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Nathan Heller | California's Recall Is a Blow to Democratic Change
Nathan Heller, The New Yorker
Heller writes: "Since 1911, when a recall amendment was voted into the California Constitution, there have been a hundred and seventy-nine attempted recalls of elected politicians, with eleven earning the signatures required to make it to the ballot."
The challenge to Governor Gavin Newsom strains election norms and institutions that are already dangerously frayed.
ince 1911, when a recall amendment was voted into the California Constitution, there have been a hundred and seventy-nine attempted recalls of elected politicians, with eleven earning the signatures required to make it to the ballot. Of those eleven, six have successfully removed officials from office, and of the six just one removed a governor. That was in 2003, when Gray Davis was bounced from his seat in favor of Arnold Schwarzenegger—the first but not the last orange-colored strongman to rise on fulminant political winds, and a guy whose candidacy seemed a buff embodiment of the question Well, why not? In his acceptance speech, the Governator-elect was reverent. “Thank you very much to all the people of California for giving me their great trust,” he said. “It’s very important that we need to bring back trust in the government itself.”
It was a nice thought while it lasted. September 14th brings the spectre of California’s second gubernatorial recall election, and the man in the barrel this time is Gavin Newsom, elected three short years (O.K., long years) ago, and now applying for the job he holds, with the reward of being able to apply again in 2022, when he’s up for reëlection. Being a governor hasn’t looked like much fun lately, and the stakes out West run high. Not only is California the most populous state in the Union, it has the fifth-largest economy in the world, ahead of the United Kingdom’s, and in recent years it has become the epicenter of what could be called the country’s intellectual mood, being home to such enduring points of interest as Facebook, epidemiology, Netflix, and the Kardashians. “As goes California, so goes the nation” runs the adage (invoked, it’s bittersweet to note, by Newsom, in 2008, when cheering on same-sex marriage as the mayor of San Francisco). The risk now is of that being true. The recall puts alarming strain on democratic norms that already, nationwide, are dangerously frayed.
Newsom’s odds of holding his seat in September’s special election have been narrow: recent polling has the Governor ahead, 50.6 per cent to 46.3 per cent, according to a late-August analysis by FiveThirtyEight. The offenses that necessitate his removal, as the recall’s mostly Republican ringmasters tell it, are various and somewhat vague. Newsom is said to have been insufficiently supportive of business during the pandemic. Many residents find California’s taxes and unemployment too high and its housing supply too small. Some consider his wildfire response weak; some resent his decision to release state prisoners at the tail end of their terms or with serious health risks, to stem the spread of COVID-19 in overcrowded facilities. And there’s l’affaire French Laundry, in which, last fall, the Governor ignored his own pandemic guidelines and went to a birthday party at a super-fancy Napa restaurant. (Let them eat ramps!) These are formidable complaints—the kind that accrue to every official at the end of every term, when citizens choose whether to vote the bums back in or boot them out.
What they aren’t is a leadership emergency. We know, more than ever now, what gross incompetence or personal abuse looks like in executive roles. Newsom displays no evidence of either, and his tenure hasn’t been empty of feats. He finally put a moratorium on death-row executions in California, and committed an unprecedented twelve billion dollars to homelessness-alleviation projects (with another ten billion for affordable housing tacked on). In the earliest days of the pandemic, California dodged the fate of states such as New York, in part because Newsom was the first governor to declare shelter-in-place. The business costs of such restrictions? In a bad year nationally, it’s hard to claim they were inordinate, given the nearly seventy-six-billion-dollar budget surplus Newsom says California pulled in this year, much of it from taxes. Even at its worst, his record has been the best a politician can hope for: mixed.
So—to the booth. Voters this month face two questions. First: recall Newsom, yea or nay? Then: if he’s out (the recall needs a majority of the vote, at which point the incumbent is eliminated from the running), who should replace him? Forty-six candidates, including Caitlyn Jenner, aspire, but the front-runner is Larry Elder, a conservative talk-radio host and outspoken Donald Trump supporter, who believes it is unfair to hold the former President responsible for the events of January 6th. His proposals reject statewide mask and testing requirements, renewable-energy programs, and criminal-justice reform. Elder is not insensible to homelessness, and proposes to solve it by waiving California’s Environmental Quality Act, which mandates disclosure about the environmental impact of most housing developments. He has the rare distinction of being both anti-welfare and anti-wage, explaining to the McClatchy news agency this summer that “the ideal minimum wage is $0.00.” And he leads the field by about ten points after having raised nearly five million dollars in the first several weeks of his campaign—pretty generous, from folks who start at zero bucks an hour. With the recall split into two questions, Elder doesn’t need more votes than Newsom to sail to victory; if Newsom is out, Elder is likely to be in.
