Here’s a guest column from Kent Holsinger and David Kueter that’s running in The Valley Courier:
Once every ten years a comet is visible in the night sky, the census counts every person living in the United States, and your water rights are at risk of abandonment in Colorado. Water is Colorado’s most precious natural resource. Colorado’s proposed decennial abandonment lists were published online on July 1st. Over four thousand water rights were listed, including over 630 rights in Division 3. This is a marked increase from decades past.
Put another way, the lists prepared by the Division Engineers at the Colorado Division of Water Resources could result in a significant number of water rights being declared abandoned throughout the state. The Rio Grande Basin has been over appropriated since the 1890’s with groundwater resources depleted throughout much of the basin. The Colorado Water Plan projects the basin will need an additional 180,000 acre feet (AF) by 2050. As a result, protecting existing rights is more important than ever. Water right owners should check the lists online at http://water.state.co.us to determine whether their rights are at risk. The lists will also be published in the local papers of record throughout the state in July and August.
While the agency is required to notify the “last known owner or claimant” of a water right included on the list by July 31st, the State’s ownership records are not always up-to-date. In an arid climate like Colorado, water rights are highly coveted and highly valued. Losing a water right to abandonment can be catastrophic. It can also directly impact the bottom line and the market value of your property. Water right owners have multiple opportunities to protest inclusion of a right on the abandonment lists. Under Colorado water laws, abandonment requires both an overt act (typically non-use) and intent. Good record-keeping, personal knowledge and extrinsic evidence like Google Earth imagery can help protect valued water rights. Lands protected by conservation easements may have other good arguments to employ.
Fortunately, the deadline for written objections to be submitted to the appropriate Division Engineer (along with a $10.00 fee for each water right) is July 1, 2021. In the meantime, water right owners would be wise to start collecting records and consulting with legal counsel. By December 31, 2021, after considering any filed objections, the Division Engineers will file the final proposed abandonment lists with the Water Court. Water right owners can then formally protest the inclusion on the list by June 30, 2022, which protests will be heard by the Water Judge beginning in October 2022. This article does not constitute legal advice nor the creation of an attorneyclient relationship. Kent Holsinger and David Kueter are attorneys at Holsinger Law, LLC and can be contacted at: http://www.holsingerlaw.com.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District spans 15 Western Slope counties. River District directors are asking voters this fall to raise the mill levy.
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Dennis Webb):
Voters in 15 counties this fall will be asked if they’re willing to lighten their wallets a little for the sake of supporting Western Slope water interests.
The Colorado River District board on Tuesday voted almost unanimously to put a proposal on the November ballot to boost its property tax rate to 0.5 mills. The move would raise its annual revenue by an estimated $4.9 million and cost an additional $1.90 per $100,000 in residential property value. The district’s levy is now capped at 0.252 mills and its effective current rate is 0.235 mills.
The district is seeking to address a growing financial crisis and strengthen its ability to play a role in addressing the water issues that challenge the region amid a continuing trend toward longterm drought…
The river district measure includes a provision that would relieve the district from TABOR’s limits on how much revenue it can collect and spend in any year, though it would continue to have to go to voters for any further hike in its tax rate.
The district already has cut staff and other expenses. Absent a tax hike, it is expecting a possible $425,000 reduction in general fund revenues based on the latest projection for how Gallagher will affect collections of taxes from residential properties next year.
If the measure passes, the district says it will spend only 14% of the new revenues to address its financial structural deficit, with the remainder to focus on projects partnering with others and focused on agriculture, infrastructure, healthy rivers, watershed health and water quality, conservation and efficiency…
Polling the district did in March and again a few weeks ago suggest that a majority of voters (about 63% in the latest poll) would support the tax measure today, even amidst a pandemic and its economic impacts. That polling suggests 60% support in Mesa County, which will be pivotal to the measure’s chances because Mesa has the largest population of any district county and also is largely conservative when it comes to tax and other issues.
Steve Acquafresca, Mesa County’s representative on the district board, is supporting the tax proposal.
Acquafresca had agreed to support the measure after ballot language was added that commits the district not to use any of the new tax revenue to pay for fallowing of agricultural fields. He said Mesa County commissioners also were unanimous on insisting on that clause being included before they would even consider supporting the tax measure.
“At least with the smog, you can see it. With the flaring, we can see it,” said [Ean Thomas] Tafoya. “I would say average people aren’t really aware as much about water pollution because it’s something that’s invisible.”
What concerns Tafoya is recent evidence Suncor is emitting high levels of per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, into Sand Creek…
Since last summer, Suncor has complied with a state directive to test treated groundwater it pumps into Sand Creek for the chemicals. A letter state regulators sent to the company show the effluent often had PFAS concentrations far exceeding what the EPA recommends for safe drinking water.
According to one test from January, the levels of PFOS and PFOA, two of the best understood PFAS, combined to 199 parts per trillion. That’s almost three times the federal health advisory of 70 parts per trillion. It’s seven times more than stricter levels recently adopted in New Hampshire…
Combined PFOA and PFOS emission levels from the Suncor refinery in Commerce City, Colo., in parts per trillion. Graphic credit: Colorado Public Radio
The refinery’s problems with water pollution date back to the 1990s. Due to hydrocarbon spills and benzene pollution, the company began to pump up groundwater, treat it and release it into Sand Creek…
While the presence of PFAS in that water has not been reported until now, it was not a huge surprise to state regulators at the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. The refinery has long practiced firefighting at an onsite location. In a statement, spokesperson Erin Rees said the company believes the chemicals in groundwater comes from the historic use of Class B firefighting foam. She added the company has since replaced the foam with a new product in line with EPA recommendations…
The news also follows a statewide survey commissioned by the legislature, which identified Suncor as a forever-chemical hotspot. The state conducted tests of 24 wells at the refinery between October 2018 and May 2019. The results found concentrations almost 150 times above the EPA health advisory.
That same survey included tests of surface water across the state. The only place where levels exceeded the threshold of 70 parts per trillion was the mouth of Sand Creek, just below Suncor…
After finding such high concentrations, Dani said the state worked with local health officials to reach nearby homes with shallow groundwater wells. The campaign, conducted in English and Spanish, offered residents free PFAS tests. According to Dani, the results show “we don’t have anyone drinking water above the health advisory.”
[…]
Kipp Scott, the manager of the South Adams County Water & Sanitation District, said the same can be said for municipal tap water. His system supplies water to more than 60,000 people in Commerce City and other parts of southern Adams County.
The district has worked to control PFAS in its water supply since 2018 when it found high concentrations in a dozen wells near I-270 and Quebec. The district disconnected three of the wells and purchased supplies from Denver Water to dilute what it sent to customers…
Following the incident, Scott said his district improved its water treatment practices and launched programs to conduct regular tests of the chemicals. Those results show water now sent to customers contains about 25 parts per trillion for PFOS/PFOA, below the health advisory.
Scott added he’s “reasonably sure” forever chemicals from Suncor aren’t affecting the water supply of its neighbors. That’s because most of the water supplied to the district comes from wells sunk into a different branch of the alluvial aquifer running beneath the district. Based on groundwater models, he said he has no reason to believe the chemicals at Suncor have reached the water supply.
Still, the water in Sand Creek does join the South Platte, which flows through Colorado into Nebraska. Water districts downstream from Commerce City use the river to grow crops and supply drinking water.
A Coming Crack Down
Even if forever chemicals from Suncor aren’t affecting drinking water, it will likely affect the company.
Last week, the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission adopted the state’s first-ever limits on forever chemicals. The new policy was pushed ahead in the absence of federal regulation, which has lagged under complex EPA rulemaking and inaction from Congress. It allows the state to set limits for the chemicals in wastewater permits in line with the federal health advisory. If a company or wastewater district exceeds the limit, it could require water treatment or issue fines of up to $54,000 per day.
Meg Parish, permit section manager for the Water Quality Control Division, said Suncor’s permit is up for renewal next year and would be subject to the new policy…
Rees, the spokesperson for Suncor, said the company is already exploring PFOS/PFOA treatment options as a part of its general efforts to improve water coming from the Commerce City facility…
But the commitment from Suncor doesn’t put Olga Mijares at ease. The school administrator lives near the refinery and raised her three children in Commerce City. Like most people in the largely Latino community, she doesn’t drink the tap water but showers and cooks with it.
Her oldest son, who is 29 years old, has already battled thyroid and brain cancer. She said a doctor told her she would never know what was behind the conditions and to put it out of her mind, if possible. She said that gets a lot harder when she learns about any new pollution near her home.
PFAS contamination in the U.S. via ewg.org. [Click the map to go to the website.]
States can force members of the Electoral College to vote for the winner of the popular vote in their state’s presidential primary, the Supreme Court recently ruled. The July 6 decision removed one of the two reasons why the framers of the U.S. Constitution created this election system: to empower political elites who may know more about the candidates than ordinary voters. Now, the founders’ only remaining justification for the Electoral College is structural racism.
Though the Electoral College has changed since it was first used to elect George Washington to the presidency in 1789, my research shows that the system continues to give more power to states whose populations are whiter and more racially resentful.
Electoral College myths and realities
The Founding Fathers created the Electoral College in large part because they feared voters would not know all the candidates who would be running for president. In that era, most people never left their home states, so they were not likely to know candidates from other states.
With its recent decision, the Supreme Court has abandoned the possibility that electors might vote for people other than the candidate who wins the popular vote in their state.
The other reason for the Electoral College was to bridge a major divide among the states: slavery. As James Madison said at the Constitutional Convention: “[T]he great division of interests in the U. States did not lie between the large & small States; it lay between the Northern & Southern” because of “their having or not having slaves.”
The 13 colonies had competing land claims in the early years of the United States. Kmusser, CC BY
Race in early America
By the time the founders discussed how to pick a president, they had already made the so-called “three-fifths compromise,” counting enslaved people as three-fifths of a person in the census and allotting seats in the House of Representatives accordingly. That gave Southern slave states an advantage over the Northern states in the House.
Slave states – with many people and with fewer – insisted on the Electoral College to preserve this advantage to give them a similar advantage in presidential selection. Ultimately, delegates to the Constitutional Convention decided that each state would receive votes in the Electoral College equal to their representation in both houses of Congress.
As a result, after the 1790 census, Virginia got 21 electoral votes and Pennsylvania got 15, though both were home to just over 110,000 free white male adults, who were then the only Americans allowed to vote. That’s because Virginia had 292,627 enslaved residents, to Pennsylvania’s 3,737, the country’s very first census shows.
Similarly, South Carolina and New Hampshire had nearly identical numbers of free white men – right around 36,000. But South Carolina got two more electoral votes, for a total of eight, because more than 100,000 enslaved people lived there, compared to New Hampshire’s 158 enslaved people.
In 1803, the 1800 census was about to shift the balance even more toward slave states. Representative Samuel Thatcher of Massachusetts complained that counting enslaved people added significant numbers to the slave states’ delegations.
The slavery bonus ensured that the nation’s first 18 presidential elections delivered a slave-owner as either president, vicepresidentorboth. Only in 1860, with the victory of Abraham Lincoln from Illinois and his running mate, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, did a team of Northern politicians manage to beat the Electoral College’s skew toward white Southerners.
After the Civil War
Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment removed the three-fifths clause, and the 15th Amendment should have protected African Americans’ legal right to vote. But that didn’t fix the Electoral College’s anti-Black bias. It actually made the problem worse, because Southern state governments were happy to get the representation from their large numbers of Black citizens – while keeping them from voting through discriminatory practices like literacy tests and poll taxes.
Judicial decisions at the time upheld Jim Crow restrictions on the right to vote, but those practices are illegaltoday.
This system benefited the Democratic Party, which was dominant in the South. Republicans tried to counter that power by strategically admitting new states from the Great Plains and Mountain West. In part because of racially disparate postwar settlement policies, these states – such as Nebraska, the Dakotas and Wyoming – were unusually thinly populated, heavily white and reliably Republican.
Those statehood decisions made a century and a half ago still reverberate today. States with smaller populations have more electoral votes per resident because, no matter how few people they might have, they still get two senators and one House member.
I recently performed a quantitative analysis of race and the allocation of electoral votes. The data indicate that whiter states consistently wield more electoral power partly because of their population.
On average, as a state’s racial composition gets whiter, its electoral power increases. For instance, in 2016, North Dakota was the seventh whitest state and 47th on the list in terms of adult population. It had more than 5.2 electoral votes per million adult residents, when an average state had just 2.2 electoral votes per million adult residents. According to my analysis, a state that is 10% whiter than the average state tends to have one extra electoral vote per million adult residents than the average state.
