Energy & Environment — Water crisis raises environmental racism concerns

Advocates are linking the water crisis in Jackson, Miss., to environmental racism. Meanwhile, California is facing electric grid issues amid extreme heat, and a judge sided with the Biden administration over a challenge to oil lease sale postponements in Wyoming.

This is Overnight Energy & Environment, your source for the latest news focused on energy, the environment and beyond. For The Hill, we’re Rachel Frazin and Zack Budryk. Someone forward you this newsletter? Subscribe here. 

Advocates see justice issue in Jackson water crisis

As tens of thousands of residents of Jackson, Miss., were without clean water, some advocates say the situation stems from years of environmental racism. 

More than 80 percent of Jackson residents are Black, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Last week, those residents saw their main water treatment facility fail in the wake of flooding, leaving them without clean water for drinking, bathing or cooking. 

“While the recent flooding has been a contributor to where we are today, this is not the first time this issue has come about, where the city of Jackson is without water and unable to function,” Vangela Wade, president and CEO of the Mississippi Center for Justice, told The Hill. “Over the last 50 years, you could say that this has been brewing because of the lack of investment in the city’s infrastructure by primarily state leadership.” 

The latest water issues come after the last two years saw the city’s water system fail an Environmental Protection Agency inspection — which found the drinking water had the potential to host harmful bacteria or parasites — and the bursting and freezing of pipes during a winter storm last year left residents without water for nearly a month. 

But advocates say the crisis has been decades in the making. Jackson first became a majority-Black city in the years following integration. The white population fell from
52 percent to 43 percent through the 1980s, with another 35,000 leaving the city over the course of the 1990s, according to The Jackson Free Press. 

• This population loss has reduced the city’s tax base and left it with far less money for basic resources. 
  
• While the city tried to fight the new loss of water by handing out free bottled water to residents, they quickly ran out. Now, some of that responsibility has fallen to local community organizations.  

For years, the anti-violence prevention program Operation Good has been delivering water to residents across the city. Gino, who is the founder of the organization and asked not to have his last name published, said his group began handing out water back in 2015. 

“This is nothing new for us,” said Gino, adding that the group prioritizes taking care of the elderly and disabled first, following up with children and those living in poverty. More recently, he added, they’ve been bringing water pallets to different schools that contacted Operation Good in desperate need of providing for their students. 

Difference in circumstances: Gino said he doesn’t normally use terms like “environmental racism” but added he knows “surrounding cities that are majority white that don’t have infrastructure problems like Jackson.” 

• “Jackson’s infrastructure problems are horrendous,” he said. “For us to be the capital city of the state of Mississippi, it does not receive the attention, financing and things of that nature that it should.”  
  
• Gino said children in the city are exposed to raw sewage so often, they’ve become immune to it: it’s in their bathing water, it’s in their cooking water, it’s in their drinking water. And through it all, residents have still received water bills. 
  
• “It always felt like it was a ‘Jackson problem,’ not a Mississippi problem,” Gino said. “It was a Black-people problem, not a majority-of-the-state problem.” 

Read more about the issue here, from Zack and The Hill’s Cheyanne M. Daniels. 

Heat strains California’s power grid  

A record heat wave is pushing California’s electric grid up against the point of failure this week, with officials pointing to climate change for putting continued stress on the system. 

The state issued an emergency alert for a seventh consecutive day on Tuesday, urging customers to conserve energy between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. 

“We have now entered the most intense phase of this heat wave,” Elliot Mainzer, chief executive officer of California’s principal electric grid, California ISO, said in a briefing on Monday.  

• As temperatures in the state capital of Sacramento head toward 114 degrees, California ISO said Tuesday that demand could hit an all-time record of
  51,000 megawatts by 5:30 p.m., as solar capacity begins to taper off with sunset while temperatures — and power demand for air conditioner use — remain high. 
  
• Officials said the grid was expected to be as much as 4,000 megawatts short of demand by late afternoon on Monday. 

To make matters worse, the older natural gas plants that provide additional power when demand is at its highest are less reliable in extreme heat, The Associated Press reported. 

“We are on razor thin margins,” Siva Gunda, vice chairman of the California Energy Commission, told the Sacramento Bee. 

California is attempting to meet demand by spinning up emergency natural gas generators — enough to power 120,000 homes. 

But those plants will provide just 120 megawatts — about 3 percent of the potential shortfall. That has the state calling on business and industry to cut power usage while asking households to raise thermostats and turn off large appliances in the evening. 

Citizen attempts to cut electricity usage over the weekend helped cut power by
1,000 megawatts — enough to supply 750,000 households, Mainzer said. 

• “Your efforts have been making a real difference,” he said. 
  
• But with temperatures set to keep rising throughout the week, if consumers can’t close the gap by cutting demand, then “blackouts, rolling, rotating outages are a possibility,” Mainzer added. 

