. Extreme weather, including droughts and flooding, and disease, such as the deadly avian flu, have been hurting crops and killing egg-laying hens, squeezing supplies.

“The environment clearly is still very inflationary with a lot of supply chain challenges across the industry,” Pepsi

(PEP)CEO Ramon Laguarta said on an earnings call Wednesday. The company’s prices increased 17% annually.

Meanwhile, demand is high. Consumers may be able to pull back on some discretionary items, but they have to eat. Many people are still working from home and consuming more of their meals there than they did before the pandemic.

This imbalance between supply and demand means companies can pass along higher prices to shoppers without sales plunging.

But higher prices at the grocery store are forcing customers to make some trade offs.

Many shoppers are buying fewer products, switching to cheaper private-label brands and pulling back on discretionary items.

More than one million new households have shopped at discount grocery chain Aldi for the first in the past year, according to the company.

Walmart

(WMT) said recently that high levels of food inflation are impacting customers’ ability to purchase discretionary goods such as clothing and furniture.

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October 13, 2022
Suspect in deaths of California family spent almost a decade in prison | CNN

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CNN
—

Four kidnapped California family members – including a baby girl – were found dead in a farm area Wednesday, authorities said, two days after they were abducted from their business in a case where investigators have detained a suspect but not announced a motive.

The bodies of 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri, her parents Jasleen Kaur and Jasdeep Singh, and her uncle Amandeep Singh were recovered by authorities Wednesday evening after a farmworker alerted them to remains in an orchard in central California’s Merced County, authorities said.

The discovery, coming a day after a suspect in the case was detained, was announced by a visibly emotional sheriff who said the killings were “completely and totally senseless.”

“There’s a special place in hell for this guy,” Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said Wednesday night, referring to the suspect.

“A whole family (was) wiped out, and we still don’t know why,” Warnke said.

The suspect, identified by the Merced Sheriff’s Office as 48-year-old Jesus Manuel Salgado, remains in custody but has not been charged.

Salgado is “suspected of involvement in the kidnapping and death of the four victims,” Alexandra Britton, a spokeswoman for the sheriff’s department, told CNN on Thursday.

Salgado was previously in prison for nearly a decade after being convicted of attempted false imprisonment, first degree robbery and possession of a controlled substance, according to records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

The family was kidnapped at gunpoint – an abduction recorded on surveillance video – from their trucking business Monday morning in Merced, a city between Modesto and Fresno in central California, authorities said. Investigators learned they were missing after a family vehicle was found abandoned and on fire that morning, authorities said.

Police took the suspect into custody Tuesday after his family told law enforcement he admitted to being involved in the kidnapping, Britton said.

“The circumstances around this, when we are able to release everything, should anger the hell out of you,” Warnke said.

The suspect attempted suicide sometime before he was taken into custody, and he has been receiving medical attention, Warnke said.

Warnke did not say how the family was slain. He said it appears they were killed where they were found, and killed before the sheriff’s department was notified Monday that the family was missing.

Salgado is the main suspect in the killings, though investigators believe others may have been involved, according to Warnke, who did not elaborate on the extent of that involvement.

“I fully believe that we will uncover and find out that there was more than just him involved,” Warnke said.

He has been providing information to investigators, and officials are working with him to identify a motive, Warnke said.

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‘Our worst fears were realized’: Sheriff makes announcement about missing family

In the previous case, Salgado was sentenced to 11 years in January 2007. He was released on parole in June 2015, and his parole supervision ended in Jun 2018, the department told CNN in an email.

CNN is working to identify Salgado’s legal representative for comment.

Earlier Wednesday, authorities released surveillance footage of the kidnapping at the family’s Merced trucking business Monday morning.

The video shows Jasdeep Singh arriving at the business’ parking lot at 8:30 a.m., followed by Amandeep Singh arriving nine minutes later.

Shortly before 9 a.m., Jasdeep is seen encountering a man outside the business. The man carried a trash bag and pulled out what appeared to be a firearm, the video shows.

Several minutes later, Jasdeep and Amandeep are seen with their hands tied behind their backs as they get into a truck. Shortly after, the truck leaves and returns six minutes later.

Upon returning, the suspect enters the business and exits with a gun in hand as Jasleen Kaur holds 8-month-old Aroohi and walks in front of the suspect to the truck.

Later Monday, a farmer found two of the victims’ cell phones on a road, authorities said. At one point, the farmer answered the phone and spoke with a relative of the victims.

Before the bodies were found Wednesday evening, a family member had urged people to come forward with any information in the case.

“This is a peace-loving family and running a small business in the Merced area,” pleaded Balvinder, a family member. “This is something that nobody is prepared for dealing with … we are just hoping and praying every moment.”

On Tuesday morning, investigators learned that an ATM card belonging to one of the victims was used at a bank in Atwater, California, which is about 9 miles northwest of Merced, the sheriff’s office said.

It is unclear whether the man in custody is the person who used that card, Britton said.

The suspect in custody was convicted in 2005 in a case involving armed robbery and false imprisonment and was paroled in 2015, Warnke said.

In that previous case, the man acted alone and knew the victims, according to Warnke.