Dive-bomb the governorship, take the biggest vote-getter out of the running, and jam your candidate into the vacuum: it is hard to conceive of a more cynical plan from extreme conservatives trying to control Sacramento, or a scheme more damaging to the premises on which democracy runs. If the recall works, it will be because those premises are weak already, anti-institutionalism having become something of an institution in itself. Whether raiding the Capitol because we don’t like an election result or demanding a vote now because we can’t fathom waiting until next year, we are approaching a point at which there’s just one button left in politics, the big red one that says “EJECT.” We press it; things move; we begin from scratch again.
As far as change goes, this is the most impoverished kind, because it builds on nothing and leads nowhere, and it clears no space for an enduring public voice. The central tenet of our public institutions is that our fellow-citizens are in the game for the same reasons we are. There are voters we’d hope never to meet at a picnic, but, if their chosen voices prevail on Election Day, we give them their full term, because we want the same when our time comes around. A vote against the recall strengthens democratic norms and institutions, but it also preserves the possibility of real change. And that includes the right of challengers to return next fall and vie against the Governor. May the best candidate win.
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Tristan Williams, a 14-year-old from Houston, uses a flag to get some respite from the sun in D.C. on Saturday, the 58th anniversary of the historic March on Washington. (photo: Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)
Thousands Rally for Voting Rights, DC Statehood in Washington
Ellie Silverman, Fredrick Kunkle, Nicole Asbury and Jasmine Hilton, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "Thousands of people marched on Saturday to mark the 58th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and voice their support for expanding and protecting access to the ballot."
Many invoke the late Rep. John Lewis and other Civil Rights figures in new push to expand ballot access
housands of people marched on Saturday to mark the 58th anniversary of the historic March on Washington and voice their support for expanding and protecting access to the ballot.
The crowd cheered, sang and danced in the streets on the way to the National Mall while calling on Congress to pass an extensive voting rights measure and eliminate the filibuster if necessary to do so. The marchers, though fewer than in years past, also demanded D.C. statehood and an end to police brutality.
“If we keep going down this road, we’re going to be back like Jim Crow,” said Craig Browne, 74, who traveled to the nation’s capital from Wyncote, Pa.
Browne, who lived in Alabama when segregation was still in place, said he had wanted to join the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and other civil rights leaders in the historic 1963 march, but his mother didn’t want him to miss school. So he wasn’t missing this one.
As he gathered with others in McPherson Square, he wore a shirt with the face of Lewis, who went on to become a Democratic congressman from Georgia, and carried a sign with a quote of his that read, “The vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have.” Others also held signs invoking Lewis’s name and his words encouraging “good trouble.”
“I remember segregation,” Browne said. “I remember separate, and it wasn’t equal.”
Organizers had arranged buses to bring people in from across the country to rally on the Mall. There was a celebratory mood as demonstrators urged Congress to pass the For the People Act, a sweeping elections and ethics bill that would impose national standards for voting and override state-level restrictions. They also called for passage of the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which aims to restore voting rights protections that have been weakened by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Civil and labor leaders have coalesced around the cause, saying this is a continuation of the same battles King fought when he inspired tens of thousands of people to show up to the seminal March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
As the crowd passed the National Museum of African American History and Culture, one protester yelled into a megaphone: “You can’t stop the revolution!”
Another group started chanting: “What do we want? Justice! When do we want it? Now!”
Shirley Thompson, 66, of Petworth, held the hands of her great-granddaughters Harley, 7, and Laloni, 8, as she marched past the Washington Monument.
“Pass the John Lewis Act Now! Let’s get into some good trouble!” she chanted.
“We want statehood for D.C.!” she chanted into the crowd. “We want you to know we are serious!”
As the crowd turned from Constitution Avenue back onto 14th Street NW, Jeremiah Surratt began walking backward and shimmied his shoulders in rhythm with the marchers’ drums and yelled, “Black votes matter!”