Statistically speaking, if two states’ population numbers indicate each would have 10 electoral votes, but one had substantially more racial resentment, the more intolerant state would likely have 11.
This is not an ironclad rule, and the inherent bias isn’t always decisive. For instance, Donald Trump owes his presidency to winning Wisconsin, a state that is whiter than the average state, but that has slightly less electoral votes per capita than average.
In addition, the centuries-old racial bias in the Electoral College could disappear with future population changes. Perhaps other states with relatively few people will follow the pattern of Nevada, whose population has recently become larger and more racially diverse. But the Electoral College remains a system born from white supremacy that will likely continue to operate in a racially discriminatory fashion.
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Western Water Assessment (WWA) is hosting a virtual workshop focused on municipal water planning in the Mountain West. The workshop will feature talks from scientists and water professionals on the current water year, and on recent trends and future projections in snowpack, drought, and water supply. In addition, we will provide demonstrations of several tools and data sources on this topic. There will be several opportunities to engage in discussions with scientists, water managers, and other experts, including a panel discussion with several water utilities.
Releases from the Aspinall Unit will be decreased from 1550 cfs to 1450 cfs on Tuesday, July 21st. Releases are being adjusted to maintain flows near the baseflow target in the lower Gunnison River. The July 15th runoff forecast for Blue Mesa Reservoir predicts 57% of average for April-July inflows.
There is a drought rule in the Aspinall Unit Operations EIS which has changed the baseflow target at the Whitewater gage. The rule states that during Dry or Moderately Dry years, when the content of Blue Mesa Reservoir drops below 600,000 AF the baseflow target is reduced from 1050 cfs to 900 cfs. Therefore, the baseflow target for July and August will now be 900 cfs.
Flows in the lower Gunnison River are currently above the baseflow target of 900 cfs. River flows are expected to stay at levels above the baseflow target after the release decrease has arrived at the Whitewater gage.
Currently, Gunnison Tunnel diversions are 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon are around 550 cfs. After this release change Gunnison Tunnel diversions will still be around 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon will be around 450 cfs. Current flow information is obtained from provisional data that may undergo revision subsequent to review.
Grand opening of the Gunnison Tunnel in Colorado 1909. Photo credit USBR.
U.S. Commissioner Jayne Harkins of the International Boundary and Water Commission, United States and Mexico, today reiterated that Mexico must take immediate action to deliver Rio Grande water to the United States to comply with the bilateral 1944 Water Treaty. Under the treaty, Rio Grande water is allotted to the United States in quantities calculated based on cycles of five years. The current cycle ends on October 24, 2020. To meet its international obligations, Mexico must deliver an additional 416,829 acre-feet (514.2 million cubic meters [mcm]) to the United States between now and the end of the cycle.
“Mexican government officials have stated there is enough water stored in the Mexican reservoirs to enable Mexico to meet the needs of Chihuahua farmers during this year’s irrigation season while complying with the treaty. They need to increase their water releases to the United States immediately,” said Commissioner Harkins. “Mexico has failed to implement releases promised earlier and continuing to delay increases the risk of Mexico failing to meet its delivery obligation.”
Commissioner Emily Lindley of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said, “Mexico has not honored its commitments. Texas farmers, irrigators, municipalities, and industries along the Rio Grande rely on water that should be delivered as laid out in the 1944 Treaty. I echo Commissioner Harkins that it is vital Mexico deliver water immediately to the U.S.”
Mexico has only delivered 1,333,171 acre-feet (1,644 mcm) out of the minimum five- year obligation of 1,750,000 acre-feet (2,159 mcm). The remaining volume yet to be delivered exceeds the 350,000 acre-feet (431.7 mcm) minimum average volume the 1944 Water Treaty requires over an entire year, demonstrating that immediate action is required.
“I want to emphasize that farmers and cities in South Texas rely on this water to get them through the summer,” Commissioner Harkins added.
Under the 1944 Water Treaty, Mexico delivers Rio Grande water to the United States while the United States delivers Colorado River water to Mexico. The United States continues to meet its obligations to deliver Colorado River water and expects Mexico to fulfill its Rio Grande obligations to the United States. The International Boundary and Water Commission is responsible for applying the boundary and water treaties between the United States and Mexico.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Here’s the release from Rice University (Jade Boyd):
Rice’s trap-and-zap strategy for antibiotic resistant bugs becomes wrap, trap and zap
A shield of graphene helps particles destroy antibiotic-resistant bacteria and free-floating antibiotic resistance genes in wastewater treatment plants.
Improved bacterial affinity and reactive oxygen species generation enhances antibacterial inactivation in wastewater by graphene oxide-wrapped nanospheres developed by scientists at Rice University and Tongji University, Shanghai. Antibiotic resistance genes (eARG) released by inactivated antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB) in the vicinity of photocatalytic sites on the spheres facilitates their degradation. (Credit: Alvarez Research Group/Rice University)
Think of the new strategy developed at Rice University as “wrap, trap and zap.”
The labs of Rice environmental scientist Pedro Alvarez and Yalei Zhang, a professor of environmental engineering at Tongji University, Shanghai, introduced microspheres wrapped in graphene oxide in the Elsevier journal Water Research.
Alvarez and his partners in the Rice-based Nanosystems Engineering Research Center for Nanotechnology-Enabled Water Treatment (NEWT) have worked toward quenching antibiotic-resistant “superbugs” since first finding them in wastewater treatment plants in 2013.
“Superbugs are known to breed in wastewater treatment plants and release extracellular antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs) when they are killed as the effluent is disinfected,” Alvarez said. “These ARGs are then discharged and may transform indigenous bacteria in the receiving environment, which become resistome reservoirs.
“Our innovation would minimize the discharge of extracellular ARGs, and thus mitigate dissemination of antibiotic resistance from wastewater treatment plants,” he said.
A scanning electron microscope image shows a graphene oxide shell around the layered nanoplates that make up the core of a particle that traps and zaps antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the resistance genes they release. The wrapped spheres developed at Rice and Tongji universities proved three times better able to disinfect secondary effluent from wastewater plants than the spheres without the nitrogen-doped graphene oxide. (Credit: Deyi Li/Tongji University)
The Rice lab showed its spheres — cores of bismuth, oxygen and carbon wrapped with nitrogen-doped graphene oxide — inactivated multidrug-resistant Escherichia coli bacteria and degraded plasmid-encoded antibiotic-resistant genes in secondary wastewater effluent.
The graphene-wrapped spheres kill nasties in effluent by producing three times the amount of reactive oxygen species (ROS) as compared to the spheres alone.
The spheres themselves are photocatalysts that produce ROS when exposed to light. Lab tests showed that wrapping the spheres minimized the ability of ROS scavengers to curtail their ability to disinfect the solution.
The researchers said nitrogen-doping the shells increases their ability to capture bacteria, giving the catalytic spheres more time to kill them. The enhanced particles then immediately capture and degrade the resistant genes released by the dead bacteria before they contaminate the effluent.
“Wrapping improved bacterial affinity for the microspheres through enhanced hydrophobic interaction between the bacterial surface and the shell,” said co-lead author Pingfeng Yu, a postdoctoral research associate at Rice’s Brown School of Engineering. “This mitigated ROS dilution and scavenging by background constituents and facilitated immediate capture and degradation of the released ARGs.”
An electron microscope image shows E. coli bacteria trapped by wrapped microspheres developed at Rice and Tongji universities. The spheres were created to disinfect secondary effluent from wastewater treatment plants, a breeding ground for antibiotic resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes. (Credit: Deyi Li/Tongji University)
Because the wrapped spheres are large enough to be filtered out of the disinfected effluent, they can be reused, Yu said. Tests showed the photocatalytic activity of the spheres was relatively stable, with no significant decrease in activity after 10 cycles. That was significantly better than the cycle lifetime of the same spheres minus the wrap.
Deyi Li of Tongji University, Shanghai, is co-lead author of the paper. Co-authors are Xuefei Zhou and Zhang of Tongji and Jae-Hong Kim, the Henry P. Becton Sr. Professor and Chair of Chemical and Environmental Engineering at Yale University. Alvarez is the George R. Brown Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, a professor of chemistry, of materials science and nanoengineering, and of chemical and biomolecular engineering and director of NEWT.
The National Science Foundation, the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the National Key R&D Program of China supported the research.
Jade Boyd is science editor and associate director of news and media relations in Rice University’s Office of Public Affairs.
2020 has been a tumultuous year, and as we enter our fifth month of quarantine and social distancing, it can be encouraging to find things to celebrate. With the close of Colorado’s legislative session last month and Governor Polis finalizing his bill signings, one thing that we can laud is the work that was accomplished for our rivers. Even though the Colorado General Assembly struggled to fully address a more than $3 billion budget shortfall, they maintained and expanded programs and investments necessary to keep our rivers flowing, and this is something we can be proud of.
In March, Governor Polis signed two bills into law that expand and improve Colorado’s instream flow program. These bills, HB20-1157 and HB20-1037, provide new tools for water users and conservationists to work together to keep water in rivers for the benefit of fish and wildlife. HB20-1157 will be a particularly important tool for the Yampa River Fund which provides grants to improve the health of the Yampa River, including through leases of water from Stagecoach Reservoir to enhance late-season fish habitat, agriculture, and to benefit the local tourism and outdoor recreation economy.
Colorado also made a new commitment to improve water conservation in our cities and towns. The Colorado Water Plan, finalized in 2015, sets a goal of achieving 400,000 acre-feet of municipal and industrial water conservation savings by 2050. The way that we plan and build our cities and towns contributes to how we use water, how much we use, and how quickly demands grow for new supplies. The new law, HB20-1095, authorizes local governments to include water conservation elements into their master plans, thereby encouraging local governments to combine their land and water use planning to accelerate the state toward its 400,000 acre-foot conservation savings goal.
While budgets were slashed statewide, fortunately funding for the implementation of Colorado’s Water Plan was maintained. Over $7 million was included in the Colorado Water Conservation Board budget for Water Plan implementation grants or water projects across the state, and an additional $4 million was allocated to invest in stream and watershed management planning efforts to keep rivers healthy and flowing. We appreciate the state’s continued recognition of the importance of clean rivers and drinking water for all Coloradans and hope that this commitment continues.
State Capitol May 12, 2018 via Aspen Journalism
Just over six months ago, voters demonstrated their own commitment to healthy rivers and water supplies by legalizing sports betting and directing tax revenues to fund the implementation of Colorado’s Water Plan. As sports begin to start back up, we urge the General Assembly to respect the will of the voters and ensure this tax revenue is directed, as intended, to Water Plan implementation.
While we celebrate these wins for Colorado’s waterways, we recognize there is still more work to be done.
In June, the Trump administration issued rules that significantly reduce protections for Colorado’s rivers and wetlands under the Clean Water Act, leaving many previously protected waterways in limbo. The new federal rule leaves one out of every five stream miles in Colorado, including half of the state’s wetlands, unprotected from construction activity discharges. Thanks to a lawsuit led by Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the rule has been temporarily blocked pending resolution, which maintains protections for our state’s waterways—for now.
Regardless of the outcome in court, it is time for Colorado to ensure that its rivers and wetlands will always be protected from destructive dumping and discharges. The Water community is coming together—virtually—this summer to try to find some common ground on this issue and we plan to bring a solution before the General Assembly for the 2021 legislative session.
While 2020 seems to be the year of one bad headline after the next, we are heartened by the work of our state legislature and government to make positive strides toward safeguarding our water future.
While monsoon rainfall in the Four Corners has been of a hit-or-miss nature so far this season, most of San Juan County [New Mexico] will see a good chance of precipitation in the week ahead.
Randall Hergert, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Albuquerque, said the moisture outlook for the next several days is very encouraging.
“We are in the monsoon season,” he said. “We are finally getting a nice plume of moisture coming up from Mexico.”
Hergert said storms will begin to form over high terrain on July 21 and continue to build July 21 through July 23, moving out over lower-elevation areas.
“The peak of activity will be toward the end of the week for the Four Corners area,” he said, explaining that a plume of moisture is making its way toward northwest New Mexico and eastern Arizona.
The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project will add 77,000 total acre feet — 72,000 for Denver Water use and 5,000 for an environmental pool that provides additional water for South Boulder Creek during low-flow periods — nearly tripling reservoir capacity.
