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IN THIS ISSUE – “A Governor has to Keep the Damned Lights On”

Veteran political consultant on environmentalists attacking Newsom

 Advocacy Groups Push Governor, Legislature at 11th Hour   

Capital News & Notes (CN&N) harvests California policy, legislative and regulatory insights from dozens of media and official sources for the past week. Please feel free to forward this unique client service. 

FOR THE WEEK ENDING AUG. 19, 2022

 

Advocacy Groups Push Governor, Legislature at 11th Hour   

Politico

With just a few weeks left before the end of the legislative session, advocacy groups are ramping up their requests for action from Newsom — who signed a slim stack of bills Monday — and state lawmakers. A few key examples:

  • As Newsompushes lawmakers to take urgent, last-minute climate action, some of the state’s most influential labor groups and automobile and energy companies sent him a Monday letter requesting a $300 million budget allocation to build 1,000 hydrogen fueling stations across California in the next decade. “At this still early stage in market development, the signal California sends on hydrogen will impact private investment decisions,” the coalition wrote, noting that “beyond its environmental attributes, hydrogen also provides a transitional pathway for skilled and trained, high-wage labor jobs in the oil and gas sectors.” Among the letter’s signatories: the president of the powerful State Building and Construction Trades Council and the chief executives of Toyota, Hyundai, Chevron, Shell, Linde and True Zero.
  • Fast food workers are set to converge at the state Capitol for two days of rallies in support of a controversial bill — a version of whichfailed to clear the Legislature last year — that would allow the state to negotiate wages, hours and work conditions for the entire fast food industry, which employs more than 700,000 Californians. Some workers plan to sleep outside the Capitol “to make it impossible for lawmakers to ignore their demand,” according to the advocacy group Fight for $15 and a Union. About 100 people are expected to participate, according to event permits approved by the California Highway Patrol.
  • Meanwhile, members of theUnited Farm Workers union are about halfway through a 24-day, 355-mile march from Delano to Sacramento to push Newsom to sign a bill to allow farmworkers to vote by mail in union elections, a version of which he vetoed last year. Farmworkers, who set out on a 22-mile leg of the journey on Monday, are expected to arrive at the Capitol on Aug. 26. “It’s 91 degrees now and the high is expected to reach a high of 104 degrees,” the union tweeted Monday. “But we will not be deterred from reaching Sacramento and telling @Cagovernor Newsom to sign” the bill.

 

Legislative Appropriations Committees: “Where Good Bills Go to Die”

Sacramento Bill

Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham, R-San Luis Obispo, went into the last month of California’s legislative session somewhat hopeful about prospects for his biggest bill. Cunningham co-authored a law that would have allowed prosecutors to sue big social media companies for addicting children and teens to their online platforms. Companies like Meta, which oversees Facebook and Instagram, hated the bill and deployed lobbyists to fight it. Even so, it advanced easily through the Assembly and the Senate Judiciary Committees before landing in the Senate Appropriations Committee.

Assembly Bill 2408 died there without a vote or any public explanation. Twice a year, a legislative instrument called the suspense file leaves many lawmakers, lobbyists and members of the public seething. Appropriations committees in the Senate and Assembly use it to kill or quietly amend bills before they can reach the floor.

Proponents say the suspense file is a tool of efficiency, essential for screening the hundreds of bills that come through the legislature each year for their potential fiscal impact. Detractors call it a burial ground, used by lawmakers for decades to inter politically hazardous measures before they are forced to vote on them.

“This is a tale as old as time. Everybody knows there is a massive transparency problem at the heart of California’s legislative process,” said Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, a good government watchdog. It may be old hat for longtime members of the Capitol community, but Stein said that every time a new employee joins his organization, they are shocked to discover that there is a process where bills can be killed or amended with zero public scrutiny. “It is just so established that it doesn’t get scrutinized in the way that it probably should,” he said.

Carmen Balber, of the group Consumer Watchdog, couldn’t hide her frustration after Assembly Bill 2370, requiring government agencies to retain records for a minimum of two years, died in suspense. “The suspense file is one of the most undemocratic features of the California Legislature,” Balber said. “It’s known as a place that good bills go to die.”

While it’s true that suspense offers little in the way of public scrutiny, it isn’t the only way legislative leaders can bury bills to evade casting an unpopular vote. Bills can be denied a committee hearing date or simply languish without a committee assignment at all.

