Boiling Point: Repowering the West, Part 5!

In January 2020, I sat down with my editors at the L.A. Times office and pitched them on a series of stories that would eventually become Repowering the West. I would hopscotch the region’s most glorious and scarred landscapes, exploring power-line routes and solar-farm construction sites and huge hydropower dams and trying to figure out how we could put together the pieces of a climate-friendly electric grid without causing more environmental damage than necessary.

Four years later, a lot has changed.

The pandemic delayed our first road trip by two years. I work from home now, meaning I no longer waste time or energy driving to the office every day. As a result of layoffs and retirements and general turmoil in the media industry, a bunch of the wonderful colleagues with whom I started Repowering the West are no longer employed by the Los Angeles Times.

But I’m still here. The L.A. Times continues to invest in robust climate journalism.

And today we’re publishing Part 5 of Repowering the West.

It’s all about Colstrip, a small Montana town whose economy is almost entirely dependent on a coal mine and power plant that’s been shipping electricity to the Portland and Seattle areas for decades. The lessons are relevant for Los Angeles and other major cities that continue to depend on faraway coal generators, and that won’t be able to tackle the climate crisis — whether they like it or not — without support from politically powerful rural towns that are determined to keep burning fossil fuels.

That’s an extremely simplified summary of a story that took me six months to report and write, so I hope you’ll read the whole thing and then let me know what you think, rather than rushing to judgment and sending me a hot-take email.

And I hope you’ll consider paying $98 a year for a digital subscription to The Times, to help support our incredible environmental journalism. It’s not just me — we’ve got more than a dozen other reporters on our environment, health and science team:

• Tony Briscoe (air quality and environmental health)
• Rosanna Xia (California coast)
• Hayley Smith (climate change in California)
• Susanne Rust (climate investigations)
• Russ Mitchell (electric vehicles and energy storage)
• Tyrone Beason (environmental justice)
• Melody Petersen (environmental policy and accountability)
• Karen Kaplan (health and science)
• Corinne Purtill (health and science)
• Emily Alpert Reyes (healthcare policy)
• Ian James (water)
• Alex Wigglesworth (wildfires)
• Lila Seidman (wildlife, state/national parks, urban ecology)

If $98 per year isn’t feasible for you financially — totally get it. The Boiling Point newsletter is free.

But if you find yourself making some other excuse — say, you don’t want to send money to a news outlet whose wealthy owner recently laid off staff? Or you appreciate our climate reporting but find some other area of our coverage biased or unfair?

Well, the best way to get a journalist’s attention is to start by telling them you pay for their work. So if there’s some area of our coverage you think we could improve, buy a digital subscription and then tell us how you think we could do better.

And look: If I were in charge of The Times — I’m glad I’m not — I’d probably do some things differently. But ultimately, we need more people to compensate us for our work, or we won’t be able to keep doing it. There can’t be democracy without journalism, and there can’t be journalism without journalists making a living. So please, support us. Help us keep making a living.

Still not convinced? Then I’ll ask you again to check out Repowering the West, Part 5. In addition to my reporting, you’ll get to see amazing photos by my colleague Robert Gauthier, including this one of the coal-fired Colstrip power plant at night:

The Colstrip coal plant lights up the night, generating power mostly for Oregon and Washington.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

On that note, here’s what’s happening around the West:

TOP STORIES

Planet Earth has recorded 10 straight months of record global temperatures, with March 2024 beating March 2016 for the hottest March ever measured. If that’s not an emergency, I don’t know what is. Scary details here from my L.A. Times colleague Hayley Smith. And no surprises, but the continued temperature records track with new data showing that heat-trapping carbon dioxide and methane gases have reached record high levels in the atmosphere, as the Guardian’s Oliver Milman reports. And in a reminder that those gases can be dangerous in other ways, The Times’ Tony Briscoe reports that explosive levels of methane may be leaking from a former landfill, since converted to a public park, near the San Francisco Bay Area’s Berkeley Marina.