Surratt, 18, of Cleveland, said he hadn’t been old enough to vote in the most recent election but wanted to ensure his voice was heard in the next one. But he said that as an African American, he felt his right to vote was vulnerable to suppression and manipulation — something that would only change with more participation from others like him.
“Young people today need to understand that your vote is important,” he said.
The demonstrators marched in two groups, one with the March on for Voting Rights between the Lincoln Memorial and U.S. Capitol and the other heading to the Make Good Trouble Rally near the Lincoln Memorial. The name of the Make Good Trouble Rally was also intended to honor Lewis, who in 1965 was brutally beaten by a state trooper as he led hundreds of protesters over the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma during what became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
Rodney Lewis Jr. (no relation to the late congressman) found a place in the shade with friends to listen as speakers took the stage to talk about how Black voters, especially Black women, had been critical to President Biden’s victory last year and that of many other Democrats down the ballot. Now, they said, it’s time those leaders listen.
Lewis held up his fist and nodded in agreement. He thought of his mother, 63, who had stood in line most of the day just to cast her vote last year in Lithia Springs, Ga., and, as a child growing up in a segregated state, had to go the back of the store for ice cream. Now, she would have to contend with recently enacted voting laws such as Georgia’s that seemed intended to make it harder for people like her to vote.
“It was traumatizing,” Lewis, 36, of Alexandria, said of his mother’s difficulty voting last year. “Why should it take all this for the right to vote? This isn’t the 1960s.”
Dwayne Smith, 60, a Brookland resident who was sitting nearby, expressed frustration that so little progress had been made since then.
Smith expressed frustration that similar issues inspired both Saturday’s march and the one 58 years ago. “Why should we have to march for basic human rights?” he asked.
Organizers said the march was also intended to voice support for other civil rights and social justice issues, too, including reparations for slavery, raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour, canceling student debt, reforming immigration, and ending gun violence and mass incarceration.
Several members of John Lewis’s family appeared onstage, including his youngest brother, Henry “Grant” Lewis, who urged Congress to pass legislation that would make it easier, not harder, for people to vote.
“So it doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on,” he said. “It’s more important to be on the right side of history.”
Lewis also urged the crowd to keep fighting.
“Fifty-eight years ago, my brother and others spoke at this event for voter rights,” Lewis said. “We now realize more than ever this fight is not for a day, or a week, or a month or even a year. We must be committed to fight for a lifetime.”
Some family members of people killed by police also took the stage, including George Floyd’s brother, Philonise.
“Change needs to be now because we will continue to see young men and young women murdered every day,” Philonise Floyd said. “It only takes one person in your life to change everything.”
As he spoke, April Sanchez, 49, live-streamed his remarks on Facebook. She also joined in as he led the crowd in a call and response — “Say his name!” “George Floyd!” — but she chanted the name of different person killed by police: Ryan Ronquillo, her son.
Ronquillo, 20, was shot by Denver police in the parking lot outside his friend’s funeral in July 2014. Police said Ronquillo, who had been sought on several warrants for aggravated motor theft, drove his car at the officers while trying to escape. A federal appeals court later upheld the dismissal of the family’s lawsuit against the department.
“I miss him every day,” she said sitting on the grass with a banner at her feet calling for “justice.”
“Too many people are dying at the hands of police and police aren’t being held accountable,” Sanchez said. She said that if voting rights are expanded and protected, “maybe a change could happen and more things could be fair.”
Serena Patel, 23, sat underneath the shade cooling down with a Gatorade, as she listened to the closing speakers.
“It’s definitely pretty inspiring to see how everyone is coming together supporting this,” she said. “Being actually physically present here is like a different feeling than just reading something or scrolling through stuff. That’s kind of like what I’ve taken away from this, and I hope people feel that way too.”
The Rev. William J. Barber II, a North Carolina preacher who is the co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival — a resurgence of a movement created by King before his death in 1968 — also spoke at the march. He has organized protests for voting rights and a $15 federal minimum wage.
“This is not Jim Crow, this is James Crow, Esquire,” Barber has said throughout the summer about the battle for voting rights and a higher federal minimum wage. “It’s a certain sadness that we have to fight over the American people having access to the ballot. We have to fight to get the American people a living wage.”
Civil rights leaders have pointed to the influence King’s original March on Washington, and his words, had on the civil rights movement. It created the momentum, they said, for the 1965 Selma to Montgomery march in Alabama that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act two months later.