Bills that meet a certain fiscal threshold ($50,000 or more from the general fund or $150,000 or more from a special fund) are referred to the suspense file of the Assembly or Senate Appropriations Committee. However, committees also can refer to appropriations other bills that fall short of that fiscal requirement Once a bill has been referred to the suspense file, the committee votes on whether to pass it along to the floor of either the Assembly or Senate, or else keep the bill held in suspense, effectively killing it.

There is no public testimony given during the Appropriations Committee suspense hearing, and no public vote is recorded from committee members. Bills often are amended while in suspense, but it is never made public who motioned for the amendment or how lawmakers voted on it.

Cunningham said he’ll never know why senators held AB 2408 in suspense. One of his biggest questions is how it ended up in the Senate Appropriations — an Assembly Judiciary Committee report indicated it would not have a fiscal impact. (AB 2408 never went through the Assembly Appropriations Committee).

But after Cunningham amended the bill to make prosecutors solely responsible for suing social media companies — the original bill allowed parents to sue — Senate analyses said it would cost the state some money.

The Senate Appropriations Committee analysis said the bill would require the state Department of Justice to add five new positions and would also add to the Judicial Branch’s workload.

“I don’t know where they got that information from,” Cunningham said. “Is that just a speculation? To my knowledge, the Attorney General never said they needed more positions. In fact, we were working with the Attorney General’s office right up into Appropriations (last) week on amending the bill to address some some relatively minor issues they had with it. So yeah, I guess I’m skeptical of that.”

Cunningham said he’s “never liked the suspense process” and thinks it pulls in bills that “don’t have anything more than a negligible fiscal impact.” He said it sometimes comes down to whether one person — the Appropriations Committee chair — likes a lawmaker’s bill.

Cunningham said the Legislature is “supposed to be a legislative, deliberative body” with a set process for making policy that involves making a case to fellow lawmakers and the governor.

The way the Senate Appropriations Committee works is “anti-democratic,” he said. “I never assume an outcome of anything,” Cunningham said. “But with respect to 2408, this is a bill that never got one ‘no’ vote all the way through the process up until now. And I would have liked my shot at convincing the majority of the Senate to vote for it.” Senate Appropriations Committee Chair Anthony Portantino, D-Burbank, set a defensive tone as he opened last Thursday’s meeting, pushing back against “Twitter traffic” from people raising why bills weren’t going to have a hearing.

“Every single item has had a public hearing opportunity and every author has had an opportunity to advocate for their bill,” he said. That’s why, he added, senators were only going to vote, and not hear public comments.

There were 491 bills on the committee agenda. But before Senators cast a single vote, Patricia Bates, R-Laguna Niguel, the vice chair, raised a concern about political maneuvering. Why had Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, the majority leader, temporarily filled in for Sen. Sydney Kamlager, D-Los Angeles, on the committee that day?

Portantino said it was simply due to a scheduling conflict. “It had nothing to do with any policy or any maneuver,” he said. An aide to Kamlager did not respond to a request for comment.

For all but the senators on the dais and a handful of staff, the roughly two-hour-and-forty minute meeting was all but impossible to follow. Portantino paused at times to check his phone. He stepped over to other Democratic Senators and whispered in their ears.

And multiple times he called McGuire to leave the hearing room through a backdoor so they could talk privately. The meeting also included a complicated process where voting results from one bill were sometimes used for others. The bills the committee killed were not discussed, leaving the reasons behind the decision unknown.

Stein, of California Common Cause, was reluctant to prescribe a specific solution. But he offered up that “the general idea would be to create more transparency and make more votes on the record.”

Balber was willing to get more specific. “No. 1, the suspense file should be reserved for bills that do in fact have a fiscal impact,” she said. Too often, Balber said, bills are referred to the file that don’t actually meet the fiscal impact requirement but which lawmakers nevertheless want to see buried. “The decisions need to be made in public,” Balber said. “Bills that die in suspense, no one ever knows why.”

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article264432901.html#storylink=cpy

 

Keeping the Lights On & the Water Running – Newsom & Environmentalists Struggle Over the Future of California

Environmentalists criticizing the governor of California seems to be a recurring theme lately. Environmentalists are unhappy with Newsom for signing a bill that could prolong the life of a fleet of aging gas-fired power plants — and for offering a massive loan to California’s notoriously unpopular utility to keep a nuclear plant open.

