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"title": "Why Is This Happening? Answers to Your Questions on the PG&E Shutdown",
"headTitle": "Why Is This Happening? Answers to Your Questions on the PG&E Shutdown | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Pacific Gas & Electric has generated confusion — not to mention outrage — with its power grid shutdowns. The situation continues for a second day in 34 California counties. On social media and phone calls to KQED’s Forum radio program, people throughout PG&E’s service area have asked how and why the investor-owned utility took this step. KQED reporters have some answers to some of the questions that have come in …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Is PG&E Turning the Power Off? Is This PG&E’s Fault?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bottom line, PG&E doesn’t want to risk having its power lines start another fire, so it is pre-emptively turning the power off during this week’s dry, windy weather. The company made the decision based on information from its wildfire center, where meteorologists keep watch on fire conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E’s power lines have sparked many catastrophic wildfires in California, including last year’s Camp Fire in Butte County that caused 85 deaths, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in 100 years. PG&E lines started more than a dozen fires in 2017. Less than a month ago, the company agreed to pay billion in a settlement with victims of the recent fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The shutoffs are part of its wildfire mitigation \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11750896/cpuc-pge-deenergization-wildfire-safety-power-shutoffs\">plan\u003c/a>, mandated by the state and agreed to by the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s top power regulator. — \u003cem>Kevin Stark\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Who Made This Decision and When?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If past practice tells us anything, PG&E has been making and remaking this decision, with the help of its meteorological team, over several days. The utility says it considers weather, fuel and other conditions and observations, as well as the need for notice by state and local parties, when it decides to implement shutoffs. As we’ve seen over the last few days, the planned outage times can change with shifting conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fact is, there’s nothing new about turning off power lines when conditions get risky: San Diego Gas and Electric, with the permission of the CPUC, has mitigated fire risk this way since 2012. What is new \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUC_Public_Website/Content/News_Room/Public-Safety-Power-Shutoff-Policies-and-Procedures-September-2018.pdf\">are the guidelines PG&E filed\u003c/a> just a year ago for its public safety power shutoff procedures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the last couple of years, the CPUC has required investor-owned utilities to describe their processes for arriving at decisions like the one affecting nearly three dozen California counties right now. PG&E shut off power two times last year; the last time PG&E called a public safety power shutoff, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUC_Public_Website/Content/Utilities_and_Industries/Energy_-_Electricity_and_Natural_Gas/PGE%20PSPS%20Report%20Letter_06-21-19.pdf\">for two days in June\u003c/a>, it affected about 22,000 customers in the North Bay and the Sierra foothills, including Butte County and Paradise. — \u003cem>Molly Peterson\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Are the Shutoffs So Widespread?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Essentially, PG&E says that current conditions warrant extreme caution. The utility does its own predictive analysis, with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/emergency-preparedness/natural-disaster/wildfires/psps-weather-map.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_weather\">dedicated page\u003c/a> offering a 7-day forecast of the possibility of a public safety power shutoff. As a rationale for the current outages, members of PG&E’s meteorological team have pointed out that Diablo and Santa Ana winds, along with low humidity and dry surface fuels, are making the state vulnerable to wildfire. Apart from PG&E’s in-house operation, the National Weather Service has issued \u003ca href=\"https://www.weather.gov/mqt/redflagtips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Red Flag Warnings\u003c/a> for large chunks of California, and PG&E says these are “in alignment” with its own analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, says these dangerous winds, though occurring annually, haven’t been this widespread in the state since the Wine Country Fires of 2017, before PG&E had instituted its de-energization protocol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wara also says PG&E may have had to cast a wide net because the energy infrastructure of California wasn’t built to accommodate the kind of fire risk we’re now experiencing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll have a power line that will serve one valley and then go up and over a ridge to serve the next valley,” Wara told KQED’s Miranda Leitsinger. “And that means that if you have to turn that light off, you could black out both valleys in addition to the ridgetop — even though the risk is only on the ridgetop.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, is a longtime critic of the company who is \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/TedrickG/status/1182312963090182145\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">questioning\u003c/a> the widespread nature of the outage. In a letter sent to the California Public Utilities Commission Wednesday, he wrote:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I strongly disagree with the binary position currently offered by PG&E – they can turn the power off and shut down the economy and livelihoods of millions in California, an action which may protect us from wildfire, or they can roll the dice and continue with the lights on, and risk an enormous fire starting from their power lines. This situation is not acceptable nor sustainable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hill wrote that a public safety power shutoff must be a surgical, last resort measure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In any event, PG&E will have to say more about the choices it made: The utility must file a CPUC report with information related to its decisionmaking 10 days after the shutoff event ends. —\u003cem>Molly Peterson\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>This Is Intolerable. Why Can’t PG&E Just Bury The Lines?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For new construction, PG&E places most power lines underground, so its main issue is dealing with 81,000 miles of existing overhead lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s no small feat. A little back-of-the-envelope math: Strung together, the lines could extend there and back from San Francisco to Buenos Aires about four times. Burying lines is very expensive. On its website, PG&E estimates it would cost $3 million per mile to puts its lines underground. So $3 million x 81,000 miles = $243 billion, which is more than California’s entire 2019 budget. One \u003ca href=\"https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/undergrounding/Documents/UndergroundReport.pdf\">report\u003c/a> suggests that burying lines in urban places can be even more expensive — up to $5 million a mile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, consumer safety advocates \u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article222387335.html\">argue\u003c/a> that leaders in Sacramento should require the utility to bury lines in heavily populated, high-risk fire areas. — \u003cem>Kevin Stark\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Can’t the State Take Over PG&E and Solve This Mess?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, though there’s no real model for a state taking over a publicly traded utility of this size. We also have yet to see the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11718683/pge-bankruptcy-filing-poses-big-questions-challenges-for-gov-newsom\">political\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11718683/pge-bankruptcy-filing-poses-big-questions-challenges-for-gov-newsom\">will\u003c/a> for this to occur. One reason is that taxpayers would have to take on the financial responsibility that just bankrupted PG&E — liability for its aging, unsafe electrical grid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there were a way to untangle PG&E’s many stakeholders and its various functions — don’t forget, it’s a gas company, too — other challenges would emerge: For one, figuring out how to value its massive assets and sorting out how the state would foot the bill for them, especially since ratepayers have already been paying for the system. Also, the main wildfire problems of aging, poorly maintained electrical transmission lines in rural, fire-prone areas, as well as more frequently occurring climate change-driven severe weather, are not going away, no matter who is in charge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public power \u003cem>does \u003c/em>exist in California — Sacramento and Los Angeles both have it, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">San\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">Francisco\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">is\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">offering\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">to\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">buy\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">PG\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">&\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">E\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">’\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">s\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">assets\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">within\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">city\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">limits\u003c/a>. But that’s different than completely ending PG&E as we know it and making it a public, state-run power company. It’s worth mentioning that PG&E workers largely oppose this option.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One idea that’s been floated: \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">Breaking\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">up\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">PG\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">&\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">E\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">into\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">smaller\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">companies\u003c/a>. — \u003ci> Marisa Lagos\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Are These Winds So Dangerous?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are known as “Diablo winds,” although they’re not necessarily hot. They are, however, pretty typical for this time of year. Their speed and dryness make them especially good at fanning and spreading flames. That can turn a potentially manageable wildfire into an out-of-control inferno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These winds that are so good at driving wildfires actually start out cold\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> Early autumn’s big, cold air masses, brought by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/jet\"> jet stream\u003c/a>, first move over Washington and Oregon then head to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. This cold air is drier because it holds less moisture, and it has relatively higher pressure than the warmer air sitting over California. The meeting of these air currents propels the winds over the Sierra. As the winds move downslope, they speed up, the air compresses and warms, and the humidity plummets. This removes moisture from the landscape, and makes any spark more likely to start a wildfire. — \u003cem>Danielle Venton\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Will Any Good Come Of This Shutdown?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, one thing is that the outages are testing the region’s emergency response system. They could expose weaknesses that can be fixed before the next major earthquake hits — for example, Caltrans administrators realized they needed to install a backup generator at the Caldecott Tunnel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The shutoffs underscore another fact: PG&E’s grid technology is outdated and clunky. The utility proactively shut off power on Wednesday morning, only to have people wake up to no electricity, less-than-gusty wind conditions, and warnings that the lights could remain off for days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disruption could serve as a focusing event for California to invest in local wind, solar, battery storage and other technologies that would turn neighborhoods into small power islands, called microgrids, said \u003ca href=\"https://www.navigantresearch.com/team/peter-asmus\">Peter\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.navigantresearch.com/team/peter-asmus\">Asmus\u003c/a>, a director at Navigant Research, a market research firm for the power sector.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Forecasts are often wrong,” he said. “In an ideal situation, you would have the flexibility to make real-time adjustments.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Puerto Ricans lived without electricity for months after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island in 2017. Now its main utility \u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/02/12/puerto-ricos-utility-prepa-plans-to-divide-island-into-renewable-energy-microgrids/#4c0e345755fc\">plans\u003c/a> to divide the entire island into a series of microgrids that could offer resiliency and flexibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E has not widely adopted that technology. But, Asmus suggested, “the shutoffs are going to drive California to be the leader in microgrids in the U.S.” — \u003cem>Kevin Stark\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Will These Power Shutoffs Work?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll have to wait and see. There are many other ways fires can start: discarded cigarette butts, overheated cars idling over dry vegetation, chains dragging on the ground and sparking. — \u003cem>Danielle Venton\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "You've called into Forum. You've commented on our Facebook page. You want to understand what's happening with PG&E. We answer your most common questions.",
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"title": "Why Is This Happening? Answers to Your Questions on the PG&E Shutdown | KQED",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Pacific Gas & Electric has generated confusion — not to mention outrage — with its power grid shutdowns. The situation continues for a second day in 34 California counties. On social media and phone calls to KQED’s Forum radio program, people throughout PG&E’s service area have asked how and why the investor-owned utility took this step. KQED reporters have some answers to some of the questions that have come in …\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Is PG&E Turning the Power Off? Is This PG&E’s Fault?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bottom line, PG&E doesn’t want to risk having its power lines start another fire, so it is pre-emptively turning the power off during this week’s dry, windy weather. The company made the decision based on information from its wildfire center, where meteorologists keep watch on fire conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E’s power lines have sparked many catastrophic wildfires in California, including last year’s Camp Fire in Butte County that caused 85 deaths, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in 100 years. PG&E lines started more than a dozen fires in 2017. Less than a month ago, the company agreed to pay billion in a settlement with victims of the recent fires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The shutoffs are part of its wildfire mitigation \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11750896/cpuc-pge-deenergization-wildfire-safety-power-shutoffs\">plan\u003c/a>, mandated by the state and agreed to by the California Public Utilities Commission, the state’s top power regulator. — \u003cem>Kevin Stark\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Who Made This Decision and When?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If past practice tells us anything, PG&E has been making and remaking this decision, with the help of its meteorological team, over several days. The utility says it considers weather, fuel and other conditions and observations, as well as the need for notice by state and local parties, when it decides to implement shutoffs. As we’ve seen over the last few days, the planned outage times can change with shifting conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The fact is, there’s nothing new about turning off power lines when conditions get risky: San Diego Gas and Electric, with the permission of the CPUC, has mitigated fire risk this way since 2012. What is new \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUC_Public_Website/Content/News_Room/Public-Safety-Power-Shutoff-Policies-and-Procedures-September-2018.pdf\">are the guidelines PG&E filed\u003c/a> just a year ago for its public safety power shutoff procedures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the last couple of years, the CPUC has required investor-owned utilities to describe their processes for arriving at decisions like the one affecting nearly three dozen California counties right now. PG&E shut off power two times last year; the last time PG&E called a public safety power shutoff, \u003ca href=\"https://www.cpuc.ca.gov/uploadedFiles/CPUC_Public_Website/Content/Utilities_and_Industries/Energy_-_Electricity_and_Natural_Gas/PGE%20PSPS%20Report%20Letter_06-21-19.pdf\">for two days in June\u003c/a>, it affected about 22,000 customers in the North Bay and the Sierra foothills, including Butte County and Paradise. — \u003cem>Molly Peterson\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Are the Shutoffs So Widespread?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Essentially, PG&E says that current conditions warrant extreme caution. The utility does its own predictive analysis, with a \u003ca href=\"https://www.pge.com/en_US/safety/emergency-preparedness/natural-disaster/wildfires/psps-weather-map.page?WT.mc_id=Vanity_weather\">dedicated page\u003c/a> offering a 7-day forecast of the possibility of a public safety power shutoff. As a rationale for the current outages, members of PG&E’s meteorological team have pointed out that Diablo and Santa Ana winds, along with low humidity and dry surface fuels, are making the state vulnerable to wildfire. Apart from PG&E’s in-house operation, the National Weather Service has issued \u003ca href=\"https://www.weather.gov/mqt/redflagtips\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Red Flag Warnings\u003c/a> for large chunks of California, and PG&E says these are “in alignment” with its own analysis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Michael Wara, director of the Climate and Energy Policy Program at Stanford’s Woods Institute for the Environment, says these dangerous winds, though occurring annually, haven’t been this widespread in the state since the Wine Country Fires of 2017, before PG&E had instituted its de-energization protocol.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wara also says PG&E may have had to cast a wide net because the energy infrastructure of California wasn’t built to accommodate the kind of fire risk we’re now experiencing.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You’ll have a power line that will serve one valley and then go up and over a ridge to serve the next valley,” Wara told KQED’s Miranda Leitsinger. “And that means that if you have to turn that light off, you could black out both valleys in addition to the ridgetop — even though the risk is only on the ridgetop.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>State Sen. Jerry Hill, D-San Mateo, is a longtime critic of the company who is \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/TedrickG/status/1182312963090182145\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">questioning\u003c/a> the widespread nature of the outage. In a letter sent to the California Public Utilities Commission Wednesday, he wrote:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I strongly disagree with the binary position currently offered by PG&E – they can turn the power off and shut down the economy and livelihoods of millions in California, an action which may protect us from wildfire, or they can roll the dice and continue with the lights on, and risk an enormous fire starting from their power lines. This situation is not acceptable nor sustainable.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Hill wrote that a public safety power shutoff must be a surgical, last resort measure.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In any event, PG&E will have to say more about the choices it made: The utility must file a CPUC report with information related to its decisionmaking 10 days after the shutoff event ends. —\u003cem>Molly Peterson\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>This Is Intolerable. Why Can’t PG&E Just Bury The Lines?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For new construction, PG&E places most power lines underground, so its main issue is dealing with 81,000 miles of existing overhead lines.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s no small feat. A little back-of-the-envelope math: Strung together, the lines could extend there and back from San Francisco to Buenos Aires about four times. Burying lines is very expensive. On its website, PG&E estimates it would cost $3 million per mile to puts its lines underground. So $3 million x 81,000 miles = $243 billion, which is more than California’s entire 2019 budget. One \u003ca href=\"https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/undergrounding/Documents/UndergroundReport.pdf\">report\u003c/a> suggests that burying lines in urban places can be even more expensive — up to $5 million a mile.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, consumer safety advocates \u003ca href=\"https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/soapbox/article222387335.html\">argue\u003c/a> that leaders in Sacramento should require the utility to bury lines in heavily populated, high-risk fire areas. — \u003cem>Kevin Stark\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Can’t the State Take Over PG&E and Solve This Mess?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s not beyond the realm of possibility, though there’s no real model for a state taking over a publicly traded utility of this size. We also have yet to see the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11718683/pge-bankruptcy-filing-poses-big-questions-challenges-for-gov-newsom\">political\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11718683/pge-bankruptcy-filing-poses-big-questions-challenges-for-gov-newsom\">will\u003c/a> for this to occur. One reason is that taxpayers would have to take on the financial responsibility that just bankrupted PG&E — liability for its aging, unsafe electrical grid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If there were a way to untangle PG&E’s many stakeholders and its various functions — don’t forget, it’s a gas company, too — other challenges would emerge: For one, figuring out how to value its massive assets and sorting out how the state would foot the bill for them, especially since ratepayers have already been paying for the system. Also, the main wildfire problems of aging, poorly maintained electrical transmission lines in rural, fire-prone areas, as well as more frequently occurring climate change-driven severe weather, are not going away, no matter who is in charge.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Public power \u003cem>does \u003c/em>exist in California — Sacramento and Los Angeles both have it, and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">San\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">Francisco\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">is\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">offering\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">to\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">buy\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">PG\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">&\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">E\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">’\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">s\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">assets\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">within\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">city\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11773007/san-francisco-offers-to-buy-pge-electric-grid-in-the-city-for-2-5-billion\">limits\u003c/a>. But that’s different than completely ending PG&E as we know it and making it a public, state-run power company. It’s worth mentioning that PG&E workers largely oppose this option.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One idea that’s been floated: \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">Breaking\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">up\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">PG\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">&\u003c/a>\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">E\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">into\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">smaller\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11739802/money-for-victims-uncertainty-for-pge-everythings-on-the-table-in-newsoms-new-wildfire-plan\">companies\u003c/a>. — \u003ci> Marisa Lagos\u003c/i>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why Are These Winds So Dangerous?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These are known as “Diablo winds,” although they’re not necessarily hot. They are, however, pretty typical for this time of year. Their speed and dryness make them especially good at fanning and spreading flames. That can turn a potentially manageable wildfire into an out-of-control inferno.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These winds that are so good at driving wildfires actually start out cold\u003cstrong>.\u003c/strong> Early autumn’s big, cold air masses, brought by the\u003ca href=\"https://www.weather.gov/jetstream/jet\"> jet stream\u003c/a>, first move over Washington and Oregon then head to the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. This cold air is drier because it holds less moisture, and it has relatively higher pressure than the warmer air sitting over California. The meeting of these air currents propels the winds over the Sierra. As the winds move downslope, they speed up, the air compresses and warms, and the humidity plummets. This removes moisture from the landscape, and makes any spark more likely to start a wildfire. — \u003cem>Danielle Venton\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Will Any Good Come Of This Shutdown?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, one thing is that the outages are testing the region’s emergency response system. They could expose weaknesses that can be fixed before the next major earthquake hits — for example, Caltrans administrators realized they needed to install a backup generator at the Caldecott Tunnel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The shutoffs underscore another fact: PG&E’s grid technology is outdated and clunky. The utility proactively shut off power on Wednesday morning, only to have people wake up to no electricity, less-than-gusty wind conditions, and warnings that the lights could remain off for days.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The disruption could serve as a focusing event for California to invest in local wind, solar, battery storage and other technologies that would turn neighborhoods into small power islands, called microgrids, said \u003ca href=\"https://www.navigantresearch.com/team/peter-asmus\">Peter\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://www.navigantresearch.com/team/peter-asmus\">Asmus\u003c/a>, a director at Navigant Research, a market research firm for the power sector.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Forecasts are often wrong,” he said. “In an ideal situation, you would have the flexibility to make real-time adjustments.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Puerto Ricans lived without electricity for months after Hurricane Maria ravaged the island in 2017. Now its main utility \u003ca href=\"https://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesellsmoor/2019/02/12/puerto-ricos-utility-prepa-plans-to-divide-island-into-renewable-energy-microgrids/#4c0e345755fc\">plans\u003c/a> to divide the entire island into a series of microgrids that could offer resiliency and flexibility.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>PG&E has not widely adopted that technology. But, Asmus suggested, “the shutoffs are going to drive California to be the leader in microgrids in the U.S.” — \u003cem>Kevin Stark\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Will These Power Shutoffs Work?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We’ll have to wait and see. There are many other ways fires can start: discarded cigarette butts, overheated cars idling over dry vegetation, chains dragging on the ground and sparking. — \u003cem>Danielle Venton\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Hotter Fires Are Transforming California's Forests",
