Southern California water dispute boils over [Wall Street Journal]
A
water war in Southern California could result in rates being driven up for
millions of customers, just as the state enters a third year of drought. The
San Diego County Water Authority is alleging in a lawsuit that its supplier,
the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, is gouging the county
on charges to deliver water through an aqueduct system. MWD officials say San
Diego agreed to the rates 10 years ago and is essentially suffering buyer's
remorse….The fight comes as drought in California is putting pressure on all
water agencies to stretch a scarce resource. Prolonged drought has also
afflicted the Colorado River basin, which provides water to millions of people
in California and in other Western states. While fights over evaporating water
resources are common, tensions have contributed to a rise in a once rare
phenomenon of local infighting, as opposed to the more common practice of
battles breaking out between different regions of the West, water experts say.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304173704579260291609054598?KEYWORDS=jim+carlton
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Environmental
advocates target possible flaws in EPA pesticide system [McClatchy News
Service]
The
honeybees that pollinate one-third of Americans’ daily diet are dying, and in
the eyes of some environmentalists one culprit may be a decades-old
Environmental Protection Agency system. The system is called “conditional
registration,” and it’s essentially a way to get pesticides on the market
quickly. But to environmentalists and other experts, the system has become too
loose, letting some potentially dangerous pesticides on the market, or letting
them stay there too long….The criticism of the EPA’s conditional registration
system is nothing new. A Government Accountability Office report from August,
for example, said the agency has a confusing recordkeeping system for tracking
pesticides – a problem the GAO first flagged in 1986. The recent report helped
revive claims that conditional registration is unsafe.
Industrial
meat bad, small farm good? It's not so simple [National Public Radio]
To
feed all 7 billion of us, address climate change and live longer, we all need
to eat less meat. From Al Gore to the Meatless Monday movement to Harvard
epidemiologists, that's been the resounding advice offered to consumers lately.
But hold up a minute, says Mario Herrero, the chief research scientist at
Australia's national science agency, the CSIRO…. Instead, it's important to see
the global livestock sector as a super diverse system of tiny backyards and
massive feedlots that defies generalizations,…It's also one of the takeaways of
a assessment of global livestock systems by Herrero published Monday in the
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Inside the vast dataset are
new calculations of how livestock use land, how efficiently they convert feed
into food for humans and their greenhouse gas emissions.
Commentary: Farm bill amendment
would hurt California farmers [Sacramento Bee]
If
you care about consumer safety, high food standards, the humane treatment of
animals, states’ rights or all of the above, you should vigorously oppose a little-known
provision in the yet-to-be-passed federal farm bill called the King amendment….
King, unavailable for an interview, cites the Commerce Clause, which, among
other things, allows Congress to regulate any interstate trade barriers that
might stunt the national economy. But this isn’t a trade barrier; it’s a safety
regulation. And this isn’t about the law; it’s about money. What King really
wants, obviously, is for Iowa, the nation’s largest egg producer, to access the
nation’s largest market, California. At California’s expense. Who cares what
Californians voted for?
Commentary: Why do we even need
a farm bill? [Washington Post]
House
and Senate conferees are reportedly close to agreement on a five-year farm bill
to replace the one that expired Sept. 30, 2012. According to much conventional
wisdom, this is cause for celebration…. Actually, Congress’s willingness to
debate ag policy at length is a sign of political health. The farm bill long
has been an irrational, subsidy-laden monstrosity. It’s about time somebody
challenged the ag lobby’s hammerlock on Capitol Hill. Why do we even need a
farm bill, with its billions in subsidized crop insurance and definitions of
“milk marketing orders” and “base acreage”? Is there something about farming,
as opposed to other businesses, that makes market economics uniquely
inapplicable?
Editorial: Plan to preserve
salmon crashes into other salmon [Record Searchlight]
…A
robust run of Sacramento River salmon this fall ended with what fishing
advocates at the Golden Gate Salmon Association complain is a disaster — the
dewatering of hundreds of nests of salmon eggs as the Bureau of Reclamation
cranked down releases from Shasta Dam…. So what got in the way of saving the
salmon? Other salmon. The fall run is the largest and most commercially
valuable on the Sacramento, but the scarce winter-run salmon are strictly
protected under the Endangered Species Act. The mandate to preserve a relative
handful of winter-run salmon — 29 nests still in the gravel, according to the
Golden Gate Salmon Association — stymied the change of flows and left as many
as 40 percent of the fall-run eggs stranded.
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