They criticized him for endorsing a plan to allow refineries and other industrial polluters to bury some of their carbon dioxide emissions underground. They complained bitterly when he declared his opposition to a ballot initiative that would tax the rich to subsidize electric-car purchases.

And it’s not just independent environmental organizations taking aim at Newsom. Last month, one of Newsom’s top drought officials resigned in protest, saying the administration was too willing to compromise its ideals — and wouldn’t take swift, decisive action that would actually help the ecosystem and people suffering from a changing climate.

“Witnessing the agency’s ability to tackle big challenges nearly eviscerated by this Administration has been gut wrenching,” Max Gomberg, the longtime climate and conservation manager at the State Water Resources Control Board, wrote in his resignation letter posted online.

Quite a shot at a governor who considers himself — and his state — the unrivaled leader on climate change and other environmental issues. When the U.S. Supreme Court severely weakened the federal government’s authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions,

Newsom said Califonria would take it upon itself to continue fighting climate change. “California will remain the tentpole for this movement with record investments and aggressive policies to reduce pollution, to protect people from extreme weather, and to leave our children and grandchildren a world that’s better off than we found it,” he said in June.

But ever since taking office in 2019, he’s also occasionally taken stands that anger environmentalists, whether it’s about water, air pollution or climate. The 2022 election season has seen new points of friction emerge between the governor and the environmental left, one of the most vocal and influential constituencies in California politics.

While Newsom is almost certain to win a second term, political analysts say he is working even harder to strike a balance between pushing California forward on environmental issues without doing something that could weaken the economy — and, in turn, harm any ambitions he might have for higher office.

That juggling act becomes more awkward as a possible recession looms — and the Democratic governor raises his national profile on abortion, gun control and other hot political issues in what appears to be a flirtation with a run for the White House.

Newsom’s press office didn’t make him available for an interview with The Sacramento Bee, but his top lieutenants insisted their boss is an ardent environmentalist. Jared Blumenfeld, secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency, estimates Newsom and environmental groups agree with each other 95% of the time.

“Why are we so focused on the 5%?” Blumenfeld said in a recent interview. “The alignment is pretty strong. The things we disagree on, we’re trying to reach resolution.” Blumenfeld last week announced his resignation to run a nonprofit climate-change foundation.

On the way out the door, Blumenfeld praised Newsom for setting “the global standard for bold climate leadership.” Newsom administration officials pointed to such initiatives as an executive order that will eventually ban the sale of new gasoline-powered cars. He’s also signed legislation appropriating $54 billion over five years on a variety of climate programs, from electric bus and truck subsidies to forest restoration.

Under Newsom, the state sued the federal government dozens of times to block environmental policies imposed by then-President Donald Trump’s administration.

Newsom has directed state agencies to end the controversial oil-production technology known as fracking by January 2024 and all oil production by 2045.

In a state with 40 million people, disagreements are to be expected, said Democratic strategist Garry South. Newsom “can’t make decisions just strictly on an ideological basis, or philosophical basis,” South said. “He’s got to factor in all kinds of different realities. Not just with environmental groups, but with all kinds of other interest groups.”

That includes people who don’t like power outages. In August 2020, as temperatures soared well past 100 degrees, rolling blackouts hit parts of California for two straight evenings, plunging hundreds of thousands of Californians into the dark for several sweltering hours.

The rolling blackouts were the first in California since 2001, when Enron and other companies were manipulating electricity supplies to jack up prices. The energy crisis helped catapult Arnold Schwarzenegger into the governor’s seat in 2003 in the recall election that cost Gray Davis his job.

It was a bitter lesson learned for Davis and those around him. “A governor has to keep the damned lights on,” said South, who was Davis’ senior advisor. The 2020 blackouts had multiple causes, but one factor was clear: California’s increasing reliance on renewable energy leaves the grid vulnerable during evening hours when solar power fades but air conditioners are still humming.

Even so, Newsom insisted California wouldn’t retreat from its march toward an all-green grid; state law says electricity supplies must be 100% renewable by 2045.

Yet a few weeks later, the State Water Resources Control Board, whose members are gubernatorial appointees, agreed to extend the life of several highly-polluting natural gas-fired power plants on the Southern California coast.

