Watershed Info No 1039
Daniel Salzler No. 1039
EnviroInsight.org Five Items March 6, 2020
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1. Five Driest Cities In The U.S.. The five driest cities in the U.S. are:
5. Los Angeles, CA
4. San Diego, CA
3. Riverside, CA
2. PHOENIX, AZ
1. Las Vegas
Source: Travel Trivia
2. Venus, The Morning Star Reveals A Frightening Scenario. Our closest cosmic neighbor, Venus, is often referred to as the Morning Star because of its frequent appearance in the hours before dawn. This month, however, the planet, which lies roughly 85 million miles from Earth, dominates the early evening sky. When I point to it hanging prominently in the west, friends are often dismissive, insisting it must be an airplane or helicopter. Other than the sun and moon, no object in the night sky is brighter. So luminous is Venus, in fact, that on clear nights it is possible to see it a half hour or more before sunset, blazing through the deepening blue of approaching night.
And yet, Venus’s eye-catching brightness is deceptive. Even through large telescopes, it appears as little more than a bright white dot. This is because of a thick, highly reflective layer of cloud that obscures its surface. Under that dense atmosphere, 100 times thicker than our own, lies a rocky planet almost identical to Earth in size and mass. For these reasons, it is sometimes referred to as Earth’s Twin. But the similarities are superficial—Venus could hardly be more different. It’s also a fitting object of contemplation in this time of environmental collapse. I prefer to call it the Mourning Star.
Let’s begin with Venus’s average surface temperature, which is a lead-melting 870°F. That temperature, the highest recorded on any planet in the solar system, is largely the result of tremendous pressure exerted by its smothering atmosphere—a force equivalent to what a submarine would experience under 3,000 feet of water. Venus is covered with numerous volcanoes that have also transformed the landscape and spewed enormous quantities of sulfur. Sulfuric acid vapor in the planet’s upper atmosphere gives Venus its characteristic yellow tinge.
The first glimpse of the surface of Venus came from a Russian probe called Venera 9, which landed on the planet in 1975. It survived less than an hour, but in that short time it was able to transmit several grainy pictures of a rocky surface obscured in an ominous haze. Other satellites and Earth-based telescopes have used radar to penetrate Venus’s thick clouds, revealing a stunning topography of ragged peaks and sprawling plateaus. The summits of its highest mountain range, the Maxwell Montes, rise to an elevation of 35,000 feet, more than a mile taller than Mount Everest.
But what makes Venus’s climate so deadly is the fact that 95 percent of its atmosphere is composed of CO2. Venus is a world ravaged by a runaway greenhouse effect. Scientists are still trying to piece together the geological events that led to this state, but researchers at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies have proposed a stunning hypothesis: In the distant past, Venus was covered in shallow oceans of liquid water and may even have been habitable. But over millennia, those oceans were blasted by intense sunlight. Because Venus is much closer to the sun and has an extremely slow rate of rotation (one day on Venus is equivalent to 117 of our own) the amount of solar energy reaching the planet’s surface is much greater than on Earth. This bombardment of solar radiation evaporated the oceans, turning them to water vapor. Once aloft in the atmosphere, these water molecules were broken apart by the sun’s ultraviolet rays, causing the light hydrogen atoms to escape into space. As water dwindled and eventually disappeared, carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere, causing surface temperatures to rise and evaporation rates to increase. This is the pernicious feedback loop that scientists suspect changed Venus from a watery planet to an infernal hellscape.
At current rates of warming, do we risk a planetary cataclysm— a Venusification—of our own making? We are doing our best to see to it, rapidly infusing the atmosphere with carbon. The changes we are initiating are happening on the order of decades rather than millennia. Since the Industrial Revolution, we have increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by 48 percent. A World Meteorological Organization report from last year indicates that the planet is on track for 3° to 5°C warming by the end of the century. That sort of warming would result in the near complete melting of the polar ice caps and mid-latitude glaciers, the inundation of coastal cities, the loss of vast swaths of habitat and biodiversity and the forced migration northward of tens of millions of people fleeing regions ravaged by increasing temperatures. If there is one lesson that Venus, the Mourning Star, teaches us, it is that our atmosphere—the thin membrane that makes life on Earth possible—can, with enough perturbance, become an adversary, a poison shroud, a thick blanket snuffing out all life.
hydrogen atoms to escape into space. As water dwindled and eventually disappeared, carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere, causing surface temperatures to rise and evaporation rates to increase. This is the pernicious feedback loop that scientists suspect changed Venus from a watery planet to an infernal hellscape. COMMUNITY-BASED SOLUTIONS TO LOCAL WATER CHALLENGES IN ARIZONA
3. Community-Based Solutions To Water Problems Is The Theme Of The 2020 Arroyo, newly released by the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center. The stories featured in the Arroyoillustrate how communities outside the cities of Central Arizona are approaching local challenges such as limited water supplies and increasing water demand—from traditional infrastructure projects to innovations made possible by new partnerships and cooperative action. Much of the information provided derived from the 2019 WRRC annual conference, augmented by subsequent interviews, and is not available in other published sources. Titled “Community-based Solutions to Local Water Challenges in Arizona”, the new Arroyo is a resource for sharing ideas and options for effective water management.
Read the ARROYO at https://wrrc.arizona.edu/sites/wrrc.arizona.edu/files/attachment/Arroyo-2020.pdf
4. A ‘Gap In Protection’: Arizona Looks For A Plan B Under WOTUS.
Arizona is evaluating whether to strengthen water regulations in the face of federal rollbacks from the Trump administration that could leave 93% of the state’s stream miles unprotected by the Clean Water Act.
