Equilibrium/Sustainability — Jackson residents told to shower with mouths shut

Residents of Jackson, Miss., are being told to shower with their mouths shut, as the city entered its fourth day on Thursday with unsafe water trickling from their faucets, CNN reported.  

“Please make sure in the shower that your mouth is not open,” Jim Craig, senior deputy and director of health protection at the Mississippi Department of Health, told residents the day before, according to CNN. 

After flooding from the Pearl River inundated the city on Monday, an already-damaged treatment plant failed, meaning that Jackson’s taps have hardly been able to deliver any water since.  

Some residents are reporting cloudy or even brown water in their faucets — when they have any water at all, CNN reported.  

The current situation comes amid a boil-water notice that has been in effect in Mississippi’s capital for more than a month.  

It’s still unknown as to how long residents will need to continue boiling water, as such a determination cannot be made until water pressure returns to normal, CNN reported. 

Read more from The Hill on the crisis leaving more than 150,000 people without potable water.

Welcome to Equilibrium, a newsletter that tracks the growing global battle over the future of sustainability. We’re Saul Elbein and Sharon Udasin. Send us tips and feedback. A friend forward this newsletter to you? Subscribe here.

Today we’ll start with the California legislature’s midnight rush to pass a series of climate measures, followed by a look at how extreme weather is threatening the ability of Texan cities to provide sufficient water for their growing populations.  

California advances climate measures

California state lawmakers passed an array of climate bills late Wednesday as their legislative session ticked to a close and a heat wave threatens the state’s electricity grid. 

While advancing several climate measures, legislators also voted to extend the shelf life of a fiercely disputed nuclear plant — a move supported by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) as a reliable backup for California’s transition to clean energy.  

A climate ‘win,’ with some caveats: “On the whole, this session was a huge win for our environment and public health,” Laura Deehan, state director for the group Environment California, said in a statement while voicing her disappointment about the nuclear plant decision. 

“We have no need for this potentially dangerous power source given the unstoppable momentum toward a state running on 100 percent clean, safe and renewable power — momentum that will only grow given other bills that passed,” Deehan added. 

What are some bills heading to Newsom’s desk? Among the bills is S.B. 1020, which would require 90 percent of the state’s electricity to come from clean energy sources by 2035 and 95 percent by 2040 — interim targets toward a 100 percent goal for 2045.  

• A second key item to get a go-ahead was S.B. 1137, which would prohibit oil drilling within 3,200 feet of places where residents live, work and learn.  
  
• Other bills would allocate funds to clean transportation and energy, establish a statewide carbon capture program and create an incentives-based plan to promote the use of sustainable aviation fuel. 

And the nuclear plant? Legislators gave a lifeline to the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant by passing S.B. 846  late into the night on Wednesday. 

• If signed into law, the bill would invalidate a previously approved plan under which Pacific Gas and Electric would retire the facility’s two units by 2024 and 2025.  
  
• Instead, both units would be able to continue functioning until the end of 2030. 
  
• Earlier this month, Newsom proposed extending the plant’s life, with the goal of maintaining a carbon-free, reliable power supply as the state transitions to renewable sources of energy, The Associated Press reported.   

To read more about California’s array of approved climate bills and the contention surrounding the Diablo Canyon plant, please click here for the full story. 

Texas cities face climate risks to water supply  

A growing number of extreme weather incidents are forcing Texas towns and cities to confront the threat that climate change poses to their long-term water supplies.

Texas water resources will be under increasing threat, as the state’s booming population intersects with the more unpredictable and extreme climate the state faces. 

• “Water utilities are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to climate change,” program manager Marisa Flores Gonzalez of Austin Water told Equilibrium, in the third installation of The Hill’s Dried Up series. 
  
• The risk is sufficiently dire that a majority-Republican legislative panel in July voted unanimously to require state water planners to consult with the state climatologist in planning for future supplies. 

The goal of that rule change: To “remove the possibility that the political climate could harm [local water managers] ability to plan responsibly for the future,” state Sen. Nathan Johnson (D) told Equilibrium. 

The urgent need helped the bipartisan panel cut through political differences, according to Johnson. 

• “It’s difficult to tell the public that we were not anticipating changes, resulting in drought, and flooding when it’s happening all the time,” he said.  
  
• “We’re reinforcing dams. We’re building reservoirs, doing things along these lines,” he added. 

BOOMING POPULATION, WORSENING WEATHER  

Texas’s unique geography, environment and political climate put it at particular risk for extreme weather. 

While average precipitation levels across the state may not change much, that apparent consistency masks a new rise in dangerous extremes of flood and drought. 

• Over the next 50 years, the population of Texas is expected to nearly double to over 50 million— even as water supplies grow more unpredictable.  
  
• But what that growing unpredictability means for individual municipalities isn’t clear. 

“It would be really nice if individual water suppliers weren’t left to their own devices to begin to tackle the issue,” state climatologist John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas A&M said of adapting climate projections to local conditions. 

Dallas as model: Sudden rains that hit Dallas-Fort Worth earlier this month are a model of what the state can expect, several experts and policymakers told Equilibrium. 