The plants, capable of powering 3 million homes, had been scheduled to close at the end of 2020 to comply with water-pollution mandates. The water board set a new shutdown date: Dec. 31, 2023.

Newsom backed the decision, calling it “a small step back.” Power supplies remain tight — and some Southern California leaders fear the state will allow the gas-fired power plants to keep running beyond 2023.

Newsom recently signed a bill that would let the state buy power directly from those plants if regulators agree to another stay of execution. Locals figure it’s a matter of time before the state decides to keep the plants open.

“As far as we can tell, the dates don’t matter anymore,” said Bill Brand, the mayor of Redondo Beach, which is home to three of the plants. Brand said Newsom is backing away from renewable energy for political reasons. “I think Gov. Newsom is more interested in carrying the swing states in the presidential election,” Brand said, “rather than phasing out power plants. A lot of environmental groups are unhappy about this.”

Members of his administration say Newsom hasn’t budged from his commitment to green energy. “We’re focused on how to get to carbon neutrality by 2045,” Blumenfeld said. The governor just proposed tightening existing law by forcing utilities to get 90% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2035 — on the way toward meeting the all-green mandate a decade later.

Nonetheless, the state’s commitment to eliminating fossil fuels from the electricity grid is facing another test. In February, the city of Los Angeles asked the state water board for a five-year delay in closing a pair of gas-fired coastal plants that are scheduled to be shuttered in 2024.

Losing these plants “would leave a significant risk of local grid outages,” an advisory panel has told the water board. The board hasn’t scheduled a vote on the proposal. Meanwhile,

Newsom’s drive to stabilize the power grid accelerated last week when he proposed loaning PG&E Corp. as much as $1.4 billion in state funds to prolong the life of Diablo Canyon, the last nuclear plant in California. PG&E would use the money to make upgrades and perform maintenance needed to keep the plant going.

Under Newsom’s proposal, the extension of Diablo Canyon’s license wouldn’t be subject to the reviews ordinarily required by the California Environmental Quality Act. The plant, located on the coast near San Luis Obispo, is scheduled to close in 2025 — eliminating more than 9% of the state’s electricity supply.

Some environmentalists want Diablo Canyon, a source of carbon-free energy, to remain open. But others call the plant, which is located near earthquake fault lines, a menace — and are furious with Newsom for trying to help a utility whose equipment has sparked some of the worst wildfires in California history. “How many millions get poured down the toilet for PG&E?” said David Weisman of the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, a group based in San Luis Obispo. Friends of the Earth, Environment California and the Natural Resources Defense Council called it a “dangerous and costly distraction.”

Newsom’s top aides acknowledged the controversial nature of his plan. “It’s a very difficult conversation, and it’s a last resort,” said Ana Matosantos, the governor’s cabinet secretary.

In September 2020, after a wildfire killed 15 people in rural Butte County, Newsom issued a startling executive order: Beginning in 2035, California would ban the sale of new cars that run on gas or diesel fuel.

“Our cars shouldn’t make wildfires worse — and create more days filled with smoky air,” he said.

Since then, he’s pushed the Legislature to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on vehicle charging stations and other funds to bring electric vehicles into the mainstream. Californians are eligible for rebates of as much as $7,000 under existing programs, and motorists are responding: Nearly 30% of all the new cars sold in California in the first half of this year were electrics, hybrids or plug-in hybrids, twice as much as in 2020.

But when an environmental group launched a ballot initiative to subsidize even more vehicle purchases by raising taxes on the wealthiest Californians, Newsom said no. Proposition 30, which has qualified for the November ballot, would impose a 1.75% tax on incomes above $2 million a year to pay for additional incentives.

The Legislative Analyst’s Office said the tax would raise as much as $5 billion a year. Most of the money would be spent on public and private car-charging stations and additional subsidies for Californians buying electric cars.

About 20% of the money would go for wildfire prevention. Newsom said raising taxes on millionaires would further destabilize a tax system that’s already volatile because of its heavy dependence on wealthy incomes, which tend to fluctuate wildly from year to year. He also took aim at one of the initiative’s chief sponsors, Lyft.

The ride-hailing companies are under a state mandate to electrify their fleets — 90% of their miles must be traveled in electric cars by 2030 — and Newsom said Lyft was trying to use tax dollars to meet that target.