“We are at a critical, critical juncture in our nation,” organizer Arndrea Waters King, the wife of Martin Luther King III, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s eldest son, said in an interview this month. “If we don’t have victories, which I believe that we will have, the impact will be felt for generations.”
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A rally for housing. (photo: Erik McGregor/Teen Vogue)
Anxious Tenants Await Assistance as Evictions Resume
Michael Casey and Michelle Liu, Associated Press
Excerpt: "Six months after Congress approved spending tens of billions of dollars to bail out renters facing eviction, South Carolina was just reaching its first tenants. All nine of them."
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Tina Peters. (photo: McKenzie Lange/The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel/AP)
MAGA Election Clerk Accused of Losing Ballots in Local Races
Kelly Weill, The Daily Beast
Weill writes: "Seated onstage at the most-hyped election conspiracy event of the year, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, Tina Peters, described herself as a crusader for election security."
Before she was the subject of an FBI investigation, Stop the Steal diehard Tina Peters oversaw elections where ballots went uncounted or got lost in unsecured drop boxes.
eated onstage at the most-hyped election conspiracy event of the year, the clerk of Mesa County, Colorado, Tina Peters, described herself as a crusader for election security.
“I’ve looked at it objectively,” Peters said of supposed issues in election data during her speech at MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s “Cyber Symposium” this month. “There’s some discrepancies there that I cannot deny, and I tell people, ‘I cannot unsee some of these things.’ If I’m going to be honest with the people of Mesa County and Colorado and all of you, I cannot unsee some of these things.”
But at home in Mesa County, some current and former officials have a different recollection of Peters’ tenure overseeing elections.
During Peters’ first year as clerk, in 2019, her office was blamed for leaving more than 570 uncounted ballots in a box, long past an election. Less than a year later, one of her office’s drop boxes leaked ballots, sending some floating in the summer breeze. Now Peters has gone underground, reportedly hiding in a safe house provided by Lindell, after she allegedly participated in a breach of Mesa County voting machine data this year. That data soon wound up on conspiracy websites, making Peters a folk hero among the MAGA set and the subject of an FBI investigation.
Peters (who did not return requests for comment) took office in 2019, after her predecessor, Sheila Reiner, reached her term limit. What followed was an unusually bombastic tenure in a typically low-drama role.
While overseeing the November 2019 general election, Peters’ office forgot to count 574 ballots, instead leaving them unattended in a drop box outside her office for months. That slip-up coincided with a rush of departures from Peters’ office. In December 2019, nearly 20 of Peters’ 32-person staff had departed, the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel reported at the time. More staff quit days after the missing ballots were discovered, in late February 2020, bringing the departure count over two dozen.
The Colorado Secretary of State’s Office told Peters to get her act together.
“The Secretary of State’s Office appointed someone to be in the [clerk’s] office to help with the election,” Amanda Polson, who served as elections director under Reiner, told The Daily Beast.
Patti Inscho, a Democrat and an experienced former Mesa County Clerk employee, was hired to help Peters with elections. But just two months into Inscho’s role, Peters fired her, accusing her of not doing assigned work—an allegation Inscho firmly denied. The rift turned ugly, with a Peters staffer filing a criminal complaint against Inscho for allegedly not working during a pandemic, the Colorado Sun previously reported. Police dismissed the report.
“Tina didn’t want to fight facts,” Inscho told The Daily Beast. “She wanted to damage people. She did and said a lot of things about me that are untrue. It hurt my reputation, and it’s hard to fight back against.”
Polson, who had been hopeful about Inscho’s hiring, saw her termination as a bad omen.
“Essentially, that person [Inscho] got shut out,” Polson said. “Nothing had improved in the office. She was still, we thought, not handling the ballot issue correctly. There are some lines you can’t cross in an election administration. That is one of them: not counting ballots that should be counted.”
In May 2020, Polson formally began an effort to recall Peters. The campaign took issue with Peters’ handling of the lost ballots, as well as her staff turnover, a series of controversial business expenses (including more than $3,000 in food), and her decision not to oversee a pair of town-level elections. (The towns were forced to oversee their own elections, costing them two to three times the typical cost of a county-run vote.)
Soon the recall campaign had another data point: a ballot drop-off box, installed by Peters’ office for the 2020 primary election, appeared defective, sending completed ballots blowing across a parking lot. Peters claimed the leak was staged and blamed a local couple who’d reported the issue. The couple denied the allegation in an interview with the Daily Sentinel, where a reporter also noted ongoing issues with ballots becoming lodged in the drop box.
