The future of a multibillion-dollar project to reroute water shipments from Northern California and salvage the battered ecosytem of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta started looking shaky late last year.

Irked that the project may not give them all the water they want, major San Joaquin Valley irrigation districts said they were walking away from the planning process. 

But in prepared remarks, a state water official made it clear Thursday that as far as the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown is concerned, the program is alive and vital to the millions of Californians who draw water from the delta.

Jerry Meral, the Brown administration's point man in the delta wars, canceled his appearance at a Los Angeles water policy conference because illness. His speech was delivered -- with a few wry asides -- by Randy Kanouse, a Bay Area water official who is a friend of Meral's but also a vocal critic of the delta project.

Meral did not endorse specifics of the plans, the latest version of which calls for extensive habitat restoration and construction of a huge tunnel system to carry Sacramento River water beneath the delta to southbound aqueducts.

A federal jury in Salt Lake City on Thursday convicted environmental activist Tim DeChristopher of two felony counts for using bogus bids to block the auction of 22,000 of federal land near national parks in southern Utah.

The jury deliberated for five hours before reaching its verdict. DeChristopher, 29, had infiltrated the Bureau of Land Management's auction in December 2008 as a protest against the move in the waning days of the Bush administration to open up the land to oil and gas exploration. He bid nearly $1.8 million for the 13 parcels with no ability to pay for them.

Weeks later a federal judge blocked the sale and the new Obama administration pulled the parcels from the auction block, contending their sale was improper. But the U.S. attorney's office still filed charges against DeChristopher, contending he took civil disobedience a step too far. He could face up to 10 years in prison when he is later sentenced.

Thursday afternoon, U.S. Attorney Carlie Christensen praised the verdict in a statement. "We recognize that individuals have deeply held opinions when it comes to the use and management of our public lands," she said. "As citizens of this country, we are free to hold and express these differing views. However, there are ways to express these opinions and advocate for change without violating the law, disrupting open public processes, and causing financial harm to the government and other individuals."

Supporters kept a steady vigil outside the federal courthouse during the three-day trial. DeChristopher was unrepentant when he emerged after the verdict.

"We now know I’ll have to go to prison," DeChristopher said, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. "That’s the job I have to do."

"If we want to achieve our vision," he said, "many more will have to join me."

The judge in the case had ruled that DeChristopher's defense could not raise civil disobedience or the controversial history of the leases as an explanation for the illegal bids. On the witness stand, DeChristopher testified that “I was there to raise a red flag. I wanted to delay [the auction] so that the government could take a second look, and make sure they were following their own rules.”

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No cash, but he bid anyway

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-- Nicholas Riccardi

Photo: Tim DeChristopher, now 29, after he won bids in a BLM auction on 13 parcels that he couldn't pay for as a protest against the Bush administration's sale of lands in southern Utah. Credit: Courtney Sargent / Deseret News

The ongoing effort to maintain Lake Tahoe got a bipartisan push Wednesday, when Democratic senators Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer joined Nevada's two senators to introduce the proposed Lake Tahoe Restoration Act, which would authorize $415 million over 10 years to improve the lake's water clarity and protect the basin from wildfire. 

The bill, co-sponsored by Democrat Harry Reid and Republican John Ensign of Nevada, proposes funding for a range of projects, including watershed restoration and storm-water management, two key factors in maintaining the lake's renowned water clarity.

In addition, the bill would set aside $136 million for fuels-reduction projects to help protect the Tahoe basin and its landowners from fires, and for removal of invasive species.

The legislation is a follow-up to a 2000 law that provided $453.8 million to maintain the environmental health of the Tahoe basin.

The tab to maintain the lake is substantial. According to Feinstein's office, in the last 10 years -- in addition to the federal funding -- Tahoe preservation efforts have required $616.6 million from California, $91.3 million from Nevada, $61.4 million from local governments and $264.4 million in in-kind contributions from the private sector.

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-- Julie Cart 

Photo: A view of Lake Tahoe with the Sierra in the background. Credit: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times

California may have plenty of eco-friendly construction, but according to the U.S. Green Building Council, it’s not among the top 10 states with so-called green commercial and institutional structures.

The council developed the Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design certification program -- better known as LEED. The District of Columbia has more than 25 square feet of LEED-certified space per capita.