Utility says Gross expansion needed for water security for 1.5 million people
Denver Water has been awarded its final federal permit for expansion of Gross Reservoir but may still need a permit from Boulder County.
A permit from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission announced today wraps up all the federal permitting needed to raise the existing 340-foot-tall Gross Dam across South Boulder Creek by 131 feet.
The dam has a hydro plant with a capacity of producing up to 7.6 megawatts.
But the most difficult permit may be the one that it still lacks: a 1041 permit from Boulder County. The Boulder Daily Camera explains that a district court decision affirmed the county’s authority to review the project under a 1973 law. That law, commonly known by his legislative bill title, gives local governments land use authority to review major projects by other governments.
Eagle County used that same authority in 1991 to deny a permit sought by Aurora and Colorado Springs to conduct a major water diversion project from within the Holy Cross Wilderness Area near Minturn and Red Cliff. The two Front Range cities fought the denial but lost and ultimately participated in a collaborative process designed to produce a more acceptable solution. That process is ongoing, with many opposed to the lighter, gentler approach. But by any measure, the current proposal in the Homestake Valley would have much less impact upon the wilderness area .
This case of Gross Dam is different in that the water being diverted only passes through Boulder County. The water would come from Grand County via the Moffat Tunnel. The county itself signed off on the expansion after a lengthy collaborative process that was in many ways modeled after what was created in the wake of the Homestake II denial.
Denver Water in this case committed to a collaborative process called Learning by Doing. The intent is to allow Denver to use its water rights in the Fraser Valley and also in the adjoining Williams Fork Valley but in ways that avoid the harshest of impacts.
The process earned Denver the support of Trout Unlimited, and also some fierce Denver critics such as Kirk Klancke, a Fraser Valley resident.
But some Fraser Valley residents continue to oppose the project. “We don’t have any more water to send to Denver,” says Andy Miller, a Fraser town trustee, as elected members of the governing council are known. “With the water that is being diverted now, we are barely keeping the system alive.”
Miller said additional diversions would mean that at times the only water in the Fraser River will be the releases from the wastewater treatment plants in Winter Park and Fraser. “That’s not enough,” says Miller, a member of the Upper Colorado River Watershed Group.
Denver began pursuing the expansion of the dam after the drought of 2002 exposed the vulnerability of water delivery to Arvada and other suburbs in the northwest metropolitan area that contract with Denver Water for supplies. The next year, Denver began the federal environmental permitting process. Denver already received approvals from the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2016 and 2017.
Colorado’s largest water provider, Denver Water provides water not just for the city’s residents but a broad swath of the metropolitan area, a quarter of the state’s 5.8 million residents.
In a statement, Jim Lochhead, the chief executive of Denver Water, said the FERC permit—it’s technically called an order—brings a comprehensive 17-year federal and state permitting process to a close.
Lochhead also characterized the project as a necessary given the increasing weather variability in a warming climate.
“The project provides the system balance, additional storage and resiliency needed for our existing customers as well as a growing population. We are seeing extreme climate variability and that means we need more options to safeguard a reliable water supply for 1.5 million people in Denver Water’s service area,” he said.
Denver Water’s collection system via the USACE EIS
Denver Water announced Friday it earned its final federal approval to pursue the largest construction project in the history of Boulder County with its planned Gross Reservoir expansion.
If completed, the enlargement would help continue to serve a growing population in the water provider’s jurisdiction amid climate change that is clouding future supply with uncertainty, [Jim Lochhead] said…
An opening brief is due in August for the water agency’s appeal of a Boulder District Court decision that affirmed the county’s ability to review the project under what is known as local government 1041 power, which could result in its ultimate official disapproval by local leaders, or not, if they allow it to move forward…
Denver Water touted that the project has the support of environmental groups such as Colorado Trout Unlimited, The Greenway Foundation and Western Resource Advocates. It also said it has committed more than $20 million to more than 60 environmental mitigation and enhancement projects that will create new habitat and water flow protections for rivers and streams on both sides of the Continental Divide.
“We are committed to working closely with the Boulder County community to ensure safety, be considerate neighbors and retain open, two-way communication channels during this construction project,” Jeff Martin, program manager for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project, stated in the news release. “We will continue to seek community input on topics such as traffic control plans, hauling traffic schedules, tree removal plans and other construction-related activities.”
The design phase for the Gross expansion is expected to finish by the middle of next year, followed by four years of construction, if approved. It will involve raising the existing 340-foot Gross Dam by an additional 131 feet, increasing reservoir capacity by 77,000 acre-feet, and it will include 5,000 acre-feet of storage dedicated to South Boulder Creek flows that will be managed by the Boulder and Lafayette city governments. Raising the capacity of Gross was a recommendation of environmentalists as an alternative to building a new dam, a proposal that would have created Two Forks Reservoir in the 1980s, the release said.
Even with federal approval, Boulder County still wants to conduct its own review under local government 1041 power, that could result in the project’s ultimate official disapproval by local leaders.
“We think that it was a well-reasoned decision from the district court and we have strong arguments in defense of the appeal,” County Deputy Attorney David Hughes said. “It’s not uncommon for local governments to use 1041 powers in review of major projects by other governments.”
Denver Water is expecting to appeal the county’s decision and provide an opening brief in August.
In 2018, some environmental groups sued three U.S. government agencies in an effort to stop the expansion. They argued that it would harm aquatic life and wildlife as well as hinder streamflows, adding that the Colorado River needs to be better protected…
Lochhead has said that Denver Water will only take extra water from tributaries during wet years, avoiding periods of drought.
It’s been a long road for the utility, which began the permitting process for the expansion seventeen years ago. Denver Water plans to finish the design next year, followed by four years of construction.
The bathtub ring in Lake Powell in October 2014, which illustrates how reservoir levels have dropped since 2000. A state official says she sees no reason Colorado shouldn’t move forward with an investigation of a program that would send water to Lake Powell. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
After a year of meetings, workshops and in-depth discussions, state officials feel a feasibility investigation into a program that would pay water users to reduce consumption and add to a savings account in Lake Powell should continue.
Although no formal decision has yet been made on whether to implement a voluntary, temporary and compensated water-use reduction plan known as demand management, Amy Ostdiek, Colorado Water Conservation Board deputy section chief for interstate, federal and water information, told the state agency’s board of directors on Wednesday she has not found a reason to keep from moving forward.
“I didn’t identify any points that would indicate to me that we should stop the feasibility investigation,” said Ostdiek, who has been leading and organizing the process for the state. “From my perspective, we have not identified a reason not to continue the analysis or any hard reason it wouldn’t work.”
At the heart of a potential program is a reduction in water use in an attempt to send up to 500,000 acre-feet downstream to Lake Powell to bolster levels in the giant reservoir and meet 1922 Colorado River Compact obligations.
Under such a program, agricultural water users could get paid to temporarily fallow fields and leave more water in the river, in order to fill a 500,000 acre-foot pool as an insurance policy in case of continued drought or further reduction in average flows.
This field near Carbondale is irrigated with water that eventually flows into the Colorado River. The state has wrapped up the first year of an investigation into a program that could pay irrigators to reduce their consumptive use in order to send water downstream to a savings account in Lake Powell. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Report from workgroups
In June 2019, the CWCB, a state agency responsible for developing and protecting Colorado’s water, named 74 water experts and managers to eight work groups tasked with tackling complicated issues and questions around the creation of a demand management program. The groups were divided by topics: law and policy; monitoring and verification; water-rights administration and accounting; environmental considerations; economic considerations and local government; funding; education and outreach; and agricultural impacts.
A ninth group, headed by former Colorado lawmaker and chair of the Interbasin Compact Committee Russell George, has been focusing on how to ensure a demand management program is equitable among water users and basins. The IBCC facilitates conversations among representatives of different river basins and addresses statewide water issues.
Each group met multiple times over the past year and their findings, as well as their lingering questions, were included in a 200-page demand management update report presented [July 15, 2020] to CWCB directors.
The sprawling report summarizes the work completed by the groups and their overlapping key values, concerns and uncertainties. The sustainability of agriculture and agricultural communities ranked highest in the values category, while program design and participation ranked highest in the uncertainties category.
Several board members offered their opinions on a potential demand management program. Steve Anderson, who represents the Gunnison-Uncompahgre River basin, questioned whether the state could create water savings by funding more projects outlined in the Basin Implementation Plans instead of crafting a demand management program. The BIPs identify how each basin’s water needs will be met through existing or new projects, policies and processes.
“Once we become more efficient I think we would generate more system water for the Colorado,” he said. “At the end of the day we are going to have a choice between buying an insurance plan or using those funds elsewhere for conservation and efficiency.”
It is unclear how much a demand management program would cost the state, but one of the work groups is dedicated to the funding question.
The main goal of a demand management program would be to defend against what’s known as a “compact call,” which could happen if the upper basin states — Colorado, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico — were not able to deliver the 75 million acre-feet of water over 10 years to the lower basin states, as required by the Colorado River Compact. Colorado water managers desperately want to avoid this scenario, which looms larger each year with the increasing effects of drought and climate change on an over-allocated river, because it could trigger mandatory cutbacks for water users.
CWCB board member Greg Felt, who represents the Arkansas River basin, struck a dark tone, saying moving forward with a demand management program is necessary because one of the potential alternatives — involuntary cutbacks, also known as “curtailment” under a compact call — will be impossible to enforce.
“I frankly think that people are not going to accept curtailments on any rights the way they have historically,” Felt said. “From what I’ve watched this year in rural Colorado, people aren’t going to be buying curtailment. The water is going to come out of the stream. You can’t have enough water commissioners to stop that.”
Water from the Government Highline Canal pours into Highline Lake in Mack. If irrigators in Grand Valley need more water than what was supplied upstream, the Grand Valley Water Users Association – the group that regulates water flow in the canal – can close the gate to the lake to back up water as a last resort. Photo credit: Bethany Blitz/Aspen Journalism
Funding for next steps restored
With the first year of a feasibility investigation complete, the ultimate decision on whether to move forward with a demand management program lies with CWCB board members. The board plans to discuss the work presented by the work groups at a one-day workshop in September.
CWCB staff also are planning a virtual regional workshop for the public to learn more about the first year’s findings. Both meetings will be open to the public.
For several weeks there was uncertainty surrounding the future funding of the demand management feasibility investigation, when on May 1, Gov. Jared Polis suspended the program’s funding due to the COVID-19-caused state budget crisis. But the funding was restored in this year’s projects bill, according to CWCB Deputy Director Lauren Ris.
The agency now has until the end of June 2021 to spend the remaining $834,000 of the original $1.7 million allocation, should the board decide to continue delving into the issue for another year.
CWCB Director Rebecca Mitchell urged the board to be leaders for Colorado on the issue of demand management.
“We want to do whatever we can to avoid a curtailment situation,” Mitchell said. “Everyone is looking to see what we do and how we handle this, and we do have a very unique opportunity at a very critical time to lead strongly on this.”
Aspen Journalism is a local, nonprofit, investigative news organization covering water and rivers in collaboration with The Aspen Times and other Swift Communications newspapers. This story ran in the July 18 edition of The Aspen Times.
Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River District, addressing a crowd of 265 water managers, users and stakeholders in Grand Junction [September 2018] at a River District seminar called ‘Risky business on the Colorado River.’ Mueller spelled out six principles the River District wants the state to embrace as it develops a ‘demand management’ program designed to get the state’s water users to reduce their water use in order to bolster levels in Lake Powell.
Click here to read the newsletter. Here’s an excerpt:
General Manager Andy Mueller recommends financial security for West Slope water security
The Colorado River is under tremendous strain. In seven states and two countries over 40 million people rely upon the river for their drinking water and millions more throughout the United States are fed by the more than three million acres of irrigated agriculture that the river supports. The number of people served by the river is expected to hit at least 70 million by 2060.
Long term drought and rising temperatures mean that we have less water flowing in the river. Over 60% of the river’s natural flow originates within the boundaries of the Colorado River District. As the population grows, and the river flows continue to diminish, we are experiencing greater pressure on this limited resource.
There is widespread recognition that the river is out of balance and there are many suggestions as to how the river should be brought back into balance. Many of the suggestions being promoted by Lower Basin states and major metropolitan areas focus on reducing water use in places like our District; people such as former U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt are calling for a redistribution of water from our agricultural communities to the urbanized Lower Basin. Never has it been so clear that the people of Western Colorado need a strong advocate at the water policy table who can speak for the West Slope with a unified voice, leading in the protection, conservation, use and development of the waters of the Colorado River for the residents and environment within our District. That voice is your Colorado River District.