"headTitle": "Hotter Fires Are Transforming California’s Forests | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Hotter-burning wildfires are transforming California’s forests, and not for the better. A new \u003ca href=\"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.2882\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a> from UC Davis finds high-intensity fires leave fewer trees and a less diverse population of plants behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re finding that high intensity, really dangerous fires … are becoming more frequent,” said Clark Richter, a graduate student in ecology at UC Davis. “They’re burning a larger area than was typical historically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote citation=\"Clark Richter, UC Davis\"]‘We’re finding that high intensity, really dangerous fires … are becoming more frequent.’[/pullquote]Richter and a team sampled plants across patches of land in the Sierra Nevada that were burned in at least eight fires over the last 20 years. Their goal was to get a better picture of what happened to plants in the forest understory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richter calls the current pattern of fire in California, one where fires burn intensely hot, “novel.” He and a research team saw that “when fire climbs up into the canopy, it often kills the adult trees,” he said. “And that causes a dramatic change to the system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those intense fires transform forest into shrubland. And according to Richter, the more frequent and the larger the area burned at these high-severity sites, the larger the shrub fields left behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Less Diversity\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Field sampling by the researchers found less plant diversity on the landscape after high-intensity fires, especially in shrublands. And when fire returns to that landscape, it’s more likely “that system is going to continue to be a high-severity site, that’s going to continue to be a shrub field potentially indefinitely,” Richter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t always this way in California’s yellow pine mixed-conifer forests, Richter says. Historically, the fires that burned these forests at elevation were low- and moderate-intensity. “These weren’t really fierce, fierce fires with really tall flame lengths in the canopies of trees,” Richter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richter thinks of these less-intense fires as recurring events that “chew up” but don’t destroy understory fuels on the ground, thus preserving an array of plants after the fire is out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study supports the idea that active management of forests, including reducing tree density and managing understory growth with prescribed fire and mechanical means, promotes ecosystem health. The study’s authors acknowledged the challenges to managing forests this way, including increased costs and legal opposition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, Richter said, “Our concern is that if these shrub fields continue to burn, that there will be an overall loss of understory plant diversity in these sites at a landscape level.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Hotter-burning wildfires are transforming California’s forests, and not for the better. A new \u003ca href=\"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.2882\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a> from UC Davis finds high-intensity fires leave fewer trees and a less diverse population of plants behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’re finding that high intensity, really dangerous fires … are becoming more frequent,” said Clark Richter, a graduate student in ecology at UC Davis. “They’re burning a larger area than was typical historically.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Richter and a team sampled plants across patches of land in the Sierra Nevada that were burned in at least eight fires over the last 20 years. Their goal was to get a better picture of what happened to plants in the forest understory.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richter calls the current pattern of fire in California, one where fires burn intensely hot, “novel.” He and a research team saw that “when fire climbs up into the canopy, it often kills the adult trees,” he said. “And that causes a dramatic change to the system.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those intense fires transform forest into shrubland. And according to Richter, the more frequent and the larger the area burned at these high-severity sites, the larger the shrub fields left behind.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Less Diversity\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Field sampling by the researchers found less plant diversity on the landscape after high-intensity fires, especially in shrublands. And when fire returns to that landscape, it’s more likely “that system is going to continue to be a high-severity site, that’s going to continue to be a shrub field potentially indefinitely,” Richter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It wasn’t always this way in California’s yellow pine mixed-conifer forests, Richter says. Historically, the fires that burned these forests at elevation were low- and moderate-intensity. “These weren’t really fierce, fierce fires with really tall flame lengths in the canopies of trees,” Richter said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Richter thinks of these less-intense fires as recurring events that “chew up” but don’t destroy understory fuels on the ground, thus preserving an array of plants after the fire is out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study supports the idea that active management of forests, including reducing tree density and managing understory growth with prescribed fire and mechanical means, promotes ecosystem health. The study’s authors acknowledged the challenges to managing forests this way, including increased costs and legal opposition.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, Richter said, “Our concern is that if these shrub fields continue to burn, that there will be an overall loss of understory plant diversity in these sites at a landscape level.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Fire, Rock Slides, and Floods: UN Report Details Growing Warming Threat in the Mountains",
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"content": "\u003cp>With ominous orange-gray smoke clouds seething on the western horizon, it’s easy to understand how Colorado’s highest city and other mountain communities are directly threatened by global warming. \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">[pullquote align='right' citation='Heidi Steltzer, biologist at Fort Lewis College']‘Concern, commitment and action on climate change should not depend on which places, species or people are impacted. Instead, they should be motivated by compassion.’[/pullquote]\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mountain snowpack is shrinking and melting earlier in the spring. Warmer and longer summers dry out vegetation and increase the threat of wildfires in western mountain forests, where the fire season has \u003ca href=\"https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/86268/longer-more-frequent-fire-seasons\">lengthened\u003c/a> by at least a month since 1979.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The growing wildfire risk is just part of an accelerating cycle of global warming impacts in the world’s mountain regions, according to a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25092019/ipcc-cryosphere-ocean-report-climate-change-sea-level-rise-greenland-antarctica\">report\u003c/a> that includes a \u003ca href=\"https://report.ipcc.ch/srocc/pdf/SROCC_FinalDraft_Chapter2.pdf\">section\u003c/a> focused on mountains for the first time in more than 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Snow cover duration has declined in nearly all regions, especially at lower elevations, on average by five days per decade,” the mountain chapter of the IPCC report says. On average across Western North America, the European Alps and High Mountain Asia, temperatures are warming by 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s melting glaciers and changing mountain river flows, disrupting plants and wildlife, and increasing the risk of extreme \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26092018/climate-change-mountains-landslide-hazard-thawing-permafrost-rockfall-extreme-weather-glaciers-global-warming\">rockslides\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08032019/avalanche-climate-change-risk-snow-storm-forecast-colorado-switzerland\">avalanches\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082018/global-warming-climate-change-floods-california-oroville-dam-scientists\">mountain floods\u003c/a> caused by rain falling on snow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taken together, global warming impacts represent an existential threat to millions of people in the Andes, the Himalaya, the European Alps, and the U.S. Mountain West including Alaska, said \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/heidimountains\">Heidi Steltzer\u003c/a>, a biologist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, and a lead author of the mountain chapter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Shrinking glaciers and snow harm Indigenous Peoples and rural communities greatly. Concern, commitment and action on climate change should not depend on which places, species or people are impacted. Instead, they should be motivated by compassion,” Steltzer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Water Reliability \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Crested Butte, about 100 miles southwest of Leadville, hydrologist and physicist Rosemary Carroll studies how \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07062016/unabated-global-warming-threatens-west-snowpack-water-rocky-mountains-sierra-nevada-drought\">disruptions\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07062016/unabated-global-warming-threatens-west-snowpack-water-rocky-mountains-sierra-nevada-drought\">to the water cycle\u003c/a> will affect local ranchers and ski areas, as well as drinking and agricultural water supplies hundreds of miles away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The IPCC assessment found that global warming will change the timing and amount of runoff, “affecting water storage and delivery infrastructure around the world,” a finding backed by research focusing on the West.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A 2016 \u003ca href=\"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL068798\">study\u003c/a> in six Western mountain ranges showed rising temperatures will shift the snow accumulation zone and runoff timing enough to have significant impacts on water cycles. And some towns in the Rockies and Sierra Nevada are at risk from \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082018/global-warming-climate-change-floods-california-oroville-dam-scientists\">dangerous flash floods\u003c/a> as global warming brings rain, rather than snow, to some mountain regions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carroll pointed out her living room window to a craggy ridgeline where she measures how water from melted snow trickles through rocks and meadows down to the East River, on to the Gunnison River and finally into the mighty Colorado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The new normal is that the snowpack is melting earlier and we have earlier runoff, and that’s a fact. There’s going to be less water for a given snowpack,” she said. Even in average snowfall years, global warming is reducing the amount of available water for irrigation and storage, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her research for the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy will help communities adapt as global warming disrupts flows from mountain streams. Around Crested Butte, the ski industry and local ranchers will feel the changes first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But addressing those impacts isn’t as easy as just throwing a new report on the table. Translating science into action requires working with stakeholders from the start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ranchers know what’s happening, they know that things are shifting, but they’re afraid the policy will shift in a way that they will carry the burden of the change. Since they have most of the water, they fear they will have to give up the most, and that it won’t be equitable,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The states that get their water from the Colorado River are already restructuring \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31012019/colorado-river-water-crisis-climate-science-state-conservation-plans\">water-sharing agreements\u003c/a> to stave off shortages and trying to develop new storage plans to account for extreme wet and dry years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Goodbye to Glaciers\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Global warming will change nearly every mountain ecosystem, starting with the very visible meltdown of glaciers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the European Alps, \u003ca href=\"https://www.alpenverein.at/portal/news/aktuelle_news/2018/2018_04_06_gletscherbericht.php\">some glaciers retreated by as much 410 feet\u003c/a> last year — imagine the Empire State Building shrinking by a third. Globally, the world’s glaciers have lost 9 trillion tons of ice since 1961, raising sea level by about 1 inch, according to the \u003ca href=\"http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Glaciers_lose_nine_trillion_tonnes_of_ice_in_half_a_century\">European Space Agency\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As glaciers melt, they create a series of risks: newly formed meltwater lakes can burst through their banks, flooding towns and farms below. And as the ice dwindles, that will significantly change the timing and amount of water available for hydropower production and agriculture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with disrupting ecosystems and downstream communities that rely on glacier meltwater, global warming in the mountains will cause emotional and cultural loss as cherished landscapes vanish. In Switzerland, people recently held a memorial service for the \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/matthias_huss/status/1176117412997062656\">disappearing Pizol Glacier\u003c/a> as a way of dealing with that grief, a sometimes overlooked component of climate resilience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"media media-element-container media-image_full\">\n\u003cp>The physical threats are real and growing, said Swiss glaciologist Matthias Huss.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If greenhouse gas emissions peak in the next few years and then start to decline, glaciers in the European Alps will lose two-thirds of their current ice. With continued high emissions, the glaciers will all but vanish, with only 5 percent of the current ice remaining, Huss and colleagues found in recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.the-cryosphere.net/13/1125/2019/\">study\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“\u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26092018/climate-change-mountains-landslide-hazard-thawing-permafrost-rockfall-extreme-weather-glaciers-global-warming\">An increase in rockfall events\u003c/a>, and flooding from glacier lakes, also due to more extreme weather events, is likely,” Huss said. “I think European countries are prepared, and they have the financial means to adapt. It will be much more difficult for developing countries to adapt to the challenges in mountain regions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Extreme storms that destroy forests and damage roads and railroad lines could also become more frequent in the world’s mountains, although climate models aren’t yet localized enough to project such changes accurately, the IPCC assessment concluded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It won’t be cheap to redesign and rebuild water infrastructure, Huss said. In some snow-dependent communities, the meltdown will also drive wrenching cultural and economic changes. But “one could also see this as a chance for major development toward a more sustainable way to live on our planet,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Adapting Food Crops\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s what University of Colorado researcher Tsegay Wolde-Georgis was thinking when he led a \u003ca href=\"https://instaar.colorado.edu/news-events/instaar-news/apple-trees-in-atebes-cultivating-climate-resilience-in-an-ethiopian-villag/\">project\u003c/a> in the early 2000s to cultivate apple trees around Atebe, in the dry highlands of Ethiopia where he grew up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diversifying local food supplies will help make the region more resilient to global warming, he said. The new IPCC assessment affirms that global warming is driving dangerous changes in mountain environments that threaten food supplies. But along with warnings, the world needs action, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything is getting more extreme, and there is seasonal confusion,” he said. But there is enough scientific and traditional knowledge to find on-the-ground projects and do them, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the apple orchard, he adapted a traditional permaculture technique, using water-filled clay pots to efficiently irrigate the young trees. At the same time, residents enhanced the water-holding capacity of deforested hillsides by building terraces and planting vegetation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such regenerative agriculture is crucial for food security in developing countries, said Wolde-Georgis, who works with the \u003ca href=\"https://instaar.colorado.edu/research/programs/consortium-for-capacity-building/\">Consortium for Capacity Building\u003c/a>, part of the University of Colorado’s \u003ca href=\"https://instaar.colorado.edu/\">Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After decades of academic research and projects, he radiates the kind of practical wisdom that can help shape resilience to global warming. His eyes gleam as he recalls the look on a local priest’s face during the first apple harvest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was the first time in his life he tasted an apple. When we plant apples, it’s mitigation [of the climate impact], but at the same time, we are solving problems. We have to find something that’s doable on the ground,” he said. In four years, the farmers planted 1,400 apple trees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, communities worked to restore watersheds by building terraces and replanting clear-cut hillsides. Wolde-Georgis said the work was successful. Streams that had been dry by the end of December now hold water through the end of May.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a larger scale, Wolde-Georgis helps build physical and information infrastructure to boost resilience, including new roads and railroads to help transport food when climate extremes cause crop failures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ethiopia and other developing countries also need more institutional science-based infrastructure to inform good governance across jurisdictional boundaries, he said. To meet the challenges ahead requires working in an atmosphere of trust and a spirit of collaboration, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Disrupting Plants\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic, Colorado, David Inouye’s cabin near a patch of shimmering gold aspens is marked by wisps of chimney smoke. For nearly 50 years, he’s been recording plant and animal activity while other observers tally snowfall and snowmelt data day by day — a scientific deep dive into time and space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compared to the 1970s, spring is coming earlier. There is more winter rain, and summers are longer and drier. It all adds up to disruption for mountain ecosystems, where most plants only have a few weeks to bloom. And the plants are tightly linked with pollinating insects in \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15062018/climate-change-impacts-pollen-pollination-flowers-bees-butterflies-europe-heat-wave-global-warming-research\">a delicately timed cycle\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The ecology of this altitude is driven largely by how much snow we get in the winter and when that snow melts,” Inouye said. “As the climate changes, we’re tending to get less snow and warmer and earlier springs. A paradoxical consequence is that we’re getting more frost damage,” he said. The effects ripple through the ecosystem as global warming disrupts plants and seed production, which, in turn, means less food for small mammals and birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Graceful yellow glacier lilies are \u003ca href=\"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/12-0255.1\">blooming 17 days earlier\u003c/a> than they did in the 1970s, but migrating hummingbirds that depend on the flower nectar aren’t keeping up. By the time they arrive, many of the plants have withered away, and if current trends continue, in two decades the hummingbirds will miss the first flowers entirely. Ecosystems could collapse as global warming continues to decouple \u003ca href=\"https://www.rmbl.org/article/science-story-june-2019/\">complex ecological relationships\u003c/a>, showing why global warming is a threat to biodiversity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another \u003ca href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2012.01766.x\">study\u003c/a> documented how earlier spring snowmelt makes mountain daisies bloom earlier, when they are more susceptible to frost. The research showed how the frost damage reduces the amount of nectar for a species of butterfly that depends on that particular flower for feeding during the egg-laying season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If they don’t get nectar, they can’t make eggs, and the population declines,” Inouye said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tipping Points\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab helps connect the dots in complex ecosystems and how global warming can make them unravel, said lab executive director Ian Billick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What people don’t realize is that we’re changing multiple things at the same time. People don’t realize how drastically things are going to change,” he said. Massive disturbance events linked with global warming like the early 2000s bark beetle outbreak that killed trees across millions of acres will happen again and again. Multiple stressors are driving mountain ecosystems past tipping points, leading to fundamental change, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our agricultural productivity depends on these ecosystems functioning in a highly integrated way, so it’s like if you throw a screwdriver in the middle of an engine, the whole thing falls apart, and I think it’s like with ag, where these finely tuned things are going to fall apart.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The IPCC report represents only the tiny tip of a “massive global change iceberg,” said Steltzer, the Colorado biologist and lead author of the mountain chapter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Nine-tenths is what we haven’t seen, measured and documented. We know things are changing for which we have no peer-reviewed scientific articles, and things are changing too fast to keep up,” she said. “There’s no reason to wait to act. We know enough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just this past winter, both Europe and parts of the Rockies experienced \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08032019/avalanche-climate-change-risk-snow-storm-forecast-colorado-switzerland\">unprecedented avalanche cycles\u003c/a> after record snowfalls, surprising scientists as well as public safety managers charged with keeping mountain roads open. Recently, mosquitoes that carry West Nile Virus have been appearing in the high mountains but remain largely untracked, along with other invasive species. And there are likely scores of other ecological cycles being disrupted that haven’t been studied at all, Inouye said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The IPCC assessment also concluded that forest fires are likely to increase in mountain areas where summers become warmer and drier. “Coastal ranges of California, the Blue Mountains of Australia, Mt. Kenya, and mountains on the fringes of the Mediterranean Sea, already subject to frequent fire episodes, would be severely affected,” the assessment said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019EF001210\">study\u003c/a> showed that the fivefold increase in the extent of California’s wildfires since the 1970s was “very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human‐induced warming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Snow is decreasing, temperatures are warming, and mountains are changing in ways I never expected I’d live to see,” Steltzer said. “Policy-makers ask for data to show how bad it is. … Instead, they could ask how do we preserve the benefits of nature for each of us and all of us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"media media-element-container media-image_full\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Mountain snowpack is shrinking and melting earlier in the spring. Warmer and longer summers dry out vegetation and increase the threat of wildfires in western mountain forests, where the fire season has \u003ca href=\"https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/86268/longer-more-frequent-fire-seasons\">lengthened\u003c/a> by at least a month since 1979.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The growing wildfire risk is just part of an accelerating cycle of global warming impacts in the world’s mountain regions, according to a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/25092019/ipcc-cryosphere-ocean-report-climate-change-sea-level-rise-greenland-antarctica\">report\u003c/a> that includes a \u003ca href=\"https://report.ipcc.ch/srocc/pdf/SROCC_FinalDraft_Chapter2.pdf\">section\u003c/a> focused on mountains for the first time in more than 20 years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Snow cover duration has declined in nearly all regions, especially at lower elevations, on average by five days per decade,” the mountain chapter of the IPCC report says. On average across Western North America, the European Alps and High Mountain Asia, temperatures are warming by 0.54 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s melting glaciers and changing mountain river flows, disrupting plants and wildlife, and increasing the risk of extreme \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26092018/climate-change-mountains-landslide-hazard-thawing-permafrost-rockfall-extreme-weather-glaciers-global-warming\">rockslides\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08032019/avalanche-climate-change-risk-snow-storm-forecast-colorado-switzerland\">avalanches\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082018/global-warming-climate-change-floods-california-oroville-dam-scientists\">mountain floods\u003c/a> caused by rain falling on snow.