Department of Water Resources
California Water News
A daily compilation of significant news articles and comment
April 29, 2008
5. Agencies, Programs, People -
Reporter, political figure Hale Champion dies
San Francisco Chronicle
Levee District 1 has financing to straighten bend -
Marysville Appeal-Democrat
Solving global warming with giant vacuums
Los Angeles Times
News Release - ACWA
ACWA Participates in Scoping Meeting on Bay-Delta Plan
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Reporter, political figure Hale Champion dies
San Francisco Chronicle – 4/29/08
By David Perlman, staff writer
Hale Champion, a San Francisco reporter who left journalism for an extraordinary public service career in California state government, the White House and academia, died Wednesday in Cambridge, Mass. He was 85.
The cause was complications from prostate cancer and kidney failure.
Mr. Champion was known widely for his political savvy and wisdom, his ironic sense of humor, and his affable but tough-minded skill in pushing through progressive social programs and legislation.
He became a powerful figure in the two-term administration of now-dead California Gov. Edmund G. "Pat" Brown, serving the governor first in 1958 as press secretary, then executive secretary, and finally as state finance director.
In what even critics conceded was a virtuoso performance, Mr. Champion helped lead Brown's successful efforts to push through such major achievements as the California State Water Project, the Master Plan for Higher Education, the state Economic Development Commission, and the state's pioneering Fair Employment and Housing legislation.
After the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley, Mr. Champion tried and failed to persuade the Legislature to appropriate a mere $3 million to buy the entire ski area as a state park. It was one of his few political failures, he later confessed to friends as Squaw Valley and its world-famous ski runs grew more and more profitable and the income went to the ski corporation rather than the state.
Pat Brown's son, the current state attorney general and former Gov. Jerry Brown, knew Mr. Champion well in those years.
"My father admired him tremendously, and they were very, very close," Jerry Brown recalled. "In fact, he was my father's major policy adviser for many years."
When Pat Brown lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan in 1966, Mr. Champion accepted an invitation to become a Kennedy Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics, the first of several tours at Harvard.
In between, he was recruited by Boston's Mayor Kevin White as director of the city's Redevelopment Authority, where he oversaw the planning and creation of $1 billion in major new civic projects, including the rebuilding of the famed Quincy Market into a vibrant commercial center.
That success led the University of Minnesota to recruit him as executive vice president to oversee the school's five campuses. Later, Harvard President Derek Bok asked Mr. Champion to return to the university as vice president for financial affairs, where among other achievements he developed the idea of building a cogeneration power plant.
Mr. Champion's reputation for political skill and liberal social policies led to an invitation to become undersecretary of health, education and welfare in the Jimmy Carter administration.
"In those days, neither Medicare nor Medicaid recognized the concept of HMOs - health maintenance organizations - and it was Mr. Champion who got Medicare's first approval for the Kaiser Health Plan's HMOs - and that broke the logjam nationally," said former Health, Education and Welfare Secretary Joseph Califano. "It was a major achievement in bringing health care to millions of working people."
Before the Carter administration ended, Mr. Champion - married and with two growing children - announced he was broke and returned to Harvard to become the first executive dean of the Kennedy School of Government.
After that post, Mr. Champion became chief secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under Gov. Michael Dukakis before returning to Harvard.
Mr. Champion was born in Coldwater, Mich., in 1922. He was originally named Charles after his grandfather, but to avoid confusion he used only the name Hale throughout his life.
He attended the University of Michigan for three years, heading for a career in journalism, but left in 1942 to join the Army and serve as a sergeant in a military government unit in Europe until the end of World War II.
After the war, he worked as a reporter in Wisconsin. He later hitchhiked to California and worked for the Sacramento Bee before enrolling at Stanford University, where he graduated in 1952.
At Stanford, he met and married a classmate, the former Marie Tifft.
In 1952, he joined The Chronicle, where he covered politics and investigated local frauds. In one probe, for example, he discovered that many local television repair scam artists were cheating customers with faked repair bills - and his work won convictions of several of them with evidence provided by his wife, who pretended that their own TV was broken.
