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President Joe Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced this week it is poised to reverse former President Donald Trump’s Navigable Waters Protection Act that helped farmers and ranchers avoid penalties based on arbitrary definitions of navigable waters that could apply to rainwater puddles, seasonal ponds, and other natural water formations. DTN covered the reaction to the EPA’s move: The Biden EPA and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a news release Wednesday the Trump rule has led to a degradation in protection of waters. The agencies asked a federal court to remand the Trump rule, to allow for...

Fears Of A ​​​​​​​”Return Of The 1930s Dust Bowl” Rise As Record Drought Sizzles SouthwestThe United States Drought Monitor publishes weekly data that shows the Western U.S. is in a historic drought. The latest Drought Monitor map shows for Mar. 4, “Dry conditions dominated much of the West and especially the Southwest and into the Plains.” Extreme to exceptional drought conditions are seen across 57% and 90% of the land in Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona, and diminishing snowpack could jeopardize drinking water for tens of millions of people from Denver to Los Angeles. The drought developed last...

Much of the southwestern portion of the United States has been gripped by a drought that never seems to end, and there is a tremendous amount of concern that patterns that we witnessed back during the Dust Bowl days of the 1930s may be starting to repeat. In a previous article, I discussed the extreme heat that we have been seeing in the region lately. Phoenix has never had more days in a year when the high temperature has hit at least 115 degrees, and other southwestern cities have been smashing records as well. At the same time, precipitation levels...

A new study using a reconstruction of North American drought history over the last 1,000 years found that the drought of 1934 was the driest and most widespread of the last millennium. Using a tree-ring-based drought record from the years 1000 to 2005 and modern records, scientists from NASA and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found the 1934 drought was 30 percent more severe than the runner-up drought (in 1580) and extended across 71.6 percent of western North America. For comparison, the average extent of the 2012 drought was 59.7 percent. “It was the worst by a large margin, falling pretty far...

Tyler Durden 05/29/2014 In early 1978, a song entitled "Dust in the Wind" by a rock band known as Kansas shot up the Billboard charts. When Kerry Livgren penned those now famous lyrics, he probably never imagined that Dust Bowl conditions would return to his home state just a few short decades later. Sadly, that is precisely what is happening. When American explorers first traveled through north Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, they referred to it as "the Great American Desert" and they doubted that anyone would ever be able to farm it. But as history has shown, when that area...

Politics: Is sanity finally coming to California's Central Valley? America's breadbasket has long been victim of capricious water cutoffs to "save" the environment. A bill in Congress puts an end to this man-made drought. It should pass. Rep. Devin Nunes of Visalia, Calif., has come forward with a legislative remedy for the policies that have turned fertile fields into hollowed-out dust bowls in the name of "being green." Nunes' Sacramento-San Joaquin Water Reliability Act goes to a vote in the House Wednesday and if it passes, it will guarantee that water the farmers paid for finally gets to the parched...

Fourteen states are suffering from a drought so early and severe that it's already causing comparisons with the dust bowl years of the 1930's. According to a story in The New York Times, farmers are running wells dry, crops aren't growing and livestock can't be fed. “It’s horrible so far,” said Mike Newberry, a Georgia farmer who is trying grow cotton, corn and peanuts on a thousand acres. “There is no description for what we’ve been through since we started planting corn in March.” David Miskus with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says the reason for the drought is...

There is not much to be happy about these days in Happy, Texas. Main Street is shuttered but for the Happy National Bank, slowly but inexorably disappearing into a High Plains wind that turns all to dust. The old Picture House, the cinema, has closed. Tumbleweed rolls into the still corners behind the grain elevators, soaring prairie cathedrals that spoke of prosperity before they were abandoned for lack of business.

Climatologist Warns Of Second Dust Bowl In Growing Southwest Desert Gus Lubin Aug. 13, 2010, 11:43 AM A climatologist at Columbia University says the Southwest looks forward to "permanent drought" conditions on par with the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Arizona was already an arid and hot, but here's how Professor Richard Seager says it will get worse. Grist: A critical player in this drying cycle is the planetary-scale circulation system known as the Hadley cell... The Hadley cell is growing. Its expansion above a larger swath of the American Southwest, along with a shifting of the jet stream and...

Delta smelts: Preferred over humans. Environmentalism: Sen. Dianne Feinstein votes to deny water to California's drought-stricken San Joaquin Valley. Farmers, families and food are being held hostage to an endangered fish called the delta smelt.There was a time when the San Joaquin Valley was the most productive agricultural region in the world. It was a large part of what made the Golden State golden.Now it's a place where farmers no longer farm, but instead line up at food banks to feed the families of those who once fed the rest of the country and a good chunk of the...