Nevada is next up, with nearly 11 square feet per person. Other states on the list include New Mexico, New Hampshire, Oregon, South Carolina, Washington, Illinois, Arkansas, Colorado and Minnesota.

California has plenty of buildings that fit the bill. The Caltrans building in downtown Los Angeles is certified LEED silver, with energy-saving features such as a sheet of photovoltaic cells.

More than 40,000 projects currently participate in the commercial and institutional LEED ratings, making up more than 7.9 billion square feet. The Green Building Council also runs a residential LEED program, with nearly 10,000 homes certified.

Buildings in the U.S. are responsible for 39% of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions and for consuming 40% of the energy and 13% of the water used.

Earlier this month, a $100-million class-action lawsuit against the council was scaled down to just four plaintiffs, all working in design and construction. The complaint alleges that most LEED buildings aren’t as energy efficient as they’re made out to be and that the council often fails to verify structures’ supposed green benefits.

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-- Tiffany Hsu

Photo: The Caltrans headquarters in downtown L.A. has motion-activated ceiling lights. Credit: Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times

Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla and Google Ventures have invested $42 million in a start-up run by former Google employees, which helps insure farmers against losses from increasingly volatile global weather.

Khosla Ventures and Google Ventures join Allen & Co, NEA and other investors in WeatherBill, whose team of software engineers and climatologists collates weather data from various sources, then sells insurance based on statistical analysis.

WeatherBill -- founded by ex-Google employees David Friedberg and Siraj Khaliq -- argues that the $3 trillion in annual global agriculture production is increasingly at risk from wild and unpredictable weather fluctuations. The year 2010, during which extreme weather caused devastating floods in Pakistan, China and Australia and a heatwave in Russia, was the warmest on record alongside 1998 and 2005, the United Nations says.

A U.N. panel of climate change experts says weather is likely to become more extreme in the 21st century, affecting everything from food to water supplies, because of a build-up of heat-trapping gases from human use of fossil fuels. "More than 90% of crop losses are due to unexpected weather, and climate change is increasing the frequency of extreme weather events," CEO Friedberg said in a statement.

The firm in 2010 launched its core product, called Total Weather Insurance, which pays clients automatically based on weather conditions, without a claims process. The new funding will support WeatherBill's product development and sales expansion plans in the United States and overseas.

The bet by Khosla and Google comes as venture funding in "green" companies slows. Investment in cleantech globally slid 30% in the third quarter from the second quarter to about $1.53 billion with a notable pull-back in solar investment, the Cleantech Group said.

But investors say, longer-term, cleantech investment remains an attractive prospect. According to the Venture Capital Journal, a Thomson Reuters publication, almost three-quarters of U.S. venture capitalists see increasing cleantech spending as a top priority for them over the next five years.

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--Edwin Chan/Reuters

At the end of 2008, the incoming Obama administration called attempts to sell prime parcels of Bureau of Land Management land near Utah's national parks improper and told the Bush administration to stop. But the person who did the most to halt the sales was a former guide and University of Utah student named Tim DeChristopher.

DeChristopher, then 27, entered the BLM auction in Salt Lake City in late December and bid for 13 parcels of land outside Arches and Canyonlands National Parks, comprising about 22,000 acres. Days later, a federal judge put all the sales on hold and the new secretary of the Interior, Ken Salazar, reversed them.

But the Obama administration did not thank DeChristopher. Instead, his trial on felony charges of intefering with a federal auction began Monday, as hundreds of sympathizers protested outside the federal courthouse in Salt Lake City. If convicted, DeChristopher, who admitted he had no intention of paying the $1.8 million tab he ran up at the auction, could face up to 10 years in prison and a $750,000 fine.

He may have been a hero to environmentalists, but DeChristopher disrupted one of BLM's regular tasks -- auctioning off parcels of land for oil or gas exploration. Energy groups, which sued to overturn Salzar's overturning of the sales, warned that allowing DeChristopher to get away with his bids would create a fatal vulnerability in any future sale of exploration rights.

(For those keeping score at home, another federal judge has ruled that Salazar exceeded his authority in reversing the sales, but the judge did not reinstate them because the energy industry's lawsuit came a day too late.)