• Dallas this summer saw record dry conditions week after week after week — and then “all of a sudden, a summers worth of rain in a single day,” said Katherine Hayhoe, a climate scientist who helped Austin design its climate plan. 
  
• More than wetter or drier, Hayhoe continued, the weather is getting “weirder.” 

Growing recognition: The new weather dynamics mean new problems for policymakers to solve, according to Johnson, the state senator. 

• He singled out the question of “how to capture the excessive amounts of rainfall that we’re experiencing with increasing frequency and be able to store and use it throughout the year.” 
  
• In a broader sense, Johnson said he thinks that “the recognition of this terrifying force of nature, that also brings us something that we can use” could “seep deep into people’s consciousness as something that we need to deal with.”  

To read the full story, please click here. 

Want more? To catch the two previous installations in this series — which cover the collapse of a vital Western reservoir and the threat to America’s independent cattle raisers — please click here. 

Gas-powered car ban could fuel GOP legal battle 

California last week approved the country’s most ambitious electric vehicle targets, with the state’s Air Resources Board voting to ban the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.  

Now the question is whether Republican officials will be able to derail it in court. 

Manufacturers are ready: Deborah Sivas, an environmental law professor at Stanford Law School, told The Hill that automobile manufacturers are already poised to make the changes outlined in California’s Advanced Clean Cars II rule, which was approved last Thursday. 

• “They’re going to electric vehicles — they’re just going faster or slower, depending on the philosophy of the company,” Sivas said.  
  
• “Who would be opposed to this?” she asked. “Well, there’s the ideological opposition.” 

Challenging California’s authority: The GOP counteroffensive could take various forms but will likely include lawsuits arguing that California does not have authority to set its own standards, and efforts to further erode the federal Clean Air Act.  

What’s in the California’s new rule? The rule, which follows a 2020 executive order issued by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), would increase the proportion of emissions-free cars sold in the state annually, until that percentage reaches 100 in 2035. 

• California’s targets extend far beyond federal goals, and many states have expressed their intention to follow suit.  
  
• While President Biden said last year that he hoped half of new vehicle sales would be electric by 2030, California’s rule would require 68 percent of sales to be electric that year. 

So what happens next? California needs to apply for a special waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as mandated by the 1970 Clean Air Act. 

• Because the Clean Air Act includes a provision prohibiting states from implementing their own standards, California must apply for a waiver with the EPA for each new rule it wants to enact.  
  
• The EPA must then approve that waiver unless the administrator determines that California’s reasons for applying are “arbitrary and capricious,” per the Clean Air Act.   

Things may not be simple this time: While the Biden administration is expected to accept California’s new application, red states could sue over that decision. 

To find out whether such a lawsuit could have teeth, please click here for the full story. 

Rising risk to forests in Western U.S.

The plants and wildlife in the forests of North America’s Mountain West are under some of the greatest threats from the effects of climate change, a new study has found.  

Dead end: While the amount of carbon stored by forests will increase overall throughout the century, certain vulnerable regions will sustain steep hits to their biodiversity and ability to store carbon, according to the paper published on Thursday in Science.

• As rising temperatures and increasingly varied rainfall puts more strain on forests, they will ‘migrate’ to more hospital climates. 
  
• That’s bad news for forests pressed against the equator, in the Arctic or high up in the mountains — places where trees have less opportunity for escape. 

Outside the U.S., the boreal forests of the sub-Arctic and the dry tropical-latitude forest of the Amazon and Andes are at the biggest risk, the study found.  

Complex threats: A forest’s long-term prognosis is the combination of three factors: its ability to store carbon, its biodiversity and its vulnerability to disturbances like fires and disease. 

• These are issues that have been explored in isolation — but they have never before been combined to create a comprehensive picture of forest health, the authors found. 
  
• “If forests are tapped to play an important role in climate mitigation, an enormous scientific effort is needed to better shed light on when and where forests will be resilient to climate change in the 21st century,” the authors wrote. 

Thursday Threats

World edition: Europe’s drought dries out its economy, crossfire interrupts U.N. mission to key nuclear plant and most global citizens are concerned about climate change. 

Europe’s drought strains energy, food and shipping 

• Europe’s major waterways are “lower than they have been in decades,” putting both agricultural and energy production at risk, experts told CNBC. Many river routes are within a foot of being unusable, and harvests of key crops like corn, soy and sunflowers are down by up to 16 percent, according to CNBC. 

Shelling interrupts inspection of Ukrainian nuclear plant 

• A long-awaited United Nations mission to inspect the embattled Zaporizhzhia nuclear facility was interrupted by shelling around the Russian-occupied plant on Thursday, Reuters reported. Both Russia and Ukraine blamed each other for the shelling, with Ukrainian President Volodymr Zelensky’s chief of staff accusing Russia of trying to sabotage the mission to Europe’s largest nuclear plant, according to Reuters. 

Climate change remains top global threat in Pew survey 

• Despite the many ongoing threats wreaking havoc on the globe, climate change stood out as a top concern among citizens in advanced economies, according to a new poll from the Pew Research Center. A median of 75 percent across 19 nations described climate change as a major threat, according to
  the survey. 

Please visit The Hill’s Sustainability section online for the web version of this newsletter and more stories. We’ll see you tomorrow.

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