Gov. Brown announces plans for a global climate summit, drastic changes in weather impact fire season, "bad paper" veterans will now receive mental health care.
State of Affairs: Brown's climate summit, Jimmy Gomez still in the Assembly
Today on State of Affairs:
With a jab at President Trump, California Governor Jerry Brown is calling for a climate summit next year:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFVOFKEN0kU
Also:
- A month ago, voters in the 34th district chose Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez to take Xavier Becerra's old seat in Congress — so why hasn't Gomez been sworn in?
- Has anyone seen President Trump around? Nearly six months since taking office, he has yet to pay California a visit.
Guests:
- Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, professor of public policy at USC
- Carla Marinucci, senior editor for Politico's California Playbook
Press the blue play button above to hear the full interview.
VA offers mental health help to vets with other-than-honorable discharges
Earlier this week, the Department of Veterans Affairs began offering emergency mental health services to veterans who had less-than-honorable discharges.
Because of "bad paper discharges," as they are sometimes called, these veterans were previously not eligible for such services.
The goal of this change is to address the alarming rate of suicide among veterans. According to a recent VA report, an average of 20 veterans died from suicide every day in 2014.
"Really, what they're offering at this point is emergency services," Sara Kintzle, told Take Two's Libby Denkmann. Kintzle is a Research Associate Professor with USC's Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work. She explained what this new policy provides for veterans.
"If you are feeling low; if you're feeling that suicide might be an option for you, you have the option to go into emergency mental health services."
Kintzle is the co-author of a recent USC study that looked at the transition from military to civilian life. She found a great discrepancy in the psychology of veterans with less-than-honorable discharges to those with honorable ones.
"The rates of PTSD, the rates of depression and suicide ideation in those with a less-than-honorable discharge were even more alarming," Kintzle said. "Even more concerning is that... Over 85 percent of the veterans [with a less-than-honorable discharge] in the study who screened positive for PTSD depression or suicide were not receiving any help."
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player above.
Breaking down the myth of California's fire season
Out on the corner of Old Topanga Canyon Road and Mulholland Highway in the Santa Monica Mountains is a little place called Wild Walnut Park.
The park is named, naturally, for the walnut trees that dot the landscape. There's not a lot of greenery otherwise, just tall wheat-like grass and many dirt trails.
Those trees give off the only shade available – and it is hot. A Martinez and the Take Two team know this firsthand, because we visited the park right in the middle of the June heatwave.
That's where we met Marti Witter, an ecologist with the National Park Service. She described what this place used to be like:
"So, this is an area that previously had sort of low-growing coastal sage scrub with really beautiful gray leaves of purple sage and California sage."
That was before a 500-acre fire destroyed all of it about a year ago.
"What we're seeing now is not the happy picture we would usually expect to see after a fire in chaparral and coastal sage scrub."
It should all be growing back now, but it's taking longer than expected. That's because the fire blazed in the middle of California's drought, before the wet winter came and quenched the state's thirst. But the rain is what brought us to the park.
We wanted to know how all that water could affect the frequency and the intensity of fires this season.
How much of a role does rainfall play in California's fire ecology?
"Rainfall has a lot to do with our fire ecology. For example, four years of no rain has had a terrible effect in terms of just generating huge amounts of standing dead fuels that are not normally there.
Another really important effect is the timing of rainfall. So, we get our rain in the winter but if our rainfall comes heavily in November and December and then stops early, it means our potential to have fires earlier starts. And that's one of the things when people talk about climate change increasing the amount of climatic variability, that's probably one of the effects we're going to see... Is that we're going to have a larger window when fires can occur."
The two Californias
"We talk about California as having two different fire regimes. There's coastal and Southern California, which would naturally have low frequency of fires. Maybe every 50 to 70 years. They burn very intensely... So it's perfectly natural after a chaparral or a coastal sage scrub fire, to see all of the vegetation burned off and see the black destroyed landscape. But those landscapes are adapted to come back after fire.
The forested systems are different. That's the other California. So, instead of having this infrequent fire regime, they actually have a regime of frequent low-intensity fires. But those fires are actually pretty easy to put out, so they're slow moving, ground surface fires. But the factors that control fires in Southern California and in the Sierra Nevada or in our Southern California upper elevations, are different.
First of all, you have the potential for lightning ignited fires, which was the natural source of fires in those habitats. And also down, coastal Southern California has one of the lowest lightning ignitions."
Fires that happen here can often be triggered by power lines coming down in high winds, cars pulling off into herbaceous growth by the side of the road, etc.
The fire season myth
"We can have a fire at any time. But I think we really have fires under certain climatic conditions. So, you're going to get larger serious fires under specific climatic conditions and those do not occur 12 months out of the year. So, I think people should be careful when they talk about the year-long fire season.
In fact, it's year-long in the sense that we can get ignitions and if we didn't have this quite amazing fire response capacity then it would be more serious. But in Southern California, you have massive response to fires. So, you want to have that capacity 12 months out of the year, but you're not going to see vast amounts of land burned all through the year. It's going to be tied to seasons where these climatic conditions are conducive to large fires."
To listen to the full segment, click the blue play button above.
Special coverage: California's fire risk
This story is part of a full day of special coverage examining the summer fire season following this winter’s record rain and snow. Check out the rest of our coverage below:
Sierra fire risk: One place we looked is a favorite vacation spot for Southern Californians this time of year — the Sierra Nevada. KPCC’s Emily Guerin has more.
Erskine Fire: We checked in with the Kern County town devastated by one of last year’s most destructive wildfires. The Erskine Fire burned more than 280 homes, left two people dead and displaced hundreds. As KPCC’s Sharon McNary reports, it’s been a slow and difficult return to normal for many.
No Place Like LA: Julie, hating the Cubs but loving the Dodgers
No Place Like LA is our new series that asks transplants and immigrants to LA, "When was the moment you felt that Los Angeles was truly home?"
This is Julie Van Winkle's story.
Being from Chicago, I was always a White Sox fan. We would walk from our house to the games!
I first came to LA in 1999 and I lived in Echo Park. Every spring I would see everybody getting all excited about the Dodgers because I lived right by the stadium.
The moment I realized I became an Angeleno, was 5 years ago.
I found myself paying more attention to the Dodgers. My husband is from New Jersey and he used to be a Mets fan, but now he's a Dodgers fan, too. We probably go to between 12 to 20 games a year.
And as a Dodgers fan, I can still hate the Cubs! Just like I did when I was a White Sox fan.
What's next for the nuclear waste at San Onofre?
Since the San Onofre nuclear plant shut down in 2013, the plant's nearly 1,800 tons of nuclear waste has sat at the site in giant concrete casks.
That could change with a plan proposed by the Trump administration. The proposal would first move the nuclear waste from San Onofre to a temporary storage site. Eventually, the waste would end up in permanent storage at a site like Yucca Mountain in Nevada, which has long been controversial. President Obama stopped plans to create a storage site at Yucca Mountain in 2010.
David Victor is a Professor of International Relations at UC San Diego, and also serves as the chair of the community engagement panel for San Onofre's decommissioning. He is optimistic about the plan to revive the Yucca Mountain project.
"Washington is in gridlock on almost everything, and this is one of the few areas where you can see people on both sides of the aisle work on a solution. It is more optimistic and more promising today than at any time in recent memory, which is why the panel that I chair is so optimistic about this legislation, because it gives us a chance to get all aspects of the plant out of there, and not be stuck with this spent fuel in our communities."
According to Victor, the earliest the waste would actually be relocated would be in 2030 or after.
To hear the full conversation, click the blue player button above.