He called Proposition 30 “a special interest carve-out — a cynical scheme devised by a single corporation to funnel state income tax revenue to their company.” California Clean Air, a coalition of environmental groups advocating for the tax, slammed Newsom with the ultimate insult for the governor of the bluest state in the nation — by aligning him with Republicans.

“The Yes on 30 campaign is disappointed that Governor Newsom would side with the California Republican Party and billionaires to oppose a measure to fight climate change and reduce wildfires.”

While Newsom pumped the brakes on more tax-subsidized rebates, he had a bold message for the state’s air-pollution agency recently. It was, in effect: Stop being so timid.

In a pointed letter last month to the California Air Resources Board, the governor took issue with its implementation of a series of climate-change programs. In particular, he indicated he was worried that the state would fall short of complying with a Jerry Brown executive order that committed California to becoming completely carbon neutral — across all sectors of California life — by 2045.

The air board’s current plan doesn’t go “far enough or fast enough,” Newsom wrote. “We need to up our game.” Newsom suggested a series of reforms that could reduce carbon emissions quickly, such as developing offshore wind-energy production facilities and promoting the construction of millions of “climate-friendly” homes and equipping them with hyper-efficient heat pumps.

Environmentalists applauded; Newsom’s laments dovetailed with their own suspicions that the air board wasn’t being aggressive enough. But portions of Newsom’s letter rankled the green community — in particular, his embrace of a technology called “carbon capture.”

Generally speaking, the technology allows companies to separate carbon dioxide from other smokestack emissions, compress it and pipe it underground. There are seven proposed carbon capture projects in California, all in the San Joaquin Valley, seeking approval from federal officials.

While the technology has been around for several years, environmentalists don’t like it because they fear the carbon could leak and, in its compressed form, could become highly dangerous. It also allows the industrial firm to continue spewing other harmful pollutants into the air, so long as they dispose of the carbon.

Environmentalists also say the technology could be used to prolong the life of aging oil fields — the pressurized carbon could loosen up hard-to-extract oil deposits — although Newsom just sent lawmakers a legislative proposal that would “prohibit an operator from using concentrated carbon fluids for purposes of enhanced oil recovery.”

Many environmentalists also were distressed that Newsom didn’t move to strengthen California’s “cap and trade” program, a decade-old system that sets a price on carbon emissions.

The program requires industrial polluters to purchase credits allowing them to emit carbon; auctions run by the state have raised $20 billion for various climate initiatives. But environmentalists say the program is weak and doesn’t truly discourage carbon emissions. Prices for the credits have been so low that companies have stockpiled 321 million of them, according to a panel that advises state officials. Each credit is good for emitting a ton of carbon.

Why does that matter? Because the companies, instead of reducing their carbon pollution, will be able to comply with the program by spending their backlog of unused credits, said Danny Cullenward, vice chair of the advisory committee and policy director at a San Francisco nonprofit called Carbon Plan.

Blumenfeld argued that cap and trade has been effective at reducing carbon emissions — and has done so without harming the business climate. “California is really a beacon to the world in how we’ve done that,” he said. “We’ve grown the jobs sector.”

Newsom has had an uneasy relationship with environmentalists over one of the toughest problems confronting any California governor: the state’s chronic water shortages.

Start with how the major rivers are governed. Environmentalists have been insisting that more water be left in the rivers to protect struggling native fish populations. These same rivers irrigate millions of acres of Central Valley farmland and provide drinking water for millions of Californian.

Newsom’s predecessor, Gov. Jerry Brown, had brokered tentative compromise: Farmers and cities would give up some of their water and pay for habitat restoration on the rivers. But they wouldn’t surrender as much water as environmentalists were demanding.

The state water board, under Chairwoman Felicia Marcus, voted to do what the environmentalists wanted, disregarding Brown’s peace initiative. Shortly after his inauguration,

Newsom fired Marcus, infuriating environmentalists. Months later, Newsom angered them again, this time by vetoing a bill designed to negate every environmental decision made by the federal government after Jan. 20, 2017 — when former President Donald Trump took office.

One reason for the veto: Farm groups were threatening to back out of the river compromise plan if Newsom signed the anti-Trump bill. The compromise is still being negotiated, without support of most environmental groups. Last week, a group of influential farm-water agencies in the San Joaquin Valley signed on to Newsom’s proposal.