Unfortunately, even before the current pandemic-inspired economic upheaval, the Colorado River District was facing a declining revenue stream. Declining tax revenues from the fossil fuel industry, losses caused by the Gallagher Amendment and the effects of the Taxpayers’ Bill of Rights (TABOR) Amendment are conspiring to drive the District’s income into significantly negative territory. The most recent state predictions for 2021 indicate that the Gallagher Amendment alone will likely cause the District to lose approximately $425,000 in the District’s General Fund budget.
Our flat and decreasing revenue led District management in the last 18 months to reduce the District work force by 4 positions or 15%, suspend our grant program, reduce the District vehicle fleet and implement across-the-board reductions in expenses. Even with these cost-saving measures, our financial projections indicate that the District will have to reduce its work force again as soon as 2022. While the District to date has been able to tighten its belt and successfully accomplish our core mission, our ability to protect the West Slope’s water security in the future will be significantly compromised through the loss of additional staff positions and proper resources.
Additionally, as our communities face the dual challenges of increasing demand on the Colorado River and reduction in the flow of the river, important West Slope priorities are not being accomplished because they are unfunded. West Slope communities through the three Basin Roundtables in our District have identified priority projects that are essential for water security. The unfunded water priorities span the full range of needs in all categories, including productive agriculture, infrastructure, healthy rivers, watershed health and water quality, conservation and efficiency.
In the recent past, advocacy and creative problem-solving by the District staff have enabled the District to serve as a catalyst for important projects. However, without the ability to bring money to the table we often find ourselves negotiating with our hands out and very little ability to influence the selection and direction of projects. As the District and our water users are forced to turn empty handed to the federal or state government for funding, we find the priorities of the state and federal governments, not those of the West Slope, are dictating the type, location and scope of projects.
The District was founded to lead in the protection, conservation, use and development of the water resources of the Colorado River basin for the welfare of the District. In 1937, at the request of West Slope leaders, the District was authorized to collect up to 2.5 mills in property tax. Today, due to a variety of reasons, the District’s mill levy is capped at 0.252 and its current, effective mill levy is set at .235 mills…less than one-tenth of its original authorization. The District’s ability to fulfill its mission and protect the West Slope is significantly hampered by declining revenue.
In January I recommended to the Colorado River District Board that it consider placing a question on the Nov. 3, 2020 ballot asking voters to approve an increase of the District’s taxing authority to up to 0.5 mills. The recommended increase is predicted on generating approximately $4.9 million in additional revenue per year at a cost of approximately $1.90 per $100,000 in residential value, which is equivalent to a tax increase of $6.34 annually for the median-priced home in the District.
The Board is still contemplating my recommendation. In January, Board members asked the staff to conduct additional outreach and public opinion research. We commenced that outreach through public forums and started discussions with Boards of County Commissioners. We arranged for public opinion polling to take place in the second half of March before the April Board meeting.
Unfortunately, by mid-March the coronavirus pandemic swept through Colorado and shut down our communities, wreaking economic havoc and interfering with our ability to conduct significant portions of our planned public outreach through districtwide events known as our State of the River meetings.
Our polling conducted in late March, after the closure of the ski areas and during the shut-down of the rest of the state, came back showing strong public support for the recommended tax increase. Specifically, the poll indicated that 65% of the likely voters polled were in favor of the measure. The poll showed widespread support across the political spectrum and throughout the District. The poll also showed incredibly strong support for the mission of the District indicating that projects that focus on water security in Western Colorado are funding priorities for residents throughout the District.
In April, society was coming to terms with the long-term economic effects of the pandemic and the Board and staff expressed concern about moving ahead with any tax increase, no matter how small. The Board requested that staff continue to engage in outreach to the public and county leadership and requested that polling be conducted closer to the July quarterly meeting so that we would have a better, more current understanding of public support for this potential ballot measure.
The additional polling was conducted at the beginning of July, and the report is still being finalized at the time of this writing. Preliminary reports from our research firm indicate that support in early July for the District and the potential tax increase remain high. 63% of likely voters polled support the tax increase. When informed that the increase would be modest, i.e. $1.90 per $100,000 in residential value, support for the measure climbed to 67%, identical to the informed support in March. Based upon our outreach to political and civic leaders in the District, there is generally widespread, but not unanimous support for the proposed ballot measure.
We have heard from the public, water-user entities and elected officials that it is incredibly important that the District Board and staff publicly commit to how the funds will be spent by the District. Our Board is contemplating the draft Fiscal Implementation Plan, which if adopted, will outline the District’s commitment as to how it would spend the additional revenue.
In summary, the plan calls for the District to allocate approximately 86% or $4.2 million of the anticipated annual revenue to partnership projects in the District, prioritizing multi-purpose projects that meet needs in one or more of the following five categories: productive agriculture, infrastructure, healthy rivers, watershed health and water quality, conservation and efficiency. The plan commits the District to expending funds in an equitable manner which, over time, disperses the benefits of the program geographically within the District boundaries and among the identified categories. The plan also commits the District to utilizing these funds to drive the initiation and completion of projects that are priorities for residents of the District by utilizing District funds as a catalyst for matching funds from state, federal and private foundation sources.
The Fiscal Implementation Plan itself has greater detail. The remaining approximately 14% of the funds will be utilized by the District to fix the District’s internal financial structural deficit caused by the cumulative impact of the Gallagher Amendment, the decline of tax revenue from the fossil fuel industry and TABOR revenue limitations. The District will not utilize the new revenue to create additional staff positions but will allocate the money to fund existing staff positions and business-related expenses. This allocation will help to ensure the financial integrity of the important work of the River District’s Enterprise Fund by preserving enterprise reserves for anticipated capital expenses and critical maintenance and repair work on water-supply assets owned by the District.
At our July meeting, the Board will be considering my recommendation and of course, the thoughts and concerns of the public. The Board may decide that the time is right to ask the voters for approval for a tax increase. The staff and Board welcome the public to attend, listen and comment on this important decision.
The public can listen to the meeting by visiting http://ColoradoRiverDistrict.com and navigating to the District’s YouTube channel.
The All American Canal diverts water from the Lower Colorado River to irrigate crops in California’s Imperial Valley and supply 9 cities. Graphic credit: USGS
The Imperial Irrigation District and farmer Michael Abatti have been locked in a years-long legal battle with as many twists as the river over which it has been fought. The saga might finally come to an end, though, after a California appellate court handed down a ruling on Thursday that found IID is the rightful manager of the portion of the Colorado River guaranteed to the Imperial Valley.
The three-judge panel was asked to determine whether IID fairly distributes water, including to the nearly 500,000 acres of agriculture that receive it every year. Additionally, the judges needed to decide whether farmers, via their private property, had a specific right to Colorado River water, as a trial court judge ruled in 2017. That decision had thrown into question a more than century-old system that doled out water in the agricultural valley south of the Salton Sea.
In the ruling, the judges found that farmers have a guaranteed right to water delivery but that they don’t hold a special claim to water rights above other industrial and residential users…
Equitable Distribution Plan
After the ruling came out, questions remained about the future of the Equitable Distribution Plan, a document IID revised in 2013 to determine how water would be apportioned in the case of a declared shortage on the river. Farmers were put last in line in the plan, and that was the other key question Abatti raised in his litigation.
The appellate court ruled that IID “abused its discretion in how it prioritizes apportionment among categories of water users,” but both sides emerged from the case claiming a level of victory on that point.
In an email, Lee Hejmanowski, one of Abatti’s attorneys, told The Desert Sun, “In 2013, Michael Abatti stood up for all of the farmers in the Imperial Valley by challenging the IID’s so-called ‘Equitable Distribution Plan.’ Mr. Abatti is pleased that the Court of Appeal has affirmed the trial court’s decision striking down the EDP, which was not, in fact, equitable because it treated farmers inequitably.”
Frank Oswalt, IID’s general counsel, said he believes “the board’s got a lot of homework to do” to ensure it is reading the decision correctly when moving forward with some form of the Equitable Distribution Plan. But, Oswalt said he viewed the decision as largely affirming the mechanisms the IID used in the plan.
Wally Leimgruber of the Imperial Valley Coalition for the Fair Sharing of Water, which supports IID’s position, said the ruling was a victory for the district. But, he expects the plan to be rewritten to clearly spell out that all water users must be treated equally if there is a water shortage…
What comes next
Both sides in the legal fight between farmers and the IID have hunkered down to determine the next phase of their battle plans.
“Mr. Abatti and his attorneys are digesting the Court of Appeal’s 106-page decision and determining the next steps in the process,” Hejmanowski said.
Oswalt said the IID, too, is mulling the finer details of the ruling, and it ultimately will be up to the board of directors to decide on next steps. But, he said, IID leadership are satisfied that the decision leaves control over water solidly with them, meaning “the IID board is a lot less likely to want to appeal this than the other side.”
Each side also will need to make a determination about how many more resources they want to plow into the fight.
In a January board meeting, Oswalt told the IID board that the district had racked up a $2.3 million legal bill. While the district would not provide an exact updated figure on Friday, Galindo said it had crept toward the $3 million range…
The parties have 10 days after the appellate court’s decision becomes final — which typically happens within a month from when it was handed down — to request that the state’s apex court take it up. The California Supreme Court only hears about 5% of cases that are sent its way, however, meaning there is a strong chance that Thursday’s decision could be the final word in Abatti’s legal challenge to IID’s control over Colorado River water in the Imperial Valley.
It’s fitting that President Trump invoked an interstate highway expansion in Atlanta last week to announce final rules that, if they survive the inevitable legal challenges, will undermine one of the nation’s bedrock environmental laws, the National Environmental Policy Act. American voters face a fork in their own road this November — stay on the Trump expressway to environmental degradation and catastrophic climate change, or shift to the road, bumpy as it may be, to a cleaner environment and more sustainable future of wind, solar and other energy sources that do not involve burning fossil fuels.
The COVID-19 pandemic understandably has seized the nation’s attention, but that hasn’t lessened the risk we all face from air and water pollution and carbon-fed global warming. Trump has unabashedly sought to dismantle federal regulatory structures to speed up construction projects while forging a national energy plan based on producing and burning fossil fuels.
His embrace of the oil, gas and coal industries defies the global scientific consensus that burning fossil fuels emits greenhouse gases that make the Earth less habitable by warming the atmosphere, feeding stronger and more frequent storms, triggering devastating droughts that propel human migration, and pushing up sea levels so that they encroach on cities and other human settlements. In fact, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week that unusually high tides led to record flooding among one-quarter of Atlantic and Gulf Coast communities where the agency maintains tide gauges. Climate change is no dystopian vision of the future; it is here.
Trump’s efforts to eviscerate regulatory oversight of the environment is rooted in his belief that regulations are for the most part unnecessary hurdles to economic progress. He bewails the amount of time it takes for projects to clear environmental reviews and related court challenges, adding what, in his mind, are unnecessary costs and delays. To be honest, he may have something there. NEPA came into being five decades ago — signed into law by President Nixon — and it’s not out of line to suspect that there are places where the law and the regulations that arose from it could use some reasonable revising. But Trump and his industry-connected advisors are not the ones to trust with such a task.
These new rules are not reasoned updates. By requiring environmental impact analyses to be completed within two years (now they often take twice that), the administration seeks to cut short the consideration of those most affected by major projects — often people of color and low-income households — and disarm the environmental activists fighting to ensure that necessary environmental protections are respected. The rules also would require regulators to no longer weigh the cumulative effects of a proposed project and limit their review to effects “that are reasonably foreseeable” and “have a close causal relationship” to the work being done. So, for example, a proposed project’s emissions could not be added to those of other nearby emitters to determine whether their cumulative impact creates an excessive burden on a specific community.
Separately, the Government Accountability Office reported last week that the administration tweaked the formula for measuring the “social cost of carbon” so that estimates of the potential harm from emissions are seven times lower than they used to be. It’s foolhardy — and dangerous — to look at environmental impacts through such a narrow lens.
Meanwhile, presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden, after lengthy negotiations with progressive environmentalists who had backed Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), released a $2-trillion plan for quickly shifting the nation from its reliance on fossil fuels to renewable sources.
It’s not the controversial “Green New Deal” that progressives have been pushing, but it’s in the neighborhood. Getting such a measure through Congress even if both chambers were controlled by Democrats would be no easy task, but Biden’s proposal at least recognizes the dire future we all face if the nation — and the world — do not fundamentally alter how we produce and consume energy.