Polson was joined in her signature-gathering campaign by Inscho and even, on occasion, Peters’ predecessor Sheila Reiner. “I agreed with the group that things weren’t being done properly,” Reiner told The Daily Beast. “I didn’t believe that Tina was doing a good job.”
She said she collected some signatures for the recall, but was not one of its organizers. Still, her involvement cost her. Reiner said she was antagonized by Peters loyalists who objected to the recall.
“I'm a Republican,” she said. “There are some other Republicans that felt like that I wasn't being loyal to the brand, let’s put it that way.”
Peters sometimes joined the counterattack on her critics. When the state appointed the treasurer of a nearby county to act as an independent overseer on the recall, Peters filed an official complaint about the treasurer’s political affiliation (a former Republican, current Democrat). That treasurer, Teak Simonton, said the allegation was baseless—in part because Simonton’s role mostly consisted of verifying signatures and other hard-to-fudge tasks.
“I think she probably knows as well as anyone that there’s really nothing that can be handled inappropriately based on one opinion on the situation,” Simonton told The Daily Beast. “The law is very straightforward and very detailed on exactly how you administer and verify signatures. So her concerns were really unwarranted. Anything that would have been done was verifiable and transparent. It’s my guess that she was hoping to bolster her position by diminishing my engagement because I’m a Democrat.” (Simonton was also tasked with compiling a report on Peters’ office, in which she praised Peters’ staffers but criticized the clerk as “distrusting, frequently rude and antagonistic.”)
Ultimately, the recall effort fell approximately 1,200 signatures shy of the 12,129 signers needed to advance by August 2020.
“I honestly believe that had there not been a pandemic, had there been big gatherings, that we would have passed that petition,” Inscho said. “We would have reached enough names. It was just too hard with everything shut down.”
Frustrated, the recall organizers had little recourse but to watch Peters settle in to administer the 2020 general election.
“Those of us who were involved in recall, it was very taxing on us, mentally and physically,” Polson said. “We all took a giant step back and figured that, if the recall failed, she was really someone else’s problem at that point. We had done what we could to deal with it and it didn’t work.”
When Donald Trump won Mesa County in November 2020, but not Colorado or the U.S. at large, Peters promoted an election conspiracy theory on Twitter. And by May 2021, investigators allege, she became personally involved in the intrigue.
On, or shortly before May 25, Peters or someone in her office switched off security cameras that monitored the county’s voting machines, Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold alleges. On the 25th, Peters is accused of allowing an unauthorized person, who used the name “Gerald Wood,” to access the machines and make copies of data, which were soon leaked to Ron Watkins, a conspiracy theorist who previously acted as an administrator for the fringe forum 8kun. Watkins and fellow travelers like Lindell attempted, unsuccessfully, to argue that the leaked data suggests malfeasance by voting machine company Dominion. (Dominion is suing Lindell and other election conspiracy theorists for defamation.)
Soon after the breach became public, Peters rode Lindell’s private jet to his “Cyber Symposium” in South Dakota, where she made her speech about “discrepancies” in Mesa County voting data. (For good measure, Peters also used taxpayer money to buy a United Airlines ticket to the symposium, which she listed in business expenses as a “conference,” the Daily Sentinel reported. Even larger is the cost of replacing 41 pieces of voting technology that were compromised during the breach.)
Although Peters denies wrongdoing in the data leak, the breach is now the subject of investigations by local, state, and federal investigations. And Peters is nowhere to be found. Last week, Lindell told Vice that he was helping Peters hide in an undisclosed location (originally Texas, he said, but she has since moved due to security concerns).
For Peters’ critics back home, it’s the latest development in an election security saga that should have ended one or two ballot fiascos ago.
“It’s kind of horrifying to watch. Several of us on the recall committee worked at the elections office. Seeing the work and trust that we built come crashing down was really hard to watch,” Polson said. “We figured something worse was going to happen. It was just a matter of when and how and what.”
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A child receiving a vaccine. (photo: Shawn Rocco/Duke Health/Reuters)
Why Is It Taking So Long to Get a COVID Vaccine for Kids?