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Taken together, global warming impacts represent an existential threat to millions of people in the Andes, the Himalaya, the European Alps, and the U.S. Mountain West including Alaska, said \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/heidimountains\">Heidi Steltzer\u003c/a>, a biologist at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado, and a lead author of the mountain chapter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Shrinking glaciers and snow harm Indigenous Peoples and rural communities greatly. Concern, commitment and action on climate change should not depend on which places, species or people are impacted. Instead, they should be motivated by compassion,” Steltzer said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Water Reliability \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Crested Butte, about 100 miles southwest of Leadville, hydrologist and physicist Rosemary Carroll studies how \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07062016/unabated-global-warming-threatens-west-snowpack-water-rocky-mountains-sierra-nevada-drought\">disruptions\u003c/a> \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07062016/unabated-global-warming-threatens-west-snowpack-water-rocky-mountains-sierra-nevada-drought\">to the water cycle\u003c/a> will affect local ranchers and ski areas, as well as drinking and agricultural water supplies hundreds of miles away.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The IPCC assessment found that global warming will change the timing and amount of runoff, “affecting water storage and delivery infrastructure around the world,” a finding backed by research focusing on the West.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A 2016 \u003ca href=\"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/2016GL068798\">study\u003c/a> in six Western mountain ranges showed rising temperatures will shift the snow accumulation zone and runoff timing enough to have significant impacts on water cycles. And some towns in the Rockies and Sierra Nevada are at risk from \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06082018/global-warming-climate-change-floods-california-oroville-dam-scientists\">dangerous flash floods\u003c/a> as global warming brings rain, rather than snow, to some mountain regions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carroll pointed out her living room window to a craggy ridgeline where she measures how water from melted snow trickles through rocks and meadows down to the East River, on to the Gunnison River and finally into the mighty Colorado.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The new normal is that the snowpack is melting earlier and we have earlier runoff, and that’s a fact. There’s going to be less water for a given snowpack,” she said. Even in average snowfall years, global warming is reducing the amount of available water for irrigation and storage, she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Her research for the University of Nevada’s Desert Research Institute and the U.S. Department of Energy will help communities adapt as global warming disrupts flows from mountain streams. Around Crested Butte, the ski industry and local ranchers will feel the changes first.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But addressing those impacts isn’t as easy as just throwing a new report on the table. Translating science into action requires working with stakeholders from the start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Ranchers know what’s happening, they know that things are shifting, but they’re afraid the policy will shift in a way that they will carry the burden of the change. Since they have most of the water, they fear they will have to give up the most, and that it won’t be equitable,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The states that get their water from the Colorado River are already restructuring \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/31012019/colorado-river-water-crisis-climate-science-state-conservation-plans\">water-sharing agreements\u003c/a> to stave off shortages and trying to develop new storage plans to account for extreme wet and dry years.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Goodbye to Glaciers\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Global warming will change nearly every mountain ecosystem, starting with the very visible meltdown of glaciers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the European Alps, \u003ca href=\"https://www.alpenverein.at/portal/news/aktuelle_news/2018/2018_04_06_gletscherbericht.php\">some glaciers retreated by as much 410 feet\u003c/a> last year — imagine the Empire State Building shrinking by a third. Globally, the world’s glaciers have lost 9 trillion tons of ice since 1961, raising sea level by about 1 inch, according to the \u003ca href=\"http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Observing_the_Earth/Glaciers_lose_nine_trillion_tonnes_of_ice_in_half_a_century\">European Space Agency\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As glaciers melt, they create a series of risks: newly formed meltwater lakes can burst through their banks, flooding towns and farms below. And as the ice dwindles, that will significantly change the timing and amount of water available for hydropower production and agriculture.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Along with disrupting ecosystems and downstream communities that rely on glacier meltwater, global warming in the mountains will cause emotional and cultural loss as cherished landscapes vanish. In Switzerland, people recently held a memorial service for the \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/matthias_huss/status/1176117412997062656\">disappearing Pizol Glacier\u003c/a> as a way of dealing with that grief, a sometimes overlooked component of climate resilience.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"media media-element-container media-image_full\">\n\u003cp>The physical threats are real and growing, said Swiss glaciologist Matthias Huss.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If greenhouse gas emissions peak in the next few years and then start to decline, glaciers in the European Alps will lose two-thirds of their current ice. With continued high emissions, the glaciers will all but vanish, with only 5 percent of the current ice remaining, Huss and colleagues found in recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.the-cryosphere.net/13/1125/2019/\">study\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“\u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/26092018/climate-change-mountains-landslide-hazard-thawing-permafrost-rockfall-extreme-weather-glaciers-global-warming\">An increase in rockfall events\u003c/a>, and flooding from glacier lakes, also due to more extreme weather events, is likely,” Huss said. “I think European countries are prepared, and they have the financial means to adapt. It will be much more difficult for developing countries to adapt to the challenges in mountain regions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Extreme storms that destroy forests and damage roads and railroad lines could also become more frequent in the world’s mountains, although climate models aren’t yet localized enough to project such changes accurately, the IPCC assessment concluded.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It won’t be cheap to redesign and rebuild water infrastructure, Huss said. In some snow-dependent communities, the meltdown will also drive wrenching cultural and economic changes. But “one could also see this as a chance for major development toward a more sustainable way to live on our planet,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Adapting Food Crops\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s what University of Colorado researcher Tsegay Wolde-Georgis was thinking when he led a \u003ca href=\"https://instaar.colorado.edu/news-events/instaar-news/apple-trees-in-atebes-cultivating-climate-resilience-in-an-ethiopian-villag/\">project\u003c/a> in the early 2000s to cultivate apple trees around Atebe, in the dry highlands of Ethiopia where he grew up.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Diversifying local food supplies will help make the region more resilient to global warming, he said. The new IPCC assessment affirms that global warming is driving dangerous changes in mountain environments that threaten food supplies. But along with warnings, the world needs action, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Everything is getting more extreme, and there is seasonal confusion,” he said. But there is enough scientific and traditional knowledge to find on-the-ground projects and do them, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the apple orchard, he adapted a traditional permaculture technique, using water-filled clay pots to efficiently irrigate the young trees. At the same time, residents enhanced the water-holding capacity of deforested hillsides by building terraces and planting vegetation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Such regenerative agriculture is crucial for food security in developing countries, said Wolde-Georgis, who works with the \u003ca href=\"https://instaar.colorado.edu/research/programs/consortium-for-capacity-building/\">Consortium for Capacity Building\u003c/a>, part of the University of Colorado’s \u003ca href=\"https://instaar.colorado.edu/\">Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After decades of academic research and projects, he radiates the kind of practical wisdom that can help shape resilience to global warming. His eyes gleam as he recalls the look on a local priest’s face during the first apple harvest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It was the first time in his life he tasted an apple. When we plant apples, it’s mitigation [of the climate impact], but at the same time, we are solving problems. We have to find something that’s doable on the ground,” he said. In four years, the farmers planted 1,400 apple trees.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the same time, communities worked to restore watersheds by building terraces and replanting clear-cut hillsides. Wolde-Georgis said the work was successful. Streams that had been dry by the end of December now hold water through the end of May.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On a larger scale, Wolde-Georgis helps build physical and information infrastructure to boost resilience, including new roads and railroads to help transport food when climate extremes cause crop failures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ethiopia and other developing countries also need more institutional science-based infrastructure to inform good governance across jurisdictional boundaries, he said. To meet the challenges ahead requires working in an atmosphere of trust and a spirit of collaboration, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Disrupting Plants\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>At the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab in Gothic, Colorado, David Inouye’s cabin near a patch of shimmering gold aspens is marked by wisps of chimney smoke. For nearly 50 years, he’s been recording plant and animal activity while other observers tally snowfall and snowmelt data day by day — a scientific deep dive into time and space.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Compared to the 1970s, spring is coming earlier. There is more winter rain, and summers are longer and drier. It all adds up to disruption for mountain ecosystems, where most plants only have a few weeks to bloom. And the plants are tightly linked with pollinating insects in \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/15062018/climate-change-impacts-pollen-pollination-flowers-bees-butterflies-europe-heat-wave-global-warming-research\">a delicately timed cycle\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The ecology of this altitude is driven largely by how much snow we get in the winter and when that snow melts,” Inouye said. “As the climate changes, we’re tending to get less snow and warmer and earlier springs. A paradoxical consequence is that we’re getting more frost damage,” he said. The effects ripple through the ecosystem as global warming disrupts plants and seed production, which, in turn, means less food for small mammals and birds.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Graceful yellow glacier lilies are \u003ca href=\"https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/12-0255.1\">blooming 17 days earlier\u003c/a> than they did in the 1970s, but migrating hummingbirds that depend on the flower nectar aren’t keeping up. By the time they arrive, many of the plants have withered away, and if current trends continue, in two decades the hummingbirds will miss the first flowers entirely. Ecosystems could collapse as global warming continues to decouple \u003ca href=\"https://www.rmbl.org/article/science-story-june-2019/\">complex ecological relationships\u003c/a>, showing why global warming is a threat to biodiversity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another \u003ca href=\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1461-0248.2012.01766.x\">study\u003c/a> documented how earlier spring snowmelt makes mountain daisies bloom earlier, when they are more susceptible to frost. The research showed how the frost damage reduces the amount of nectar for a species of butterfly that depends on that particular flower for feeding during the egg-laying season.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If they don’t get nectar, they can’t make eggs, and the population declines,” Inouye said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Tipping Points\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The research at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab helps connect the dots in complex ecosystems and how global warming can make them unravel, said lab executive director Ian Billick.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“What people don’t realize is that we’re changing multiple things at the same time. People don’t realize how drastically things are going to change,” he said. Massive disturbance events linked with global warming like the early 2000s bark beetle outbreak that killed trees across millions of acres will happen again and again. Multiple stressors are driving mountain ecosystems past tipping points, leading to fundamental change, he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our agricultural productivity depends on these ecosystems functioning in a highly integrated way, so it’s like if you throw a screwdriver in the middle of an engine, the whole thing falls apart, and I think it’s like with ag, where these finely tuned things are going to fall apart.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The IPCC report represents only the tiny tip of a “massive global change iceberg,” said Steltzer, the Colorado biologist and lead author of the mountain chapter.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Nine-tenths is what we haven’t seen, measured and documented. We know things are changing for which we have no peer-reviewed scientific articles, and things are changing too fast to keep up,” she said. “There’s no reason to wait to act. We know enough.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Just this past winter, both Europe and parts of the Rockies experienced \u003ca href=\"https://insideclimatenews.org/news/08032019/avalanche-climate-change-risk-snow-storm-forecast-colorado-switzerland\">unprecedented avalanche cycles\u003c/a> after record snowfalls, surprising scientists as well as public safety managers charged with keeping mountain roads open. Recently, mosquitoes that carry West Nile Virus have been appearing in the high mountains but remain largely untracked, along with other invasive species. And there are likely scores of other ecological cycles being disrupted that haven’t been studied at all, Inouye said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The IPCC assessment also concluded that forest fires are likely to increase in mountain areas where summers become warmer and drier. “Coastal ranges of California, the Blue Mountains of Australia, Mt. Kenya, and mountains on the fringes of the Mediterranean Sea, already subject to frequent fire episodes, would be severely affected,” the assessment said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A 2019 \u003ca href=\"https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019EF001210\">study\u003c/a> showed that the fivefold increase in the extent of California’s wildfires since the 1970s was “very likely driven by drying of fuels promoted by human‐induced warming.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Snow is decreasing, temperatures are warming, and mountains are changing in ways I never expected I’d live to see,” Steltzer said. “Policy-makers ask for data to show how bad it is. … Instead, they could ask how do we preserve the benefits of nature for each of us and all of us.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/div>\n\u003cdiv class=\"media media-element-container media-image_full\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "New Fire Retardant Acts Like 'Vaccine' Against Wildfires",
"headTitle": "New Fire Retardant Acts Like ‘Vaccine’ Against Wildfires | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>California’s last two fire seasons were brutal. As the Legislature struggles to fund fire \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1948013/california-lawmakers-plans-to-protect-homes-from-wildfire-fall-short\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">safety proposals\u003c/a>, and agencies spend more on firefighting crews, a team of scientists is proposing a novel solution: extinguishing fires before they start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is something we do with vaccines all the time,” said Eric Appel, materials scientist at Stanford. “You have high-risk populations and you vaccinate them against the disease in the first place. As with many things, prevention is cheaper, easier and more effective than treatment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Appel is senior author on a recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907855116\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a> published in \u003cem>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\u003c/em>, reporting on the first field trials of a long-acting, environmentally benign fire retardant that he hopes will reshape the way fires are prevented and fought in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most people think that fires just sort of start willy nilly anywhere in the forest. But it turns out that that’s not really true.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study found that most wildfires start in the same locations, and that the retardant will protect an area for months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So what that means,” Appel says, “is that you would only need to treat a very small amount of land in order to prevent a majority of fires.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Spark of An Idea\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For co-author Jesse Acosta, adjunct professor of Natural Resource Management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a moment of inspiration came years ago, as he stood in the sweltering heat of Hawaii, working for the U.S. Forest Service in a Smokey Bear costume, trying to convince people to care about fire prevention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I don’t know if it was the actual discomfort of the suit that made me think about things differently, or if it was some sort of late-night epiphany,” said the former Fire Prevention Forester, “but it became very clear to me very quickly that [outreach] was not effective in terms of preventing fires.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Likely, it was both, but it would take a move to Connecticut and a chance meeting with a colleague for the building blocks of a new approach to fall into place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the time, \u003ca href=\"http://www.supramolecularbiomaterials.com/\">Eric Appel\u003c/a>, now a materials scientist at Stanford University, was studying medical drug delivery at MIT, \u003c/span>“answering the question of ‘H\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ow do we keep these drug molecules stable and get them where they need to go and keep them where they need to be?'”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The answer lead to the development of a “hydrogel” \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">made of\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">inexpensive, renewable and benign materials that could deliver medications in a human body and keep them stable over time. For example, an early application allowed people with diabetes to receive a single injection that supplied insulin over six months.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hydrogels themselves may seem an unlikely hero: They’re pale, shapeless blobs reminiscent of thick shampoo or mayonnaise. You mix them up in buckets, foregoing a lab coat for rubber boots. But to Appel, their beauty lies in the thoughtfulness of their design.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The gels we’re making are sophisticated and scalable. They form from simple components,” said Appel. “And they function like molecular Velcro,” meaning they can change their properties to allow them to be sprayed easily from a needle or nozzle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Acosta was aware of Appel’s hydrogels and thought about what might happen if you replaced medications with a “molecular cargo” of flame retardants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It was around midnight when it finally dawned on me to use these hydrogels,” Acosta said\u003cstrong>,\u003c/strong> pointing out the many commonalities shared between what makes something safe for the human body and what makes something environmentally benign. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Let’s wrap up fire retardant in these hydrogels and see if they are able to stick to fuels and persist through weather.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://youtu.be/ilhFV7DIbxo\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Out of the Lab and Into the Fire\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After this unlikely series of events, Appel, Acosta and collaborators received funding through Stanford’s \u003ca href=\"https://woods.stanford.edu/research/realizing-environmental-innovation-program\">Realizing Environmental Innovation Program\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Appel and his collaborators began working with Cal Fire to identify where fires start each year. They found fires reproducibly start year-after-year in the same places, calculating that 84 percent of wildfires in California in the last 10 years have started at the same high-risk roadside spots or near utilities infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Following the success of a\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003ca href=\"https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52f83177e4b045fae914ddf2/t/584257b446c3c4f2f7d665e2/1480742837825/Yu_Appel_PNAS.pdf\">pilot study\u003c/a> on small piles of pine shavings, this new study tests hydrogel performance on a larger scale. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They treated plots of native grass 10 feet long and 10 feet wide with their product and set both those and untreated control plots alight, watching how they burned. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“T\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">hey just explode,” Appel said of the control plots. “It’s a pyromaniac’s best afternoon.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Appel and Acosta also wanted to address a major shortcoming of current retardants — that they are not meant to persist long beyond their initial application.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, much of the millions of tons of retardant that planes drop onto fires each year are \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">rendered useless by subsequent dumps of water onto active fire-lines. Even heavy dews and fogs, common along the California coast, can decrease the retardants’ efficiency.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The hydrogel, by contrast, stays at full potency and continues delivering fire protection over months of the traditional fire season. The hydrogels also stand up to dew, fog, and moderate rain, although they are intentionally designed to wash away at the start of the wetter fall months.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can put 20,000 gallons of this on an area for prevention, or 1 million gallons of the traditional formulation after a fire starts,” said study lead author Anthony Yu, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering at Stanford, in a media release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The New Reality of Fire in California\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Acosta, a policy of suppression and a cultural view that fire is villainous has pitted the country against a future where extreme fires are guaranteed. This is due to a massive buildup of fuel — dead trees, brush and chaparral — in an ecosystem that has historically required fires as a natural part of the landscape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every fire we fight, every fire that happens, has the potential to be the Mendocino Complex or the Thomas Fire or the Carr Fire or the Ferguson Fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the economic costs of fighting fires have become enormous. Last year the federal government spent \u003ca href=\"https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_documents/SuppCosts.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$3 billion\u003c/a> to put out blazes. Local agencies are also strapped. Fighting fires and defending one hot, 4-mile stretch along Highway 118 in Ventura County costs an average of $5.5 million annually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The true importance of hydrogels, Acosta says, extends beyond their use as a long-term, environmentally benign treatment. By stopping fires from ever starting, it pushes the balance of power further into our favor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can stop fighting these catastrophic fires in June and July, Acosta said, “and fight them on our terms with prescribed burns in cooler, wetter weather and during times when we have more money freed up for fighting fires.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the next week, crews will apply the long-term fire retardant to some of Highway 118 and two other stretches of road in San Diego County. These will be the first large projects of a company formed to promote the retardant, which is now sold as Fortify. Appel and Yu are listed as inventors on the Fortify patent. Appel is Chief Technical Advisor for the new company, Ladera Tech. Jesse Acosta is Chief Business Officer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wes Bolsen, president and CEO of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ladera.tech/team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ladera\u003c/a>, estimates roadside treatments will cost Cal Fire and the California Department of Transportation between $20,000 and $200,000, depending on the mileage and other factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bolsen says utilities have also expressed interest in the retardant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Projects such as this may signal the first drop in a flood of new tools and methods aimed at developing a more holistic approach to accommodating fires in the state. Acosta feels hopeful because ultimately everyone he has worked with — from politicians to firefighters to loggers — are working toward a common goal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These new technological advances,” he said, “are giving us the power to make new and better decisions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One example of this is that Appel and Yu hope that their retardant won’t just help put out fires. The researchers hope products like this will help start controlled burns. Not only can it be used as a tool to limit the area burned, it can protect rare plants within it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If they’re out in an area, you can’t just burn through because you might damage those plants,” said Appel. “So these materials can actually be used to provide sort of a protective layer around those plants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Stanford researchers say they have found a wildfire solution — a non-toxic, environmentally benign retardant that can persist throughout a fire season. ",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>California’s last two fire seasons were brutal. As the Legislature struggles to fund fire \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1948013/california-lawmakers-plans-to-protect-homes-from-wildfire-fall-short\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">safety proposals\u003c/a>, and agencies spend more on firefighting crews, a team of scientists is proposing a novel solution: extinguishing fires before they start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is something we do with vaccines all the time,” said Eric Appel, materials scientist at Stanford. “You have high-risk populations and you vaccinate them against the disease in the first place. As with many things, prevention is cheaper, easier and more effective than treatment.