The world cannot afford to backslide on environmental protections and the all-important fight to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. Yes, jobs are important, but survival more so. The errors and consequences of the past are crystal clear. The question is, will we heed those lessons?
These wetlands, located on a 150-acre parcel in the Homestake Creek valley that Homestake Partners bought in 2018, would be inundated if Whitney Reservoir is constructed. The Forest Service received more than 500 comments, the majority in opposition to, test drilling associated with the project and the reservoir project itself. Photo credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
With Wednesday’s move by the Trump administration to weaken one of the nation’s bedrock conservation laws – the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) – all eyes will increasingly be on local opposition and regulation when it comes to major infrastructure on federal lands.
That’s pretty much what Eagle County Commissioner Kathy Chandler-Henry told me when I asked about the proposed Whitney Reservoir project currently being scoped out by the U.S. Forest Service along Homestake Creek in southeastern Eagle County. The reservoir is being proposed by Colorado Springs and Aurora to pump Western Slope water to the Front Range.
All that’s currently being considered by the Forest Service is a test-drilling project to detect fatal flaws and see if one of four possible dam configurations is feasible, at which point an actual proposal for Whitney Reservoir would be submitted and considered by the feds, including a possible request to shrink the Holy Cross Wilderness by up to 500 acres to realign the road.
The Forest Service was flooded with more than 500 online comments opposing the drilling and the reservoir, demanding higher levels of environmental scrutiny for a special use permit for the drilling project that could be issued under what’s known as a “categorical exclusion.” Opponents are demanding an Environmental Assessment (EA) or Environmental Impact Statement (EIS)…
in the 1990s, when I first moved to the Vail area, there was a huge battle going on over what was then called Homestake II – a reservoir proposed for the same area by the same cities, which still hold 20,000 acre-feet of water rights here.
Eagle County used its 1041 permitting powers, which give counties some degree of local control over infrastructure projects with regional or statewide impacts, to deny Homestake II – a move that wound up in court and went all the way to the Colorado Supreme Court before Eagle County ultimately won. Those 1041 regulatory powers were granted by a state law in the 1970s.
All of that led to the Eagle River Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) that outlines how all the various stakeholders in the Eagle River Basin would work together going forward to resolve their issues. But one important thing remains true: Eagle County, not a signatory to the MOU, still has 1041 permitting authority.
So Chandler-Henry, the water leader on the board, had some important things to say last spring. First, on any proposal that would require redrawing the boundaries of the Holy Cross Wilderness Area: “I can tell you that’s not anything that we would ever be supportive of is moving wilderness boundaries.” Then, on the importance of local permitting power:
Chandler-Henry points out that federal protections have been stripped away by the current administration, with fens and ephemeral streams recently being removed from the definition of Waters of the United States by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Those changes, she said, are making it much easier for water providers to get their federal permits in place.
“Which means 1041 is all the more important for local considerations,” Chandler-Henry said, adding she believes her constituents oppose a dam. “I think that that is going to be a huge public sentiment, that we don’t want anything there.”
That being said, the county has to be somewhat diplomatic on both the test drilling and a possible future reservoir. Eagle County officials said they are working with the Forest Service on the test drilling proposal and may comment later.
“Eagle County cannot take a position regarding, and will not be commenting on, any future reservoir project because of its permitting authority powers,” county officials said in an email. “Eagle County must avoid prejudging a file based upon this authority.
“Eagle County plans to meet with the USDA USFS to discuss procedural questions regarding the proposed Whitney Creek Geotechnical Investigation project. Depending upon the outcome of that conversation, Eagle County may or may not choose to provide comment [to the Forest Service],” officials added.
Chandler-Henry, who talked to me well before the formal test drilling application and the recent Trump move to gut NEPA, said the county is keeping an open mind on 1041 permitting for whatever proposal eventually comes before the board. However, she reiterated that shrinking the Holy Cross boundary – something Congress would have to approve – is a non-starter…
Western Slope signatories of the Eagle River MOU were tight-lipped on the geophysical study and drilling. Jim Pokrandt, director of community affairs for the Colorado River District, declined to comment on the investigatory test work, saying only, “Yes, we have signed the MOU. That said … we are not participating in the Whitney Creek effort.”
Diane Johnson,communications and public affairs manager for the Eagle River Water & Sanitation District, said: “The short answer is we – [ERWSD] and Upper Eagle Regional Water Authority — support [Homestake Partners’] right to pursue an application for their yield. We trust the permitting process to bring all impacts and benefits to light for the community to consider and weigh in total.” Neither organization submitted a comment to the Forest Service…
Impacts from fatal-flaw drilling
If approved by the Forest Service for a special use permit, Homestake Partners would send in crews on foot to collect seismic and other geophysical data later this summer or fall. Then crews with heavy equipment would drill 10 bore holes of up 150 feet deep in three separate possible dam locations on Forest Service land.
Crews would use a standard pickup truck, a heavy-duty pickup pulling a flatbed trailer, and a semi-tractor and trailer that would remain on designated roads and parking areas, with some lane closures of Homestake Road (703) and dispersed campsites possible.
For off-road boring operations, crews would use a rubber-tracked drill rig, a utility vehicle (UTV) pulling a small trailer, and a track-mounted skid steer. The drill rigs are up to 8 feet wide, 22 feet long, and 8 feet high and can extend up to 30 feet high during drilling, requiring possible tree removal in some areas. The rigs would also have to cross Homestake Creek and some wetland areas, although crews would use temporary ramps or wood mats to mitigate impacts.
According to a technical report (pdf) filed by Homestake Partners, the subsurface work is expected to take up to five days per drilling location, or at least 50 days of daytime work only. However, continuous daytime noise from the drilling could approach 100 decibels, which is equivalent to an outboard motor, garbage truck, jackhammer or jet flyover at 1,000 feet. If work is not done by winter, crews have up to a year to complete the project and could return in 2021.
The drilling process would use several thousand gallons of Homestake Creek water per day that engineers say “would have negligible impacts on streamflow or aquatic habitat. Water pumped from Homestake Creek during drilling would amount to less than 0.01 [cubic feet per second], a small fraction of average flows.”
Homestake Partners would avoid wetlands as much as possible during drilling, but “where temporary wetland or waters disturbance is unavoidable, applicable 404 permitting would be secured from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Corps).” Crossing of Homestake Creek would occur in late summer or fall when stream flows are low, and no drilling would occur in wetlands.
While no permanent roads would be built for the drilling, temporary access routes would be necessary and reclaimed as much as possible. “Access routes would be selected to reduce surface disturbance and vegetation removal, and to avoid identified or potential unexploded ordnances (UXOs) discovered during field surveys.” The famed 10th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army used the area for winter warfare training during World War II.
One week after eastern Colorado saw a slight improvement in its drought picture, extreme drought renewed its expansion, and much of the northwest and north central part of the state drifted into abnormally dry conditions, according to the latest report from the National Drought Mitigation Center.
While some rain fell during rounds of severe thunderstorms over the past week, most areas received less than one inch of precipitation, and high temperatures generally offset the added moisture.
Colorado Drought Monitor July 14, 2020.
The USDA National Agricultural Statistics Service reports 60 percent of Colorado’s topsoil moisture was rated as short or very short. Forty percent of pasture and rangeland was rated poor or very poor. Northwest counties saw crop and pasture conditions decline due to lack of precipitation. Lower wheat yields in northeast counties have been partly attributed to drier conditions, while livestock producers are pulling stock off pastures due to lack of grass.
Most northern counties, which had been drought-free, are now in abnormally dry conditions. Portions of northwest Moffat, southern Larimer, southwest Weld and northern Jefferson counties escaped the decline. Most of Boulder, Gilpin and Broomfield counties have also avoided all levels of drought.
Extreme drought – the second-worst category – entered Mesa County and a small portion of southern Garfield County while expanding to cover most of Delta County.
Severe drought moved into Phillips County, and expanded in Garfield, Washington and Yuma counties, while moderate drought expanded in Rio Blanco and Sedgwick counties.
Overall, just five percent of Colorado is drought-free, down from 16 percent during the prior week. Abnormally dry conditions cover one-quarter of the state, up from 15 percent. Moderate drought fell two points to 12 percent, while severe drought was stable at 21 percent. Extreme drought increased by three percent to 37. Fifty-eight percent of the state is in severe or extreme conditions.
Natural gas flares near a community in Colorado. Colorado health officials and some legislators agree that better monitoring is necessary. Photo credit the Environmental Defense Fund.
A federal court late Wednesday struck down a Trump administration rule that weakened restrictions on methane gas releases from drilling on public land, restoring an Obama-era rule.
In 2018, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) rolled back parts of the prior rule that limited the release of the greenhouse gas. The change was expected to allow for more methane leaks in a process called flaring and add to air pollution.
On Wednesday, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers determined that the rulemaking process used by the BLM was “wholly inadequate.”
“In its haste, BLM ignored its statutory mandate under the Mineral Leasing Act, repeatedly failed to justify numerous reversals in policy positions previously taken, and failed to consider scientific findings and institutions relied upon by both prior Republican and Democratic administrations,” wrote the Obama appointee.
“In its zeal, BLM simply engineered a process to ensure a preordained conclusion,” she added in the decision’s conclusion. “Where a court has found such widespread violations, the court must fulfill its duties in striking the defectively promulgated rule.”
As of Wednesday, the San Juan River had a reported flow of 30.7 cfs, below the average for July 15 of 308 cfs.
The lowest reported flow total for July 15 came in 2002, when the San Juan River had a reported flow of 10.9 cfs. The highest reported flow total came in 1995, when the San Juan had a flow of 1,550 cfs.
The dome greenhouse gleams in the Sun at the center of the park. To the right is a new restroom and on the far left is the Community Garden. Along the walk way is a small paved amphitheater like space for presentations and entertainment. Photo credit The Pagosa Springs Journal.
From the Pagosa Springs Sun (Chris Mannara):
A report on the town’s geothermal heating utility was provided to the Pagosa Springs Town Council at a regular meeting on July 7.
The geothermal heating system has been operated and owned by the town since December of 1982, according to Public Works Director Martin Schmidt.
The town put out a bid and Alan Plummer Associates Inc. was awarded with an assessment of the utility, Schmidt explained.
Currently, the geothermal system has 32 customers that range from a school to small residences, Schmidt explained.
The geothermal system is fully operational and the town has not experienced any failures that would inhibit the utility to heat those that the town committed to heating, Schmidt added.
A report from Alan Plummer As- sociates Inc. Project Engineer Steve Omer done for the town touches on the system’s current conditions, ca- pacity and expansion opportunities…
One idea for an expansion opportunity was to cool homes in the summer with the geothermal piping using river water, Schmidt noted.
“When you actually look at theriver data, the average temperature of the river through the summer months is 63 and a half degrees, and 63 and a half degrees doesn’t give us enough of a difference,” he said…
Another expansion opportunity looked into by Omer was the limits of the geothermal system and how many more customers the town could add to the system.
“We found that we could not add a customer like the high school. Just the high school would overwhelm the system.” Schmidt said.
A view of the interchange of Highway 60 and Interstate 710 during the coronavirus pandemic on April 11, 2020 in Los Angeles, California. The county’s stay-at-home order has drastically decreased the traffic flow in and around Los Angeles. Photo credit: Roger Kisby/High Country News
FromBloomberg Law (Ellen M. Gilmer, Stephen Lee, and Jennifer A. Dlouhy):
States and environmental coalitions are set to wage multiple challenges to President Donald Trump’s overhaul of federal requirements for environmental permitting, setting up long-term regulatory uncertainty and the potential for a checkerboard of rules across the country.
Trump unveiled the plan Wednesday, replacing Nixon-era rules for how federal agencies conduct reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act. The changes are aimed at streamlining permitting timelines for major projects down to two years, Trump said in public remarks in Atlanta…
Yet the move poses risks for developers and federal agencies alike. Congress hasn’t rewritten the requirements in the underlying, 50-year-old environmental law, and streamlined reviews that fall short of its mandates could be struck down in court.
“Even though the president has said that he wants to make this process more efficient and effective, it’s going to make it even worse, because it’s going to create more litigation and uncertainty,” said Sharon Buccino, senior director of the lands division at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The controversy and the confusion around these projects is going to increase, rather than decrease.”
The administration’s critics are already sharpening their legal tools, vowing courtroom fights over how the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality crafted the new regulation.
Congratulations to friend of Coyote Gulch, Grace Hood.