The scam artists responded with death threats, and Mr. Champion and his family hid out for weeks in the home of a Chronicle colleague until the threats ended.
After covering Pat Brown's winning 1958 campaign for governor, Mr. Champion joined the new governor's staff, and then, a few years later, to California's horror in 1965, the Champion family became victims of the most sensational crime of the times.
Two armed men, just released from an Oregon prison after serving time for rape and murder, invaded the Champions' modest Sacramento home and kidnapped Mr. Champion, his wife and their 19-month-old daughter, Katherine. The Champions' 11-year-old son, Tom, and his cousin, Paul Thornbury, slept undisturbed in a backyard cottage.
For more than 24 hours, the kidnappers drove the Champions across Sierra back roads and through the Nevada desert, heading for Mexico while one of the greatest manhunts in California history sought to find them.
It ended near a Tonopah, Nev., casino after a local cardsharp recognized the pair and fired a shot at their car just as deputy sheriffs were moving in. The would-be vigilante wounded Mr. Champion with a bullet to his hip and the kidnappers drove off, but they soon released the family and were later caught.
Said Mr. Champion of his kidnappers: "Well, I've been treated worse in the (state) Capitol."
Less than two weeks ago, and knowing he was terminally ill, Mr. Champion remained irrepressible. He took a somber-voiced sympathy phone call from an old Chronicle colleague one day and in response to the sad voice said in a flash and a laugh, "Hey, I'm going on a strange journey - you want to come along?"
Mr. Champion is survived by his wife, Marie, of Cambridge, Mass.; his son, Tom, of Somerville, Mass.; his daughter, Katherine Murphy, of Cambridge; and three grandchildren.
Memorial contributions may be made to the Cambridge Health Alliance, c/o the Alliance Foundation, P.O. Box 398037, Cambridge, MA 02139.
A memorial event at the Kennedy School of Government is being planned.#
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/29/BAQ410AJL1.DTL
Levee District 1 has financing to straighten bend
Marysville Appeal-Democrat – 4/28/08
By John Dickey, staff writer
Levee District 1 will get an early round of state bond money to fix the weakest spot in its levees, ending any uncertainty over project funding to fix Star Bend.
The State Department of Water Resources issued a decision memo Friday that allocated $16.33 million in Proposition 1E and Proposition 84 money for the district's Star Bend setback levee project.
"You've got your money now, you're ready to go," Jeff Twitchell, engineer for LD 1, told the district's board Monday.
Fixing Star Bend by building a setback levee farther from the river would reduce the risk of a failure at one of the district's biggest trouble spots. The district's levees protect Yuba City and parts of Sutter County in the Yuba City Basin.
The money will allow the district to move ahead with land acquisition, one of the tasks still remaining before construction. The district still has to go out for bids, and get permits from various agencies.
Twitchell said work could start in April 2009. The district would like to start construction even sooner, but will probably have to put off most of the work until next spring to avoid working on the levee during flood season.
The levee district started work on an environmental study for the setback project in 2005. At the time, it may have been a bit of a gamble for the maintenance district to take on the much bigger job of building a levee.
"We're a maintenance district — we were kind of putting our neck out there," said district Director Mike Vinsonhaler.
But it appeared the gamble would pay off when state officials put the district's setback levee on a list of projects for early funding from the Proposition 1E levee bond. Friday's decision memo said the department will send an agreement to the district authorizing the funding.
"We started a long time ago, and it's a good thing we did, or else we wouldn't have had the funds," said Vinsonhaler.
Star Bend has been as a trouble spot since the Sutter County grand jury report following the 1955 flood. The report called for the bend to be straightened.
Flooding in 1997 brought the bend to the brink of failure. Aggressive flood fighting and thousands of sandbags held the levee together.
Sutter County and Yuba City also are providing funding for the levee project.#
http://www.appeal-democrat.com/news/district_63287___article.html/levee_money.html
Solving global warming with giant vacuums
Los Angeles Times - 4/29/08
By Alan Zarembo, staff writer
Here's a simple solution to global warming: vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air.
Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world's atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine.
After a decade of work, his shower-sized prototype whirs away inside a Tucson warehouse, each day capturing about 10 pounds of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas as air wafts through it.
Only a few billion tons to go.
In the battle against global warming, technology has long been seen as the ultimate savior, but Lackner's machine is a clunky reminder of how distant that dream is.
He estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of trillions of dollars a year.
The orchards of filters would have to be powered by complexes of new nuclear plants, dams, solar farms or other clean-energy sources to avoid adding more pollution to the atmosphere.
Despite the scope of the proposal, the allure of high technology is irresistible for modern humans. Salvation has arrived again and again over the last century: the automobile, the jet, the Internet, the iPod.
That dream has pushed scattered groups of scientists to work on massive schemes to reengineer the planet.
One idea is to block sunlight, either by constructing artificial volcanoes to blast sulfur particles into the atmosphere or by launching millions of tiny satellites into space and arranging them into a giant mirror.
Another concept is sprinkling iron over the oceans to nurture plankton colonies that would absorb carbon dioxide from the air and transfer it to the depths.
But while the science of dialing back the planet's thermostat is straightforward, the execution is fabulously expensive, complex and grandiose on a scale that boggles the mind.
"Nobody doubts it is possible to take CO2 out of the air," said David Keith, a professor of engineering and economics at the University of Calgary in Canada and one of several scientists around the world working on the problem. "The issue is, 'What does it cost?' "
Some policy experts argue that blind faith in technology is a harmful distraction from the hard sacrifices needed to control global warming.
"The temptation is to say, 'Let's get John Wayne on horseback or Bill Gates . . . and solve this problem,' " said Dale Jamieson, director of environmental studies at New York University.
But some scientists say that the potential of such ideas cannot be ignored given the world's political paralysis on controlling emissions and its myopic addiction to cheap and dirty coal.
"There are not that many alternatives," Lackner said.
The attraction of a technological silver bullet lies in the failure of the world to solve global warming through the obvious solution: reducing emissions.
The 1997 Kyoto accords were supposed to bring the world together to address the problem, but the two biggest polluters, the United States and China, have refused to cap their emissions, and Europe is failing to meet even its modest targets.
Worldwide annual emissions of carbon dioxide -- the main culprit in global warming -- have climbed 28% over the last decade, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The rise has been largely driven by industrializing countries, such as China and India, which argue that they have the right to exploit their coal reserves to catch up with the West.
It is clear that cheap energy is a drug that civilization will not give up. But big technological solutions could allow society to keep its drug.
Among the options, carbon filtering is the most direct and best understood. If industrialization is a process of transferring carbon stored in the earth to the atmosphere, filtering seeks to put it back.
The technology is decades old. Bottled oxygen used in hospitals started out as plain air before nitrogen, carbon dioxide and other gases were filtered out. Space capsules and submarines extract carbon dioxide to maintain breathable air for crew members.
The process for removing atmospheric carbon involves putting one compound, usually a hydroxide, in contact with the air, setting off a reaction that grabs CO2 and incorporates its carbon atoms into a carbonate compound.
Then, in a reaction that requires a large input of heat, the carbonate compound is broken apart, reconstituting and trapping the carbon dioxide.
Researchers propose pumping the captured CO2 into the ground, a practice already used to increase the pressure in oil wells. Geologists say there is room in subterranean rock formations to lock it away forever.
The beauty of carbon capture is that it scrubs the planet without intruding on it, unlike artificial volcanoes and sun reflectors, which could cause enormous planetary damage in the form of acid rain or giant shadows that stunt crops.
The filters could be placed anywhere in the world, since carbon dioxide disperses throughout the atmosphere.
For all its appeal, the process is hideously inefficient. Carbon dioxide makes up less than 0.04% of the atmosphere, and removing climate-changing quantities of it requires filtering massive amounts of air.
Lackner calculated that sucking up all 28 billion tons of CO2 released worldwide each year would require spreading out his machines over a land area the size of Arizona.
