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More Californians have searched for news about “floods” in 2023 than “wildfires,” which seems in keeping with this summer’s series of out-of-left-field climate disasters. The worst smoke pollution hit … the East Coast. The deadliest wildfire in modern U.S. history leveled … a former wetland in Hawaii. Naturally a hurriquake in Los Angeles and catastrophic flooding in Palm Springs would come next?
But California’s reputation as the land of drought and fire has obscured the fact that extreme flooding is the other player in the state’s deadly climatological triumvirate. From the atmospheric rivers this winter, which caused some 500 mudslides and inflicted as much as $1 billion in damage, to Hurricane Hilary dumping record-breaking rains over the southwestern United States this weekend, floods are understandably top-of-mind (especially with a relatedly somewhat slow start to the state’s fire season).
Here’s what you need to know about the future of extreme floods in the Golden State:
Former Hurricane Hilary was the first tropical storm to make landfall in California in 84 years, easily snapping the practically nonexistent late August daily rainfall records around L.A. In fact, hurricanes making landfall in the lower lefthand corner of the U.S. is so rare that there isn’t actually much of a data record for scientists to use as a point of comparison, Inside Climate News reports — which makes forming future projections and establishing links to climate change actually rather difficult.
What we do know is this: California has largely avoided hurricanes in the past due to the generally cold waters off its coast, which NBC News describes as acting as a sort of “shield” for the state. Hurricanes get their strength and moisture by forming over warm waters, and the eastern Pacific has historically been as much as 9 degrees cooler than the same latitude in the Gulf of Mexico.
But California’s shield has a crack. July was the hottest recorded month on planet Earth and the waters Hilary passed over on its journey north were 4 degrees warmer than usual, the Los Angeles Times explains. Sure enough, research shows that hurricane landfalls in the eastern Pacific could increase dramatically along with global and oceanic warming — bringing more rain and floods along with them.
There are certain conditions that made Hilary particularly unusual, however: A heat dome that formed over the central United States, for example, helped tug the storm directly over California, as opposed to a more typical path of a hurricane or tropical storm being pushed out to sea by easterly winds off the continent. So while hurricanes might be more intense and wet in the future, they won’t necessarily continue to make it over to California the way Hilary has.
Yes, to some extent. In addition to greenhouse gas emissions making the oceans warmer, the weather pattern called El Niño is likely responsible for some of the warming of the waters off of Baja California, which intensified Hurricane Hilary. But again, there were also unique conditions that contributed to Hilary’s unusual path over the southwestern United States, including the prevailing wind patterns. Strong El Niño years, as a result, don’t necessarily mean more hurricanes for Southern California.
El Niños have tended to bring higher winter rainfalls to Southern California, though that is also not necessarily a guarantee. NOAA’s outlook for the coming winter doesn’t currently show above-average precipitation expected for the state. Some El Niño years are actually drier than average, which goes to show that “El Niño is just one hand on the atmospheric steering wheel,” Weather Underground writes.
California isn’t a land of droughts or floods — it’s a land of both. A better way to think about the future of weather in the state is as one of extremes.
That’s because, “[i]n a seeming paradox, drought and flooding are two sides of one coin,” Governing explains. “A warmer atmosphere can hold more water, and higher temperatures cause more water on the Earth’s surface to evaporate. This can result in bigger rainstorms.”
The good news is, most of California is now free of drought conditions and this year’s fire season has been quieter because of all the wet vegetation. But while Tropical Storm Hilary apparently only inflicted minor damage and no known deaths this weekend, floods have been a devastating fixture of life in the Golden State before and they will be again.
As Yale Climate Solutions warned earlier this year, “Given the increased risk [due to climate change], it is more likely than not that many of you reading this will see a California megaflood costing tens of billions in your lifetime.”
California doesn’t need 40 days and nights of rain to experience its worst-case flood event, researchers have found. If a 30-day rainstorm similar to one that hit the then-unpopulous state in 1862 were to strike again today, it could potentially be a $1 trillion disaster — “larger than any in world history” — UCLA’s “ARkStorm 2.0” scenario modeling found last year.
“Every major population center in California would get hit at once — probably parts of Nevada and other adjacent states, too,” Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist and co-author of the paper, said in a statement at the time.
Unlike a tropical storm, which passes in a number of days, the ARkStorm flood event would last a month in the form of sequential atmospheric rivers, like the kind that battered the state this past winter. The link between climate change and heavy precipitation is well understood, and the researchers found that “climate change has already doubled the likelihood of such an extreme storm scenario,” with “further large increases in ‘megastorm’ risk … likely with each additional degree of global warming this century.”
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And more on the week’s most important conflicts around renewable energy projects.
1. Lawrence County, Alabama – We now have a rare case of a large solar farm getting federal approval.
2. Virginia Beach, Virginia – It’s time to follow up on the Coastal Virginia offshore wind project.
3. Fairfield County, Ohio – The red shirts are beating the greens out in Ohio, and it isn’t looking pretty.
4. Allen County, Indiana – Sometimes a setback can really set someone back.
5. Adams County, Illinois – Hope you like boomerangs because this county has approved a solar project it previously denied.
6. Solano County, California – Yet another battery storage fight is breaking out in California. This time, it’s north of San Francisco.
