Tag: West Coast of the United States

California’s exposure to climate change has been laid bare with warnings that San Francisco faces a far worse threat from rising seas than previously thought, while the agricultural heart of the state will increasingly struggle to support crops such as peaches, walnuts and apricots as temperatures climb. The findings, from two new scientific studies, come as California’s neighboring west coast states Oregon and Washington have both faltered in their legislative attempts to address climate change and deliver a rebuke to Donald Trump’s dismissal of the issue. “In Washington, we are holding a very good policy hostage because it’s not perfect. San Francisco can lay claim to being one of the greenest cities in the US, through its embrace of clean energy, mandated recycling and banning of single-use plastic bags, yet it faces a steep challenge to avoid the ravages of sea level rise. Researchers using satellite-based radar and GPS have discovered large areas of land beside the San Francisco bay is sinking, exacerbating the threat from sea level rise and storms. This scenario would worsen if melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica trigger a far faster rate of ocean expansion. “A huge number of people along the west coast are in low-lying areas, in Los Angeles and San Francisco all the way up to Seattle. And California’s neighbors to the north are struggling to demonstrate that states can compensate for the lack of federal action on climate change, even those where Democrats have a firm grip on power. Meanwhile, in Oregon, another state dominated by elected Democrats, lawmakers failed to agree on a cap on greenhouse gases and will instead revisit the issue in 2019. “Rather than getting bogged down in how money from a carbon tax would be spent, we need to make climate change a bipartisan issue again,” said Aseem Prakash, the director of the center for environmental politics at the University of Washington.