Since we started this week’s news roundup with despair, let’s switch to some good news. My colleague Russ Mitchell has a wonderful story about two entrepreneurs whose Los Angeles startup is training an often-overlooked workforce to repair electric car chargers — a key piece of solving the climate puzzle. Canary Media’s Maria Gallucci, meanwhile, wrote about America’s first all-electric tugboat, which is about to launch at the Port of San Diego and could help replace hugely polluting diesel tugboats. Up in Northern California, one of the West’s largest cement plants just added technology that captures a small portion of the plant’s carbon emissions and uses them to make additional cement, the Associated Press’ Isabella O’Malley writes. It’s a good start.

There’s so much snow in the Eastern Sierra that Los Angeles should be able to get 70% of its water from the Owens Valley aqueduct this year. But with “climate whiplash” driving increasingly intense swings between drought and flood, it’s crucial for the city to keep investing in local stormwater capture and water recycling to supplement faraway water sources, as The Times’ Hayley Smith reports. Using less water is also crucial, but we should keep in mind that doing so means water agencies have less money to spend on badly needed infrastructure upgrades — hence the higher water rates just approved by Southern California officials, as reported on by my colleague Ian James. In other water news, Golden State regulators are on the verge of putting farmers in part of the San Joaquin Valley on “probation” under a landmark groundwater law, which could allow officials to require them to report how much groundwater they draw and pay pumping fees. Details here from the San Francisco Chronicle’s Kurtis Alexander.

POLITICAL CLIMATE

Rooftop solar panels are installed on a house in Brea in June.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The California Supreme Court says it will hear an appeal from three environmental groups seeking to overturn a decision by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s appointees to slash incentives for rooftop solar. I wrote last year about the confounding arguments made by the California Public Utilities Commission to defend their decision to appellate court judges who ultimately ruled in their favor. The incentive cut has infuriated several state lawmakers, who have introduced bills that could restore the state’s shrinking rooftop solar market, as Jeff St. John chronicles for Canary Media. Things are going better for large solar and wind farms, with the Biden administration surpassing a congressional mandate to issue permits for 25 gigawatts of renewable energy on public lands by 2025, Reuters’ Nichola Groom reports. The question is how many of those solar and wind farms will actually get built.

Three big oil companies are challenging the federal government’s power to force them to remove oil platforms they once owned off the coast of California, in a case that could end up forcing taxpayers to foot the bill for cleaning up abandoned fossil fuel infrastructure, should the oil companies succeed. Here’s the in-depth story from E&E News’ Heather Richards. In a related story, the Biden administration is raising rates for companies to extract oil, gas and coal from public lands, and requiring those firms to set aside more money for cleanup before they start drilling or mining, per Nick Bowlin at High Country News.

President Biden plans to expand the boundaries of two California national monuments: San Gabriel Mountains National Monument near L.A. and Berryessa Snow Mountain National Monument up north. So reports the Washington Post’s Maxine Joselow, citing unnamed sources. How might former President Trump treat America’s public lands should he win a second term in November? The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 offers a detailed breakdown, drafted in part by a leading oil and gas industry lobbyist. Thanks much to HuffPost’s Chris D’Angelo for reading and analyzing the document.

WATER AND WILDLIFE

Commercial fishermen George Jue, left, and Dan St. Clair work at Pillar Point Harbor in Half Moon Bay. This year’s salmon fishing season, which typically starts in May, has been canceled for a second straight year.

(Loren Elliott / Los Angeles Times)

Salmon fishing is being canceled along the California coast for the second year running, as climate-fueled drought and over-pumping of river water to supply farms and cities send fish populations crashing. “A lot of people have already been hurting because of last year’s shutdown,” Scott Artis, executive director of Golden State Salmon Assn., told The Times’ Ian James. “And this is just going to be one more devastating blow.” In better marine life news, my colleague Lila Seidman has an adorable story about a new sea otter surrogacy program at the Aquarium of the Pacific, which is raising creatures so important to healthy coastal waters that they’re known as “climate warriors.” Also awesome: A century after humans hunted sandhill cranes nearly to extinction in California, they’re making an unexpected comeback at Lake Tahoe, LAist’s Payton Seda reports.