Arizona has long supported the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite Clean Water Act jurisdiction, with Gov. Doug Ducey (R) agreeing in a 2017 letter to EPA that “the original intent of Congress was not to use the Clean Water Act as a blanket regulation to cover all waters.”
Protection Rule, also known as the Waters of the U.S., or WOTUS, rule, which erased federal protections for streams that only flow in response to rainfall and most wetlands without surface water connections to larger waterways.
But the rule, which won’t take effect for a few months, could have a huge impact in arid states like Arizona, where waterways are dry most of the time but can flow in torrents after winter storms.
Arizona has few of its own state-level protections for wetlands and waterways, so this fall, the Department of Environmental Quality will review regulations.
The staggering statistics: Not only would the vast majority of streams no longer be federally regulated, but 99% of lakes would also lose protections.
What’s more, 98% of point-source pollution permits discharge into those waterways, meaning limits on those polluters could disappear when the federal rule changes.
“ADEQ acknowledges that the new definition creates a gap in protection for many Arizona waterways and supports developing a ‘local control approach’ at the state level to protect Arizona’s important and precious water resources,” the agency wrote on its website.
EPA officials have insisted that the federal rollback will not leave millions of stream miles unprotected nationwide, insisting that changing federal rules allows states to take charge and decide which waterways are important enough to protect.
“Our new rule recognizes this relationship and strikes the proper balance between Washington, D.C., and the states and clearly details which waters are subject to federal control under the Clean Water Act and which waters fall solely under states’ jurisdiction,” EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler told reporters last week. “Many states already have a robust network of regulations that protect their state waterways.”
A senior EPA official agreed, telling reporters times have changed since the Clean Water Act was passed.
“This isn’t the 1970s and 1980s; the states have robust environmental programs,” he said. “They value and cherish their resources. This is not a rule that presumes that if the federal government doesn’t regulate, there is no regulation.”
EPA has previously calculated that 29 states that currently lack robust wetlands regulations “may” or are “likely” to bolster dredge and fill rules as federal oversight retreats — something critics have called an overestimate (Greenwire, Jan. 21, 2019).
Even so, new state regulatory efforts can take time.
California’s new wetlands regulations finalized just last year, for example, were the result of more than a decade of work that began in response to a pair of Supreme Court rulings issued near the turn of the century (Greenwire, Feb. 4, 2019).
That’s alarming to Chris McVie, who sits on the board of the Coalition for Sonoran Desert Protection and said, “In the meantime, there is the potential for your mom-and-pop dry cleaner to just dump their waste wherever they see fit.”
It’s also not even clear whether the state will ultimately finalize any changes and if new state protections would be comparable to those being lost under the Clean Water Act. ADEQ spokeswoman Erin Jordan wrote in an email that there’s a limit to how much the state agency can do without approval from the state Legislature.
For example, ADEQ could decide to create water quality standards for waterways that are no longer federally protected, but creating a new permitting program to control pollution to those waterways would require lawmakers’ approval.
That means new protections are no guarantee, said McVie.
“Arizona is a state that has, historically, been knee-jerk in its abhorrence of regulation,” she said.
McVie said the state’s struggle to regulate groundwater pumping as its population grows — despite widespread acknowledgement that the state’s water supply is limited — makes her believe the Legislature won’t strengthen water protections for waterways that are often dry.
“We require clean water in order to have a safe and healthy life, but how they are going to do that when they are in denial of part of the problem is going to be interesting,” she said.
Pushback
Already, ADEQ’s effort is seeing significant pushback from housing developers and farmers.
Arizona Farm Bureau President Stefanie Smallhouse, who called the effort “premature” because the Trump rule will likely be met with lawsuits that could delay its implementation, said she does not believe the federal rollback will actually negatively affect Arizona water quality.
She questioned ADEQ’s statistics for the number of waterways that will lose federal protections, saying many don’t count as “waterways” because they are actually dry for most of the year.
“There is just no point in regulating waterways that don’t have water,” she said. “That would be the state of Arizona basically controlling land use instead of water quality.”
ADEQ’s Jordan said the agency’s statistics for newly unregulated waterways were developed using currently available geospatial mapping. But Smallhouse said she doubts them, in part because her group has asked ADEQ for maps of unprotected waterways and hasn’t seen any.” I think what they are doing is basically trying to scare people to say this rule has been reversed and now nothing will be protected, which is just not true,” she said. “They have not produced maps, so it’s difficult to know where they are coming from when they make these statements that we now have unprotected water, when they won’t show you where this unprotected water is or if it has water in it.”
“I think what they are doing is basically trying to scare people to say this rule has been reversed and now nothing will be protected, which is just not true,” she said. “They have not produced maps, so it’s difficult to know where they are coming from when they make these statements that we now have unprotected water, when they won’t show you where this unprotected water is or if it has water in it.”
Smallhouse’s group supports the new WOTUS definition and believes the state should similarly only regulate waterways with permanent or intermittent flow.
She accused state regulators of “confusing the efforts of the federal government to bring more clarity to regulation.”
“We support state jurisdiction over the state’s waters, but we also support clarity in the rules, which govern our clean water,” she said. Source: E&E News
5. EnviroInsight Provides Education To Lowes Home Improvement Patrons.
On Saturday, February 29th, EnviroInsight L.L.C. provide one-on-one education opportunities to over 60 people who stopped by our booth located outside Lowes Home Improvement store on Northern Avenue before entering the store, or upon leaving the store, to learn more about recycling in Glendale.
100% of those who shared their time with R.E., Susie or Dan stated they least something they did not know prior to their visit to the booth.
EnviroInsight extends its THANKS to Lowes Home Improvement on Northern Avenue allowing us to educate people about recycling and also to extend its desire to come visit your community and/or function to teach the What and How of recycling in your community.
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