A conversation with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute.
This week’s conversation is with Elizabeth McCarthy of the Breakthrough Institute. Elizabeth was one of several researchers involved in a comprehensive review of a decade of energy project litigation – between 2013 and 2022 – under the National Environment Policy Act. Notably, the review – which Breakthrough released a few weeks ago – found that a lot of energy projects get tied up in NEPA litigation. While she and her colleagues ultimately found fossil fuels are more vulnerable to this problem than renewables, the entire sector has a common enemy: difficulty of developing on federal lands because of NEPA. So I called her up this week to chat about what this research found.
The following conversation was lightly edited for clarity.
So why are you so fixated on NEPA?
Personally and institutionally, [Breakthrough is] curious about all regulatory policy – land use, environmental regulatory policy – and we see NEPA as the thing that connects them all. If we understand how that’s functioning at a high level, we can start to pull at the strings of other players. So, we wanted to understand the barrier that touches the most projects.
What aspects of zero-carbon energy generation are most affected by NEPA?
Anything with a federal nexus that doesn’t include tax credits. Solar and wind that is on federal land is subject to a NEPA review, and anything that is linear infrastructure – transmission often has to go through multiple NEPA reviews. We don’t see a ton of transmission being litigated over on our end, but we think that is a sign NEPA is such a known obstacle that no one even wants to touch a transmission line that’ll go through 14 years of review, so there’s this unknown graveyard of transmission that wasn’t even planned.
In your report, you noted there was a relatively small number of zero-carbon energy projects in your database of NEPA cases. Is solar and wind just being developed more frequently on private land, so there’s less of these sorts of conflicts?
Precisely. The states that are the most powered by wind or create the most wind energy are Texas and Iowa, and those are bypassing the national federal environmental review process [with private land], in addition to not having their own state requirements, so it’s easier to build projects.
What would you tell a solar or wind developer about your research?
This is confirming a lot of things they may have already instinctually known or believed to be true, which is that NEPA and filling out an environmental impact statement takes a really long time and is likely to be litigated over. If you’re a developer who can’t avoid putting your energy project on federal land, you may just want to avoid moving forward with it – the cost may outweigh whatever revenue you could get from that project because you can’t know how much money you’ll have to pour into it.
Huh. Sounds like everything is working well. I do think your work identifies a clear risk in developing on federal lands, which is baked into the marketplace now given the pause on permits for renewables on federal lands.
Yeah. And if you think about where the best places would be to put these technologies? It is on federal lands. The West is way more federal land than anywhere else in the county. Nevada is a great place to put solar — there’s a lot of sun. But we’re not going to put anything there if we can’t put anything there.
What’s the remedy?
We propose a set of policy suggestions. We think the judicial review process could be sped along or not be as burdensome. Our research most obviously points to shortening the statute of limitations under the Administrative Procedures Act from six years to six months, because a great deal of the projects we reviewed made it in that time, so you’d see more cases in good faith as opposed to someone waiting six years waiting to challenge it.
We also think engaging stakeholders much earlier in the process would help.
The Bureau of Land Management says it will be heavily scrutinizing transmission lines if they are expressly necessary to bring solar or wind energy to the power grid.
Since the beginning of July, I’ve been reporting out how the Trump administration has all but halted progress for solar and wind projects on federal lands through a series of orders issued by the Interior Department. But last week, I explained it was unclear whether transmission lines that connect to renewable energy projects would be subject to the permitting freeze. I also identified a major transmission line in Nevada – the north branch of NV Energy’s Greenlink project – as a crucial test case for the future of transmission siting in federal rights-of-way under Trump. Greenlink would cross a litany of federal solar leases and has been promoted as “essential to helping Nevada achieve its de-carbonization goals and increased renewable portfolio standard.”
Well, BLM has now told me Greenlink North will still proceed despite a delay made public shortly after permitting was frozen for renewables, and that the agency still expects to publish the record of decision for the line in September.
This is possible because, as BLM told me, transmission projects that bring solar and wind power to the grid will be subject to heightened scrutiny. In an exclusive statement, BLM press secretary Brian Hires told me via e-mail that a secretarial order choking out solar and wind permitting on federal lands will require “enhanced environmental review for transmission lines only when they are a part of, and necessary for, a wind or solar energy project.”
However, if a transmission project is not expressly tied to wind or solar or is not required for those projects to be constructed… apparently, then it can still get a federal green light. For instance in the case of Greenlink, the project itself is not explicitly tied to any single project, but is kind of like a transmission highway alongside many potential future solar projects. So a power line can get approved if it could one day connect to wind or solar, but the line’s purpose cannot solely be for a wind or solar project.
This is different than, say, lines tied explicitly to connecting a wind or solar project to an existing transmission network. Known as gen-tie lines, these will definitely face hardships with this federal government. This explains why, for example, BLM has yet to approve a gen-tie line for a wind project in Wyoming that would connect the Lucky Star wind project to the grid.
At the same time, it appears projects may be given a wider berth if a line has other reasons for existing, like improving resilience on the existing grid, or can be flexibly used by not just renewables but also fossil energy.
So, the lesson to me is that if you’re trying to build transmission infrastructure across federal property under this administration, you might want to be a little more … vague.