In a rolling blackout, grid officials deal with power shortfalls by cycling outages among users. In California in August 2020, that meant outages ranging from 15 minutes to more than two hours. 

Read more here from The Hill’s Saul Elbein. 

WATCHDOG DETAILS ‘URGENT’ NEED TO PREVENT NUCLEAR ACCIDENT 

A global nuclear watchdog said Tuesday that there is an “urgent” need for interim measures to prevent a nuclear accident related to shelling near Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia power plant.  

The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in a report released on Tuesday, specifically called for an end to gunfire near the power plant and the establishment of a protection zone around it.  

• “Pending the end of the conflict and re-establishment of stable conditions there is an urgent need for interim measures to prevent a nuclear accident arising from physical damage caused by military means,” the IAEA report said.  
  
• “This can be achieved by the immediate establishment of a nuclear safety and security protection zone,” the agency continued.  

The IAEA noted in the report that some damage had already been caused to parts of the plant, and that ongoing shelling could have worse consequences, including the “unlimited release of radioactive materials to the environment.” 

The risk: Exposure to very high levels of radiation can cause skin burns, nausea, vomiting and sometimes death in the short term. In the long term, it can cause cancer and cardiovascular disease.  

Read more about the warning here.  

Judge sides with Biden in oil lease pause ruling 

A federal judge sided with the Biden administration in a case related to its oil and gas leasing pause in Wyoming. 

However, because of another case, the government still appears to be barred from continuing its leasing pause in several other states. 

At the start of his tenure, President Biden temporarily paused new oil and gas leasing on federal lands and waters. This pause prevented new rights to drill for the fuels on federal lands from being auctioned off.  

The ruling: U.S. District Judge Scott Skavdahl, an Obama appointee, ruled Friday that the Biden administration was within its rights to postpone lease sales in Wyoming during the first quarter of 2021.  

• He wrote that there was “substantial evidence” to support the Interior Department’s move to put off lease sales that had been slated for March 2021 over concerns about the adequacy of their underlying environmental reviews.  
  
• Wyoming filed its suit after the March lease sales were postponed, but before other postponements. Skavdahl also ruled that Wyoming did not have the right to challenge any postponements that occurred after its suit was filed.  

However: In most states, the Biden administration still appears to be barred from pausing new oil and gas leasing.  

Last month, Trump appointee District Judge Terry Doughty ruled in favor of 13 states that had challenged the oil and gas leasing pause.  

 He determined that the law requires the government to sell oil and gas leases, and therefore, the Biden administration must auction more acres for drilling. 

Read the story here.  

‘DOOMSDAY GLACIER’ HANGING ON ‘BY ITS FINGERNAILS’ 

A glacier that could cause a multi-foot sea level increase if it melted is disappearing at about twice the previously observed rate, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience.  

Although the findings indicate the rate of retreat has slowed in recent years, researchers also saw indications that past a certain point the recession could begin increasing rapidly again.   

• “Thwaites is really holding on today by its fingernails, and we should expect to see big changes over small timescales in the future — even from one year to the next — once the glacier retreats beyond a shallow ridge in its bed,” co-author Robert Larter of the British Antarctic Survey said in a statement.   
  
• “Just a small kick to Thwaites could lead to a big response,” added Graham.  

Researchers, led by Alistair Graham of the University of South Florida, analyzed historical data on the retreat of the Thwaites Glacier, which is about the size of Florida and considered among the most vulnerable parts of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. They found that during a five-month period in the previous two centuries, the glacier receded at an annual rate of about 1.3 miles — twice the rate observed over the 2010s.  

Another day on the doomsday beat: The Thwaites Glacier is also known as the “Doomsday Glacier” for the sea level rise its melt could cause — just over two feet. It is at particular risk due to its position on the ocean floor rather than land, making it vulnerable to warming ocean currents. 

Read more about the issue here.  

WHAT WE’RE READING

• As water levels drop in California’s Lake Isabella, a Wild West ghost town re-emerges (SFGate) 
• Russian Gas Cut-Off Scuppers German Plan to Bolster Reserves (Bloomberg) 
  GAO: Trump team bogged down sensitive Interior grants(E&E News) 
• Democrats push White House to strengthen environmental justice efforts (The Washington Post) 
• OPEC agrees to cut production after oil price slump (CNN) 
  

ICYMI

• Arizona Democrat says California ‘failing to do its part’ on Colorado River crisis 
• Mississippi Gov. on Jackson water crisis: ‘Privatization is on the table’ 
• Tim Ryan backing Manchin plan for expediting energy permits 

🌽 Lighter click: It’s corn!

That’s it for today, thanks for reading. Check out The Hill’s Energy & Environment page for the latest news and coverage. We’ll see you tomorrow.  

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