California
How California’s Salton Sea went from vacation destination to toxic nightmare
This story is a part of the Grist sequence Parched, an in-depth have a look at how local weather change-fueled drought is reshaping communities, economies, and ecosystems.
Within the spring of 1905, the Colorado River, bursting with seasonal rain, topped an irrigation canal and flooded the location of a dried lake mattress in Southern California. The flooding, which continued for 2 years earlier than engineers sealed up the busted channel, created an sudden gem in the midst of the arid California panorama: the Salton Sea. Within the many years that adopted, vacationers, water skiers, and pace boat fanatics flocked to the physique of water. The Seaside Boys and the Marx Brothers docked their boats on the North Shore Seaside and Yacht Membership, which opened in 1959. On the time, it appeared just like the Salton Sea, and the colourful communities that had sprung up round it, can be there for hundreds of years to come back.
However the sea’s heyday was short-lived. Minimize off from the life supply that created it — the Colorado River — and sustained primarily by restricted agricultural runoff from close by farms, the landlocked waterbody started to evaporate. The water that remained turned more and more salty and poisonous. Tourism dried up. The scent of rotten eggs, from excessive ranges of hydrogen sulfide within the sea, stuffed the air. Fish died in droves from lack of oxygen, their bones washing up on the seashore like sand.
AP Picture / Gregory Bull
By the Eighties, the wealthy, white vacationers had fled. Immediately, the group is made up of predominantly Latino agricultural staff who labor in close by fields in Imperial County, among the many poorest counties in California, and Indigenous tribes which have referred to as the area residence for millennia. They undergo from a novel cocktail of well being threats that stem from the Salton Sea.
The waterbody is fed by about 50 agricultural channels, carrying restricted quantities of water infused with pesticides, nitrogen, fertilizers, and different agricultural byproducts. In consequence, the briny lake’s sediment is laced with toxins like lead, chromium, and DDT. Local weather change and the extended megadrought gripping the western United States are solely compounding these issues. The Salton Sea is projected to lose three quarters of its quantity by the top of this decade; declining water ranges may expose an extra 100,000 acres of lake backside. The ocean’s floor has already shrunk roughly 38 sq. miles since 2003.
As the ocean dries and extra shoreline is uncovered, the sturdy winds that plague this a part of California kick up chemical-laced mud and blow it into close by communities, the place roughly 650,000 individuals reside. Residents complain of complications, nosebleeds, bronchial asthma, and different well being issues.
“It’s an enormous environmental justice subject,” Jenny Binstock, a senior marketing campaign consultant on the Sierra Membership, instructed Grist. “It results in elevated bronchial asthma assaults, bronchitis, lung illness.” Hospitalization charges for kids with bronchial asthma in services close to the ocean are practically double the state common.
Past mud, Ryan Sinclair, an environmental microbiologist on the Loma Linda College Faculty of Public Well being in California, is anxious about bioaerosols — tiny airborne particles that come from vegetation and animals — that may develop from algae or micro organism within the sea’s shallow, tepid waters.
David McNew / Getty Pictures
“Algae produce algal toxins and micro organism can produce endotoxins,” he stated, “and each of these can aerosolize and blow into close by communities.” When researchers uncovered mice to aerosolized Salton Sea water, the mice developed a “distinctive kind of bronchial asthma,” Sinclair famous. He’s at present working with communities across the Salton Sea to measure and doc ranges of vitamins and algae within the water, one thing that’s not at present being accomplished by state or federal businesses. “One thing must be accomplished about this,” he stated.
However options are restricted. The mud that will get kicked up might be suppressed, to some extent, with habitat restoration initiatives. The primary-ever large-scale restoration venture for the Salton Sea, a community of ponds on 30,000 acres of lake mattress, is proposed to start out this 12 months. However the venture isn’t any substitute for the apparent: The ocean is quickly shrinking and it wants a contemporary infusion of water to outlive. “An ideal answer for the Salton Sea — in a world the place now we have an abundance of water and extra dependable hydrological cycles — is we’d simply fill that factor again up,” Binstock, from the Sierra Membership, stated.