Newsom’s complicated relationship with environmentalists over water issues took another turn last week, when the governor unveiled a broad set of strategies for coping with expected declines in supplies in the next 20 years. Environmentalists applauded much of the blueprint, including Newsom’s support for water recycling and stronger conservation efforts.

But Newsom also called for streamlining the red tape snarling a series of water projects that have been on the drawing boards for years. These include Sites Reservoir, the largest reservoir to be built in California since 1979.

“The time to get these damned projects (approved) is ridiculous,” he said. “It’s absurd. It’s reasonably comedic.”

Environmentalists don’t like Sites, which would draw water from the Sacramento River and, as they see it, pose a major threat to the river’s health. “Unfortunately, this strategy doubles down on promoting water storage projects, such as Sites Reservoir, that won’t provide new water supply but will detrimentally affect California’s rivers, lakes, streams, and communities,” said Brandon Dawson, director of Sierra Club California.

Then there’s the issue of fixing the Delta. The West Coast’s largest freshwater estuary is the hub of California’s north-to-south water network. Giant pumps at the south end of the Delta, operated by the state and federal governments, take water from the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers and ship it to the farms of the San Joaquin Valley and millions of people in Silicon Valley and Southern California.

Thanks in part to decades of pumping, fish populations have fallen to critical levels. Sometimes environmental regulations force the state and federal water projects to throttle back their pumps to protect the fish, allowing more water to reach the ocean — which reduces deliveries to farms and cities.

The result is that the Delta is becoming a bottleneck. Brown championed a plan to build two tunnels beneath the Delta to siphon off a portion of the Sacramento River’s flows during heavy storms and route it directly to the canals serving the southern half of the state. This re-engineering was designed so the pumps wouldn’t have to work as hard, fish populations would benefit — and water deliveries to the south would become more reliable.

Environmentalists hated Brown’s plan, arguing it do far more harm than good. Within days of taking office, Newsom agreed to scuttle the twin-tunnel plan but directed water planners to consider a scaled-back, single-tunnel project.

Three years later, Newsom unveiled his single-tunnel plan — and environmentalists are just as outraged as ever. Sierra Club California said “this flawed project is incredibly wasteful.”

Four Democratic congressmen from the area said it “will devastate the Delta communities and ecosystem.” Newsom’s administration argues that the tunnel would be an essential tool for coping with climate change.

California is getting hotter and drier — and its water supplies are becoming increasingly fragile. Fixing the Delta so the pumps can operate more regularly is critical. And Newsom believes he can do it without sacrificing the fish.

“We’re literally doing every single thing in our capacity to make sure the environmental consideration is lifted up,” Blumenfeld said. If the project overcomes the opposition — no sure bet — it will take as much as 20 years to complete. So the environmental ramifications — good or bad — won’t be felt until long after Newsom leaves the governor’s office.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article264525011.html#storylink=cpy

 

Preparing California for the “ArkStorm”

UCLA Research Study

California lives with a sleeping giant — an occasional flood so large that it inundates major valleys with water flows hundreds of miles long and tens of miles across.

Motivated by one such flood that occurred in 1862, scientists investigated the phenomenon in 2010. They called it the “ArkStorm scenario,” reflecting the potential for an event of biblical proportions.

To account for the additional flood-worsening effects of climate change, scientists from UCLA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research have completed the first part of ArkStorm 2.0.

“In the future scenario, the storm sequence is bigger in almost every respect,” said Daniel Swain, UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the paper, which is published today in the journal Science Advances. “There’s more rain overall, more intense rainfall on an hourly basis and stronger wind.”

In total, the research projects that end-of-the-century storms will generate 200% to 400% more runoff in the Sierra Nevada Mountains due to increased precipitation and more precipitation falling as rain, not snow.

The researchers used a combination of new high-resolution weather modeling and existing climate models to compare two extreme scenarios: one that would occur about once per century in the recent historical climate and another in the projected climate of 2081-2100. Both would involve a long series of storms fueled by atmospheric rivers over the course of a month.

The paper also simulated how the storms would affect parts of California at a local level.

“There are localized spots that get over 100 liquid-equivalent inches of water in the month,” Swain said, referring to the future scenario. “On 10,000-foot peaks, which are still somewhat below freezing even with warming, you get 20-foot-plus snow accumulations. But once you get down to South Lake Tahoe level and lower in elevation, it’s all rain. There would be much more runoff.”