The U.S. attorney's office is not commenting on the case, but when it filed charges in 2009, acting U.S. Attorney Brett Tolman said: “Our nation is a nation of laws, and we live by the rule of law. We recognize that individuals have deeply felt views about important public issues, and they certainly should hold and express those views. However, there are ways to express viewpoints and to press for change without violating the law, disrupting open public processes, and causing financial harm to the government and to other individuals."

Actress Darryl Hannah was one of the demonstrators outside the courthouse on Monday, as was Angel Hays of Millcreek, Utah. “The bigger picture for him was the national parks," she told the Salt Lake Tribune. "Protecting our sacred places is worth going to jail for.”

DeChristopher's trial is expected to take about four days and he is expected to testify. The judge hearing the case has ruled that DeChristopher's defense cannot bring up his motivations for his action.

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-Nicholas Riccardi

Photo: Tim DeChristopher, now 29, after he won bids on 13 parcels at a BLM auction to block the Bush administration's sale of lands in southern Utah. Photo Credit: Courtney Sargent, Deseret News

A day after announcing it would scale back costly roundups of wild horses across the West, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management abruptly halted a controversial gather of mustangs in northeastern Nevada.

The roundup ended Friday with the removal of 1,368 horses from the range in the 1.3 million-acre Antelope Complex about 60 miles south of Wells, which was short of the agency's goal of gathering about 2,000 mustangs there, said BLM spokeswoman Heather Jasinski.

She said the halt to the roundup that began Jan. 23 had nothing to do with BLM Director Bob Abbey's announcement Thursday that the agency would reduce the number of wild horses removed from the range by about one-quarter — to 7,600 a year.

The action also didn't stem from a Feb. 16 House of Representatives vote in favor of an amendment to cut the agency's budget by $2 million to protest the roundups, she added.

It was called off because of high winds that frequently grounded a helicopter used to herd horses, Jasinski said, and the dispersal of mustangs into smaller groups that made them more difficult to gather.“That's all it was — a combination of those factors made it harder to gather horses in this area,” she said. “It's been a successful gather.”

But some horse activists say the roundup may have been called off because the BLM and a contractor were having difficulty locating horses in the complex, raising questions about the validity of census data upon which the agency bases its management decisions and the true number of mustangs on the range.

Contamination is spreading from an old coastal Oxnard metal recycling plant, which is now a federal Superfund site. The Environmental Protection Agency reported Thursday that lead, zinc and other pollutants are migrating from the 40-acre Halaco plant to the neighboring Ormond Beach wetlands, which is home to several rare and endangered species.

Superfund project manager Wayne Praskins told the Ventura County Star that the discovery complicates cleanup efforts and the EPA will likely need to expand the Superfund cleanup to include areas adjacent to the site.

However, the EPA, which regulates air, water and toxics contamination nationwide, is a target of massive budget cuts proposed by Republicans in Congress who say the agency's rules are burdensome for businesses.

Halaco shut down the plant years ago and filed for bankruptcy, leaving a massive waste heap laden with heavy metals and trace amounts of radioactive thorium.

-- Margot Roosevelt, with the Associated Press

The solar industry is usually on the oil industry’s case -- sniping about dirty energy and whatnot -- but the two sides came together Thursday in an unlikely alliance.

Fremont-based company GlassPoint Solar unveiled a demonstration facility that uses solar technology to coax petroleum out of an old oil field in Kern County.

In a process that usually involves heated natural gas, the sun will heat water to create 750-degree-Fahrenheit steam, which will seep into the underground rock. There, it will reduce the viscosity of the thick crude oil stubbornly residing in the well.

GlassPoint claims that its pilot plant is the only solar oil removal mechanism. Roughly 40% of the oil drawn out in the state relies on the natural gas method. The company claims that it could eventually take over 80% of that burden -- and at cheaper rates, even though natural gas prices are currently low.

The facility, which took less than seven weeks to build, sits on less than an acre. GlassPoint erected a glass greenhouse over reflective troughs -- made with lightweight aluminum foil like the type used for soda cans -- that concentrate sunlight to make steam.

The technology, GlassPoint says, could eventually be used in oil fields in the Middle East. In Fresno County, BrightSource Energy is already working on a similar project set to wrap up this year.