Tara Parker-Pope, The New York Times
Parker-Pope writes: "As kids around the country head back to school, there has been disappointing news this week for parents of children under 12. While many health experts had hoped for an early fall approval of a vaccine for young children, two of the nation’s top public health officials said it’s not going to happen."
s kids around the country head back to school, there has been disappointing news this week for parents of children under 12. While many health experts had hoped for an early fall approval of a vaccine for young children, two of the nation’s top public health officials said it’s not going to happen.
“I’ve got to be honest, I don’t see the approval for kids 5 to 11 coming much before the end of 2021,” said Dr. Francis S. Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, on the NPR program “Morning Edition.”
Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, offered a slightly more hopeful timeline. He told the “Today Show” on NBC that there was a “reasonable chance” that Covid-19 shots would be available to children under 12 by mid- to late fall or early winter. Both Pfizer and Moderna are gathering data on the safety, correct dose and effectiveness of the vaccines in children, he said.
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People older than 70 wait in an observation area after getting a COVID-19 jab at a vaccination centre in Singapore. (photo: Edgar Su/Reuters)
Singapore Vaccinates 80 Percent of Population Against COVID-19
Al Jazeera
Excerpt: "Singapore has fully inoculated 80 percent of its 5.7 million people against COVID-19, according to officials, becoming the world’s most vaccinated country and setting the stage for further easing of cure."
“We have crossed another milestone, where 80% of our population has received their full regimen of two doses,” Singapore’s Health Minister Ong Ye Kung said in a Facebook post on Sunday.
“It means Singapore has taken another step forward in making ourselves more resilient to COVID-19.”
That gives the tiny city-state the world’s highest rate of complete vaccinations, according to a tracker by the Reuters news agency.
Other countries that have high vaccination rates include the United Arab Emirates, Uruguay and Chile, which have fully inoculated more than 70 percent of their populations.
Singapore, which began its vaccination campaign in January, relied mostly on the vaccines developed by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna.
Earlier in August, Ong said if Singapore can “continue to keep the number of severe cases and illnesses under control and our healthcare capacity is not overly stretched,” then the country will further open up its economy and allow social activities and quarantine-free travel to resume.
“Our lives will be more normal, (and our) livelihoods will be better protected,” he said.
Ong, along with two other ministers, described what the new normal would look like in an article in the Straits Times in June.
They said large gatherings such as the New Year Countdown will resume and “businesses will have certainty that their operations will not be disrupted”.
Singaporeans will also be allowed to travel again, at least to countries that have also controlled the virus.
“We will recognise each other’s vaccination certificates. Travellers, especially those vaccinated, can get themselves tested before departure and be exempted from quarantine with a negative test upon arrival,” they said.
Singapore reported 113 new infections on Saturday, according to Channel News Asia. The country has logged a total of 67,171 cases and 55 deaths since the pandemic began.
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Lake Mead, the nation's largest freshwater reservoir, has been losing water because of epochal drought since 2000. (photo: Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
40 Million People Rely on the Colorado River. It's Drying Up Fast.
Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica
Lustgarten writes: "On a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground."
n a 110-degree day several years ago, surrounded by piles of sand and rock in the desert outside of Las Vegas, I stepped into a yellow cage large enough to fit three standing adults and was lowered 600 feet through a black hole into the ground. There, at the bottom, amid pooling water and dripping rock, was an enormous machine driving a cone-shaped drill bit into the earth. The machine was carving a cavernous, 3-mile tunnel beneath the bottom of the nation’s largest freshwater reservoir, Lake Mead.
Lake Mead, a reservoir formed by the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s, is one of the most important pieces of infrastructure on the Colorado River, supplying fresh water to Nevada, California, Arizona and Mexico. The reservoir hasn’t been full since 1983. In 2000, it began a steady decline caused by epochal drought. On my visit in 2015, the lake was just about 40% full. A chalky ring on the surrounding cliffs marked where the waterline once reached, like the residue on an empty bathtub. The tunnel far below represented Nevada’s latest salvo in a simmering water war: the construction of a $1.4 billion drainage hole to ensure that if the lake ever ran dry, Las Vegas could get the very last drop.
For years, experts in the American West have predicted that, unless the steady overuse of water was brought under control, the Colorado River would no longer be able to support all of the 40 million people who depend on it. Over the past two decades, Western states took incremental steps to save water, signed agreements to share what was left and then, like Las Vegas, did what they could to protect themselves. But they believed the tipping point was still a long way off.