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Appel is senior author on a recent \u003ca href=\"https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1907855116\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a> published in \u003cem>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences\u003c/em>, reporting on the first field trials of a long-acting, environmentally benign fire retardant that he hopes will reshape the way fires are prevented and fought in California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Most people think that fires just sort of start willy nilly anywhere in the forest. But it turns out that that’s not really true.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study found that most wildfires start in the same locations, and that the retardant will protect an area for months.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So what that means,” Appel says, “is that you would only need to treat a very small amount of land in order to prevent a majority of fires.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Spark of An Idea\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For co-author Jesse Acosta, adjunct professor of Natural Resource Management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, a moment of inspiration came years ago, as he stood in the sweltering heat of Hawaii, working for the U.S. Forest Service in a Smokey Bear costume, trying to convince people to care about fire prevention.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“I don’t know if it was the actual discomfort of the suit that made me think about things differently, or if it was some sort of late-night epiphany,” said the former Fire Prevention Forester, “but it became very clear to me very quickly that [outreach] was not effective in terms of preventing fires.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Likely, it was both, but it would take a move to Connecticut and a chance meeting with a colleague for the building blocks of a new approach to fall into place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">At the time, \u003ca href=\"http://www.supramolecularbiomaterials.com/\">Eric Appel\u003c/a>, now a materials scientist at Stanford University, was studying medical drug delivery at MIT, \u003c/span>“answering the question of ‘H\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">ow do we keep these drug molecules stable and get them where they need to go and keep them where they need to be?'”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The answer lead to the development of a “hydrogel” \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">made of\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">inexpensive, renewable and benign materials that could deliver medications in a human body and keep them stable over time. For example, an early application allowed people with diabetes to receive a single injection that supplied insulin over six months.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">Hydrogels themselves may seem an unlikely hero: They’re pale, shapeless blobs reminiscent of thick shampoo or mayonnaise. You mix them up in buckets, foregoing a lab coat for rubber boots. But to Appel, their beauty lies in the thoughtfulness of their design.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The gels we’re making are sophisticated and scalable. They form from simple components,” said Appel. “And they function like molecular Velcro,” meaning they can change their properties to allow them to be sprayed easily from a needle or nozzle.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Acosta was aware of Appel’s hydrogels and thought about what might happen if you replaced medications with a “molecular cargo” of flame retardants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“It was around midnight when it finally dawned on me to use these hydrogels,” Acosta said\u003cstrong>,\u003c/strong> pointing out the many commonalities shared between what makes something safe for the human body and what makes something environmentally benign. \u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“Let’s wrap up fire retardant in these hydrogels and see if they are able to stick to fuels and persist through weather.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/ilhFV7DIbxo'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/ilhFV7DIbxo'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Out of the Lab and Into the Fire\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>After this unlikely series of events, Appel, Acosta and collaborators received funding through Stanford’s \u003ca href=\"https://woods.stanford.edu/research/realizing-environmental-innovation-program\">Realizing Environmental Innovation Program\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Appel and his collaborators began working with Cal Fire to identify where fires start each year. They found fires reproducibly start year-after-year in the same places, calculating that 84 percent of wildfires in California in the last 10 years have started at the same high-risk roadside spots or near utilities infrastructure.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Following the success of a\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\"> \u003ca href=\"https://static1.squarespace.com/static/52f83177e4b045fae914ddf2/t/584257b446c3c4f2f7d665e2/1480742837825/Yu_Appel_PNAS.pdf\">pilot study\u003c/a> on small piles of pine shavings, this new study tests hydrogel performance on a larger scale. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">They treated plots of native grass 10 feet long and 10 feet wide with their product and set both those and untreated control plots alight, watching how they burned. \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">“T\u003c/span>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">hey just explode,” Appel said of the control plots. “It’s a pyromaniac’s best afternoon.”\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Appel and Acosta also wanted to address a major shortcoming of current retardants — that they are not meant to persist long beyond their initial application.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In fact, much of the millions of tons of retardant that planes drop onto fires each year are \u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">rendered useless by subsequent dumps of water onto active fire-lines. Even heavy dews and fogs, common along the California coast, can decrease the retardants’ efficiency.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cspan style=\"font-weight: 400\">The hydrogel, by contrast, stays at full potency and continues delivering fire protection over months of the traditional fire season. The hydrogels also stand up to dew, fog, and moderate rain, although they are intentionally designed to wash away at the start of the wetter fall months.\u003c/span>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You can put 20,000 gallons of this on an area for prevention, or 1 million gallons of the traditional formulation after a fire starts,” said study lead author Anthony Yu, a Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering at Stanford, in a media release.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The New Reality of Fire in California\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>According to Acosta, a policy of suppression and a cultural view that fire is villainous has pitted the country against a future where extreme fires are guaranteed. This is due to a massive buildup of fuel — dead trees, brush and chaparral — in an ecosystem that has historically required fires as a natural part of the landscape.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every fire we fight, every fire that happens, has the potential to be the Mendocino Complex or the Thomas Fire or the Carr Fire or the Ferguson Fire.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And the economic costs of fighting fires have become enormous. Last year the federal government spent \u003ca href=\"https://www.nifc.gov/fireInfo/fireInfo_documents/SuppCosts.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">$3 billion\u003c/a> to put out blazes. Local agencies are also strapped. Fighting fires and defending one hot, 4-mile stretch along Highway 118 in Ventura County costs an average of $5.5 million annually.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The true importance of hydrogels, Acosta says, extends beyond their use as a long-term, environmentally benign treatment. By stopping fires from ever starting, it pushes the balance of power further into our favor.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We can stop fighting these catastrophic fires in June and July, Acosta said, “and fight them on our terms with prescribed burns in cooler, wetter weather and during times when we have more money freed up for fighting fires.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the next week, crews will apply the long-term fire retardant to some of Highway 118 and two other stretches of road in San Diego County. These will be the first large projects of a company formed to promote the retardant, which is now sold as Fortify. Appel and Yu are listed as inventors on the Fortify patent. Appel is Chief Technical Advisor for the new company, Ladera Tech. Jesse Acosta is Chief Business Officer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wes Bolsen, president and CEO of \u003ca href=\"https://www.ladera.tech/team\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ladera\u003c/a>, estimates roadside treatments will cost Cal Fire and the California Department of Transportation between $20,000 and $200,000, depending on the mileage and other factors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Bolsen says utilities have also expressed interest in the retardant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Projects such as this may signal the first drop in a flood of new tools and methods aimed at developing a more holistic approach to accommodating fires in the state. Acosta feels hopeful because ultimately everyone he has worked with — from politicians to firefighters to loggers — are working toward a common goal.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“These new technological advances,” he said, “are giving us the power to make new and better decisions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One example of this is that Appel and Yu hope that their retardant won’t just help put out fires. The researchers hope products like this will help start controlled burns. Not only can it be used as a tool to limit the area burned, it can protect rare plants within it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If they’re out in an area, you can’t just burn through because you might damage those plants,” said Appel. “So these materials can actually be used to provide sort of a protective layer around those plants.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "These Big Plans to Protect California Homes From Wildfire Fell Short in the Legislature",
"headTitle": "These Big Plans to Protect California Homes From Wildfire Fell Short in the Legislature | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>After 86 people in the town of Paradise lost their lives in a massive wildfire last year, California lawmakers vowed to prepare the state for future infernos. But while millions of dollars are going toward new firefighting crews and technology, some say the state is overlooking an area in dire need of help: making homes and buildings safer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align='right' citation='State Sen. Bob Wieckowski']‘I’m concerned that a lot of localities are going to be making a lot of bad decisions because we haven’t rung the bell that you can’t do this any longer.’[/pullquote]Several bills in the state Legislature were drafted to help millions of homeowners in high fire-risk areas retrofit their homes with fire-resistant materials. This was considered critical because most of these homes were built before California enacted its modern wildfire building codes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other bills required stepped-up inspections of fire-prone vegetation around structures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But due to a lack of funding in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s state budget, the bills were scaled back. They now await Newsom’s signature.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another bill, SB 182, would have directed cities and counties to limit how much housing is built in very high fire-hazard zones absent adequate firefighting capacity, evacuation routes and defensible space enforcement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Due to concerns it could reduce the state’s housing stock, the bill failed to pass by the time legislators adjourned in September.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many fire experts have warned that California must make existing communities safer, if it’s going to tackle wildfire risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I personally believe that spending money upfront to prevent wildfires is a better use of funds than having to spend a lot more money later on to deal with a tragedy,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman, who authored one of the bills, \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB1516\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AB 1516\u003c/a>, now on Newsom’s desk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Awaiting Newsom’s Signature: Improving Defensible Space, But No Cal-Fire Inspection Requirement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many houses destroyed in wildfires aren’t consumed by advancing flames; they’re ignited by embers that are blown ahead of the fire and land on brush, trees or grasses next to a home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>State law requires homeowners in fire zones to minimize and clear vegetation to create “defensible space” within 100 feet of their home. In fire zones outside city limits, Cal Fire inspects homes and can issue citations for homeowners who don’t comply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Cal Fire has a goal of inspecting 33 percent of structures in its jurisdiction each year, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943058/whos-checking-homes-for-flammable-brush-in-some-high-risk-areas-maybe-no-one\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">KQED investigation \u003c/a>found the agency only did half that in 2018. In some parts of the state, only 6 percent of homes in risky areas were inspected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s become really clear that our defensible space has been insufficient to protect homes from embers,” said Yana Valachovic, a fire expert with UC Cooperative Extension. “What’s immediately adjacent to a structure affects the probability of a structure’s survival.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first draft of AB 1516 would have required Cal Fire to reach its 33 percent inspection goal. That would have meant hiring dozens of additional inspectors, potentially costing millions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But without support from Gov. Newsom to fund the bill, its supporters struck a compromise. Local groups, like fire safe councils, the California Conservation Corps and those affiliated with Native American tribes, would be empowered to make defensible space assessments of communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those groups could look at vegetation around homes but would not have the same authorization as Cal Fire to write citations requiring homeowners to reduce it. The groups would instead send that information to Cal Fire to inform its inspection program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We believe that this will get Cal Fire to its 33 percent inspection goal,” said Assemblymember Friedman. “I would like to see 100 percent, which will mean more funding, but I do think that using these trained third parties is a really good, cost-effective way to get statewide inspections.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Newsom signs the bill, it will also create new defensible space requirements within 5 feet of homes and buildings in high-risk fire zones. Cal Fire would develop the guidelines for these “ember-resistant” areas, potentially limiting the kinds of vegetation and mulch that can touch a building, something fire experts strongly recommend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The science has been clear for quite a while, but it’s been slow to incorporate into codes, standards and practices,” said Valachovic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Awaiting Newsom’s Signature: Home Retrofitting Fund Created … With No Money\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wind-driven fire embers can also ignite a home by \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1917346/wildfires-can-attack-your-house-from-the-inside-heres-how-to-prevent-it\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">landing on its wood roof or even entering an attic vent\u003c/a>. Some communities, like Big Bear, have provided residents with grants to replace wood roofs with those that are fire-resistant. Fire experts say even more affordable retrofits, like covering attic vents with mesh, can also make a difference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To help homeowners across the state, Assemblymember Jim Wood introduced \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB38\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AB 38\u003c/a>, a bill that would create a $1 billion fund for no- or low-interest loans for home retrofits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when it became clear the funding wasn’t prioritized in the state budget, the bill was amended. The retrofitting program would be created, but the actual funding would have to be found at a later date, potentially relying on federal hazard funds from FEMA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This year we made some very good steps in the right direction to help protect homes and communities,” said Wood. “But we still have a massive hill to climb and we need to climb it much faster to make sure communities are as safe as they can be as soon as they can be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Housing vs. Wildfire Protection: Restrictions on New Construction Stalls\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawmakers also took up one of the biggest debates around wildfire: balancing the state’s desperate need for new housing with the need to keep housing out of fire zones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Imposing development restrictions has been a third-rail of fire policy. When asked about it in April, Newsom responded that he wouldn’t advocate for a ban on building in high-risk areas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve never seen a deep analysis,” Newsom \u003ca href=\"https://www.apnews.com/b17b5c9200a64466b49f3f605f9202fe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told the Associated Press\u003c/a>. “And I think one has to be cautious about that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This session, State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson introduced \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB182\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">SB 182\u003c/a>, a bill that sought to dissuade local governments from building in very high fire hazard zones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill required areas in which multiunit developments are approved to have a funded defensible space enforcement program, adequate emergency response capacity, and low-risk areas where residents can shelter from fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We do have to build, but on the other hand, we don’t want to see another Paradise,” said Jackson. “This bill is designed to work with those competing interests and is designed to meet the needs of both.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the bill got tangled up in another controversial California issue: local requirements to build housing, set to help address the state’s housing crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Jackson’s bill specified that the wildfire building restrictions couldn’t be used to excuse an overall region from its housing requirement, some lawmakers thought it didn’t go far enough to protect housing mandates in individual cities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way the bill is structured right now, it would let cities like Berkeley and some other cities off the hook and reduce their housing obligations when they have plenty of non-wildfire areas to build,” said State Sen. Scott Wiener, chair of the Senate Housing Committee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Wiener agrees with the bill’s provision that regions should consider their fire risk when determining how much housing should be built.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cities where most of the land or all of the land is in a high wildfire risk area?” he said. “We should not be building there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill failed to pass at the end of the legislative session in September, as lawmakers struggled to hammer out a compromise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As we enter another fire season, I’m concerned that a lot of localities are going to be making a lot of bad decisions because we haven’t rung the bell that you can’t do this any longer,” State Sen. Bob Wieckowski said, when it became clear the bill wouldn’t proceed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiener says he’s confident the bill can be passed in early 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The delay is going to be a very short delay,” he said. “Taking a little bit of extra time to make sure we get it right is not going to harm anyone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Where State Funding Is Going: Emergency Response\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As soon as he took office, Newsom announced that tackling California’s wildfire readiness would be a priority for his administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If anyone is wondering if climate change is real, come to California,” he said in April. “We are in a very precarious state, literally and figuratively. It requires us to adapt. It requires us to be nimble. It requires us to meet the moment and meet the challenge. “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state is spending more than $900 million this year preparing for fires. More than $240 million is being directed at new firefighting crews, purchasing new aircraft and acquiring new technology. Large-scale forest management and vegetation-reduction projects received $225 million. Other funds are directed at improving emergency warning systems and 911 services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improving existing homes and buildings gets little mention in the \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2019-20/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/EmergencyPreparednessResponseandRecovery.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">budget document\u003c/a>, only receiving a one-time $5 million infusion for defensible space programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While fire experts say improving emergency response is critical, shoring up existing communities will be as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s no single solution that’s going to solve the fire problem,” said Valachovic. “It takes an all-hands-on-deck approach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "State lawmakers wanted to spend millions preparing homes for wildfires, but the funding never came through.",
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"title": "These Big Plans to Protect California Homes From Wildfire Fell Short in the Legislature | KQED",