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-- Tiffany Hsu

Photo: GlassPoint

The United Nations has long courted celebrities for its peace-keeping and anti-poverty efforts, from Mia Farrow and Ricky Martin to George Clooney and Angelina Jolie.

It is a mutually beneficial arrangement. Hollywood stars grasp at gravitas; the U.N. pushes for publicity.

Now the beleaguered multi-national agency, fresh from a disappointing round of climate negotiations in Cancun, wants something more concrete: actual story lines in movies, television and social media drawing attention to the dangers of global warming.

The push comes at a time when public concern over climate change has plummeted in the polls and Congress has rejected federal legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“Usually I speak to prime ministers and presidents, but that has its limits” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who arrived in Los Angeles on Monday for a high-profile outreach effort. “Movie producers, directors, actors — they have global reach.”

Ban will sit down for a conversation with actor Don Cheadle before several hundred entertainment industry invitees at a “Global Creative Forum” Tuesday at the Hammer Museum.

The day-long gathering will feature panels titled “The United Nations and Hollywood for a Greener and Better Planet,” “Making Global Warming a HOT Issue” and "Empowering Women and Protecting Children for a Safer World.”

A federal judge in New Orleans has ordered the Interior Department to move forward with five drilling applications for the Gulf of Mexico that have been under review for four to nine months.

U.S. District Judge Martin Feldman, who overruled the Obama administration's first deep-water drilling moratorium last year, said Interior's stance that there was no strict time limit to the review process for permit applications "would produce autocratic discretion at best."

"Perhaps it is reasonable for permit applicants to wait more than two weeks in a necessarily more
closely regulated environment," Feldman wrote, in a reversal of his previous decision on a case brought by ENSCO Offshore Co. and other oil-rig service businesses. "Delays of four months and more in the permitting process, however, are unreasonable, unacceptable, and unjustified by the evidence before the Court."

Feldman noted that before the Deepwater Horizon disaster, which spewed more than 200 million gallons of oil into the gulf and killed 11 men, permits were approved in about two weeks. "Beyond dispute is that before the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, permit applications were resolved in some two weeks. Also clear is that the permit applications at issue here have experienced delays of four months, if not more," he wrote

The plaintiff, ENSCO, has five deep-water permits pending with the Interior Department and asked the court to require the department to act within a 30-day time frame set by federal regulations in 1978. Feldman agreed.

A month after the BP spill began, President Obama said that a congressionally  mandated 30-day time limit to decide on completed permit applications contributed to a rush to allow drilling in the gulf without adequate review.

"That leaves no time for the appropriate environmental review," Obama said during a May 27 news conference. "The result is, they are continually waived. And this is just one example of a law that was tailored by the industry to serve their needs instead of the public's. So Congress needs to address these issues as soon as possible, and my administration will work with them to do so."

When it comes to water management, California Assemblyman Jose Solorio focuses on three C's: capture, conservation and conveyance. Of those, the state has been most successful with  conservation, Solorio says, but it hasn't been nearly as adept at capturing rain and snowfall and conveying it to where it needs to be.

In an effort to reduce California's demand on limited drinking-water supplies and to minimize the amount of polluted storm water that flows into the ocean, Solorio has written AB 275, also known as the Rainwater Capture Act of 2011. Introduced last week, the bill would authorize property owners to install different types of rainwater-capture devices, including rain barrels that could provide water for outdoor gardens and other systems that would allow captured water to be used indoors for non-potable uses, such as toilet flushing.

"California has traditionally relied on expensive and large public works projects to capture and store water, such as dams and groundwater basins and other forms of above-surface water-storage projects, but those projects are large and expensive," Solorio said. "It's time we start thinking about what we can individually do in our own residential properties, as well as what businesses might do, in terms of capturing water on property voluntarily."

Solorio said the primary barrier to adoption of rainwater catchment has been ambiguity and uncertainty about what is legal.

"My bill is really for individuals, as well as entrepreneurs, to show that capturing rainwater and putting it to good use is consistent with the goals of California to increase water supply and protect the environment."

AB 275 will likely be reviewed by the Assembly's Water, Parks and Wildlife Committee in April, after which it is expected to proceed to the full Legislature for a vote.

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-- Susan Carpenter

Photo: A rain barrel outside a home in Sun Valley. Credit: Katie Falkenberg / For The Times