That seems like a reasonable sacrifice to save civilization, until you consider the expense.
Experts estimate that it would cost up to $200 a ton to filter and store carbon dioxide from the air. That means the yearly vacuuming bill could reach $5.6 trillion.
Even filtering the greenhouse gas from smokestacks, where it is hundreds of times more concentrated and thus much cheaper to capture, is still deemed too expensive for commercial use.
The enormous cost raises the question: Who would pay?
It is the same impasse that has stymied efforts toward a global agreement to reduce emissions. China argues that the West should foot the bill because it created the problem over the last two centuries. The United States says China must accept its share of responsibility as the world's new top polluter.
The cost of the technology will surely fall over time, but without government action that is unlikely to happen soon enough to stave off the worst effects of climate change.
Without at least a 50% cut in emissions by mid-century, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the temperature rise will exceed 2 degrees, resulting in worsening drought, a dangerous sea level rise and widespread extinction of species.
Paul Crutzen, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, said that the failure to cut emissions might force the world to reshape the environment through drastic use of technology.
The risks could be enormous, but the risks of failing to reduce emissions could be greater, he said.
Crutzen said that only out of a "sense of despair" had he come to favor the last-ditch option of spewing more than a million tons of sulfur a year into the air.
It's a dirty proposition that, in some ways, is its own environmental crime. But it works, as shown by the 1991 Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippines, which temporarily cooled the planet by almost 1 degree Fahrenheit. "It might be the last escape route from the problem," he said.
The power to reengineer the planet raises another question: Who gets to control the thermostat? Despite the perception that climate change is a global problem, it is in reality a series of regional transformations that benefits some places and harms others.
Countries in the far northern latitudes have less incentive than tropical countries to counteract the warming. Russia has already laid claim to the North Pole in hopes that the arctic thaw will open access to new oil reserves. Canada is pondering the possibility of its vast expanse of tundra becoming a breadbasket.
With enough carbon filters, a single country or even several rich individuals would have the power to set the world's temperature.
"No matter how you go about it, there will be a lot of politics," Lackner said.
For now, his machine, a solitary prototype, continues to hum away in the Tucson warehouse. With no good place to store the carbon dioxide it traps, the gas is simply released back into the air.#
http://www.latimes.com/news/science/environment/la-sci-carbon29apr29,1,2160719.story?track=rss
News Release - ACWA
ACWA Participates in Scoping Meeting on Bay-Delta Plan
Association Calls Process a Critical Step toward Comprehensive Water Solution
Sacramento — Association of California Water Agencies (ACWA) President Glen Peterson today took part in the first in a series of scoping meetings in the environmental review process for Bay-Delta Conservation Plan (BDCP). The plan is a collaborative effort by state, federal and local agencies and environmental organizations to map out a comprehensive conservation plan for the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
The BDCP process is aimed at protecting Delta species in way that provides for sufficient and reliable water supplies. Improving the sustainability of the Delta is a key policy priority for ACWA, and association members will be participating in scoping meetings around the state in the coming weeks.
Peterson said ACWA members view the BDCP process as a critical step toward fixing the troubled Delta and the larger goal of securing a more sustainable water system for California.
“We welcome the start of this environmental review process because there is not a minute to lose when it comes to the Delta,” Peterson said. “We need to get moving on a solution because every day we wait is another day of environmental decline and lost water supplies.
“Improving the sustainability of the Delta is in everyone’s best interest. California simply cannot hope to achieve a comprehensive water solution without a plan to stop the Delta’s downward slide.”
He noted that without a sustainable Delta, important tools such as recycling and local surface and groundwater storage cannot work effectively in many areas of the state. Significant public investments in local programs are at risk as a result.
The scoping meetings continue through May 14. The environmental review process is expected to be completed in 2010.
ACWA is a statewide association of public agencies whose 450 members are responsible for about 90% of the water delivered in California. For more information, visit www.acwa.com.#
http://www.acwa.com/mediazone/newsreleases/view_release.asp?ID=670