However there’s no water available. One proposal is to ship saltwater in from Mexico’s Sea of Cortez, 125 miles south, however Binstock isn’t so positive the positives of that plan outweigh the negatives. “The large investments in exhausting infrastructure, the disturbance of playa, and the general public well being and environmental impacts, the prices are simply … it’s fairly bananas to consider,” she stated.
Final week, an unbiased assessment panel appointed by the state to evaluate viable, long-term mud suppression choices for the Salton Sea suggested towards importing water from the Sea of Cortez or every other close by physique of saltwater. As a substitute, the panel advisable the state construct a desalination plant subsequent to the ocean to regularly filter out a few of the lake’s salinity. It additionally steered paying Imperial County farmers to not plant their fields, which might enable extra water to achieve the ocean from the Colorado River as a substitute of getting siphoned off by farmers. Each methods would slowly replenish the ocean with contemporary water, revive its aquatic ecosystems, and permit the ocean to “return to being a jewel within the Californian desert, and a spot others will wish to go to and reside subsequent to once more,” the panel’s abstract report stated.
Mariela Loera, a coverage advocate on the California-based Management Counsel for Justice and Accountability, doesn’t see an enough, long-term answer to the issue. She has been doing work with communities surrounding the Salton Sea for years. Mud suppression efforts and habitat restoration initiatives are a helpful bandaid, she stated, “however ideally, there’s a long-term, clear water answer.”
In the meantime, the Salton Sea’s copious brine presents an sudden alternative: a bonanza of lithium, the extremely sought-after metallic.
Lithium is the important thing ingredient in electrical autos batteries and clear vitality storage, however it’s also in brief provide. Lithium costs shot up some 400 p.c this 12 months as the worldwide urge for food for EVs rose and firms turned more and more determined to search out new sources of the metallic. The state of California estimates that the Salton Sea has sufficient lithium to provide America’s total urge for food, now and sooner or later, and 40 p.c of the globe’s demand on high of that.
Loera and different native teams acknowledge the significance of the ocean’s lithium shops, however they are saying communities affected by the area’s poisonous mud and algae blooms want justice earlier than extraction can start. “Lots of residents have questions on potential impacts,” Loera stated. Lithium mining requires copious quantities of water. Would that water come from the ocean’s personal restricted provide? And what impacts would mining have on the state’s ongoing habitat restoration and mud suppression efforts? These questions and others raised by the group haven’t been adequately answered but. “There’s an absence of group engagement within the resolution making course of up to now,” she stated. “We have to have that dialog: How are we going to proceed this inexperienced transition, however in an environmentally simply means?”
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom may exclude Tesla and other automakers from an electric vehicle (EV) rebate program if the incoming Trump administration scraps a federal tax credit for electric car purchases.
Newsom proposed creating a new version of the state’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Program, which was phased out in 2023 after funding more than 594,000 vehicles and saving more than 456 million gallons of fuel, the governor’s office said in a news release on Monday.
“Consumers continue to prove the skeptics wrong – zero-emission vehicles are here to stay,” Newsom said in a statement. “We’re not turning back on a clean transportation future – we’re going to make it more affordable for people to drive vehicles that don’t pollute.”
The proposed rebates would be funded with money from the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is funded by polluters under the state’s cap-and-trade program, the governor’s office said. Officials did not say how much the program would cost or save consumers.
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California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Monday proposed creating a new version of the state’s Clean Vehicle Rebate Program if the incoming Trump administration scraps a federal tax credit for electric car purchases. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, File / Getty Images)
They would also include changes to promote innovation and competition in the zero-emission vehicles market – changes that could prevent automakers like Tesla from qualifying for the rebates.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who relocated Tesla’s corporate headquarters from California to Texas in 2021, responded to the possibility of having Tesla EVs left out of the program.
Tesla and other automakers may not qualify for the proposed tax credits, according to the governor’s office. (Getty Images, File / Getty Images)
“Even though Tesla is the only company who manufactures their EVs in California! This is insane,” Musk wrote on X, which he also owns.
