By Todd C. Frankel 29 May 2015 ALONG THE SALTON SEA, CALIFORNIA (Washington Post) – The bone-dry lake bed burned crystalline and white in the midday sun. Ecologist Bruce Wilcox hopped out of his truck and bent down to scoop up a handful of the gleaming, crusty soil. Wilcox squeezed, then opened his fist. The […]

By Chris Clarke29 May 2015 (KCET) – Stick a fork in the Hidden Hills Solar Electric Generating System. The 500-megawatt solar power tower project proposed for the Charleston View area in Inyo County, then put on the back burner in 2013, will be canceled by its owner, Oakland-based BrightSource Energy. The news came in an […]

Desalination: Could one of California’s drought solutions backfire?

By Jessica Rosenthal20 May 2015 California (FOX News Radio) – The obvious solution to California’s drought is water. A lot of it. A NASA analysis late last year found the state needs 11 trillion gallons to get out of the drought. And if it’s not coming from the sky, water agencies, politicians and regulators have […]

California drought caused by global warming

By Greg Laden22 May 2015 (Science Blogs) – […] A paper just out in Geophysical Research Letters uses modeling and historic data to confirm that the current California drought is very likely an effect of climate change. The paper is “Temperature Impacts on the Water Year 2014 Drought in California“, by Shraddhanand Shukla, Mohammad Safeeq, […]

Vandals destroy dam, release 49 million gallons of water into San Francisco Bay – ‘It is an utterly senseless, destructive, and wasteful thing to do’

By Mario Sevilla22 May 2015 Fremont (KRON) – Fremont police say vandals attacked an inflatable dam on Alameda Creek that resulted in the loss of nearly 50 million gallons of water. Police believe that those responsible entered a restricted area sometime on Thursday morning and intentionally damaged the dam. “The dam, which is instrumental to […]

California’s growing concern: Crops raised with oil field water – ‘When I talk to growers, and they smell the oil field crap in that water, they assume the soil is taking care of this’

By Julie Cart2 May 2012 (Los Angeles Times) – Here in California’s thirsty farm belt, where pumpjacks nod amid neat rows of crops, it’s a proposition that seems to make sense: using treated oil field wastewater to irrigate crops. Oil giant Chevron recycles 21 million gallons of that water each day and sells it to […]

Religious zealot would like to talk to you for a minute about the California drought

By Ben Dreyfuss10 May 2015 (Mother Jones) – As you may know, there is a drought in California. The water? It’s gone! The state? It’s dry! The consequences? Very bad, indeed. Where did the water go? I have no idea. I’m not a private detective who specializes in missing water. Why did the water leave? […]

California looks to Australia for drought advice – ‘Their advice to us was: Conserve, conserve, conserve early to avoid pain later on’

By Chris Nichols9 May 2015 SACRAMENTO (UT San Diego) – Severe dry spells aren’t unique to California. Just ask Australia, where the Millennium Drought stretched from 1997 to 2009, devastating the southeastern portion of the country and forever changing how it uses water. For months now, water experts in California have asked their counterparts Down […]

Who controls California’s water?

By Nathanael Johnson11 May 2015 (Grist) – Like lots of people in drought-desiccated California, I have been hustling to educate myself about the power dynamics of water in the state. And so I read this appreciation of California water historian, Norris Hundley Jr., with great interest. It portrays Hundley as the historian whose picture is […]

Lawsuit seeks to halt California wastewater injections

By Richard Nemec 8 May 2015 (NGI) – A trio of environmental groups in California on Thursday filed a complaint in state Superior Court seeking to have declared illegal new state interim rules governing oil/gas operators’ use of wastewater injection wells (see Daily GPI, April 24). The lawsuit by Earthjustice on behalf of the Center […]

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