The increased runoff could lead to devastating landslides and debris flows — particularly in hilly areas burned by wildfires.

The paper, which was coauthored by climate scientist Xingying Huang, found that historical climate change has already doubled the likelihood of such an extreme storm scenario, building on previous UCLA research showing increases in extreme precipitation events and more common major floods in California. The study also found that further large increases in “megastorm” risk are likely with each additional degree of global warming this century.

“Modeling extreme weather behavior is crucial to helping all communities understand flood risk even during periods of drought like the one we’re experiencing right now,” said Karla Nemeth, director of the Califiornia Department of Water Resources, which provided funding for the study. “The department will use this report to identify the risks, seek resources, support the Central Valley Flood Protection Plan, and help educate all Californians so we can understand the risk of flooding in our communities and be prepared.”

With drought and wildfire getting so much attention, Californians may have lost sight of extreme flooding, Swain said. “There is potential for bad wildfires every year in California, but a lot of years go by when there’s no major flood news. People forget about it.”

The state has experienced major floods over the years, but nothing on the scale of the Great Flood of 1862. During that disaster — when no flood management infrastructure was in place — floodwaters stretched up to 300 miles long and as wide as 60 miles across in California’s Central Valley. The state’s population then was about 500,000, compared to nearly 40 million today. Were a similar event to happen again, parts of cities such as Sacramento,

Stockton, Fresno and Los Angeles would be under water even with today’s extensive collection of reservoirs, levees and bypasses. It is estimated that it would be a $1 trillion disaster, larger than any in world history.

Though no flood so large has happened since, climate modeling and the paleoclimate record — including river sediment deposits dating back thousands of years — shows that it typically happened every 100 to 200 years in the pre-climate change era.

The ArkStorm flood is also known as “the Other Big One” after the nickname of an expected major earthquake on the San Andreas Fault. But, unlike an earthquake, the ArkStorm would lead to catastrophe across a much larger area.

“Every major population center in California would get hit at once — probably parts of Nevada and other adjacent states, too,” Swain said.

The effects on infrastructure would complicate relief efforts, with major interstate freeways such as the I-5 and I-80 likely shut down for weeks or months, Swain said. Economic and supply chain effects would be felt globally.

The first ArkStorm exercise concluded that it would not be possible to evacuate the 5 to 10 million people who would be displaced by flood waters, even with weeks of notice from meteorologists and climatologists. While it helped inform flood planning in some regions, theexercise was limited due to lack of organized resources and funding, Swain said.

California has already seen increases in climate-driven drought and record-breaking wildfires, Swain said. With climate change-amplified flooding, ArkStorm 2.0 aims to get ahead of the curve.

Further research and preparations to respond to such a scenario — including advanced flood simulations supported by the California Department of Water Resources — are planned to follow, Swain said.  This will include collaborations with partner agencies including the California Office of Emergency Services and the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Researchers next hope to map out where flooding could be worst and inform statewide plans to mitigate it. That could mean letting water out of reservoirs preemptively, allowing water to inundate dedicated floodplains and diverting water away from population centers in other ways.

https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/climate-change-makes-catastrophic-flood-twice-as-likely

NY Times interactive story:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/08/12/climate/california-rain-storm.html

 

Updating The California Soundtrack, or Music for Your Road Trip from Imperial Beach to Crescent City

NY Times, improbably so…

Imagine you’re planning a road trip along the length of the California coast, from Imperial Beach to Crescent City.

You’re all packed, and you know where you’re stopping along the way. But what music will you listen to in the car? What songs perfectly capture the Golden State in all its messy glory?

This is, essentially, the pursuit of the California Soundtrack, our playlist that tries to put all California-focused and California-inspired tracks in one place. For the past three years, we’ve been periodically updating the playlist based on your many, many wonderful suggestions.

Today, I’ve added a few dozen more of your picks. Some of the most recommended in this round were “California 1” by Con Funk Shun (1981), “Bixby Canyon Bridge” by Death Cab for Cutie (2008) and “Hollywood Swinging” by Kool & the Gang (1974).

You can peruse the full list of California songs here (the latest additions are in bold) or listen here.

As always, the California Soundtrack is a work in progress that we’ll continue editing and building. Email your Golden State song recommendation and a few lines about why you think it deserves inclusion to [email protected].