San Benito County Local News: Environment

12/21/2023
The California Department of Water Resources has approved building a tunnel between the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The approval could signal a new wave of legal challenges to the long-running and controversial project.

12/21/2023
The Hoopa Valley Tribe announced it is acquiring about 10,000 acres of land in Northern California for $14.1 million. As part of this, the tribe will remove dams along the Klamath River and restore salmon runs.

12/19/2023
Farmland is being rezoned for industrial use, and massive warehouses are being built on spec near communities like Buttonwillow and Shafter, so goods coming through the Southern California ports can be shipped quickly throughout the western United States.

12/19/2023
The San Benito County Planning Commission voted to recommend to the Board of Supervisors that it delete four New Community Study Areas from the 2035 General Plan after Senior Planner Kelley recommended removing those areas from consideration for future developments.

12/17/2023
Salmon populations in the Scott and Shasta rivers have crashed, so state officials are about to restrict irrigation again. And the controversial rules may even become permanent.

12/15/2023
Seasonal counts are showing there are, as expected, fewer butterflies overwintering in Pacific Grove than last year, but not the record lows of 2018-20.

12/12/2023
Officials in Kern County are proposing to build a carbon management facility that would be twice the size of Manhattan. By doing this, they would leverage federal tax credits to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

12/11/2023
An estimated 100,000 pizza boxes have been removed from Yosemite’s waste stream. This is because the famed park now serves pizza on trays and puts to-go portions in compostable bags, part of a move to reduce food-related waste.

12/11/2023
Judson Jones, a meteorologist and reporter for The New York Times, gave a Q&A about California’s year of intense weather. This included the state’s largest snowpack in 40 years and a “pretty astonishing” amount of precipitation.

12/11/2023
Birds are affected by the mass use of fireworks on New Year’s Eve up to a distance of 10 km away, reports an international team of researchers.

12/08/2023
The California Department of Water Resources released an environmental impact report for a tunnel that the state would like to build through the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The report identifies potential impacts to farmland, tribal remains and endangered species of fish.

12/08/2023
A Cal Poly Humboldt professor is partnering with USDA researchers to study biochar, which results from heating dry plant-based materials at high temperatures without oxygen. The CO2 in the charcoal then stays in the soil for hundreds of years, rather than in the atmosphere.

12/07/2023
Conservationists intend to shoot all of the deer on Santa Catalina Island by helicopter. Some people are opposed, either for not wanting to eliminate the deer or for missing out on future chances to hunt them.

12/06/2023
Staff at the state’s air regulatory agency have been restricted from communicating with Jim Duffy, a scientist who retired from the agency in 2022. Duffy had criticized gas lobbyists and an agency director.

12/06/2023
California energy regulators are considering requiring homeowners to replace broken air-conditioning systems with heat pumps or HVAC systems that are more energy efficient. The change would go into effect in 2026.

12/05/2023
Private company Brightline secured a $3 billion grant through the U.S. Department of Transportation toward a 218-mile high-speed rail line from Rancho Cucamonga to Las Vegas. The line would allow people to make the trip to Sin City in a little over two hours.

12/04/2023
A new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has found that approximately 3,400 kilotons of lithium are located below Imperial County in Southern California. This could produce more than $7 billion in lithium carbonate annually, helping power significant numbers of electric vehicles.