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"headline": "These Big Plans to Protect California Homes From Wildfire Fell Short in the Legislature",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>After 86 people in the town of Paradise lost their lives in a massive wildfire last year, California lawmakers vowed to prepare the state for future infernos. But while millions of dollars are going toward new firefighting crews and technology, some say the state is overlooking an area in dire need of help: making homes and buildings safer.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "‘I’m concerned that a lot of localities are going to be making a lot of bad decisions because we haven’t rung the bell that you can’t do this any longer.’",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Several bills in the state Legislature were drafted to help millions of homeowners in high fire-risk areas retrofit their homes with fire-resistant materials. This was considered critical because most of these homes were built before California enacted its modern wildfire building codes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Other bills required stepped-up inspections of fire-prone vegetation around structures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But due to a lack of funding in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s state budget, the bills were scaled back. They now await Newsom’s signature.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another bill, SB 182, would have directed cities and counties to limit how much housing is built in very high fire-hazard zones absent adequate firefighting capacity, evacuation routes and defensible space enforcement.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Due to concerns it could reduce the state’s housing stock, the bill failed to pass by the time legislators adjourned in September.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many fire experts have warned that California must make existing communities safer, if it’s going to tackle wildfire risk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I personally believe that spending money upfront to prevent wildfires is a better use of funds than having to spend a lot more money later on to deal with a tragedy,” said Assemblymember Laura Friedman, who authored one of the bills, \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB1516\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AB 1516\u003c/a>, now on Newsom’s desk.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Awaiting Newsom’s Signature: Improving Defensible Space, But No Cal-Fire Inspection Requirement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many houses destroyed in wildfires aren’t consumed by advancing flames; they’re ignited by embers that are blown ahead of the fire and land on brush, trees or grasses next to a home.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>State law requires homeowners in fire zones to minimize and clear vegetation to create “defensible space” within 100 feet of their home. In fire zones outside city limits, Cal Fire inspects homes and can issue citations for homeowners who don’t comply.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Cal Fire has a goal of inspecting 33 percent of structures in its jurisdiction each year, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943058/whos-checking-homes-for-flammable-brush-in-some-high-risk-areas-maybe-no-one\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">KQED investigation \u003c/a>found the agency only did half that in 2018. In some parts of the state, only 6 percent of homes in risky areas were inspected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s become really clear that our defensible space has been insufficient to protect homes from embers,” said Yana Valachovic, a fire expert with UC Cooperative Extension. “What’s immediately adjacent to a structure affects the probability of a structure’s survival.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The first draft of AB 1516 would have required Cal Fire to reach its 33 percent inspection goal. That would have meant hiring dozens of additional inspectors, potentially costing millions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But without support from Gov. Newsom to fund the bill, its supporters struck a compromise. Local groups, like fire safe councils, the California Conservation Corps and those affiliated with Native American tribes, would be empowered to make defensible space assessments of communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Those groups could look at vegetation around homes but would not have the same authorization as Cal Fire to write citations requiring homeowners to reduce it. The groups would instead send that information to Cal Fire to inform its inspection program.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We believe that this will get Cal Fire to its 33 percent inspection goal,” said Assemblymember Friedman. “I would like to see 100 percent, which will mean more funding, but I do think that using these trained third parties is a really good, cost-effective way to get statewide inspections.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If Newsom signs the bill, it will also create new defensible space requirements within 5 feet of homes and buildings in high-risk fire zones. Cal Fire would develop the guidelines for these “ember-resistant” areas, potentially limiting the kinds of vegetation and mulch that can touch a building, something fire experts strongly recommend.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The science has been clear for quite a while, but it’s been slow to incorporate into codes, standards and practices,” said Valachovic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Awaiting Newsom’s Signature: Home Retrofitting Fund Created … With No Money\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wind-driven fire embers can also ignite a home by \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1917346/wildfires-can-attack-your-house-from-the-inside-heres-how-to-prevent-it\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">landing on its wood roof or even entering an attic vent\u003c/a>. Some communities, like Big Bear, have provided residents with grants to replace wood roofs with those that are fire-resistant. Fire experts say even more affordable retrofits, like covering attic vents with mesh, can also make a difference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To help homeowners across the state, Assemblymember Jim Wood introduced \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB38\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">AB 38\u003c/a>, a bill that would create a $1 billion fund for no- or low-interest loans for home retrofits.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But when it became clear the funding wasn’t prioritized in the state budget, the bill was amended. The retrofitting program would be created, but the actual funding would have to be found at a later date, potentially relying on federal hazard funds from FEMA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This year we made some very good steps in the right direction to help protect homes and communities,” said Wood. “But we still have a massive hill to climb and we need to climb it much faster to make sure communities are as safe as they can be as soon as they can be.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Housing vs. Wildfire Protection: Restrictions on New Construction Stalls\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Lawmakers also took up one of the biggest debates around wildfire: balancing the state’s desperate need for new housing with the need to keep housing out of fire zones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Imposing development restrictions has been a third-rail of fire policy. When asked about it in April, Newsom responded that he wouldn’t advocate for a ban on building in high-risk areas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I’ve never seen a deep analysis,” Newsom \u003ca href=\"https://www.apnews.com/b17b5c9200a64466b49f3f605f9202fe\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told the Associated Press\u003c/a>. “And I think one has to be cautious about that.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This session, State Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson introduced \u003ca href=\"https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200SB182\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">SB 182\u003c/a>, a bill that sought to dissuade local governments from building in very high fire hazard zones.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill required areas in which multiunit developments are approved to have a funded defensible space enforcement program, adequate emergency response capacity, and low-risk areas where residents can shelter from fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We do have to build, but on the other hand, we don’t want to see another Paradise,” said Jackson. “This bill is designed to work with those competing interests and is designed to meet the needs of both.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the bill got tangled up in another controversial California issue: local requirements to build housing, set to help address the state’s housing crisis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Jackson’s bill specified that the wildfire building restrictions couldn’t be used to excuse an overall region from its housing requirement, some lawmakers thought it didn’t go far enough to protect housing mandates in individual cities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The way the bill is structured right now, it would let cities like Berkeley and some other cities off the hook and reduce their housing obligations when they have plenty of non-wildfire areas to build,” said State Sen. Scott Wiener, chair of the Senate Housing Committee.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But Wiener agrees with the bill’s provision that regions should consider their fire risk when determining how much housing should be built.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Cities where most of the land or all of the land is in a high wildfire risk area?” he said. “We should not be building there.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill failed to pass at the end of the legislative session in September, as lawmakers struggled to hammer out a compromise.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“As we enter another fire season, I’m concerned that a lot of localities are going to be making a lot of bad decisions because we haven’t rung the bell that you can’t do this any longer,” State Sen. Bob Wieckowski said, when it became clear the bill wouldn’t proceed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Wiener says he’s confident the bill can be passed in early 2020.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The delay is going to be a very short delay,” he said. “Taking a little bit of extra time to make sure we get it right is not going to harm anyone.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Where State Funding Is Going: Emergency Response\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As soon as he took office, Newsom announced that tackling California’s wildfire readiness would be a priority for his administration.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“If anyone is wondering if climate change is real, come to California,” he said in April. “We are in a very precarious state, literally and figuratively. It requires us to adapt. It requires us to be nimble. It requires us to meet the moment and meet the challenge. “\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The state is spending more than $900 million this year preparing for fires. More than $240 million is being directed at new firefighting crews, purchasing new aircraft and acquiring new technology. Large-scale forest management and vegetation-reduction projects received $225 million. Other funds are directed at improving emergency warning systems and 911 services.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Improving existing homes and buildings gets little mention in the \u003ca href=\"http://www.ebudget.ca.gov/2019-20/pdf/Enacted/BudgetSummary/EmergencyPreparednessResponseandRecovery.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">budget document\u003c/a>, only receiving a one-time $5 million infusion for defensible space programs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While fire experts say improving emergency response is critical, shoring up existing communities will be as well.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There’s no single solution that’s going to solve the fire problem,” said Valachovic. “It takes an all-hands-on-deck approach.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "Harrowing Photos From the Amazon Rainforest Wildfires",
"headTitle": "Harrowing Photos From the Amazon Rainforest Wildfires | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire,” French President Emmanuel Macron \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1164617008962527232\">wrote in a tweet Thursday\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He called it an “international crisis” and urged members of the G7 to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/23/753639869/macron-urges-g7-members-to-put-amazon-fires-at-top-of-agenda\">prioritize the issue at its summit this weekend\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946739\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946739\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-800x534.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-1200x801.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-1920x1282.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946741\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946741\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85-800x560.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85-768x538.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A satellite image shows smoke rising from Amazon rainforest fires in Rondonia State, just southwest of Porto Velho, Brazil, in the upper Amazon River basin on Aug. 15. \u003ccite>(Maxar Technologies)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many of the fires are believed to have been set by farmers clearing land. Environmentalists say the attitude of Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, has encouraged the farmers, as well as cattle ranchers, loggers and miners, NPR’s Scott Neumann reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946742\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946742\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A view of the devastation caused by a fire during the dry season in Brasilia, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Adriano Machado/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bolsonaro has described measures to protect the rainforest as “obstacles” to economic growth. Bolsonaro, who took office in January, has said repeatedly that he wants to open the Amazon to development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946743\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946743\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85-800x528.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"528\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85-768x507.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Humaita, Brazil, on Aug. 14. \u003ccite>(Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946744\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946744\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85-800x540.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"540\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85-768x518.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A tract of Amazon jungle being cleared by loggers and farmers burns in Novo Airao, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Bruno Kelly/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year — \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/21/753140642/tens-of-thousands-of-fires-ravage-brazilian-amazon-where-deforestation-has-spike\">most of which erupted in the Amazon\u003c/a>, reports NPR’s Colin Dwyer. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946745\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946745\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>About half those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as in all of 2018. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities such as São Paulo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=The+Amazon+Rainforest%2C+Ablaze+In+Brazil&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "There have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year, mostly in the Amazon, and about half of which have ignited in just the past month. Some international leaders are raising the alarm.",
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"description": "There have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year, mostly in the Amazon, and about half of which have ignited in just the past month. Some international leaders are raising the alarm.",
"title": "Harrowing Photos From the Amazon Rainforest Wildfires | KQED",
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"headline": "Harrowing Photos From the Amazon Rainforest Wildfires",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Our house is burning. Literally. The Amazon rain forest – the lungs which produces 20% of our planet’s oxygen – is on fire,” French President Emmanuel Macron \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/EmmanuelMacron/status/1164617008962527232\">wrote in a tweet Thursday\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He called it an “international crisis” and urged members of the G7 to \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/23/753639869/macron-urges-g7-members-to-put-amazon-fires-at-top-of-agenda\">prioritize the issue at its summit this weekend\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946739\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946739\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-800x534.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"534\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-800x534.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-768x513.jpg 768w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-1020x681.jpg 1020w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-1200x801.jpg 1200w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2-1920x1282.jpg 1920w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nebx_custom-b79cd0eaccb6a8c9324c8a516121605a4b8ba376-2.jpg 2048w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946741\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946741\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85-800x560.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"560\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85-160x112.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/web-03_close-up-view-of-a-fire_15august2019_southwest-of-porto-velho-brazil_wv3__custom-480f95cb50aa08bbc233624d8441aa2c3da15686-s800-c85-768x538.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A satellite image shows smoke rising from Amazon rainforest fires in Rondonia State, just southwest of Porto Velho, Brazil, in the upper Amazon River basin on Aug. 15. \u003ccite>(Maxar Technologies)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Many of the fires are believed to have been set by farmers clearing land. Environmentalists say the attitude of Brazil’s right-wing president, Jair Bolsonaro, has encouraged the farmers, as well as cattle ranchers, loggers and miners, NPR’s Scott Neumann reports.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946742\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946742\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nbvn_custom-77bc2a1493706213e13ec4bbfefa159d78dba65e-s800-c85-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A view of the devastation caused by a fire during the dry season in Brasilia, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Adriano Machado/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Bolsonaro has described measures to protect the rainforest as “obstacles” to economic growth. Bolsonaro, who took office in January, has said repeatedly that he wants to open the Amazon to development.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946743\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946743\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85-800x528.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"528\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85-160x106.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nh3w_custom-b78db5925e777ff5b00e60880e33a865c2399df4-s800-c85-768x507.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Humaita, Brazil, on Aug. 14. \u003ccite>(Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946744\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946744\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85-800x540.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"540\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85-160x108.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nc8d_custom-1ed747a2516df8e98b9b3712198eccd7593065cd-s800-c85-768x518.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">A tract of Amazon jungle being cleared by loggers and farmers burns in Novo Airao, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Bruno Kelly/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>According to Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year — \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/21/753140642/tens-of-thousands-of-fires-ravage-brazilian-amazon-where-deforestation-has-spike\">most of which erupted in the Amazon\u003c/a>, reports NPR’s Colin Dwyer. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946745\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1946745\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1-800x533.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"800\" height=\"533\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1-160x107.jpg 160w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/rts2nec81_custom-b1e593ad6a6d41811b748a410274b6e23fd9c896-s800-c85-1-768x512.jpg 768w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Smoke billows during a fire in an area of the Amazon rainforest near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil, on Wednesday. \u003ccite>(Ueslei Marcelino/Reuters)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>About half those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as in all of 2018. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities such as São Paulo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=The+Amazon+Rainforest%2C+Ablaze+In+Brazil&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the gist of an \u003ca href=\"http://queimadas.dgi.inpe.br/queimadas/portal/situacao-atual\">announcement this week\u003c/a> by the country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About half those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as in all of 2018. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities, such as São Paulo.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/shannongsims/status/1163632818221719558?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has signaled unconcern about the situation. The far-right leader, who took office in January, has repeatedly lambasted Brazil’s environmental regulations as an impediment to economic development, and under his tenure environmental agencies have seen diminished staff and funding. That includes INPE itself, whose leader, Ricardo Magnus Osório Galvão, was \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/mctic/status/1157321742840467466?s=12\">canned this month\u003c/a> because — according to Galvão — he questioned how Bolsonaro was using his agency’s data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Asked about the fires \u003ca href=\"https://g1.globo.com/google/amp/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml?__twitter_impression=true\">by local media\u003c/a>, Bolsonaro baselessly suggested that nongovernmental organizations have been setting the fires themselves as retaliation for the scaling back of Brazil’s usual funding support for them. He posited that these groups are trying to increase international pressure on his government — but when reporters pressed him on the point, he didn’t name any specific NGOs or offer any proof for his assertion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So, there could be … I’m not affirming it, criminal action by these ‘NGOers’ to call attention against my person, against the government of Brazil. This is the war that we are facing,” he said Wednesday in a Facebook Live video, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49415973\">translation by the BBC\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/GlobalEcoGuy/status/1164226424405762048?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He added that his government is “not insensitive” to the fires and that his government may look into measures to combat them. In a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/rsallesmma/status/1163990341361553415\">tweet Tuesday\u003c/a>, Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, attributed the fires to “dry weather, wind and heat” and said federal officials and equipment are available to help and “already in use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a lot of deforestation has less to do with natural factors and more to do with human activities. INPE says the amount of land that was deforested last month alone represented a nearly 300% surge over deforestation in June 2018.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As NPR \u003ca href=\"http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/brazil/\">reported in 2015\u003c/a>, deforestation such as this is often tied to subsistence farming and ranching, which uses more than two-thirds of Brazil’s deforested land — and which has tripled the number of cattle in the country in the past three decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We estimate that the forest areas in the Brazilian Amazon have decreased something between 20 and 30% compared to the last 12 months,” Carlos Nobre, a researcher at the University of São Paulo, \u003ca href=\"https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-forest-fires-rage-as-farmers-push-into-the-amazon/a-50116455\">told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fluvio Mascarenhas, who works at a government agency called the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/19/752529425/brazils-amazon-rainforest-is-disappearing-under-president-jair-bolsonaro\">told NPR’s Philip Reeves\u003c/a> that operations that the agency usually carries out against illegal loggers and ranchers have been drastically scaled back this year. And that, he says, together with Bolsonaro’s comments, only encourages further illegal activity in the rainforest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that has him afraid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every time you look at a satellite image of the forest,” he tells Reeves, “you see another little piece missing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Tens+Of+Thousands+Of+Fires+Ravage+Brazilian+Amazon%2C+Where+Deforestation+Has+Spiked&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Fires in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest are proliferating at an alarming rate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>That’s the gist of an \u003ca href=\"http://queimadas.dgi.inpe.br/queimadas/portal/situacao-atual\">announcement this week\u003c/a> by the country’s National Institute for Space Research, or INPE. According to the agency, there have been 74,155 fires in Brazil so far this year — most of which erupted in the Amazon. That represents an astonishing leap of more than 80% over last year and by far the most that the agency has recorded since it began compiling this data in 2013.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About half those fires, or nearly 36,000 of them, have ignited in just the past month. That’s nearly as many as in all of 2018. Smoke from the fires has darkened the skies over major Brazilian cities, such as São Paulo.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Asked about the fires \u003ca href=\"https://g1.globo.com/google/amp/politica/noticia/2019/08/21/bolsonaro-diz-que-ongs-podem-estar-por-tras-de-queimadas-na-amazonia-para-chamar-atencao-contra-o-governo.ghtml?__twitter_impression=true\">by local media\u003c/a>, Bolsonaro baselessly suggested that nongovernmental organizations have been setting the fires themselves as retaliation for the scaling back of Brazil’s usual funding support for them. He posited that these groups are trying to increase international pressure on his government — but when reporters pressed him on the point, he didn’t name any specific NGOs or offer any proof for his assertion.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So, there could be … I’m not affirming it, criminal action by these ‘NGOers’ to call attention against my person, against the government of Brazil. This is the war that we are facing,” he said Wednesday in a Facebook Live video, according to a \u003ca href=\"https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49415973\">translation by the BBC\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\n\u003cp>He added that his government is “not insensitive” to the fires and that his government may look into measures to combat them. In a \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/rsallesmma/status/1163990341361553415\">tweet Tuesday\u003c/a>, Brazil’s environment minister, Ricardo Salles, attributed the fires to “dry weather, wind and heat” and said federal officials and equipment are available to help and “already in use.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But a lot of deforestation has less to do with natural factors and more to do with human activities. INPE says the amount of land that was deforested last month alone represented a nearly 300% surge over deforestation in June 2018.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As NPR \u003ca href=\"http://apps.npr.org/lookatthis/posts/brazil/\">reported in 2015\u003c/a>, deforestation such as this is often tied to subsistence farming and ranching, which uses more than two-thirds of Brazil’s deforested land — and which has tripled the number of cattle in the country in the past three decades.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We estimate that the forest areas in the Brazilian Amazon have decreased something between 20 and 30% compared to the last 12 months,” Carlos Nobre, a researcher at the University of São Paulo, \u003ca href=\"https://www.dw.com/en/brazil-forest-fires-rage-as-farmers-push-into-the-amazon/a-50116455\">told German broadcaster Deutsche Welle\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Fluvio Mascarenhas, who works at a government agency called the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation, \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2019/08/19/752529425/brazils-amazon-rainforest-is-disappearing-under-president-jair-bolsonaro\">told NPR’s Philip Reeves\u003c/a> that operations that the agency usually carries out against illegal loggers and ranchers have been drastically scaled back this year. And that, he says, together with Bolsonaro’s comments, only encourages further illegal activity in the rainforest.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And that has him afraid.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Every time you look at a satellite image of the forest,” he tells Reeves, “you see another little piece missing.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2019 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"https://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Tens+Of+Thousands+Of+Fires+Ravage+Brazilian+Amazon%2C+Where+Deforestation+Has+Spiked&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Data Pinpoints 14 California Towns Where an Emergency Escape Could Be a Problem",