Here’s the release From the University of Colorado:
The Center for Environmental Journalism is proud to welcome its 24th class of Ted Scripps Fellows, who will spend nine months at the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information working on long-term, in-depth journalistic projects and reflecting on critical questions.
The group brings a depth of experience across a range of media, with backgrounds covering local issues as a public radio reporter and a photojournalist, overseeing a non-profit news organization and a science magazine, and reporting abroad as a Moscow correspondent.
“We’re thrilled to welcome these incredibly accomplished journalists to the Center for Environmental Journalism,” said Tom Yulsman, CEJ director. “We gain as much from their presence as they do from spending a year at the university.”
Vasquez Boulevard/ Interstate 70 Superfund site. Map view via DenverGov.org
Stacy Feldman, co-founder of InsideClimate News (ICN), a Pulitzer Prize-winning non-profit news organization providing reporting and analysis on climate change, energy and the environment. Serving as executive editor from 2015 to 2020, she’s spent the past 13 years helping to build and lead ICN as it transformed from a two-person startup to an operation with nearly 20 employees and a model for national and award-winning non-profit climate journalism.
As a fellow, she plans to study new approaches to local journalism that could help people connect environmental harm and injustice to their own health and their communities’ well-being.
Karley Robinson with newborn son Quill on their back proch in Windsor, CO. A multi-well oil and gas site sits less than 100 feet from their back door, with holding tanks and combustor towers that burn off excess gases. Quill was born 4 weeks premature. Pictured here at 6 weeks old. Photo credit: The High Country News
Grace Hood, who has covered water, science and energy topics across the American southwest as Colorado Public Radio’s environment and climate reporter since 2015. Throughout more than a decade in public radio, she’s profiled octogenarian voters worried about climate change, scientists tracking underground mine fires, a visually impaired marijuana farmer and a homeowner who lives next door to Colorado’s first underground nuclear fracking experiment.
As a fellow, she plans to study how cities and states monitor air quality near oil and gas sites. She has a particular interest in the rise of citizen science when it comes to measuring air pollution across the West.
Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, looking south toward the Brooks Range. By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – images.fws.gov (image description page), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5787251
Alec Luhn, an independent journalist with a focus on the changing communities and ecosystems of the far north. Previously a Moscow correspondent for The Guardian and The Daily Telegraph, he’s been published in The Atlantic, GQ, The Independent, MAXIM, The Nation, The New York Times, POLITICO, Reuters, TIME, Slate and WIRED, among others. During a decade abroad, he’s reported from the coldest permanently inhabited place on earth and covered the conflict in eastern Ukraine, annexed Crimea, war-torn Syria and Chernobyl reactor four, as well as covering oil spills, permafrost thaw, reindeer herding, polar bear patrols, Gulag towns and the world’s only floating nuclear power plant in the Arctic.
As a fellow, he plans to study how climate change and resource extraction are altering the fragile environment of the north, with deep repercussions for reindeer and caribou and the indigenous peoples that depend on them.
Wattenberg Oil and Gas Field via Free Range Longmont
Amanda Mascarelli, managing editor of Sapiens, an award-winning digital magazine that covers anthropology and archaeology for the general public. She has led the publication since before its 2016 launch and has overseen the production of hundreds of stories on topics including Holocaust archaeology, schizophrenia, fracking, cultural appropriation, and, most recently, the COVID-19 pandemic. Previously, she spent more than a decade as a freelance science journalist specializing in health and the environment. She’s been published by outlets including Audubon, Nature, New Scientist, Science, Science News for Students and The New York Times and worked as a health columnist for the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post.
As a fellow, she will study the social inequalities of health in vulnerable communities in the Denver metro region and elsewhere in Colorado, with an eye to exploring the health and social impacts of industrial expansion, fossil fuel extraction, and a planned massive urban redesign. Center pivot sprinklers in the Arikaree River basin to irrigate corn. Each sprinkler is supplied by deep wells drilled into the High Plains (Ogallala) aquifer.
RJ Sangosti, who has been a photojournalist at The Denver Post since 2004, where he’s covered events spanning from Hurricane Katrina to presidential elections. Over more than a decade, he has documented the people and landscape of eastern Colorado, where years of drought and a loss of agricultural earning power continue to hurt farmers. Most recently, he completed a story about a Denver neighborhood in one of the country’s most polluted urban zip codes, whose residents continue to be impacted by a huge interstate construction project. His work was included in the 2012 Time Magazine top 10 photos of the year, and he was honored to be part of the 2016 jury for the centennial year of The Pulitzer Prizes.
As a fellow, he will report on the effects pesticides and fertilizers have on aquifers and groundwater, and he hopes to gain new skills in research and writing.
Ninety-five percent of Colorado is now abnormally dry as the drought here, which is among the worst in the nation currently, continues to expand.
Another 10% of Colorado reached abnormally dry levels over the past week, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor’s weekly report.
Seventy percent of the state is now experiencing moderate drought; 58% of Colorado is seeing severe drought levels; and 37% of the state is experiencing extreme drought, according to the latest data.
The drought has now seeped in to every county in Colorado, with just seven counties that have pockets of land that are drought-free – all of them in northern Colorado. Almost the entirety of southern Colorado is under extreme drought conditions.
Colorado has the largest amount of land under extreme drought conditions currently of anywhere in the United States. Only Utah has more land mass under any sort of drought condition than Colorado.
A year ago, Colorado was 100% drought-free.
Colorado Drought Monitor July 16, 2019.
Colorado has not experienced this widespread of a drought since February 2018, when 99% of the state was considered abnormally dry and 76% of the state was under moderate drought conditions, according to the Drought Monitor.
The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project will add 77,000 total acre feet — 72,000 for Denver Water use and 5,000 for an environmental pool that provides additional water for South Boulder Creek during low-flow periods — nearly tripling reservoir capacity.
[On July 17, 2020], the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission ordered Denver Water to proceed with design and construction to expand Gross Reservoir in Boulder County.
Seventeen years ago, Denver Water began the federal environmental permitting process that lead to approvals by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 2016 and 2017.
“Obtaining the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission order to move forward with the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project brings a comprehensive 17-year federal and state permitting process — one that involved nearly 35 agencies and organizations — to a close,” said Denver Water CEO/Manager Jim Lochhead. “This order directs Denver Water to move ahead with construction to meet mandated milestones and timelines.”
“Expanding Gross Reservoir is a critical project to ensure a secure water supply for nearly a quarter of the state’s population. The project provides the system balance, additional storage and resiliency needed for our existing customers as well as a growing population. We are seeing extreme climate variability and that means we need more options to safeguard a reliable water supply for 1.5 million people in Denver Water’s service area,” Lochhead said.
The design phase of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project is expected to wrap up by mid-2021 and will be followed by four years of construction. The project involves the raising of the existing 340-foot-tall Gross Dam by an additional 131 feet, which will increase the capacity of the reservoir by 77,000 acre-feet, and includes 5,000 acre-feet of storage dedicated to South Boulder Creek flows that will be managed by the cities of Boulder and Lafayette.
“We are committed to working closely with the Boulder County community to ensure safety, be considerate neighbors and retain open, two-way communication channels during this construction project,” said Jeff Martin, program manager for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. “We will continue to seek community input on topics such as traffic control plans, hauling traffic schedules, tree removal plans, and other construction-related activities.”
The FERC order, along with the permitting conditions put in place by CDPHE and the Corps, further commits Denver Water to implement environmental improvements by putting in place measures evaluated in the environmental assessment issued in February 2018.
The project relies on the expansion of an existing footprint — without the placement of a new dam, reservoir or diversion structure; it also benefits from an original design that anticipated eventual expansion. Increasing the capacity of Gross Reservoir was a specific and formal recommendation from the environmental community as an alternative to construction of the proposed Two Forks Reservoir in the 1980s.
Denver Water has committed more than $20 million to more than 60 different environmental mitigation and enhancement projects that create new habitat and flow protections to rivers and streams on both sides of the Continental Divide as a result of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. According to Colorado officials, those commitments will have a net environmental benefit for the state’s water quality.
This project has earned the support of major environmental groups including Colorado Trout Unlimited, The Greenway Foundation and Western Resource Advocates; local, state and federal elected officials (including Colorado’s last five Governors); and major business and economic development groups, among others.
An expanded Gross Reservoir is critical to Denver Water’s multi-pronged approach — including efficient water use, reuse and responsibly sourcing new storage — to improve system balance and resiliency while contributing to water security for the more than 1.5 million people in the Denver metro area.
The FERC regulates the production of hydropower in the United States. As a Federal Power Act project dating back to 1954, expanding Gross Reservoir required the FERC’s approval of Denver Water’s application to amend its hydropower license. This approval and order carry the force of law and are the final federal authority over the reservoir project.
According to a new United Nations report, global rates of hunger and malnutrition are on the rise. The report estimates that in 2019, 690 million people – 8.9% of the world’s population – were undernourished. It predicts that this number will exceed 840 million by 2030.
If you also include the number of people who the U.N. describes as food insecure, meaning that they have trouble getting access to food, over 2 billion people worldwide are in trouble. This includes people in wealthy, middle-income and low-income countries.
The report further confirms that women are more likely to face moderate to severe food insecurity than men, and that little progress has been achieved on this front in the past several years. Overall, its findings warn that eradicating hunger by 2030 – one of the U.N.‘s main Sustainable Development Goals – looks increasingly unlikely.
COVID-19 has only made matters worse: The report estimates that the unfolding pandemic and its accompanying economic recession will push an additional 83 million to 182 million people into undernourishment. But based on our work serving as independent experts to the U.N. on hunger, access to food and malnutrition, under the mandate of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, it’s clear to us that the virus is only accelerating existing trends. It is not driving the rising numbers of hungry and food-insecure people.
The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s Food Insecurity Experience Scale (FIES) is a global reference for measuring food insecurity. SDG Indicator 2.1.2 measures progress toward the Sustainable Development Goal of ending hunger by 2030. FAO, CC BY-ND
How much should healthy food cost?
Experts have debated for years how best to measure hunger and malnutrition. In the past, the U.N. focused almost exclusively on calories – an approach that researchers and advocacy groups criticized as too narrow.
This year’s report takes a more thoughtful approach that focuses on access to healthy diets. One thing it found is that when governments primarily focused on making sure people had enough calories, they did so by supporting large transnational corporations and by making fatty, sweet and highly-processed foods cheap and accessible.
This perspective raises some important issues about the global political economy of food. As the new report points out, people who live at the current global poverty level of US$1.90 per day cannot feasibly secure access to a healthy diet, even under the most optimistic scenarios.
More broadly, the U.N. report addresses one of the longest-running debates in agriculture: What is a fair price for healthy food?
One thing everyone agrees on is that a plant-heavy diet is best for human health and the planet. But if prices for fruits and vegetables are too low, then farmers can’t make a living, and will grow something more lucrative or quit farming altogether. And costs eventually go up for consumers as the supply dwindles. Conversely, if the price is too high, then most people can’t afford healthy food and will resort to eating whatever they can afford – often, cheap processed foods.
What it will take to achieve a zero-hunger world.
The role of governments
Food prices don’t just reflect supply and demand. As the report notes, government policies always directly or indirectly influence them.
Some countries raise taxes at the border, making imported food more expensive in order to protect local producers and ensure a stable supply of food. Rich countries like the U.S., Canada, and in the EU heavily subsidize their farming sectors.
Governments can also spend public money on programs like farmer education or school meals, or invest in better roads and storage facilities. Another option is to grant people living in poverty food vouchers or cash to buy food, or to ensure everyone has a basic income that allows them to cover their fundamental spending. There’s a host of ways in which governments can make sure food prices allow producers to make a living and consumers to afford healthy meals.
The human cost of cheap food
The U.N. report focuses on trying to make sure that food is as cheap as possible. This is limited in a number of ways.
New research highlights that mostly focusing on cheap prices can promote environmental damage and brutal economic systems. That’s because only large corporations can afford to compete in a market committed to cheap food. As our research has shown, today and in the past, people’s access to food is usually determined by how much power is concentrated in the hands of the few.
One current example is meatpacking plants, which have been coronavirus transmission centers in the U.S., Canada, Brazil and Europe. To keep prices low, people work shoulder-to-shoulder processing meat at an incredible speed. During the pandemic, these conditions have enabled the virus to spread among workers, and outbreaks in factories have then spread the virus to nearby communities.