Green shoots are bursting out. Or so we are told. But before concluding that the recession will soon be over, we must ask what history tells us. It is one of the guides we have to our present predicament. Fortunately, we do have the data. Unfortunately, the story they tell is an unhappy one. EDITOR’S CHOICE Tight rules helped mitigate crisis in Brazil - Jun-16 Economists’ forum - Oct-01 Opinion: The three steps to financial reform - Jun-16 In depth: Global financial crisis - Sep-04 Economics: How the world economy might recover its poise - Jun-15 Two economic historians, Barry...

US dollar rallies as extent of worldwide recession becomes clearer By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, International Business Editor Last Updated: 10:13pm BST 08/08/2008 The psychology of global markets has shifted hugely over recent days as it becomes clear that Europe, Australasia and parts of Asia are sliding into recession. The US dollar has launched its best rally in half a decade, reflecting a recognition that half the world is in even worse shape than the US. In fact, America is the only G7 country to eke out modest growth this summer. The US dollar index - currencies watched closely by traders -...

RGE Monitor MEDIA ALERT: Nouriel Roubini predicts the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and the worst U.S. Recession in the last few decades. New York, July 15, 2008- In a series of recent writings on the RGE Monitor Nouriel Roubini - Chairman of RGE Monitor and Professor of Economics at the NYU Stern School of Business - has argued that the U.S. is experiencing its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and will undergo its worst recession in the last few decades. His analysis leads to the following conclusions: This is by far the worst financial crisis...

The top ten likely effects as the bear market bites Patrick Hosking: Business Commentary There is now no doubt about it. Even the cheeriest of optimists would have to acknowledge that we are in the grip of a pronounced bear market. The FTSE 100 has slumped by more than 500 points in the past month and from the peak of last October is down by 18 per cent. At one point yesterday it dived to 5,470, close to the nadir of the Bear Stearns panic in March, although it managed a half-hearted rally at the end of the day. One...

So much for that second-half rebound. Truth be told, that was always more of a wish than a serious forecast, happy talk from the Fed and Wall Street desperate to get things back to normal. It ain't gonna happen. Not this summer. Not this fall. Not even next winter. This thing's going down, fast and hard. Corporate bankruptcies, bond defaults, bank failures, hedge fund meltdowns and 6 percent unemployment. We're caught in one of those vicious, downward spirals that, once it gets going, is very hard to pull out of. Only this will be a different kind of recession --...

Climate modelers see modern echo in '30s Dust BowlApril 29, 2008 Goodwell, Oklahoma, June 4, 1937. Climate scientists using computer models to simulate the 1930s Dust Bowl on the U.S Great Plains have found that dust raised by farmers probably amplified and spread a natural drop in rainfall, turning an ordinary drying cycle into an agricultural collapse. The researcher say the study raises concern that current pressures on farmland from population growth and climate change could worsen current food crises by leading to similar events in other regions. Recent studies indicate that periodic droughts in the western United States are...

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Sales of existing homes fell to a record low in October, according to the latest reading on the battered housing market by an industry trade group released Wednesday, as even the largest drop in home prices ever wasn't enough to revive moribund sales. The National Association of Realtors reported that sales of homes by homeowners fell to an annual pace of 4.97 million in October, down from the revised 5.03 reading in September, which was the previous record low since the trade group started tracking sales on that basis in 1999. Economists surveyed by Briefing.com had...

Applications for U.S. home mortgages fell last week as rates on some adjustable loans soared to their highest levels in more than two months, according to data from an industry group Wednesday. RELATED LINKS Comments Lift Sentiment Stocks Open Higher Durable Goods Orders Fall for Third Straight Month Mortgage Applications Fall as Rates Soar The Mortgage Bankers Association said its seasonally adjusted index of mortgage application activity declined 4.3 percent to 652.5 in the week ended Nov. 23. Rates on one-year adjustable-rate mortgages that include many jumbo loans climbed 26 basis points to 6.24 percent, the highest since the height...

Eighty-five bungalows dot the cul-de-sac that joins West Ontario Avenue and East Ontario Avenue in Atlanta. Twenty-two are vacant, victims of mortgage fraud and foreclosure. Now house fires, prostitution, vandals and burglaries terrorize the residents left in this historic neighborhood called Westview Village. "It's created a safety hazard. And if we have to sell our house tomorrow, we're out of luck," said resident Scott Smith. "Real estate agents say to me 'We're not redlining you, but I tell my clients to think twice about buying here.'" As defaults surge on mortgages made to borrowers with spotty credit and adjustable-rate loans,...

The euro, worth 83 cents in the early George W. Bush years, is at $1.45. The British pound is back up over $2, the highest level since the Carter era. The Canadian dollar, which used to be worth 65 cents, is worth more than the U.S. dollar for the first time in half a century. Oil is over $90 a barrel. Gold, down to $260 an ounce not so long ago, has hit $800. Have gold, silver, oil, the euro, the pound and the Canadian dollar all suddenly soared in value in just a few years? Nope. The dollar has...