"headTitle": "Data Pinpoints 14 California Towns Where an Emergency Escape Could Be a Problem | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>California has the second-largest number of small communities with limited evacuation routes when compared to other states, according to a new nationwide analysis of towns with populations under 40,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.streetlightdata.com/limited-evacuation-routes-map/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a>, conducted by San Francisco-based traffic analytics company \u003ca href=\"https://www.streetlightdata.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">StreetLight Data\u003c/a>, identified 100 communities across the country with the most limited means of escaping disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. It found that 14 of those communities are in California, second only to Florida’s 20.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study comes on the heels of the deadliest and most destructive blaze in California history, last November’s Camp Fire, which killed 86 people and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1942547/in-the-age-of-the-crazy-fast-fire-a-good-evacuation-plan-may-not-be-enough\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">put into perspective\u003c/a> some of the challenges facing rural communities with limited escape routes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the fast-moving blaze swept through Paradise — a Butte County town of roughly 27,000 — on an early Thursday morning, fleeing residents ended up caught in gridlocked traffic along Skyway, the main route out of town. Many people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot. Some were found dead in their cars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new analysis marks an attempt to highlight the potential for similar situations in other small towns, according to StreetLight’s Chief Technical Officer Paul Friedman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Transportation infrastructure, and sharing information about transportation options, is one part of the complex requirements of disaster and evacuation preparation,” Friedman said. “We hope this data can be a useful support to those working in this challenging field.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In order to identify evacuation-challenged communities, StreetLight analyzed location data points from smartphones and GPS navigation devices in cars and trucks to identify trends in what routes people tend to use to exit their communities. They calculated which communities face the greatest challenges by determining what percentage of a population’s daily trips take only one main exit, while also taking into account the number of alternative exits and the total population of an area, according to U.S. Census data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s not included in the analysis is the potential for natural disasters in a given area, according to StreetLight CEO Laura Schewel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is purely the transportation data, because that’s where we’re really the experts, and we want to stay in our lane,” she said. “What we hope is that this data can be mixed with people who have expertise about other risk factors … and be part of the full picture of data-driven evacuation preparedness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In essence, Schewel said, an emergency manager in a small town that’s on the list could use the data from the analysis as a launching point for drawing up wildfire evacuation routes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The following is a list of the California communities among the 100 most evacuation-limited in the country, according to StreetLight, in order:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Limited Evacuation Routes\" aria-label=\"Long Table\" src=\"//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Ykzc7/1/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border: none;\" width=\"600\" height=\"671\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s two most evacuation-constrained communities — Coto de Caza in Orange County and Bell Canyon in Ventura County — are both in the southern portion of the state and are both at-risk for wildfire: Coto de Caza is surrounded by burnable open space; Bell Canyon was \u003ca href=\"https://www.dailynews.com/2018/11/13/bell-canyon-residents-hit-hard-by-woolsey-fire-return-to-find-dozens-of-homes-destroyed-many-others-spared/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">hit hard\u003c/a> by the Woolsey Fire in 2018.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area is, for the most part, absent from the list, though that’s likely due in part to the study’s methodology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>StreetLight identified some small communities in the region with limited evacuation routes, including Ladera, a development adjacent to Portola Valley, near the Alpine Road exit off Interstate 280 on the edge of Silicon Valley, and Fetters Hot Springs, on Highway 12 just north of the town of Sonoma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But because the analysis was limited to communities with populations under 40,000, larger towns and cities that may have areas with limited escape routes are missing from the list.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland, for example, has some areas with the potential for both limited exit routes and high risk for fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1934332/the-largest-deadliest-and-most-destructive-fires-in-california-history\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">East Bay Hills fire\u003c/a> in October 1991, which killed 25 people, congestion was a major problem. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-060.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">report\u003c/a> on the blaze conducted by the U.S. Fire Administration found that as some roads were blocked down due to the spread of the fire, others “became clogged with cars and pedestrians.” As in Paradise, some victims died after being trapped on narrow, blocked roads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>StreetLight’s Schewel said the company chose to analyze only small towns because it feels those communities will benefit most from the research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We figured if we’re going to put a bunch of information on the internet for free, the small towns who don’t have the resources to do their own studies might get the most benefit out of that type of exercise,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schewel said this type of analysis could be conducted for a larger population center like Oakland, but in that case, it might be more helpful to analyze the area in smaller sections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also important to note, Schewel said, that there’s no silver bullet for evacuation planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Data-driven planning is important, but we want to be very clear that this is not a magical robot that tells evacuation professionals what to do,” she said. “It’s — we hope — a helpful extra tool in the toolkit.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>California has the second-largest number of small communities with limited evacuation routes when compared to other states, according to a new nationwide analysis of towns with populations under 40,000.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The \u003ca href=\"https://www.streetlightdata.com/limited-evacuation-routes-map/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">study\u003c/a>, conducted by San Francisco-based traffic analytics company \u003ca href=\"https://www.streetlightdata.com/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">StreetLight Data\u003c/a>, identified 100 communities across the country with the most limited means of escaping disasters like wildfires and hurricanes. It found that 14 of those communities are in California, second only to Florida’s 20.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The study comes on the heels of the deadliest and most destructive blaze in California history, last November’s Camp Fire, which killed 86 people and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1942547/in-the-age-of-the-crazy-fast-fire-a-good-evacuation-plan-may-not-be-enough\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">put into perspective\u003c/a> some of the challenges facing rural communities with limited escape routes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When the fast-moving blaze swept through Paradise — a Butte County town of roughly 27,000 — on an early Thursday morning, fleeing residents ended up caught in gridlocked traffic along Skyway, the main route out of town. Many people abandoned their vehicles and fled on foot. Some were found dead in their cars.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The new analysis marks an attempt to highlight the potential for similar situations in other small towns, according to StreetLight’s Chief Technical Officer Paul Friedman.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Transportation infrastructure, and sharing information about transportation options, is one part of the complex requirements of disaster and evacuation preparation,” Friedman said. “We hope this data can be a useful support to those working in this challenging field.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In order to identify evacuation-challenged communities, StreetLight analyzed location data points from smartphones and GPS navigation devices in cars and trucks to identify trends in what routes people tend to use to exit their communities. They calculated which communities face the greatest challenges by determining what percentage of a population’s daily trips take only one main exit, while also taking into account the number of alternative exits and the total population of an area, according to U.S. Census data.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s not included in the analysis is the potential for natural disasters in a given area, according to StreetLight CEO Laura Schewel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“This is purely the transportation data, because that’s where we’re really the experts, and we want to stay in our lane,” she said. “What we hope is that this data can be mixed with people who have expertise about other risk factors … and be part of the full picture of data-driven evacuation preparedness.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In essence, Schewel said, an emergency manager in a small town that’s on the list could use the data from the analysis as a launching point for drawing up wildfire evacuation routes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The following is a list of the California communities among the 100 most evacuation-limited in the country, according to StreetLight, in order:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c!-- iframe plugin v.4.3 wordpress.org/plugins/iframe/ -->\u003cbr>\n\u003ciframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"Limited Evacuation Routes\" aria-label=\"Long Table\" src=\"//datawrapper.dwcdn.net/Ykzc7/1/\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"0\" style=\"border: none;\" width=\"600\" height=\"671\" class=\"iframe-class\">\u003c/iframe>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California’s two most evacuation-constrained communities — Coto de Caza in Orange County and Bell Canyon in Ventura County — are both in the southern portion of the state and are both at-risk for wildfire: Coto de Caza is surrounded by burnable open space; Bell Canyon was \u003ca href=\"https://www.dailynews.com/2018/11/13/bell-canyon-residents-hit-hard-by-woolsey-fire-return-to-find-dozens-of-homes-destroyed-many-others-spared/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">hit hard\u003c/a> by the Woolsey Fire in 2018.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Bay Area is, for the most part, absent from the list, though that’s likely due in part to the study’s methodology.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>StreetLight identified some small communities in the region with limited evacuation routes, including Ladera, a development adjacent to Portola Valley, near the Alpine Road exit off Interstate 280 on the edge of Silicon Valley, and Fetters Hot Springs, on Highway 12 just north of the town of Sonoma.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But because the analysis was limited to communities with populations under 40,000, larger towns and cities that may have areas with limited escape routes are missing from the list.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Oakland, for example, has some areas with the potential for both limited exit routes and high risk for fire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1934332/the-largest-deadliest-and-most-destructive-fires-in-california-history\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">East Bay Hills fire\u003c/a> in October 1991, which killed 25 people, congestion was a major problem. A \u003ca href=\"https://www.usfa.fema.gov/downloads/pdf/publications/tr-060.pdf\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">report\u003c/a> on the blaze conducted by the U.S. Fire Administration found that as some roads were blocked down due to the spread of the fire, others “became clogged with cars and pedestrians.” As in Paradise, some victims died after being trapped on narrow, blocked roads.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>StreetLight’s Schewel said the company chose to analyze only small towns because it feels those communities will benefit most from the research.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We figured if we’re going to put a bunch of information on the internet for free, the small towns who don’t have the resources to do their own studies might get the most benefit out of that type of exercise,” she said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Schewel said this type of analysis could be conducted for a larger population center like Oakland, but in that case, it might be more helpful to analyze the area in smaller sections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s also important to note, Schewel said, that there’s no silver bullet for evacuation planning.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Data-driven planning is important, but we want to be very clear that this is not a magical robot that tells evacuation professionals what to do,” she said. “It’s — we hope — a helpful extra tool in the toolkit.”\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Atty. Gen. Becerra: It Does Seem Like You're Fighting Trump's Environmental Policy At Every Turn",
"headTitle": "Atty. Gen. Becerra: It Does Seem Like You’re Fighting Trump’s Environmental Policy At Every Turn | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Last week, the Trump Administration \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/forum/2010101872729/changes-to-endangered-species-act-weaken-wildlife-protections\">weakened\u003c/a> the Endangered Species Act with the broadest changes to the bedrock environmental law in decades.[aside postID=science_1946454,science_1946394]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration’s new rules make it harder to consider the future impacts of climate change when officials consider whether a species is threatened and should be placed on the endangered species list. It also introduces a factor the existing law never did, intended to calculate the economic impact of protecting a species. Indeed, the Endangered Species Act had expressly forbidden agencies from taking economic considerations into account.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During a call with reporters, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra promised he’d take the federal government to court over this. He added that California goes to court against the Trump administration only when state officials deem it “necessary.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Becerra may not sue over each of Trump’s actions, it certainly \u003cem>seems\u003c/em> that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than 24 hours after he promised legal action over endangered species, Becerra gathered reporters again to announce that California is suing the Trump administration over another environmental law, a rollback of Obama-era rules to reduce pollution from power plants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The latest suit over the Clean Power Plan raises to 27 the number of times that Becerra has sued the Trump administration over an environmental issue. A \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/education/2018/03/becerra-v-trump-california-using-courts-fight-administration/\">tracker\u003c/a> by the nonprofit, nonpartisan news site CalMatters keeps a running tally. That’s almost as many as all other lawsuits he’s filed against the administration, at least 29 in total, on subjects ranging from immigration to health care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946566\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 541px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1946566 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/RS22958_GettyImages-584444536-sfi.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"541\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/RS22958_GettyImages-584444536-sfi.jpg 541w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/RS22958_GettyImages-584444536-sfi-160x106.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 541px) 100vw, 541px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. \u003ccite>(Alex Wong/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Obama’s policy mandated that states curb pollution from power plants and aimed to reduce U.S. power sector emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, but it also allowed states to carve out their own plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trump’s EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler often criticized the Obama policy, saying it would require Americans pay more for energy. Under his plan, the Affordable Clean Energy rule, the agency will still regulate emissions by drastically lowering the bar to about a percent by 2030.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are top takeaways about how the new federal policies will affect California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scientists Are Concerned About Biodiversity and Climate Change\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The media focus lots of attention on megafauna— the grizzlies, the bald eagles, the California condor. But in this state, more plants are threatened than animals. And many scientists say their main concern is biodiversity; California has more endangered species than any state except Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Northern California’s old growth forests, for example, the redwoods and Douglas fir are habitat for a lot of threatened critters. Their threatened status extends protections to the ecosystem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the Central Coast, specific \u003ca href=\"https://calscape.org/Arctostaphylos-refugioensis-(Refugio-Manzanita)?srchcr=sc5627ff4e616af\">manzanita\u003c/a> face pressures from wildfire. So the use of climate data becomes very important in accurate analyses of the trees’ status and the threats to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a complete change from the existing law, the Trump administration proposes that agencies conduct economic analyses and release them to the public. At the same time, the administration’s proposal says agencies won’t use that analysis in determining whether to list a species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How Will the New Rules Affect California? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California maintains strong environmental laws, but animals don’t care about state boundaries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The endangered grey wolf, for example, walked into California from Oregon. Laws in California protect the wolf, but the animal loses those protections if it walks into another state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, California’s strong emissions laws known as the Clean Power Plan don’t extend into other states. This state is part of a regional grid system, and coal-burning plants operate in neighboring Nevada and Arizona.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About half of California’s land is public. Some of it is managed by the Federal Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service. The military manages others — Camp Pendleton and China Lake Naval Air Station, for example. An endangered species doesn’t know whether it’s on military, state or private land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How a New State Law Might Cover the Gap\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becerra promised that California would push back against federal environmental deregulation through any and all means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Legislature is considering a bill, SB 1, under which any federal environmental or worker safety standard in place and effective when President Trump took office would remain enforceable under California law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill in the Assembly Appropriations Committee would apply to the Clean Power Plan and the Endangered Species Act. It has passed out of the Senate and must move out of the committee by August 30.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why All the Lawsuits Now?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The upcoming presidential election is the reason for the rapid-fire pace of the lawsuits. The Trump administration wants to see all of these legal questions answered by 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the Democrats beat Trump, the new president may reverse the executive orders. If Trump wins, the administration wants to begin its second term with the legal disputes settled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuits over the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Power Plan are going to be heard either by the U.S. Supreme Court or by a panel of judges at the D.C. Circuit Court.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Trump administration’s new rules make it harder to consider the future impacts of climate change when officials consider whether a species is threatened and should be placed on the endangered species list. It also introduces a factor the existing law never did, intended to calculate the economic impact of protecting a species. Indeed, the Endangered Species Act had expressly forbidden agencies from taking economic considerations into account.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>During a call with reporters, California Attorney General Xavier Becerra promised he’d take the federal government to court over this. He added that California goes to court against the Trump administration only when state officials deem it “necessary.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>While Becerra may not sue over each of Trump’s actions, it certainly \u003cem>seems\u003c/em> that way.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Less than 24 hours after he promised legal action over endangered species, Becerra gathered reporters again to announce that California is suing the Trump administration over another environmental law, a rollback of Obama-era rules to reduce pollution from power plants.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The latest suit over the Clean Power Plan raises to 27 the number of times that Becerra has sued the Trump administration over an environmental issue. A \u003ca href=\"https://calmatters.org/education/2018/03/becerra-v-trump-california-using-courts-fight-administration/\">tracker\u003c/a> by the nonprofit, nonpartisan news site CalMatters keeps a running tally. That’s almost as many as all other lawsuits he’s filed against the administration, at least 29 in total, on subjects ranging from immigration to health care.\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_1946566\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\" style=\"max-width: 541px\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"wp-image-1946566 size-full\" src=\"https://ww2.kqed.org/science/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/RS22958_GettyImages-584444536-sfi.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"541\" height=\"360\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/RS22958_GettyImages-584444536-sfi.jpg 541w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/35/2019/08/RS22958_GettyImages-584444536-sfi-160x106.jpg 160w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 541px) 100vw, 541px\">\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">California Attorney General Xavier Becerra. \u003ccite>(Alex Wong/Getty Images)\u003c/cite>\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>Obama’s policy mandated that states curb pollution from power plants and aimed to reduce U.S. power sector emissions 32 percent below 2005 levels by 2030, but it also allowed states to carve out their own plans.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Trump’s EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler often criticized the Obama policy, saying it would require Americans pay more for energy. Under his plan, the Affordable Clean Energy rule, the agency will still regulate emissions by drastically lowering the bar to about a percent by 2030.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Here are top takeaways about how the new federal policies will affect California.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Scientists Are Concerned About Biodiversity and Climate Change\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The media focus lots of attention on megafauna— the grizzlies, the bald eagles, the California condor. But in this state, more plants are threatened than animals. And many scientists say their main concern is biodiversity; California has more endangered species than any state except Hawaii.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In Northern California’s old growth forests, for example, the redwoods and Douglas fir are habitat for a lot of threatened critters. Their threatened status extends protections to the ecosystem.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On the Central Coast, specific \u003ca href=\"https://calscape.org/Arctostaphylos-refugioensis-(Refugio-Manzanita)?srchcr=sc5627ff4e616af\">manzanita\u003c/a> face pressures from wildfire. So the use of climate data becomes very important in accurate analyses of the trees’ status and the threats to them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a complete change from the existing law, the Trump administration proposes that agencies conduct economic analyses and release them to the public. At the same time, the administration’s proposal says agencies won’t use that analysis in determining whether to list a species.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How Will the New Rules Affect California? \u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California maintains strong environmental laws, but animals don’t care about state boundaries.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The endangered grey wolf, for example, walked into California from Oregon. Laws in California protect the wolf, but the animal loses those protections if it walks into another state.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, California’s strong emissions laws known as the Clean Power Plan don’t extend into other states. This state is part of a regional grid system, and coal-burning plants operate in neighboring Nevada and Arizona.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>About half of California’s land is public. Some of it is managed by the Federal Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service. The military manages others — Camp Pendleton and China Lake Naval Air Station, for example. An endangered species doesn’t know whether it’s on military, state or private land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>How a New State Law Might Cover the Gap\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Becerra promised that California would push back against federal environmental deregulation through any and all means.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The California Legislature is considering a bill, SB 1, under which any federal environmental or worker safety standard in place and effective when President Trump took office would remain enforceable under California law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The bill in the Assembly Appropriations Committee would apply to the Clean Power Plan and the Endangered Species Act. It has passed out of the Senate and must move out of the committee by August 30.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why All the Lawsuits Now?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The upcoming presidential election is the reason for the rapid-fire pace of the lawsuits. The Trump administration wants to see all of these legal questions answered by 2021.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>If the Democrats beat Trump, the new president may reverse the executive orders. If Trump wins, the administration wants to begin its second term with the legal disputes settled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The lawsuits over the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Power Plan are going to be heard either by the U.S. Supreme Court or by a panel of judges at the D.C. Circuit Court.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Feds Extend Review For Controversial Forest Plan",