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Those buying or leasing Tesla vehicles accounted for about 42% of the state’s rebates, The Associated Press reported, citing data from the California Air Resources Board.
Newsom’s office told Fox Business Digital that the proposal is intended to foster market competition, and any potential market cap is subject to negotiation with the state Legislature.
| Ticker | Security | Last | Change | Change % |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| TSLA | TESLA INC. | 338.59 | -13.97 | -3.96% |
“Under a potential market cap, and depending on what the cap is, there’s a possibility that Tesla and other automakers could be excluded,” the governor’s office said. “But that’s again subject to negotiations with the legislature.”
Newsom’s office noted that such market caps have been part of rebate programs since George W. Bush’s administration in 2005.
Newsom has pushed Californians to replace gas-powered vehicles with zero-emission vehicles. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images / Getty Images)
Federal tax credits for EVs are currently worth up to $7,500 for new zero-emission vehicles. President-elect Trump has previously vowed to end the credit.
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California has surpassed 2 million zero-emission vehicles sold, according to the governor’s office. The state, however, could face a $2 billion budget deficit next year, Reuters reported, citing a non-partisan legislative estimate released last week.
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Along with most other Democratic politicians in California, Gov. Gavin Newsom still doesn’t seem to understand what happened in the 2024 election.
For years, Newsom, along with California cronies like former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and, of course, Vice President Kamala Harris, bragged about their state being a “model for the nation.”
In one sense–not the one they intended, of course–that’s true. California became a model of what not to do.
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The terrible combination of elitism and extremism that has defined Democratic policymaking in my home state for at least the last decade has delivered failure on every front.
Despite having the highest taxes in the nation, despite the state’s budget nearly doubling in the last ten years (even as our population has been falling, in the exodus from blue state misrule), California has the highest rate of poverty in America. We have the highest housing costs, the lowest homeownership, highest gas and utility bills, and the worst business climate–ten years in a row.
This record of failure is exactly why Democrats lost so badly on November 5th. Voters had a clear choice: between more of the same Democrat policies that raised the cost of living and lowered their quality of life, or a return to the peace and prosperity of the Trump years.
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In many ways, the contest between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris represented a battle between the ‘blue state model’ championed by Gavin Newsom in California, and the ‘red state model’ that has driven people and businesses out of California and into the arms of more welcoming states like Texas, Tennessee and Florida.
Of course, the red state model won and the blue state model was roundly rejected.
You would think that would make blue state leaders like Newsom pause and reflect. But the exact opposite has happened. Gavin Newsom immediately called a “special session” of the California legislature to “Trump-proof” his state.
What California really needs is “Newsom-proofing.”
Instead, California Democrats are doubling down on the exact same agenda that was defeated across the country – including in California, which saw the biggest shift from Democrats to the GOP in decades.
Here are the five things California Democrats still don’t get:
1. People want results, not lectures
Democrats and their media sycophants can do all the self-righteous, sanctimonious bloviating they like about “our democracy” and “equity”, but in the end people want the basics of the American Dream: a good job that pays enough to raise your family in a home of your own in a safe neighborhood with a good school so your kids can have a better life than you. No amount of moral superiority from the people in charge will make up for that if they fail to provide it.
2. Enough with the ‘climate’ extremism
“Climate” has become a religion for Democrats, and you see that especially clearly in California. But when you look at the main reason life is so unaffordable for working people, whether that’s gas prices, utility bills or housing costs, extreme climate policies are to blame. Working-class Americans can’t afford these ‘luxury beliefs.’
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3. Who cares about Hollywood?
This election destroyed forever the myth that fancy celebrities can sway votes. Oprah, Beyonce, George Clooney, Taylor Swift…nobody cares! The new cultural powerhouses are the podcast hosts, comedians…the raw power of UFC is where it’s at, not the decadent Hollywood elite who won’t even turn up to support “their” candidate without a multimillion dollar paycheck.
