Environmental News From Last Week

May 13 – Bloomberg (Naureen Malik, David R Baker and Mark Chediak):
“First they struck California, then Texas. Now blackouts are threatening the entire U.S. West as nearly a dozen states head into summer with too little electricity. From New Mexico to Washington, power grids are being strained by forces years in the making — some of them fueled by climate change, others by the fight against it. If a heat wave strikes the whole region at once, the rolling outages that darkened Southern California and Silicon Valley last August will have been previews, not flukes. ‘It’s really the same case in different parts of the West,’ said Elliot Mainzer, chief executive officer of the California Independent System Operator… ‘It’s revealed competition for scarce resources that we haven’t seen for some time.’”

May 12 – Bloomberg (Ari Natter): 

“The federal agency charged with protecting the nation’s pipelines hasn’t imposed any mandatory cybersecurity requirements since its creation in wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks -- despite dire warnings from the intelligence community about vulnerability to hackers. Instead, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Pipeline Security Branch, which oversees nearly three million miles of pipelines, has relied on voluntary best practices and self-reporting by the industry to secure the operations. Those measures have alarmed pipeline safety advocates and been criticized as inadequate by government regulators and lawmakers.”