California almond growers look to future amidst water woes [Fox Business]
While reservoirs parch, almond growers are working to meet a continued surge in demand for their product. The state grows about 85% of the world’s supply, sending almonds to China and India. Many in the industry have been put between a rock and a hard place – largely depending on where they’re located – with those who have held water rights in the state the longest impacted the least. Woolf Farming & Processing President and CEO Stuart Woolf, whose family-owned business has operated on the west side of Fresno County since the mid-1940s, is near the “bottom” of priority rights. “You know, for the last couple of decades we’ve been losing our surface water; it’s been diverted for other things. So, we’re kind of used to not getting our water and trying to figure out how to do a workaround,” he told Fox Business. Chris Scheuring, senior counsel for the California Farm Bureau, said following Tuesday’s announcement that farmers are “discouraged” and “dismayed” by the state’s regulatory decisions. “In general, farmers understand drought and they understand lean rain years. That’s the business we’re in,” he said. “But they don’t understand the downward slide in water reliability we are facing in California, sort of on a systemic level.”
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/california-almond-growers-look-to-future-amidst-water-woes
‘Code red’: UN scientists warn of worsening global warming [The Associated Press]
Earth is getting so hot that temperatures in about a decade will probably blow past a level of warming that world leaders have sought to prevent, according to a report released Monday that the United Nations called a “code red for humanity.” “It’s just guaranteed that it’s going to get worse,” said report co-author Linda Mearns, a senior climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research. “Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.” Each of five scenarios for the future, based on how much carbon emissions are cut, passes the more stringent of two thresholds set in the 2015 Paris climate agreement. World leaders agreed then to try to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above levels in the late 19th century because problems mount quickly after that. The world has already warmed nearly 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since then. Under each scenario, the report said, the world will cross the 1.5-degree-Celsius warming mark in the 2030s, earlier than some past predictions. Warming has ramped up in recent years, data shows. In three scenarios, the world will also likely exceed 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-industrial times — the less stringent Paris goal — with far worse heat waves, droughts and flood-inducing downpours unless there are deep emissions cuts, the report said.
Trump told California to sweep the forest floors. What’s Biden’s plan to combat wildfires? [Sacramento Bee]
After four years of antagonism between Sacramento and Washington, the state has a friend in the White House — and, perhaps more importantly, a president who agrees with California’s leaders on the root cause of the wildfire crisis plaguing the West. Former President Donald Trump — like his successor — said Western forests have to be managed more aggressively to reduce fuel loads that have built up over the decades. Newsom signed a memorandum of understanding last year with the Trump administration in which each side promised to “thin” a half-million acres of forestland each year. But Biden, unlike Trump, says the country must address climate change and the lethal effect it’s having on the increasingly-flammable landscape of the West.
https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article253221348.html
Business Groups Call on Biden to Restart Trade Talks With China [Wall Street Journal]
Nearly three dozen of the nation’s most influential business groups—representing retailers, chip makers, farmers and others—are calling on the Biden administration to restart negotiations with China and cut tariffs on imports, saying they are a drag on the U.S. economy. In a Thursday letter to U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai and Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, the business groups contend that Beijing had met “important benchmarks and commitments” in the agreement, including opening markets to U.S. financial institutions and reducing some regulatory barriers to U.S. agricultural exports to China. The trade groups include some of Washington’s most influential big business associations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable, the National Retail Federation, the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Ozone containers pique interest of Napa Valley winemakers with goal of mitigating smoke taint [Napa Valley Register]
When the smoke and fire came earlier than expected last year in 2020, there wasn’t much winemaker Rebekah Wineburg thought she could do about it. “From the first moment, I decided we were going to do a complete harvest, but I didn’t know what we could do about the smoke,” she said. One of Wineburg’s colleagues — Ken Bernards of Ancien Wines — had been trying out an ozone treatment container for his own grapes and, back in 2017, had treated his smoke-impacted harvest as an experiment. In partnering with Purfresh’s wine division, Quintessa leased its own container to treat its grapes through the specialized 24-hour ozonation process. This process is supposed to oxidize unwanted entities like bacteria, mold, E. coli, salmonella and viruses, and according to Purfresh CEO Christian DeBlasio, it may help mitigate the impacts of smoke taint as well. “In looking at the structures of different chemicals that we’ve mitigated before, we realized smoke taint molecules had a lot of similar properties,” said DeBlasio, “And by treating grapes before crushing them, you could remove a lot of the long term damage that smoke taint does in the end wine product down the road.”
More Klamath Basin wells go dry as groundwater decline persists [Klamath Falls Herald and News]
In July, the number of dry wells registered in Klamath County was at 84. A month later, that number has climbed to 185 as wells from the California state line all the way to Crescent and La Pine are getting low and going dry. For now, well users in Klamath County are encouraged to continue registering dry wells with the watermaster in order to receive water storage tanks and water deliveries from the state. Tulelake is operating under a similar procedure, and asks water users to report dry wells directly to the Tulelake Irrigation District. Klamath County is working with the Oregon Department of Human Services to provide 500 gallon water storage tanks to people with dry wells. County Commissioner Kelley Minty-Morris said approximately 75 tanks were delivered to people with dry wells as of July 30. Some needed the 500-gallon tanks to store water, but others were able to find their own. Regardless, everyone is struggling to fill them.
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