Blue Marble

Click here for a larger version. James West

The $50 billion drought that bedeviled the country last Summer—the worst since the Dust Bowl of the 1930's—still has its fingers around half the country. And if predictions are to be believed, it's only going to get worse for many in the coming months.

Weekly drought figures released Thursday by the US Drought Monitor, a joint project of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the USDA and several other government and academic partners, show the situation has worsened slightly from last week, with nearly 52% of the continental US now suffering from a moderate drought or worse. Below-average winter snow pack and rainfall are keeping much of the country in a holding pattern. No measurable precipitation fell on most of central and northern Illinois, southern Wisconsin, central and northern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and the Louisiana Bayou last week. Rain that fell in the West did nothing to alleviate the drought there; in fact, parts of western Oregon and southwestern Washington have reported their driest start to a calendar year on record. The forecast for the next two weeks? Dry and dry again.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's climate prediction center warns today that drought is likely to persist for much of the West and expand across northern California and southern Oregon. Although the numbers are more optimistic across eastern Kansas and Oklahoma, with some rain on the way, drought still has a strong grip on much of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, and Arizona due to low snow-water (around 75% of normal) heading into spring and early summer. That is just the latest in a battery of warning signs that show another brutal summer on its way: California experienced its driest January-February period on record, and average winter temperatures across the contiguous US were 1.9°F above the 20th century average.

These figures come on the back of the spring outlook from NOAA released two weeks ago that point to hotter, drier conditions coming up across much of the US, and with that, flooding.

In many parts of the country, drought in fact never loosened its grip, imperiling the winter wheat crop that sustains much of the US wheat industry.

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Bill Pracht has bad memories of last summer. "The drought was so bad here that the corn was just decimated," he recalls of the farm country around Garnett, Kan., where he oversees East Kansas Agri-Energy, an ethanol plant. "Many fields were zero."

In August, corn prices hit their highest level ever, driven mainly by the severe drought that crippled America's corn belt. By October, Pracht could see that he was spending more on corn than he could make with ethanol, and with no relief in sight, he began to have doubts about keeping the plant open.

"We knew we'd be wasting money," he says.

So, he pulled the plug, shuttering the plant and laying off twenty employees until conditions improve enough to make churning out what was until recently one of the nation's fastest-growing fuel sources profitable again. And as the EPA nears a final decision on new regulations that would require oil companies to use more ethanol in their gasoline mixes, Pracht's story illustrates a risk of increasing reliance on corn-based fuels in a warming world.

Pracht isn't alone: Over the last year, nearly 10 percent of the nation's ethanol plants have shut down. Annual corn yields came in almost a third lower than projected, according to the USDA, driving record-high corn prices that are likely to continue to rise into 2013, up to 19 percent higher than 2011-2012 averages. Overall, 2012 was the first year since 1996 (another drought year) in which total ethanol production decreased (by 4.5 percent), reversing a trend of exponential growth that's lasted almost a decade, according to the federal Energy Information Administration:

Tim McDonnell

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Miss Thursday's event? No problem—watch it here:

On February 17, more than 40,000 people rallied in Washington to convince the president to reject the Keystone XL, a proposed 875-mile pipeline running from the Canadian border into Nebraska and slated to transport oil from tar sands (which is 17 percent more greenhouse gas intensive than standard crude oil). The crowds outside the White House provided overwhelming proof that opposing Keystone has mobilized a new and powerful grassroots constituency.

But in the US Senate, the mood was different. In a nonbinding vote, 62 Senators—including 17 pro-Keystone Democrats—voted to approve the pipeline. Just 37 Senators voted against it. In fact, the amendment was co-sponsored by four Democrats, including Max Baucus of Montana and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota.

So are activists' efforts all in vain? What will happen to the environmental movement if President Obama ultimately lets Keystone go forward?

And more broadly: What does this say about the best strategy for fighting climate change? Does compromise, horse-trading, and winning industry allies ultimately work best—or do you have to push the limits of the possible? You're invited to the next Climate Desk Live event—hosted by myself—for a debate and discussion between some of the leading voices on this issue:

May Boeve, executive director and co-founder, 350.org.

David Roberts, Grist magazine, who has been covering Keystone regularly and recently wrote about the "Virtues of Being Unreasonable on Keystone."

Michael Levi, director of the program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of the new book The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and the Battle For America’s Future (Oxford, May 2013), where he writes that combating climate change will require "doing deals [with those] who want to expand production of oil and gas."

Michael Grunwald, senior national correspondent for Time magazine, author of The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of Change in the Obama Era, who recently declared that on Keystone, "I'm with the Tree Huggers!"

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UPDATE: Apparently Exxon is using Craigslist to hire cleanup workers. "Need 40 HR Hazmat trained laborers. Emergency cleanup of oil," requests this ad posted on the Little Rock site on Monday morning.

An ExxonMobil pipeline broke on Friday evening, dumping thousands of gallons of tar sands oil in Mayflower, Arkansas. The Pegasus pipeline starts in Illinois and carries 95,000-barrels of oil per day from Alberta's tar sands to refineries in Texas.

HAWK Center (Helping Arkansas Wild Kritters)/Facebook

At least 22 homes had to be evacuated after the spill, and local residents have posted some alarming photos and video of the mess in their streets and backyards. The group HAWK Center (Helping Arkansas Wild Kritters) is also posting photos of oiled birds that have been rescued and brought in.

Exxon was cagey, at first, about giving an estimate of how much spilled, initially telling reporters it was "a few thousand" barrels or declining to give an estimate. In an interview with Inside Climate, a local official gave an estimate of 2,000 barrels (or 84,000 gallons). When I asked for a specific figure on the number of barrels spilled, this is what I got from Charlie Engelmann, a media relations adviser for Exxon Mobil Corporation:

A few thousand barrels of oil were observed in the area; a response for 10,000 barrels has been undertaken to ensure adequate resources are in place. Approximately 12,000 barrels of oil and water have been recovered. Crews are steam cleaning oil from property.

That's still not a very specific answer. This actual figure is something that people will want to know, given that the spill is igniting even more debate about pipeline safety in general and the proposed Keystone XL pipeline in particular.

Meanwhile, an eagle-eyed tipster points out to Mother Jones that the company that provided the fuzzy map of where the oil spilled posted on the response site is the Center for Toxicology and Environmental Health, or CTEH, a contractor that has been criticized in the past for using bad data and a "long pattern of tainted results" in its environmental analysis. Based in Little Rock, the company also contracted with BP to test workers during the Gulf spill, prompting others in the field to complain that the company's results were often skewed to favor whatever company had hired them. "They're paid to say everything's OK," a toxicologist told Greenwire at the time. Here's CTEH's less-than-helpful map of the spill:

Engelmann told Mother Jones via email that CTEH is "conducting continuous air quality monitoring" at the spill site. "The air quality does not likely present a human health risk, with the exception of the high pooling areas, where cleanup crews are working with safety equipment," he added.

When called, the phone number listed for the Mayflower Incident Unified Command Joint Information Center on the town's website on Monday morning, the call went straight to an Exxon operations center in Fairfax, Virginia, where an Exxon press flack answered the phone.

This is a bit of a flashback to the 2010 Gulf spill—we'd call the joint information press line, and it would often be a BP employee on the line. I also asked Engelmann if it was all Exxon staff at the information office, to which he responded, "We are working with a number of entities, including the EPA, Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, Arkansas Department of Health, Faulkner County and ExxonMobil Pipeline Company, among others, on response efforts."

Of course company staff can answer some of my questions, but it's hard to know if you're getting reliable information when the responsible party is the one fielding the press calls.

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