Producer and actress Oprah Winfrey holds up Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ hand as she arrives onstage during a campaign rally on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on November 4, 2024. (Getty Images)
4. ‘Little tech’ beats Big Tech
Democrats may console themselves with the knowledge that California’s Big Tech monopolies are on their side. But in this election we saw the rise of what famed Silicon Valley investor Marc Andressen calls “little tech”, the upstarts and rebels who reject leftist groupthink. They got engaged in this election in a way we’ve never seen before. It’s a massive shift and will be a huge force for the future.
5. Working class beats the elite
Back in 2016, after the Brexit vote, and then Donald Trump’s victory here, shocked the world, I predicted that the Republican Party had the opportunity to become a “multiracial working class coalition.” Trump’s 2024 victory has delivered that — a revolutionary shift in our political landscape. The other part of my prediction? Democrats will be left as the party of the “rich, white and woke.”
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Unless Democrats come to terms with these realities and change course, they can expect to lose elections for years to come. The reaction in California – epicenter of today’s Democrat elite — shows that there is zero sign of this happening.
They just don’t get it.
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- Gov. Gavin Newsom plans to revive California’s EV rebate if Trump ends the federal tax credit.
- But Tesla, the largest maker of EVs, would be excluded under the proposal.
- Elon Musk criticized Tesla’s potential exclusion from the rebate.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is preparing to step in if President-elect Donald Trump fulfills his promise to axe the federal electric-vehicle tax credit — but one notable EV maker could be left out.
Newsom said Monday if the $7,500 federal tax credit is eliminated he would restart the state’s zero-emission vehicle rebate program, which was phased out in 2023.
“We will intervene if the Trump Administration eliminates the federal tax credit, doubling down on our commitment to clean air and green jobs in California,” Newsom said in a statement. “We’re not turning back on a clean transportation future — we’re going to make it more affordable for people to drive vehicles that don’t pollute.”
The rebates for EV buyers would come from the state’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which is funded by polluters of greenhouse gases under a cap-and-trade program, according to the governor’s office.
But Tesla’s vehicles could be excluded under the proposal’s market-share limitations, Bloomberg News first reported.
The governor’s office confirmed to Business Insider that the rebate program could include a market-share cap which could in turn exclude Tesla or other EV makers. The office did not share details about what market-share limit could be proposed and also noted the proposal would be subject to negotiations in the state legislature.
A market-share cap would exclude companies whose sales account for a certain amount of total electric vehicle sales. For instance, Tesla accounted for nearly 55% off all new electric vehicles registered in California in the first three quarters of 2024, according to a report from the California New Car Dealers Association. By comparison, the companies with the next highest EV market share in California were Hyundai and BMW with 5.6% and 5% respectively.
Tesla sales in California, the US’s largest EV market, have recently declined even as overall EV sales in the state have grown. Though the company still accounted for a majority of EV sales in California this year as of September, its market share fell year-over-year from 64% to 55%.
The governor’s office said the market-share cap would be aimed at promoting competition and innovation in the industry.
Elon Musk, who has expressed support for ending the federal tax credit, said in an X post it was “insane” for the California proposal exclude Tesla.
The federal electric vehicle tax credit, which was passed as part of the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, provides a $7,500 tax credit to some EV buyers.
Musk, who is working closely with the incoming Trump administration, has expressed support for ending the tax credit. He’s set to co-lead an advisory commission, the Department of Government Efficiency, which is aimed at slashing federal spending.
The Tesla CEO said on an earnings call in July that ending the federal tax credit might actually benefit the company.
“I think it would be devastating for our competitors and for Tesla slightly,” Musk said. “But long-term probably actually helps Tesla, would be my guess.”
BI’s Graham Rapier previously reported that ending the tax credit could help Tesla maintain its strong standing in the EV market by slowing its competitors growth.
Prior to the EV rebate proposal, Newsom has already positioned himself as a foil to the incoming Trump administration. Following Trump’s election win the governor called on California lawmakers to convene for a special session to discuss protecting the state from Trump’s second term.
“The freedoms we hold dear in California are under attack — and we won’t sit idle,” Newsom said in a statement at the time.
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