New international standards allow factories to continue to operate, but in a way that protects workers. In our view, governments are not adequately enforcing these safety standards to stop the spread of the virus. Globally, four corporations – Brazil’s JBS, Tyson and Cargill in the United States, and Chinese-owned Smithfield Foods – dominate the meat-producing sector. Studies have shown that they are able to lobby and influence government policy in ways that prioritize profit over worker and community safety.
Our work has convinced us that the best way for governments to make sure that everyone has access to good food is to view a healthy diet as a human right. This means first understanding who has the most power over food supplies. Ultimately, it means making sure that the health, safety and dignity of people who produce the world’s food is a central part of the conversation about the cost of healthy diets.
From the Water Education Foundation (Gary Pitzer):
Western Water Notebook: Dust suppression, habitat are key elements in long-term plan to aid sea, whose ills have been a sore point in Colorado River management
The Salton Sea is a major nesting, wintering and stopover site for about 400 bird species (Source: California Department of Water Resources)
Out of sight and out of mind to most people, the Salton Sea in California’s far southeast corner has challenged policymakers and local agencies alike to save the desert lake from becoming a fetid, hyper-saline water body inhospitable to wildlife and surrounded by clouds of choking dust.
The sea’s problems stretch beyond its boundaries in Imperial and Riverside counties and threaten to undermine multistate management of the Colorado River. A 2019 Drought Contingency Plan for the Lower Colorado River Basin was briefly stalled when the Imperial Irrigation District, holding the river’s largest water allocation, balked at participating in the plan because, the district said, it ignored the problems of the Salton Sea.
“The Salton Sea has to be acknowledged for what it is — a serious public health and environmental crisis that can and will have long-term, devastating consequences across the region,” said Norma Galindo, president of the irrigation district’s board of directors. “It is an indispensable part of the Colorado River system, not an invisible one. Its decline simply must be addressed.”
The state of California, long derided for its failure to act in the past, says it is now moving full-bore to address the sea’s problems, with ambitious plans for wildlife habitat expansion and dust suppression.
“We are moving as fast as we can and are fully committed to doing the really good things that we need to be doing at the Salton Sea to address the real issues down there,” said Arturo Delgado, assistant secretary for Salton Sea policy at the California Natural Resources Agency.
Agencies with a stake in the Salton Sea are racing to cope with twin problems: suppressing dust from the sea’s receding shoreline to protect the small communities that ring the lake while enhancing areas that are essential to fish and birds. In a state where more than 90 percent of historic wetlands have been lost, the Salton Sea is a vital stop for birds along the migratory route of the Pacific Flyway. All told, more than 400 bird species make regular use of the Salton Sea.
A Question of Urgency
Rising salinity levels have had a detrimental impact on wildlife at the Salton Sea. (Source: California Department of Water Resources)
As California’s largest lake, the Salton Sea is unique. More than 230 feet below sea level, it has no natural outlet and is twice as salty as ocean water. For about 20 years, the sea’s water level has steadily declined, further concentrating the salinity.
Protecting and restoring the sea’s ecological values has been a longtime aspiration, but progress has been achingly slow. State plans, some of them ambitious in scope, have come and gone while the sea deteriorates.
“There is no sense of urgency,” said Frank Ruiz, Salton Sea program director with Audubon California. “The Salton Sea has never been a priority for the state or any other entity outside the area.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration has pledged to make progress. Getting there includes the laborious tasks of siting, designing and building dust suppression and habitat projects and convincing skeptical locals that inroads will be made where other efforts have fallen short. The state has set the lofty goal of creating 30,000 acres of habitat and dust suppression by 2028.
Delgado said he and his colleagues are up to the challenge.
“When I came in eight months ago, we took stock of our current situation and started developing a realistic timeline based on when we could possibly complete this work,” he said. “It’s a very aggressive timeline but it’s doable.”
The action plan includes working with local partners such as the Imperial Irrigation District, which has long chafed at the pace of progress at the sea. Earlier this year, the state and Imperial Irrigation District completed the Bruchard Road Dust Suppression Project on about 125 acres of exposed playa at the sea’s southern edge.
Imperial Irrigation District opposed participating in a Colorado River Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan last year because it did not adequately address the sea’s plight. The federal government’s lack of financial commitment to the sea “has been the single biggest impediment to a Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan that could do what Imperial and all other Colorado River contractors need it to do, which is reduce the risk of reaching critical elevations at Lake Mead,” said Galindo, the district’s board president. Earlier this month, in its legal challenge to the Drought Contingency Plan, the district reaffirmed its view that the drought plan should be suspended until the sea’s environmental needs are assessed.
Making Something Bad Better
Deep furrows are carved into the playa to help suppress blowing dust along the receding shoreline of the Salton Sea. (Source: Imperial Irrigation District)
Imperial Irrigation District signed on to a landmark 2003 water transfer between the district and San Diego, known as the Quantification Settlement Agreement (QSA), to help California reduce its overuse of Colorado River water. One effect of that was a significant curtailment of the Salton Sea’s inflow from farm irrigation. As part of the agreement, the state committed to pursuing a restoration plan for the sea while the district contributed mitigation water through 2017. However, a long-term, comprehensive Salton Sea management program has never fully emerged, due in part to the expense.
The transition from the Gov. Jerry Brown administration to the Newsom administration in 2019 brought renewed focus to the sea. However, tangible results remain elusive, said Tina Shields, Imperial’s water manager.
“When you are 15 years behind, you are not just going to wave a magic wand and suddenly have all of these projects completed,” she said.
Identifying and remedying problem areas can be a checkered process, Shields said. Potential projects often face extensive hurdles. “You’d think it would be easy to permit a mitigation project, something that’s going to make something bad better,” Shields said. “But it’s just as complicated as building a Walmart in Temecula because you have to bring in all of those wetlands permits.”
The state’s plan hinges on near-term and long-term actions that improve all elements of the sea, including evaluation of a possible “whole sea” solution that would import ocean water from the Sea of Cortez to stabilize the Salton Sea. Adding water from a source as reliable as the Pacific Ocean would seem to be an obvious solution, but it’s not that easy.
“It’s all about the salt,” said Phil Rosentrater, executive director of the Salton Sea Authority, the joint powers authority of local leaders that works with the state to revitalize the sea. “Water is certainly a critical part of the equation for a more sustainable sea, but salt management is the difference between life and death for the ecosystem.”
Teed up for work this year are plans by the state to launch 3,800 acres of habitat for the fish-eating birds that are most affected by a crashing sea. Rosentrater said his agency is poised to leverage state investments with federal dollars to work on habitat and dust suppression projects.
Air quality is a significant issue. At times the rotten egg smell caused by the sea’s hydrogen sulfide emissions has spurred complaints from people in Simi Valley, 200 miles away.
Dust suppression is paramount. The sea’s inflow from farm runoff has fallen substantially since 2003, accelerating the sea’s retreat, increasing salinity and exposing more shoreline, especially in the shallower areas. What’s left is a chalky playa that stirs into blinding clouds when the wind blows. The dust is laden with toxic elements, posing further harm to local communities, many of them disadvantaged and already struggling with high asthma rates.
The situation does not sit well with Imperial County, which last year declared a local state of emergency at the sea to address the dust suppression issue. Last month, on June 23, the county’s Air Pollution Control District slapped notices of violation on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Imperial Irrigation District for failing to address ongoing dust problems at the sea’s southeastern edge.
Projects to address the problems take time and resources and must navigate the regulatory permitting process. Furthermore, because the state is not a major landowner or water rights holder in the region, it must secure easements and needed water, said Delgado, the Resources Agency official.
The Imperiled Sea
Situated in an ancient lakebed that naturally filled with Colorado River water on occasion through the centuries, the Salton Sea of today came to life in the early 1900s when river water blew through an irrigation ditch. By the time the flow stopped, it filled a basin 45 miles long, 17 miles wide, and 83 feet deep.
In the 1950s and 1960s, it was touted as a Riviera-like destination for sun lovers and water enthusiasts, but that destiny was short-lived. Since then, the Salton Sea has assumed an other-worldly aura with occasional spikes of foul odor and dead fish.
The Salton Sea’s role as one of the few remaining refuges for migratory waterfowl raises its profile substantially.
“Everybody in the Western Hemisphere needs to care at one level because it’s an integral and critical part of the Pacific Flyway,” Celeste Cantú, former executive director of the State Water Resources Control Board, said in an interview. “If we lose the Salton Sea, we lose one of the last wetlands for migrating birds.”
A native of Calexico in the Imperial Valley, Cantú moderated a panel on the state’s response at the October 2019 Salton Sea Summit.
The state has outlined short-term and long-term actions for the sea, targeting habitat creation and more than 8,000 acres of dust suppression projects by the end of 2022.
Shields, with Imperial Irrigation District, sees both sides of the equation – the state’s efforts and the frustration of local residents tired of inaction.
“I think the state’s making progress,” she said. “The problem is for all the effort they are putting into it now; the general public isn’t going to see that progress for two or three years. Until you get the contractors out there, the trucks moving dirt, they [the general public] don’t get the process behind designing and going out to bid and staffing up.”
The Big Picture
Since the signing of the QSA, the clock has been ticking at the Salton Sea, which will keep demanding the attention of everyone concerned about and responsible for public health and ecological preservation.
Forging a sustainable path for the Salton Sea is “a must-have,” according to Norma Galindo, president of the Imperial Irrigation District’s board of directors. (Source: Imperial Irrigation District)
Then there is how the sea will be accounted for in the grander vision of Colorado River management. Imperial Irrigation District hopes the sea “will have a much higher profile and receive the attention it needs in relation to the region’s collective management of the Colorado River,” said Galindo, the district’s board president.
Forging a sustainable path for the Salton Sea is “a must-have” for Imperial, Galindo said. She added that the district’s twin goals of being a good citizen on the Colorado River and seeing a sustainable Salton Sea are compatible and “linked together, hydrologically and morally.”
Rosentrater acknowledged the inertia of the past and the difficulties with finding the right solutions. There was a time when people believed the sea’s problems were insurmountable and not worth the investment of time or resources. That’s changed.
“When you get down to it, doing nothing turns out to be the most costly and reckless of all options,” he said. “That was the conversation of a decade ago, let the thing die and stop trying to prop it up. We have come a long way from there to realizing if we let it go, it’s catastrophic.”
Reach Gary Pitzer: gpitzer@watereducation.org, Twitter: @GaryPitzer.
FromColorado Politics (Marianne Goodland) via The Colorado Springs Gazette:
The Colorado Water Quality Control Commission, part of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, announced Wednesday the approval of a new policy to reduce the use of perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances — also known as PFAs, a chemical found in firefighting foam.
Widefield aquifer via the Colorado Water Institute.
Among the most serious problems caused by PFAs in Colorado: contaminated well water supplies in El Paso County, most notably in the Widefield aquifer that serves the communities of Fountain, Widefield and Security.
The policy “will provide the department with clear guardrails for setting wastewater discharge permit limits on the chemicals released into local waterways. It also provides time for city and county wastewater treatment plants to work to reduce the chemicals from industries that use them and that discharge their wastewater with these chemicals into local sewer systems,” according to a CDPHE statement…
…delays by the EPA in developing a standard for surface or groundwater limits on PFAs has now prompted the state’s water quality commission to take action of its own. The new policy has been in the works since February.
It’s not without its detractors, including a nine-member group known as AF CURE (the Arkansas Fountain Coalition for Urban and River Evaluation). That group includes Colorado Springs Utilities; the sanitation districts for Fountain, Security and Widefield; and the Tri-Lakes water district. The group claimed the policy is more stringent than existing state policy on groundwater standards and would control decision-making for groundwater discharge for central El Paso County, in the vicinity of Fountain Creek.
AF CURE claimed the policy addresses “parent” PFAs compounds with no known toxicity. The policy would also present challenges to public utilities projects, including costs, according to a group presentation Tuesday.
Colorado Springs Utilities said it has spent $120,000 for PFAs testing in the past eight months, including installing 21 monitoring wells. The water quality division failed to fully look at the economic impact of the policy, the group said. “Do not adopt Policy 20-1 as drafted. There are many unaddressed issues wih significant complications.” And doing the policy through a rulemaking hearing, instead of the administrative hearing held Tuesday, would allow for a “more robust cost/benefit analyses.”
[…]
The Water Quality Control Division said what’s known about PFAs in Colorado is not enough:
50% of community systems have unknown levels of PFAS in drinking water
96% of community water systems haven’t had their sources tested
95% of surface water segments have not been tested, which leads to questions about how PFAs impacts fish, livestock and crops
20% of Colorado’s population relies on private wells, yet nearly none have been tested, and shallow wells are a higher risk.