Like the record-breaking heat waves and the ceaseless mega-fires, the decline of the Colorado River has been faster than expected. This year, even though rainfall and snowpack high up in the Rocky Mountains were at near-normal levels, the parched soils and plants stricken by intense heat absorbed much of the water, and inflows to Lake Powell were around one-fourth of their usual amount. The Colorado’s flow has already declined by nearly 20%, on average, from its flow throughout the 1900s, and if the current rate of warming continues, the loss could well be 50% by the end of this century.
Earlier this month, federal officials declared an emergency water shortage on the Colorado River for the first time. The shortage declaration forces reductions in water deliveries to specific states, beginning with the abrupt cutoff of nearly one-fifth of Arizona’s supply from the river, and modest cuts for Nevada and Mexico, with more negotiations and cuts to follow. But it also sounded an alarm: one of the country’s most important sources of fresh water is in peril, another victim of the accelerating climate crisis.
Americans are about to face all sorts of difficult choices about how and where to live as the climate continues to heat up. States will be forced to choose which coastlines to abandon as sea levels rise, which wildfire-prone suburbs to retreat from and which small towns cannot afford new infrastructure to protect against floods or heat. What to do in the parts of the country that are losing their essential supply of water may turn out to be the first among those choices.
The Colorado River’s enormous significance extends well beyond the American West. In addition to providing water for the people of seven states, 29 federally recognized tribes and northern Mexico, its water is used to grow everything from the carrots stacked on supermarket shelves in New Jersey to the beef in a hamburger served at a Massachusetts diner. The power generated by its two biggest dams — the Hoover and Glen Canyon — is marketed across an electricity grid that reaches from Arizona to Wyoming.
The formal declaration of the water crisis arrived days after the Census Bureau released numbers showing that, even as the drought worsened over recent decades, hundreds of thousands more people have moved to the regions that depend on the Colorado.
Phoenix expanded more over the past 10 years than any other large American city, while smaller urban areas across Arizona, Nevada, Utah and California each ranked among the fastest-growing places in the country. The river’s water supports roughly 15 million more people today than it did when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992. These statistics suggest that the climate crisis and explosive development in the West are on a collision course. And it raises the question: What happens next?
Since about 70% of water delivered from the Colorado River goes to growing crops, not to people in cities, the next step will likely be to demand large-scale reductions for farmers and ranchers across millions of acres of land, forcing wrenching choices about which crops to grow and for whom — an omen that many of America’s food-generating regions might ultimately have to shift someplace else as the climate warms.
California, so far shielded from major cuts, has already agreed to reductions that will take effect if the drought worsens. But it may be asked to do more. Its enormous share of the river, which it uses to irrigate crops across the Imperial Valley and for Los Angeles and other cities, will be in the crosshairs when negotiations over a diminished Colorado begin again. The Imperial Irrigation District there is the largest single water rights holder from the entire basin and has been especially resistant to compromise over the river. It did not sign the drought contingency plan laying out cuts that other big players on the Colorado system agreed to in 2019.
New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and Wyoming — states in the river’s Upper Basin — will most likely also face pressure to use less water. Should that happen, places like Utah that hoped to one day support faster development and economic growth with their share of the river may have to surrender their ambition.
The negotiations that led to the region being even minimally prepared for this latest shortage were agonizing, but they were merely a warm-up for the pain-inflicting cuts and sacrifices that almost certainly will be required if the water shortages persist over the coming decades. The region’s leaders, for all their efforts to compromise, have long avoided these more difficult conversations. One way or another, farms will have to surrender their water, and cities will have to live with less of it. Time has run out for other options.
Western states arrived at this crucible in large part because of their own doing. The original multistate compact that governs the use of the Colorado, which was signed in 1922, was exuberantly optimistic: The states agreed to divide up an estimated total amount of water that turned out to be much more than what would actually flow. Nevertheless, with the building of the Hoover Dam to collect and store river water, and the development of the Colorado’s plumbing system of canals and pipelines to deliver it, the West was able to open a savings account to fund its extraordinary economic growth. Over the years since, those states have overdrawn the river’s average deposits. It should be no surprise that even without the pressures of climate change, such a plan would lead to bankruptcy.