"headTitle": "Feds Extend Review For Controversial Forest Plan | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The U.S. Forest Service has extended public comment period on a controversial \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/06/13/2019-12195/national-environmental-policy-act-nepa-compliance\">plan\u003c/a> to relax environmental permitting for new logging and forest management projects across millions of acres of federal forest lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The proposal would upend long-held environmental practices that have been in place since 1970, and make it easier for timber harvesting and bulldozing forest roads in all 20 of California’s federal forests, including national forests in Mendocino, Tahoe, Los Padres, and Lassen.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘This will be the largest change in the regulation in a decade.’’\u003ccite>Alejandro Camacho, UC Irvine law professor\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>The Forest Service has \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/emc/nepa/revisions/index.shtml\">said\u003c/a> that, with its limited staff, extended droughts, pests, and tree diseases have made it difficult for the agency to protect people from catastrophic wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only about two million acres of federal forests are treated with thinning projects, prescribed burns or logging each year. The Forest Service would like to do a lot more. They \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/sites/default/files/toward-shared-stewardship.pdf\">estimate\u003c/a> 17 million acres of federal forests at high fire risk could be logged to reduce fire danger and 35 million acres should be treated with prescribed burns. The proposed rule changes will allow them to act more quickly, officials say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Regulation Rollback\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s only part of the picture. In 2018, President Donald Trump issued an \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/eo-promoting-active-management-americas-forests-rangelands-federal-lands-improve-conditions-reduce-wildfire-risk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">executive order \u003c/a>that encouraged federal agencies to ease environmental review for industrial operations on federal land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The administration has called for more ‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/08/29/642955787/will-more-logging-save-western-forests-from-wildfires\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">active\u003c/a>’ logging in western forests and wants to open up more federal forests to the timber industry. They say it will provide badly needed jobs in rural communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“On the one hand, periodically updating federal agency regulations is a good thing,” said Alejandro Camacho, a law professor at UC Irvine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But this will be the largest change in the regulation in a decade,” he said. “The most prominent changes are concerning because they open a category of actions by the agency that they are trying to exclude from environmental review.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The proposal would more than double the size of projects that can bypass the analysis. For commercial logging and timber harvesting, that means expediting any proposal smaller than 4,200 acres, Camacho said. For forest thinning projects, where forest managers clear dense stands of trees and thick brush, the threshold is 7,000 acres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmentalists have decried the plan, calling it a giveaway for corporations and saying it has the potential to destroy the environment. They say the rule change would shield logging contracts from public and scientific scrutiny, and could extend to new oil and gas drilling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, however, most of the federal drilling occurs on land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, which is a separate agency with its own environmental process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Randi Spivak, a public lands policy advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said that if the rule passes as it is written, the public will have no voice on the majority of decisions the government makes about national forests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s the voice of the people,” Spivak said. “Public comment is an opportunity for everyday citizens who love their national forests to get to comment and raise concerns over proposals by the Forest Service.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent weeks, environmentalists rallied their people to oppose the plan, who flooded the Forest Service with comments. The comment \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/08/09/2019-17071/national-environmental-policy-act-nepa-compliance\">period\u003c/a> was initially supposed to last 60 days, ending on August 12. But the Forest Service has extended the comment period to the end of the month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Forest Service was not available for comment at the time of publication.[emailsignup newslettername='science' align='right']\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Spill That Spurred a Movement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On January 28, 1969, toxic sludge and gas \u003ca href=\"https://psmag.com/news/the-ocean-is-boiling-the-complete-oral-history-of-the-1969-santa-barbara-oil-spill\">erupted\u003c/a> from an oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara. The spill energized a burgeoning environmental movement around the idea that society needed to protect its wild lands and regulate how it does business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, colloquially known as NEPA\u003cstrong>, \u003c/strong>into law. This mandated federal agencies to study how their plans could harm natural ecosystems. Officials must present these findings to the public, and give them a chance to weigh-in. The government doesn’t have to heed the advice or requests, but it’s required to respond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These proceedings can take years and the law has been a punching bag of business groups who complain of cumbersome bureaucracy. But the review process is the tip of the spear for environmental justice groups, who use comments and lawsuits to press policy and advocate for protections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California has its own, more rigorous environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act. But that law covers state lands and doesn’t require review for logging in federal forests, Camacho said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says the Forest Service’s proposal is one part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to erode environmental protections. The administration wants to relax how the government regulates carbon dioxide emissions, for example, and has set a two year limit on assessments of major infrastructure projects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They are focused not on the quality of analysis, but just on speeding it up,” Camacho said. “Ironically, that may slow it down because of all the number of lawsuits that will come because of the rushed analysis.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Forest Service will be accepting comments on its proposal until August 26.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The U.S. Forest Service has extended public comment period on a controversial \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/06/13/2019-12195/national-environmental-policy-act-nepa-compliance\">plan\u003c/a> to relax environmental permitting for new logging and forest management projects across millions of acres of federal forest lands.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The proposal would upend long-held environmental practices that have been in place since 1970, and make it easier for timber harvesting and bulldozing forest roads in all 20 of California’s federal forests, including national forests in Mendocino, Tahoe, Los Padres, and Lassen.\u003c/p>\n\u003caside class=\"pullquote alignright\">‘This will be the largest change in the regulation in a decade.’’\u003ccite>Alejandro Camacho, UC Irvine law professor\u003c/cite>\u003c/aside>\n\u003cp>The Forest Service has \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/emc/nepa/revisions/index.shtml\">said\u003c/a> that, with its limited staff, extended droughts, pests, and tree diseases have made it difficult for the agency to protect people from catastrophic wildfires.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Only about two million acres of federal forests are treated with thinning projects, prescribed burns or logging each year. The Forest Service would like to do a lot more. They \u003ca href=\"https://www.fs.fed.us/sites/default/files/toward-shared-stewardship.pdf\">estimate\u003c/a> 17 million acres of federal forests at high fire risk could be logged to reduce fire danger and 35 million acres should be treated with prescribed burns. The proposed rule changes will allow them to act more quickly, officials say.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Regulation Rollback\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that’s only part of the picture. In 2018, President Donald Trump issued an \u003ca href=\"https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/eo-promoting-active-management-americas-forests-rangelands-federal-lands-improve-conditions-reduce-wildfire-risk/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">executive order \u003c/a>that encouraged federal agencies to ease environmental review for industrial operations on federal land.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The administration has called for more ‘\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/08/29/642955787/will-more-logging-save-western-forests-from-wildfires\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">active\u003c/a>’ logging in western forests and wants to open up more federal forests to the timber industry. They say it will provide badly needed jobs in rural communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“On the one hand, periodically updating federal agency regulations is a good thing,” said Alejandro Camacho, a law professor at UC Irvine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“But this will be the largest change in the regulation in a decade,” he said. “The most prominent changes are concerning because they open a category of actions by the agency that they are trying to exclude from environmental review.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The proposal would more than double the size of projects that can bypass the analysis. For commercial logging and timber harvesting, that means expediting any proposal smaller than 4,200 acres, Camacho said. For forest thinning projects, where forest managers clear dense stands of trees and thick brush, the threshold is 7,000 acres.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Environmentalists have decried the plan, calling it a giveaway for corporations and saying it has the potential to destroy the environment. They say the rule change would shield logging contracts from public and scientific scrutiny, and could extend to new oil and gas drilling.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In California, however, most of the federal drilling occurs on land overseen by the Bureau of Land Management, which is a separate agency with its own environmental process.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Randi Spivak, a public lands policy advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, said that if the rule passes as it is written, the public will have no voice on the majority of decisions the government makes about national forests.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“It’s the voice of the people,” Spivak said. “Public comment is an opportunity for everyday citizens who love their national forests to get to comment and raise concerns over proposals by the Forest Service.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In recent weeks, environmentalists rallied their people to oppose the plan, who flooded the Forest Service with comments. The comment \u003ca href=\"https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2019/08/09/2019-17071/national-environmental-policy-act-nepa-compliance\">period\u003c/a> was initially supposed to last 60 days, ending on August 12. But the Forest Service has extended the comment period to the end of the month.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Forest Service was not available for comment at the time of publication.\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>The Spill That Spurred a Movement\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>On January 28, 1969, toxic sludge and gas \u003ca href=\"https://psmag.com/news/the-ocean-is-boiling-the-complete-oral-history-of-the-1969-santa-barbara-oil-spill\">erupted\u003c/a> from an oil platform off the coast of Santa Barbara. The spill energized a burgeoning environmental movement around the idea that society needed to protect its wild lands and regulate how it does business.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the National Environmental Policy Act, colloquially known as NEPA\u003cstrong>, \u003c/strong>into law. This mandated federal agencies to study how their plans could harm natural ecosystems. Officials must present these findings to the public, and give them a chance to weigh-in. The government doesn’t have to heed the advice or requests, but it’s required to respond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>These proceedings can take years and the law has been a punching bag of business groups who complain of cumbersome bureaucracy. But the review process is the tip of the spear for environmental justice groups, who use comments and lawsuits to press policy and advocate for protections.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>California has its own, more rigorous environmental law, the California Environmental Quality Act. But that law covers state lands and doesn’t require review for logging in federal forests, Camacho said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He says the Forest Service’s proposal is one part of a broader campaign by the Trump administration to erode environmental protections. The administration wants to relax how the government regulates carbon dioxide emissions, for example, and has set a two year limit on assessments of major infrastructure projects.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“They are focused not on the quality of analysis, but just on speeding it up,” Camacho said. “Ironically, that may slow it down because of all the number of lawsuits that will come because of the rushed analysis.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Forest Service will be accepting comments on its proposal until August 26.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "You Are Now Much More Likely to Read This Climate Change Story",
"headTitle": "You Are Now Much More Likely to Read This Climate Change Story | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>The public is paying a lot more attention to climate change news stories. That’s the thrust of Andrew McCormick’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/climate-change-stories-readers.php\">piece\u003c/a> in the Columbia Journalism Review this week, challenging the conventional wisdom that people’s interest in the topic is low. Confronted with a report about climate change, this view holds, most news consumers will change the channel, turn the radio dial, click off the website.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote align=\"right\"]MSNBC’s Chris Hayes’called climate change a ‘ratings killer,’ and just 22 of the top 50 U.S. newspapers last year covered a U.N. report that said humanity had just 12 years to avoid an even more catastrophic level of climate-related impacts than it already faces. But new data suggests the public is now starting to pay a lot more attention to the climate.[/pullquote]\u003cbr>\nAccording to the CJR report, only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the U.S. covered the release of an October 2018 \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1946004/you-are-now-much-more-likely-to-read-this-climate-change-story\">report\u003c/a> from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that said humanity had just \u003ca href=\"https://www.vox.com/2018/10/8/17948832/climate-change-global-warming-un-ipcc-report\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">12 years\u003c/a> to reduce emissions or face an even worse level of catastrophic impacts than it already does.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MSNBC host Chris Hayes captured the media’s reluctance to delve into the climate story with a July 2018 \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1021759145425489920?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweet.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Almost without exception, every time we’ve covered it’s been a palpable ratings killer,” Hayes\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1021759145425489920?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> \u003c/a>wrote. “So the incentives are not great.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that appears to be changing, McCormick reports. He writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A review of industry-wide data and accounts from numerous top-line publications suggest that audience interest in climate coverage is, in fact, on the rise, and that dedicating resources to the story might suit companies’ bottom lines.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McCormick reached that conclusion after CJR obtained January 2017 to June 2019 data from about 1,300 media outlets, mainly from North America and Europe. He enlisted the help of data scientist Su Hang and her team at Chartbeat, a web analytics company, to crunch the numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking at the first quarter of each year, Hang found the number of total minutes people spent reading climate change stories, which Chartbeat says represents “attentive traffic,”\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>almost doubled from 2017 to 2019. At the same time, Hang noted, the number of articles published about climate change were up just 27%, an increase that wouldn’t alone account for the big jump in engaged minutes. Hang’s team defined a climate change story as any piece that included a discussion of the issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You would expect people that are randomly bumping around the internet to be reading 20 or 30 percent more, but what we are seeing is that they are doubling their attention,” Hang said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The increase in reader attention was also fairly steady over time, according to Josh Schwartz, head of the data science team at Chartbeat. That means the rise in engagement wasn’t driven by single blockbuster news events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are certainly huge news events like the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, but for the most part, this is a week-over-week increase. It is not individual stories blowing it out and changing the curve,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is unclear is what’s driving the increased interest. In an email, CJR’s McCormick said he thinks that some outlets are “finding ways to crack the code” on covering the climate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Especially those that are finding ways to localize the issue,” he said. “That is, explaining the local environmental impacts of climate change or explaining how climate change is playing a role in extreme weather events in whatever region those publications serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whatever the reason, McCormick says it’s clear from his interviews with experts and editors at media outlets that people are hungrier for climate change reporting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The unfortunate irony here is that climate change concern is on the rise because extreme weather events are happening with increased frequency and duration,” he said. “That is, audiences are seeing it and they’re now finally believing that it will affect them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Climate Anxiety\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How that concern translates into people’s engagement with media is unclear. But the most recent Public Policy Institute of California annual \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-the-environment-july-2019/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">poll\u003c/a> on the environment suggests that the public’s climate anxiety is driven by actual disasters linked to global warming. This year, for instance, 71% of Californians said they were “very concerned” about wildfires becoming more severe\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1944993/study-climate-change-a-leading-driver-of-californias-wildfires\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> due to\u003c/a> climate change, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1945845/californians-concerns-about-worsening-wildfires-at-record-high\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">record high \u003c/a>for the poll. The survey was conducted about eight months after last year’s Camp Fire, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11710884/list-of-those-who-died-in-butte-county-paradise-camp-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">deadliest\u003c/a> U.S. wildfire in 100 years, which was followed by months of media coverage on the state’s perilous wildfire conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the same poll, just 30% of Californians said the water supply is a “big problem,” down from nearly 50% in 2018. That result came after the state’s drought officially ended because of a particularly strong water year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, only 42% expressed a strong concern about higher sea levels, even though one U.S. Geological Survey study showed that 600,000 coastal residents and $150 billion worth of property and infrastructure are now \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1939059/the-ocean-is-not-a-bathtub-so-sea-level-rise-will-be-more-damaging\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">threatened \u003c/a>with inundation from rising seas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED Science’s own metrics seem to bear out the theory that the increasingly tangible effects of global warming are having an effect on the audience’s interest in the topic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve done several climate-related series,” said KQED Science Digital Editor Jon Brooks, “but our recent group of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/tag/livingwithwildfire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stories\u003c/a> on ways to decrease the threat from worsening wildfires attracted by far the biggest audience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason people might be more focused on the climate is that as temperatures continue to rise and storms become more frequent and severe, the coverage increasingly reflects a sense of urgency. The Guardian, for instance, now refers to global warming as a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/31/climate-crisis-change-language\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">climate crisis\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McCormick thinks the media stumbled in the past by assuming that climate change is largely a science story. He said climate change angles can and should be included in a broad array of stories, just like economics or politics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Climate change is going to permeate most aspects of human life,” he said. “In some places, it already is. Many folks I spoke with emphasized that climate change is a dramatic human story — a food story, a housing story, a national security story and more.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://twitter.com/johnupton/status/1021801036862947328?s=20\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The public is paying a lot more attention to climate change news stories. That’s the thrust of Andrew McCormick’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/climate-change-stories-readers.php\">piece\u003c/a> in the Columbia Journalism Review this week, challenging the conventional wisdom that people’s interest in the topic is low. Confronted with a report about climate change, this view holds, most news consumers will change the channel, turn the radio dial, click off the website.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "MSNBC’s Chris Hayes’called climate change a ‘ratings killer,’ and just 22 of the top 50 U.S. newspapers last year covered a U.N. report that said humanity had just 12 years to avoid an even more catastrophic level of climate-related impacts than it already faces. But new data suggests the public is now starting to pay a lot more attention to the climate.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cbr>\nAccording to the CJR report, only 22 of the 50 biggest newspapers in the U.S. covered the release of an October 2018 \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1946004/you-are-now-much-more-likely-to-read-this-climate-change-story\">report\u003c/a> from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that said humanity had just \u003ca href=\"https://www.vox.com/2018/10/8/17948832/climate-change-global-warming-un-ipcc-report\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">12 years\u003c/a> to reduce emissions or face an even worse level of catastrophic impacts than it already does.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>MSNBC host Chris Hayes captured the media’s reluctance to delve into the climate story with a July 2018 \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1021759145425489920?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tweet.\u003c/a>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Almost without exception, every time we’ve covered it’s been a palpable ratings killer,” Hayes\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1021759145425489920?lang=en\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> \u003c/a>wrote. “So the incentives are not great.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But that appears to be changing, McCormick reports. He writes:\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A review of industry-wide data and accounts from numerous top-line publications suggest that audience interest in climate coverage is, in fact, on the rise, and that dedicating resources to the story might suit companies’ bottom lines.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McCormick reached that conclusion after CJR obtained January 2017 to June 2019 data from about 1,300 media outlets, mainly from North America and Europe. He enlisted the help of data scientist Su Hang and her team at Chartbeat, a web analytics company, to crunch the numbers.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Looking at the first quarter of each year, Hang found the number of total minutes people spent reading climate change stories, which Chartbeat says represents “attentive traffic,”\u003cstrong> \u003c/strong>almost doubled from 2017 to 2019. At the same time, Hang noted, the number of articles published about climate change were up just 27%, an increase that wouldn’t alone account for the big jump in engaged minutes. Hang’s team defined a climate change story as any piece that included a discussion of the issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You would expect people that are randomly bumping around the internet to be reading 20 or 30 percent more, but what we are seeing is that they are doubling their attention,” Hang said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The increase in reader attention was also fairly steady over time, according to Josh Schwartz, head of the data science team at Chartbeat. That means the rise in engagement wasn’t driven by single blockbuster news events.