The Biden administration has set the first-ever limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water. The toxic compounds have been linked to cancer and other illnesses, as The Times’ Melody Petersen explains in her story. In other water pollution news, the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Tammy Murga reports that federal officials are facing another lawsuit over sewage spills in San Diego County, where the U.S.-Mexico border meets the sea. Farther up the coast, meanwhile, some residents wonder whether SpaceX rocket launches are causing environmental problems — and whether the California Coastal Commission can limit the number of launches, even when they’re taking place on a military base. The Times’ Salvador Hernandez explored those questions.

Several environmental groups are suing the Biden administration over its decision not to protect gray wolves under the Endangered Species Act, saying the creatures are especially at risk in Idaho and Montana, where Republican lawmakers have made it easier to kill them. Here’s the story from Kurt Repanshek at National Parks Traveler, who writes that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, a federal agency, “opted not to list the gray wolf in the West under the [Endangered Species Act], saying the predators didn’t need the protection and it would be better to develop a national recovery plan.”

AROUND THE WEST

State Farm’s decision to cancel 72,000 home insurance policies as California’s climate-driven wildfire crisis escalates will hit especially hard on L.A.’s Westside. The Times’ Ruben Vives tallied up which ZIP Codes will see the most lost policies, among them Bel-Air, Pacific Palisades and Woodland Hills. In other wildfire news, Pacific Gas & Electric is facing another lawsuit over the 2021 Dixie fire, this one from timber companies seeking $225 million in damages, my colleague Hannah Wiley reports. And in a reminder that some climate damages are difficult to measure in dollars, a new study focused on California found a link between fires and mental health concerns. Specifically, researchers found an increase in prescriptions to treat depression and anxiety or stabilize mood in the six weeks following blazes, as Taylor Blatchford writes for the Seattle Times.

For environmental injustice at its finest, look to the Los Angeles County city of Santa Fe Springs, where state officials are poised to renew a permit for a hazardous waste treatment facility near a largely Latino neighborhood despite a history of alleged violations. “You’ll see a pattern of violating the law, paying a penalty, and then violating the law again,” a lawyer for the nonprofit law firm Earthjustice told my colleague Emily Alpert Reyes. In California’s Monterey County, meanwhile, local and state officials are facing a lawsuit from a teachers union and environmentalists who don’t think strawberry farmers should be allowed to spray toxic pesticides near mostly Latino schools. Details here from The Times’ Hailey Branson-Potts.

Layoffs are coming at Tesla amid slowing demand for electric cars. With Elon Musk’s company planning to lay off more than 10% of its workforce, 14,000 people could lose their jobs, my colleague Andrea Chang reports. That sucks. As we wait for electric engines to overtake oil — and for public transit to take market share away from personal vehicles — let’s not forget that living near a freeway is extremely unhealthy, because of the fumes spewed by cars and trucks. (Same with living near refineries, ports and power plants.) For those of us lucky enough to have a choice in where we live, check out this video by Yadira Flores, Jessica Q. Chen and Maggie Beidelman, in which L.A. Times air quality reporter Tony Briscoe explains how he decided where to live in L.A.

ONE MORE THING

(Patrick Hruby)

One last plug: If you live in the Los Angeles area or will be in town this weekend, please join us at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, an annual event on the USC campus. I’ll be hosting a panel discussion Saturday at 3:30 p.m., featuring an all-star lineup of authors who have written climate change books, including my Times colleague Rosanna Xia, whose book on sea level rise — “California Against the Sea” — I discussed with her for an edition of Boiling Point last year.

You can find the full schedule and get tickets here. I’m doing an “ask a reporter” Q&A session with Rosanna and The Times’ Russ Mitchell, who writes about electric vehicles, on Saturday at 11:45 a.m. Please come say hi and ask us questions!

Also, thanks very much to everyone who came to last week’s “Temperature Check” climate event hosted by The Times, KCRW and the USC Annenberg Center for Climate Journalism and Communication, headlined by actor and activist Jane Fonda. Jillian Gorman had a great writeup for USC’s student newspaper, the Daily Trojan.

This column is the latest edition of Boiling Point, an email newsletter about climate change and the environment in California and the American West. You can sign up for Boiling Point here. And for more climate and environment news, follow @Sammy_Roth on X.