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October 6, 2022
Biden issues second veto of presidency to save his administration’s hallmark water rule | CNN Politics

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CNN
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President Joe Biden on Thursday vetoed a resolution that would have rescinded his administration’s hallmark water rule, with proponents of the rollback arguing that the regulation places a burden on the agriculture community by being too restrictive in defining what is a navigable waterway.

Biden’s announcement marked both the second veto of his presidency and the second veto he’s issued in recent weeks, illustrating how power dynamics in Washington have shifted since Republicans became the majority party in the House of Representatives at the beginning of this year.

“I just vetoed a bill that attempted to block our Administration from protecting our nation’s waterways – a resource millions of Americans depend on – from destruction and pollution,” the president wrote in a tweet on Thursday. “Let me be clear: Every American has a right to clean water. This veto protects that right.”

I just vetoed a bill that attempted to block our Administration from protecting our nation’s waterways – a resource millions of Americans depend on – from destruction and pollution.

Let me be clear: Every American has a right to clean water.

This veto protects that right. pic.twitter.com/ozfOVu5HEq

— President Biden (@POTUS) April 6, 2023

When the White House issued a veto threat over the Republican-led resolution, the administration argued that the legislation would “leave Americans without a clear ‘waters of the United States’ definition.”

“The increased uncertainty would threaten economic growth, including for agriculture, local economies, and downstream communities. Farmers would be left wondering whether artificially irrigated areas remain exempt or not. Construction crews would be left wondering whether their waterfilled gravel pits remain exempt or not,” a statement of administration policy said in advance of the veto.

By comparison, proponents of the resolution argued that Biden’s water rule constituted overreach by the executive branch and say it creates burdensome red tape that would lead to confusion within a variety of industries, including agriculture.

“By vetoing this Congressional Review Act resolution of disapproval, President Biden is ignoring the will of a bipartisan majority in Congress, leaving millions of Americans in limbo, and crippling future energy and infrastructure projects with red tape,” West Virginia Republican Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, who led the joint resolution in the Senate, said in a statement on Thursday. “There’s a reason those who work in agriculture, building, mining, and small businesses of all kinds across America strongly supported our effort to block the Biden waters rule, and I’m disappointed the president chose to stand by his blatant executive overreach.”

The waterways resolution cleared the House in March and the final Senate vote was 53-43, with Democratic Sens. Catherine Cortez Masto and Jacky Rosen of Nevada, Jon Tester of Montana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema joining Republicans in support of the legislation.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell released a statement in support of the bill on Wednesday saying, “If the President vetoes it, Americans will need to hope the Supreme Court makes it clear that these EPA bureaucrats are way outside the authority that Congress actually provided in the Clean Water Act.”

Manchin, who backed the repeal, was asked last month if he would vote to overturn the administration’s new EPA rule. He said: “Oh yeah, that’s ridiculous. It can’t be just a ditch that dries up. They’ll grab everything and make it miserable for you. The overreach.”

Earlier this year, Biden issued the first veto of his presidency on another environment-focused resolution which aimed to overturn a retirement investment rule that allows managers of retirement funds to consider the impact of climate change and other environmental, social and governance factors when picking investments.

Republican lawmakers led the push to pass the resolution through Congress, arguing the rule is “woke” policy that pushes a liberal agenda on Americans and will hurt retirees’ bottom lines, while Democrats say it’s not about ideology and will help investors.

Biden has frequently promised to veto legislation passed by the GOP-controlled House he disagrees with. Even before Republicans took control of that chamber, Biden often mentioned his ability to nix their priorities. “The good news is I’ll have a veto pen,” he told a group of donors in Chicago just days before November’s midterm elections.

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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April 12, 2021
States accelerate efforts to block Chinese purchases of agricultural land | CNN Politics

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Washington
CNN
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A growing number of states are considering or have passed measures this legislative term to ban “foreign adversaries” and foreign entities – specifically China – from buying farmland.

Proponents of the laws, mostly Republicans but some Democrats as well, have frequently cited concerns about food security and the need to protect military bases and other sensitive installations. But the moves have stoked anxieties among some experts on US-Chinese relations, including those who see echoes of past discriminatory laws in the United States like the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Florida last month joined a list of at least seven other states – including Virginia, North Dakota, Montana and Arkansas – to pass variations of such bills this session, according to the National Agricultural Law Center (NALC), which is tracking the issue and conducts research on agricultural and food law. Similar measures are percolating in more than two dozen states and there’s a bill in Congress that seeks to federalize the issue, the NALC said.

States have previously sought to limit foreign investment, said Micah Brown, a staff attorney at the NALC. What’s new, Brown says, is that some lawmakers are taking aim at specific countries and their governments.

“2023 is really swinging for the fences here, with a majority of states having some kind of proposal, at least one proposal,” Brown told CNN.

Of slightly more than 40 million acres of agricultural held by foreign investors in the United States, China held less than 1% of that land – or 383,935 acres – as of the end of 2021, according to a report from the US Department of Agriculture.