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“There are certainly huge news events like the U.S. withdrawing from the Paris climate accord, but for the most part, this is a week-over-week increase. It is not individual stories blowing it out and changing the curve,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Why?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What is unclear is what’s driving the increased interest. In an email, CJR’s McCormick said he thinks that some outlets are “finding ways to crack the code” on covering the climate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Especially those that are finding ways to localize the issue,” he said. “That is, explaining the local environmental impacts of climate change or explaining how climate change is playing a role in extreme weather events in whatever region those publications serve.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Whatever the reason, McCormick says it’s clear from his interviews with experts and editors at media outlets that people are hungrier for climate change reporting.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The unfortunate irony here is that climate change concern is on the rise because extreme weather events are happening with increased frequency and duration,” he said. “That is, audiences are seeing it and they’re now finally believing that it will affect them.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Climate Anxiety\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>How that concern translates into people’s engagement with media is unclear. But the most recent Public Policy Institute of California annual \u003ca href=\"https://www.ppic.org/publication/ppic-statewide-survey-californians-and-the-environment-july-2019/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">poll\u003c/a> on the environment suggests that the public’s climate anxiety is driven by actual disasters linked to global warming. This year, for instance, 71% of Californians said they were “very concerned” about wildfires becoming more severe\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1944993/study-climate-change-a-leading-driver-of-californias-wildfires\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> due to\u003c/a> climate change, a \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1945845/californians-concerns-about-worsening-wildfires-at-record-high\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">record high \u003c/a>for the poll. The survey was conducted about eight months after last year’s Camp Fire, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11710884/list-of-those-who-died-in-butte-county-paradise-camp-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">deadliest\u003c/a> U.S. wildfire in 100 years, which was followed by months of media coverage on the state’s perilous wildfire conditions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the same poll, just 30% of Californians said the water supply is a “big problem,” down from nearly 50% in 2018. That result came after the state’s drought officially ended because of a particularly strong water year.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Similarly, only 42% expressed a strong concern about higher sea levels, even though one U.S. Geological Survey study showed that 600,000 coastal residents and $150 billion worth of property and infrastructure are now \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1939059/the-ocean-is-not-a-bathtub-so-sea-level-rise-will-be-more-damaging\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">threatened \u003c/a>with inundation from rising seas.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>KQED Science’s own metrics seem to bear out the theory that the increasingly tangible effects of global warming are having an effect on the audience’s interest in the topic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“We’ve done several climate-related series,” said KQED Science Digital Editor Jon Brooks, “but our recent group of \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/tag/livingwithwildfire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">stories\u003c/a> on ways to decrease the threat from worsening wildfires attracted by far the biggest audience.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another reason people might be more focused on the climate is that as temperatures continue to rise and storms become more frequent and severe, the coverage increasingly reflects a sense of urgency. The Guardian, for instance, now refers to global warming as a “\u003ca href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/31/climate-crisis-change-language\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">climate crisis\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>McCormick thinks the media stumbled in the past by assuming that climate change is largely a science story. He said climate change angles can and should be included in a broad array of stories, just like economics or politics.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Climate change is going to permeate most aspects of human life,” he said. “In some places, it already is. Many folks I spoke with emphasized that climate change is a dramatic human story — a food story, a housing story, a national security story and more.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"title": "When It Comes to Wildfire Solutions, Relocating Communities Is a Tough Sell",
"headTitle": "When It Comes to Wildfire Solutions, Relocating Communities Is a Tough Sell | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>They call it “managed retreat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[pullquote size='small' align='right' citation='Lisa Dale, Columbia University']‘It’s hard to imagine asking 50% of western residents to move to the city.’[/pullquote]More than a buzzphrase, the term has become something of a movement among officials looking for ways to cope with rising sea levels and increased river flooding. In short, it means getting out of harm’s way, literally moving people and possibly whole communities to higher ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It sounds radical, but it’s now a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/12/04/672285546/retreat-is-not-an-option-as-a-california-beach-town-plans-for-rising-seas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">serious topic among planners\u003c/a> and scientists who are scheduling whole conferences around the benefits as well as the challenges of managed retreat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what about in fire country, where California has seen so much devastation in recent years? I recently asked \u003cstrong>Lisa Dale\u003c/strong>, a social scientist at Columbia University’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2323\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sustainable Development Program\u003c/a>, if we should also be discussing managed retreat as a defense against the increasingly catastrophic wildfires we’ve seen in California. Here are excerpts from that interview, edited for length and clarity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nearly all the emphasis whenever anyone talks about managed retreat is on coastal and river flooding. Even out west, we don’t talk about it much in terms of fire. Should we\u003c/strong>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa Dale\u003c/strong>: I’m hard-pressed to say we should. I worked in the wildfire community for decades. I’ve never heard it discussed. To look back and say, “Really those people should be moving,” I don’t think it’s realistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[aside postID='science_1943266']Remember, half the residents of the American West live in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlandfirersg.org/About/Wildland-Urban-Interface\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wildland-urban interface\u003c/a>. It’s hard to imagine asking 50% of western residents to move to the city. We’re asking for complete and total urbanization of the West if we want to retreat from wildfire zones. And that’s not what the West is about, and that’s not why people live there. So I don’t think it’s realistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nearly all of the coastal U.S. is developed, whereas a relatively small proportion of the wildland-urban interface is developed. So it does seem like there’s at least an opportunity there\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes. I think the opportunity is on the front end. So, while I’m reluctant to argue that we should be pushing people to move who already live in the risk area, I think there’s a lot we can do to create disincentives for new people to move there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An estimated 85% or so of the wildland-urban interface area is not yet developed. We have a huge opportunity there to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943266/one-potential-solution-to-fires-in-the-wilderness-dont-build-there\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">minimize our future risk\u003c/a> by planning carefully and zoning and creating movement patterns for people to relocate, so that we’re not setting ourselves up for an inevitable situation where we do have to start considering relocating communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In California, they tried to attach a kind of a risk premium to people’s insurance policies, saying essentially, “Okay, if you’re going to live in these designated zones, you’re going to pay for some of the public costs of wildfires when they happen.” It didn’t fly.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We tried a number of similar measures in Colorado when I lived there, and those didn’t fly, either. And part of the problem comes down to the shortcomings of risk mapping. Because that is a binary choice. Some people will have to pay that fee and some people won’t have to pay that fee, and who gets put in the pay bucket becomes a really contentious question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So what is the answer? I see you kind of rolling your eyes.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I really think local governments are the key. States can do a lot to force local governments to act, but states themselves can only take limited steps. Since the local governments are also the ones often saddled with the costs of wildfire, that’s an easy match. This is a layer of government that is facing the costs now and is therefore incentivized to create solutions. They run up against problems like, “If we close the wildland-urban interface from building, we’ve just reduced our tax base. We’ve just reduced the availability of private property in our town.” And no local government wants to do that. So it’s not easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Insurance companies are also key to this story, and we’re starting to see some real action on that in the West. We’re starting to see home insurance companies require their policy holders in risk areas to complete defensible space work around their homes. We’re starting to see policies with disclosure requirements across the West, so that if you are moving there and don’t know you’re moving into a risk zone, there’s mandatory disclosure. Those will help. I think the combination of home insurance action and local government steps are likely the location of solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[\u003cem>Note: Insurance companies have have also been canceling an \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943180/increasingly-unavailable-and-unaffordable-home-insurance-threatened-amid-wildfire-crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">increasing number\u003c/a> of homeowner policies in California’s wildfire-prone areas, with more expensive, less comprehensive policies as the alternative.\u003c/em>]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>After the devastating\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/tubbs-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> wine country fires\u003c/a> a couple of years ago, that swept through \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11622421/video-santa-rosa-reeling-from-devastating-tubbs-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">dense urban areas\u003c/a> in Santa Rosa, we saw residents go right back in and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11741498/a-third-of-homes-lost-in-2017-tubbs-fire-now-under-construction\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">build in the same place\u003c/a>. And the local politicians were very reluctant to say they couldn’t.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, I think that’s tricky. You’ve seen this for a long time across the West, which is part of why I’m a little distrustful of these risk maps. I think they lead to a false sense of safety for people whose homes are marked safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, in fact, we know the fires are behaving in unprecedented ways so we can’t adequately predict the future. And we’re also seeing some really unexpected bottlenecks for progress. For example, one thing we kept coming up against in Colorado was homeowner associations that required certain building materials be used on their properties. Fire-resistant materials, for example, were forbidden in some of these homeowner associations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>For aesthetic reasons?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Exactly. So, they’re trying to create a style for all the homes in a community. And when those decisions were made decades ago, nobody was thinking about fire risk. We can do a lot with building materials, with requiring flame-resistant roof tiles for example, removing barriers to the adoption of those types of materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Local governments can do a lot to think about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1942547/in-the-age-of-the-crazy-fast-fire-a-good-evacuation-plan-may-not-be-enough\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ways to get in and out\u003c/a> of high-risk neighborhoods for emergency vehicles so that fires don’t become as catastrophic as we’ve seen and can be more easily tackled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>That was a huge factor in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/camp-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Camp Fire\u003c/a>, which leveled the entire city of Paradise in Butte County in 2018.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>I\u003c/b>t’s a huge factor in many communities. Part of living up in the woods is that you live on these long, windy roads, and there’s only one road to get to you. So it’s also a transportation and road-network issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We have a lot of opportunities, I think, especially in the West since so much of it is not yet developed, to redefine the way we develop those areas, redefine the way we build in those areas, all within the framework of reducing risk from wildfire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n",
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"excerpt": "Asking people to move their homes out of the so-called wildland-urban interface isn't realistic, Columbia University social scientist Lisa Dale says. But there are plenty of other ways to minimize the destruction.",
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"description": "Asking people to move their homes out of the so-called wildland-urban interface isn't realistic, Columbia University social scientist Lisa Dale says. But there are plenty of other ways to minimize the destruction.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>They call it “managed retreat.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>More than a buzzphrase, the term has become something of a movement among officials looking for ways to cope with rising sea levels and increased river flooding. In short, it means getting out of harm’s way, literally moving people and possibly whole communities to higher ground.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It sounds radical, but it’s now a \u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/2018/12/04/672285546/retreat-is-not-an-option-as-a-california-beach-town-plans-for-rising-seas\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">serious topic among planners\u003c/a> and scientists who are scheduling whole conferences around the benefits as well as the challenges of managed retreat.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But what about in fire country, where California has seen so much devastation in recent years? I recently asked \u003cstrong>Lisa Dale\u003c/strong>, a social scientist at Columbia University’s \u003ca href=\"https://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2323\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sustainable Development Program\u003c/a>, if we should also be discussing managed retreat as a defense against the increasingly catastrophic wildfires we’ve seen in California. Here are excerpts from that interview, edited for length and clarity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nearly all the emphasis whenever anyone talks about managed retreat is on coastal and river flooding. Even out west, we don’t talk about it much in terms of fire. Should we\u003c/strong>?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Lisa Dale\u003c/strong>: I’m hard-pressed to say we should. I worked in the wildfire community for decades. I’ve never heard it discussed. To look back and say, “Really those people should be moving,” I don’t think it’s realistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>Remember, half the residents of the American West live in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.wildlandfirersg.org/About/Wildland-Urban-Interface\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">wildland-urban interface\u003c/a>. It’s hard to imagine asking 50% of western residents to move to the city. We’re asking for complete and total urbanization of the West if we want to retreat from wildfire zones. And that’s not what the West is about, and that’s not why people live there. So I don’t think it’s realistic.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>Nearly all of the coastal U.S. is developed, whereas a relatively small proportion of the wildland-urban interface is developed. So it does seem like there’s at least an opportunity there\u003c/strong>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes. I think the opportunity is on the front end. So, while I’m reluctant to argue that we should be pushing people to move who already live in the risk area, I think there’s a lot we can do to create disincentives for new people to move there.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>An estimated 85% or so of the wildland-urban interface area is not yet developed. We have a huge opportunity there to \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943266/one-potential-solution-to-fires-in-the-wilderness-dont-build-there\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">minimize our future risk\u003c/a> by planning carefully and zoning and creating movement patterns for people to relocate, so that we’re not setting ourselves up for an inevitable situation where we do have to start considering relocating communities.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>In California, they tried to attach a kind of a risk premium to people’s insurance policies, saying essentially, “Okay, if you’re going to live in these designated zones, you’re going to pay for some of the public costs of wildfires when they happen.” It didn’t fly.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We tried a number of similar measures in Colorado when I lived there, and those didn’t fly, either. And part of the problem comes down to the shortcomings of risk mapping. Because that is a binary choice. Some people will have to pay that fee and some people won’t have to pay that fee, and who gets put in the pay bucket becomes a really contentious question.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>So what is the answer? I see you kind of rolling your eyes.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I really think local governments are the key. States can do a lot to force local governments to act, but states themselves can only take limited steps. Since the local governments are also the ones often saddled with the costs of wildfire, that’s an easy match. This is a layer of government that is facing the costs now and is therefore incentivized to create solutions. They run up against problems like, “If we close the wildland-urban interface from building, we’ve just reduced our tax base. We’ve just reduced the availability of private property in our town.” And no local government wants to do that. So it’s not easy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Insurance companies are also key to this story, and we’re starting to see some real action on that in the West. We’re starting to see home insurance companies require their policy holders in risk areas to complete defensible space work around their homes. We’re starting to see policies with disclosure requirements across the West, so that if you are moving there and don’t know you’re moving into a risk zone, there’s mandatory disclosure. Those will help. I think the combination of home insurance action and local government steps are likely the location of solutions.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[\u003cem>Note: Insurance companies have have also been canceling an \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1943180/increasingly-unavailable-and-unaffordable-home-insurance-threatened-amid-wildfire-crisis\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">increasing number\u003c/a> of homeowner policies in California’s wildfire-prone areas, with more expensive, less comprehensive policies as the alternative.\u003c/em>]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>After the devastating\u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/tubbs-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> wine country fires\u003c/a> a couple of years ago, that swept through \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11622421/video-santa-rosa-reeling-from-devastating-tubbs-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">dense urban areas\u003c/a> in Santa Rosa, we saw residents go right back in and \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/11741498/a-third-of-homes-lost-in-2017-tubbs-fire-now-under-construction\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">build in the same place\u003c/a>. And the local politicians were very reluctant to say they couldn’t.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Well, I think that’s tricky. You’ve seen this for a long time across the West, which is part of why I’m a little distrustful of these risk maps. I think they lead to a false sense of safety for people whose homes are marked safe.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And, in fact, we know the fires are behaving in unprecedented ways so we can’t adequately predict the future. And we’re also seeing some really unexpected bottlenecks for progress. For example, one thing we kept coming up against in Colorado was homeowner associations that required certain building materials be used on their properties. Fire-resistant materials, for example, were forbidden in some of these homeowner associations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>For aesthetic reasons?\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Exactly. So, they’re trying to create a style for all the homes in a community. And when those decisions were made decades ago, nobody was thinking about fire risk. We can do a lot with building materials, with requiring flame-resistant roof tiles for example, removing barriers to the adoption of those types of materials.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Local governments can do a lot to think about \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/science/1942547/in-the-age-of-the-crazy-fast-fire-a-good-evacuation-plan-may-not-be-enough\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ways to get in and out\u003c/a> of high-risk neighborhoods for emergency vehicles so that fires don’t become as catastrophic as we’ve seen and can be more easily tackled.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cstrong>That was a huge factor in the \u003ca href=\"https://www.kqed.org/news/tag/camp-fire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Camp Fire\u003c/a>, which leveled the entire city of Paradise in Butte County in 2018.\u003c/strong>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cb>I\u003c/b>t’s a huge factor in many communities. Part of living up in the woods is that you live on these long, windy roads, and there’s only one road to get to you. So it’s also a transportation and road-network issue.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>We have a lot of opportunities, I think, especially in the West since so much of it is not yet developed, to redefine the way we develop those areas, redefine the way we build in those areas, all within the framework of reducing risk from wildfire.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
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"marketplace": {
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"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
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"mindshift": {
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"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
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"order": 12
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
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"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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},
"perspectives": {
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"order": 14
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"info": "The economy explained. Imagine you could call up a friend and say, Meet me at the bar and tell me what's going on with the economy. Now imagine that's actually a fun evening.",
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"title": "Political Breakdown",
"tagline": "Politics from a personal perspective",
"info": "Political Breakdown is a new series that explores the political intersection of California and the nation. Each week hosts Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos are joined with a new special guest to unpack politics -- with personality — and offer an insider’s glimpse at how politics happens.",
"airtime": "THU 6:30pm-7pm",
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"possible": {
"id": "possible",
"title": "Possible",
"info": "Possible is hosted by entrepreneur Reid Hoffman and writer Aria Finger. Together in Possible, Hoffman and Finger lead enlightening discussions about building a brighter collective future. The show features interviews with visionary guests like Trevor Noah, Sam Altman and Janette Sadik-Khan. Possible paints an optimistic portrait of the world we can create through science, policy, business, art and our shared humanity. It asks: What if everything goes right for once? How can we get there? Each episode also includes a short fiction story generated by advanced AI GPT-4, serving as a thought-provoking springboard to speculate how humanity could leverage technology for good.",
"airtime": "SUN 2pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Possible-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.possible.fm/",
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"source": "Possible"
},
"link": "/radio/program/possible",
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"spotify": "https://open.spotify.com/show/730YpdUSNlMyPQwNnyjp4k"
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},
"pri-the-world": {
"id": "pri-the-world",
"title": "PRI's The World: Latest Edition",
"info": "Each weekday, host Marco Werman and his team of producers bring you the world's most interesting stories in an hour of radio that reminds us just how small our planet really is.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 2pm-3pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-World-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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},
"radiolab": {
"id": "radiolab",
"title": "Radiolab",
"info": "A two-time Peabody Award-winner, Radiolab is an investigation told through sounds and stories, and centered around one big idea. In the Radiolab world, information sounds like music and science and culture collide. Hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich, the show is designed for listeners who demand skepticism, but appreciate wonder. WNYC Studios is the producer of other leading podcasts including Freakonomics Radio, Death, Sex & Money, On the Media and many more.",
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},
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