Making a bad situation worse, leaders in Western states have allowed wasteful practices to continue that add to the material threat facing the region. A majority of the water used by farms — and thus much of the river — goes to growing nonessential crops like alfalfa and other grasses that feed cattle for meat production. Much of those grasses are also exported to feed animals in the Middle East and Asia. Short of regulating which types of crops are allowed, which state authorities may not even have the authority to do, it may fall to consumers to drive change. Water usage data suggests that if Americans avoid meat one day each week they could save an amount of water equivalent to the entire flow of the Colorado each year, more than enough water to alleviate the region’s shortages.
Water is also being wasted because of flaws in the laws. The rights to take water from the river are generally distributed — like deeds to property — based on seniority. It is very difficult to take rights away from existing stakeholders, whether cities or individual ranchers, so long as they use the water allocated to them. That system creates a perverse incentive: Across the basin, ranchers often take their maximum allocation each year, even if just to spill it on the ground, for fear that, if they don’t, they could lose the right to take that water in the future. Changes in the laws that remove the threat of penalties for not exercising water rights, or that expand rewards for ranchers who conserve water, could be an easy remedy.
A breathtaking amount of the water from the Colorado — about 10% of the river’s recent total flow — simply evaporates off the sprawling surfaces of large reservoirs as they bake in the sun. Last year, evaporative losses from Lake Mead and Lake Powell alone added up to almost a million acre feet of water — or nearly twice what Arizona will be forced to give up now as a result of this month’s shortage declaration. These losses are increasing as the climate warms. Yet federal officials have so far discounted technological fixes — like covering the water surface to reduce the losses — and they continue to maintain both reservoirs, even though both of them are only around a third full. If the two were combined, some experts argue, much of those losses could be avoided.
For all the hard-won progress made at the negotiating table, it remains to be seen whether the stakeholders can tackle the looming challenges that come next. Over the years, Western states and tribes have agreed on voluntary cuts, which defused much of the political chaos that would otherwise have resulted from this month’s shortage declaration, but they remain disparate and self-interested parties hoping they can miraculously agree on a way to manage the river without truly changing their ways. For all their wishful thinking, climate science suggests there is no future in the region that does not include serious disruptions to its economy, growth trajectory and perhaps even quality of life.
The uncomfortable truth is that difficult and unpopular decisions are now unavoidable. Prohibiting some water uses as unacceptable — long eschewed as antithetical to personal freedoms and the rules of capitalism — is now what’s needed most.
The laws that determine who gets water in the West, and how much of it, are based on the principle of “beneficial use” — generally the idea that resources should further economic advancement. But whose economic advancement? Do we support the farmers in Arizona who grow alfalfa to feed cows in the United Arab Emirates? Or do we ensure the survival of the Colorado River, which supports some 8% of the nation’s GDP?
Earlier this month, the Bureau of Reclamation released lesser-noticed projections for water levels, and they are sobering. The figures include an estimate for what the bureau calls “minimum probable in flow” — or the low end of expectations. Water levels in Lake Mead could drop by another 40 vertical feet by the middle 2023, ultimately reaching just 1,026 feet above sea level — an elevation that further threatens Lake Mead’s hydroelectric power generation for about 1.3 million people in Arizona, California and Nevada. At 895 feet, the reservoir would become what’s called a “dead pool”; water would no longer be able to flow downstream.
The bureau’s projections mean we are close to uncharted territory. The current shortage agreement, negotiated between the states in 2007, only addresses shortages down to a lake elevation of 1,025 feet. After that, the rules become murky, and there is greater potential for fraught legal conflicts. Northern states in the region, for example, are likely to ask why the vast evaporation losses from Lake Mead, which stores water for the southern states, have never been counted as a part of the water those southern states use. Fantastical and expensive solutions that have previously been dismissed by the federal government — like the desalinization of seawater, towing icebergs from the Arctic or pumping water from the Mississippi River through a pipeline — are likely to be seriously considered. None of this, however, will be enough to solve the problem unless it’s accompanied by serious efforts to lower carbon dioxide emissions, which are ultimately responsible for driving changes to the climate.
Meanwhile, population growth in Arizona and elsewhere in the basin is likely to continue, at least for now, because short-term fixes so far have obscured the seriousness of the risks to the region. Water is still cheap, thanks to the federal subsidies for all those dams and canals that make it seem plentiful. The myth persists that technology can always outrun nature, that the American West holds endless possibility. It may be the region’s undoing. As the author Wallace Stegner once wrote: “One cannot be pessimistic about the West. This is the native home of hope.”
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