Florida’s law, signed on May 8, prohibits most citizens from “foreign countries of concern” from purchasing land on or within 10 miles of any “military installation or critical infrastructure facility,” including seaports, airports and power plants. It was signed alongside a different bill that bans internet applications like TikTok on Florida government devices, a similar area of focus for state politicians who have concerns about Chinese influence.

The foreign countries of concern that are named include China, Russia, Cuba, North Korea and Iran, along with agencies and governments operating on their behalf. In public remarks, governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis repeatedly called out China.

“Today, Florida makes it very clear: We don’t want the (Chinese Communist Party) in the Sunshine State. We want to maintain this as the ‘Free State of Florida.’ That’s exactly what these bills are doing,” DeSantis said at a bill signing in May.

Following the bill’s passage, a group of Chinese citizens who live and work in Florida, along with a real estate company with primarily Chinese and Chinese-American clients, sued state officials, alleging the law would violate their equal protection and due process guarantees under the US Constitution. CNN has reached out to the governor’s office for comment.

Virginia’s legislation doesn’t name China, though Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin has specifically cited the CCP in advocating for the new law. Montana’s applies to “foreign adversaries” as designated by the US Commerce Department, a list that includes China, Iran, North Korea and Russia.

Brown said the 2023 laws are part of a larger “political flashpoint” prompted out of concerns over Chinese companies attempting to build agricultural sites near military bases in North Dakota and Texas. States including Arkansas and Indiana already had laws restricting certain foreign investments prior to this year’s legislative push.

In North Dakota, a US subsidiary of Chinese company Fufeng Group attempted to build a wet corn milling plant in Grand Forks that would have sat near an Air Force base there and thus pose what the Department of the Air Force called a “significant threat to national security.”

The head of Fufeng’s US operation denied the company has a “direct relationship” with the Chinese government in an interview with the Grand Forks Herald last year.

“We’ve got lots of places in North Dakota they could have built that plant without being a security risk, but instead, they chose to buy land right next to an Air Force base,” North Dakota Republican state Rep. Lawrence Klemin, who co-sponsored the state’s bill, told CNN. “We’ve got two Air Force bases in North Dakota, and we’ve got lots of places where we don’t have them, so why didn’t they do that?” Klemin’s bill was signed in April.

Texas is also considering a bill that would bar “hostile nations including China,” in the state from purchasing real property, like agricultural land, as Republican State. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst describes her legislation. The bill initially ignited controversy because it would have barred citizens of China and other adversarial countries from buying land in the state, though the bill was later amended to clarify that it would not apply to lawful permanent residents, US citizens and dual citizens and to include an exception for property considered “residence homestead.”

Several experts on US-China relations with whom CNN spoke warned against knee-jerk responses and called for lawmakers to act on evidence, not suspicion.

“I think there’s a good reason to want to keep control of strategic interests in one’s own country … but these bills about farmland, these bills about just property in general, to me, it’s transparent that they’re rooted in racism and xenophobia again because we’ve seen this before. It really isn’t the first time,” said Nancy Qian, a professor of economics at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management who has conducted research on US exclusion laws.

Yan Bennett, the assistant director of the Paul and Marcia Wythes Center on Contemporary China at Princeton University, noted that US farmland is appealing for China because the country has food security issues and does not have enough arable land for cultivation.

“When national security is threatened, yes, we need to take action,” Bennett told CNN. “But not every land purchase by a foreign government or a foreign national is a national security threat, so we need to make sure that we distinguish those purchases from those that are actual threats.”

An atmosphere of racism and anti-China sentiment threatens other US interests as well, such as possibly deterring Chinese students from wanting to come to the US and obtain advanced degrees, explained Robert Daly, the director of the Kissinger Institute on China and the United States at the Wilson Center.

“If we’re not careful that we are telling the world’s biggest talent pool that they’re an unwelcomed class or a reviled class here in the United States and that will also have implications for Chinese Americans,” Daly told CNN in February. “Real demonstrable security threats have to be met as such. I’m not saying that the Chinese Communist Party does not have plans and intentions that harm America’s interests – it does, and we need to go after those – but based on evidence.”

In response to efforts in Texas and other states that are considering barring some Chinese citizens from owning US land over national security concerns, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson said earlier this year that trade between the two countries is “mutually beneficial.”

“To overstretch the concept of national security and politicize economic, trade and investment issues runs counter to the principles of market economy and international trade rules, which undercuts international confidence in the US market environment,” spokesperson Mao Ning said at a news briefing in February.

Virginia state Sen. Ryan McDougle, a Republican and co-sponsor of his state’s new law, dismissed what he called “ridiculous” concerns about his bill perpetuating racism against Asian-Americans, telling CNN in February it is “focused on a country that has established hostility to the United States.”

In the near future, the Chinese spy balloon incident earlier this year will prompt increased attention to “the challenges that we are seeing from the CCP” – and thus the issue of Chinese farmland purchases in the US, predicted Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Washington Republican. The longtime China critic is sponsoring a bill in Congress that would that would ban the purchase of public or private agricultural land in the US by foreign nationals linked to the Chinese government.

“I think people are waking up to the fact that we need to be more aware of what’s going on and prevent something happening that we don’t want to see,” Newhouse said.

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April 12, 2021