John Putnam, environmental programs director for the CDPHE, said in a statement Wednesday that “we can’t wait for the EPA to come up with guidance; it would take too long. We need to take action now using the most current and best information available so we can start getting a better sense of the level of exposure we have in our state and to take the necessary steps to protect Coloradans from being more at risk.”
The Water Quality Control Division recently collected 71 samples from rivers and streams around Colorado, and every one of them showed at least some detectable levels of PFAs. A sample collected at the mouth of Sand Creek in Commerce City showed a level of 77 parts per trillion, which exceeded the EPA’s drinking water limit of 70 parts per trillion.
While the commission statement said they were unaware that anyone was drinking that water, it’s still a concern since PFAs doesn’t break down and can impact downstream drinking water supplies.
The sampling data indicates that industrial companies that have discharge permits for wastewater may be playing a role in the buildup of PFAs in water supplies. There are several companies that treat and discharge wastewater into Sand Creek, according to the commission statement.
PFAS contamination in the U.S. via ewg.org. [Click the map to go to the website.]
To set an enforceable limit, the EPA must pass through a complex set of steps established in law to regulate contaminants in drinking water. And powerful lobbies that face cleanup liability, including the chemical industry, oppose regulation of PFAS as a group…
LONG TIME COMING
The question of whether and how much to regulate these persistent chemicals in drinking water has spanned the administrations of US presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump. “This is a multi-administration failure to take action on PFOA and PFOS and on the broader class of PFAS chemicals that may pose health effects,” says Melanie Benesh, legislative attorney for the Environmental Working Group, which has called for limiting the two chemicals in drinking water since the early 2000s. “It has taken EPA an extraordinarily long time to do anything.”
Action toward possibly regulating these chemicals in drinking water began about a decade ago, when the EPA gathered data collected by water utilities on occurrence and levels of PFOA and PFOS. Neither PFOA nor PFOS is manufactured domestically anymore, but communities across the nation face legacy pollution. Also, either chemical may still be imported as a component, such as a coating, in products.
Drinking water in at least 25 states is tainted with PFOA or PFOS. In some areas, including the Pease Tradeport, other PFAS also turn up, according to data gathered by the Environmental Working Group and Northeastern University. Overall, PFAS may contaminate public drinking-water systems that serve an estimated 19 million people living in the US.
Project to raise dam will improve water reliability for more than 1.5 million people while benefiting the environment. The post FERC gives final federal nod of approval for Gross Reservoir expansion appeared first on News on TAP.
Denver Water’s Gross Reservoir Expansion team doesn’t let COVID-19 keep them from staying in touch. The post Always engaging, even in a pandemic appeared first on News on TAP.
The City of Aspen is in a stage one water shortage, citing continued drought conditions. The city will make efforts to reduce water usage by 10%, but water-saving measures for residents are voluntary.
After an exceptionally hot and dry spring, most Pitkin County is in a state of “moderate drought,” with some portions in a state of “severe drought” that applies to much of Western Colorado.
Steve Hunter, a hydrologist with Aspen’s utility office, said officials are keeping tabs on water conditions before they become problematic. Aspen’s main water supply, he said, has no storage and comes from Castle Creek and Maroon Creek watersheds.
“Right now we’re fine,” Hunter said. “But without storage, you don’t have a backup, so you need to be really cognizant of the supply and meeting the demand.”
Gothic mountain shrouded in clouds behind several cabins in the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado, USA. By Charlie DeTar – Own workby uploader, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4795644
The Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic has spent almost a century working to protect pristine swaths of wild lands. The research site, which draws scientists from across the globe every summer and ranks among the world’s largest, oldest and most productive field stations, now is permanently protecting its entire 270-acre research site.
As part of a deal announced Thursday, the lab above Crested Butte — known locally as “Rumble” — is protected under a conservation easement with Colorado Open Lands, ensuring that the hundreds of scientists and students who convene at the remote research station can continue their ecological research free from the ever-creeping threat of development…
Formed in 1928 in the abandoned mining town of Gothic, the lab’s natural landscape in the headwaters of the Elk Range’s East River has hosted a rotating array of scientists who have published more than 1,900 studies. Landmark research into wildlife, insects, habitats, soil, water ecology and the roaming impacts of climate change has flowered in the undisturbed high-altitude terrain surrounding the laboratory.
And the lab has played a critical role in conservation in Colorado, working with advocacy groups to manage protected land. The lab manages the Mexican Cut Preserve atop the Elks’ Galena Mountain, which was the first property protected by The Nature Conservancy in Colorado in 1966. The lab has helped many conservation groups with the management of protected landscapes, including, most recently, the protection of 4,377 acres of working ranch land — the venerable Trampe Ranch — in the Gunnison River and Upper East River valleys. That easement — funded with a $10 million grant from Great Outdoors Colorado, the group’s largest single transaction — protects acreage that borders Rocky Mountain Biological Lab…
“From an ecological standpoint, this is the capstone of the conservation work in that basin. This is at the very top of the Trampe Ranch conservation easement, which protects the whole valley,” said Tony Caligiuri, the executive director of Colorado Open Lands.
There was potential that a deep-pocketed developer with big dreams could scheme a ski resort or community development around Gothic, Caligiuri said, which could threaten the work done to protect the Trampe Ranch. The conservation easement also protects RMBL’s water rights, which were among the first in Colorado and helped establish the now commonly accepted value of leaving water in streams to support wildlife, habitat and recreation…
Caligiuri said about half of all the working ranchland in the Gunnison River Valley has been protected with easements that prevent development. Colorado Open Lands has protected 69 properties totaling more than 25,000 acres in Gunnison County, where voters in 1997 passed a 1% sales tax to fund the protection of open space…
“In some places with high development pressures, agriculture can become a small niche. The Gunnison River Basin is a place that will be guaranteed to remain in agriculture for as long as we can imagine. And now it continues and can be economically viable,” said Caligiuri, who believes the conservation easement over an entire historic town and surrounding acreage — all owned by Rocky Mountain Biological Lab — is a first for Colorado.
Gothic may have been established as a silver mining camp, but it has survived on science. The Rocky Mountain Biological Lab has built housing, research areas, a community center and more since it moved in. Now, as many as 150 biologists gather at the lab every summer. (In the winter, Gothic is accessible only by a long walk or ski.)
The science that flows from the lab’s visiting researchers is one of the world’s largest collections of ongoing research. Those note-takers include Gothic’s longest running resident, billy barr, the capital-letter eschewing citizen scientist who moved to a remote cabin in Gothic 48 years ago and began tracking observations on the weather. (He’s not going anywhere, by the way.)
His daily measurements have made the reclusive barr a sort of accidental apostle among climate researchers, with hundreds of notebooks detailing decades of daily high and low temperatures, snowfall, snowpack and snow water equivalent.
Billy Barr photo via Sotheby’s
His data are now some of the country’s most detailed observations of a warming climate with shrinking winters and climbing temps.
Recent heavy rain is testing draining in Colorado Springs, and so far improvements seem to be working…
The city made a commitment four years ago to improve infrastructure, including redoing drainage and bringing the system up-to-date.
That work is ongoing, but so far the efforts seem to be making a difference.
“A lot of that too is coordination with us and the 2C program, so when they go in to repave roads, they’re rebuilding curb and gutter, we’re working with them to replace pipe, fix that conveyance as we go,” said Stormwater Enterprise Manager Richard Mulledy.
City leaders say runoff appears to be cleaner because less trash is making its way downstream.
Controlling the speed and the amount of water is also helping.
USDA forecasters say they are beginning to see signs of the North American monsoon season in the southern US as humidity levels creep up…
…questions remain about how helpful the monsoon will be for Colorado growers.
Bolinger: “It is coming and hopefully it is coming for us too.
Becky Bolinger Assistant State Climatologist. She says a Tucson, Arizona weather station has picked up signs that the monsoon is beginning to move up from Mexico and toward Arizona, New Mexico and then hopefully north to Colorado and Utah.
Bolinger: “Unfortunately the last couple of years Colorado has not had much benefit from the monsoon as we’ve had previously so we’re hoping for a stronger showing of that monsoon this year.”
The monsoon is one of last opportunities for measurable summer rains in Colorado before typically dryer weather in the fall.
Bolinger says as of now, the state’s water supply is doing okay. But it didn’t get as much benefit from snow melt as it normally would. Blue Mesa Reservoir, the largest reservoir in the state, is below the average for this time of year but, so far, not as low as it was after the 2018 drought.
Volunteers load plastic bags for a weekly food pantry service in Everett, Mass., May 10, 2020. Everett has some of the highest COVID-19 infections rates in the state. Joseph Prezioso /AFP via Getty Images
COVID-19 is changing how the U.S. disposes of waste. It is also threatening hard-fought victories that restricted or eliminated single-use disposable items, especially plastic, in cities and towns across the nation.
Our research group is analyzing how the pandemic has altered waste management strategies. Plastic-Free July, an annual campaign launched in 2011, is a good time to assess what has happened to single-use disposable plastics under COVID-19, and whether efforts to curb their use can get back on track.
California banned single-use plastic bags in 2016, but state officials waived the ban during COVID-19 quarantines because plastic was perceived as more sanitary.
From plans to pandemic
Over several decades leading up to 2020, many U.S. cities and states worked to reduce waste from single-use disposable objects such as straws, utensils, coffee cups, beverage bottles and plastic bags. Policies varied but included bans on Styrofoam, plastic bags and straws, along with taxes and fees on bottles and cups.
Social norms around plastic waste have evolved quickly in the past several years. Pre-COVID-19, “Bring your own” tote bags, mugs and other foodware had become part of daily life for many consumers. Innovative startups targeting reusable foodware niches include Vessel, which partners with cafes, enabling customers to rent stainless steel to-go mugs, and DishCraft, which picks up dirty dishes from dine-in restaurants and to-go food outlets, cleans them with high-tech equipment and returns them ready for reuse.
Just before COVID-19 lockdowns began in March 2020, the New Jersey senate adopted a bill that would have made the state the first to ban all single-use bags made of either paper or plastic. And U.S. Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico and U.S. Rep. Alan Lowenthal of California introduced the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act – the first federal measure limiting use of single-use disposable items.
COVID-19 shutdowns drastically changed all of this. In just a few weeks, plastic bags returned to grocery stores in states that had recently banned them. Even before lockdowns were official, restaurants and cafes started refusing personal reusables such as coffee mugs, reverting to plastic cups and lids, wrapped straws and condiment packets.
By late June, cities and states had temporarily suspended almost 50 single-use item reduction policies across the U.S. – mainly bans plastic bag bans. The pandemic also spurred demand for single-use personal protective equipment, such as masks and plastic gloves. These items soon began appearing in municipal solid waste streams and discarded on streets.
The plastic pandemic
With legislation restricting disposables suspended, many food vendors and grocery stores have shifted entirely to disposable bags, plates and cutlery. This switch has raised their operating costs and cut further into their already-low margins.
The recycling industry has weighed in on the impacts of more single-use bags and higher residential waste volumes. Waste industry workers, who have been uniformly declared essential, work in closed spaces with many other people, so even if surface transmission of coronavirus is not a serious risk, the pandemic has increased person-to-person transmission risks in the waste industry.
Hygiene: A red herring
The main rationale that states, cities and vendors have offered to justify switching from reusables back to disposables is hygiene. Plastic packaging, the argument goes, protects public health by keeping contents safe and sealed. Also, discarding items immediately after use protects consumers from infection.
This narrative handily dovetails with the plastics industry’s ongoing effort to slow or derail bans and restrictions. The industry has loudly supported turning the clock back toward single-use disposable products.
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In a March 2020 letter to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the Plastics Industry Association argued that single-use items were the “most sanitary” option for consumers. Industry representatives are actively lobbying against the Break Free From Plastics Act.
However, studies show that these products are not necessarily safer than reusable alternatives with respect to COVID-19. The virus survives as long on plastic as it does on other surfaces such as stainless steel. What’s more, studies currently cited by the plastics industry focus on other contaminants such as E.coli and listeria bacteria, not on coronaviruses.
Viewed more holistically, plastics generate pollutants upstream when their raw materials are extracted and plastic goods are manufactured and transported. After disposal – typically via landfills or incineration – they release pollutants that can seriously affect environmental and human health, including hazardous and endocrine disrupting chemicals.
All of these impacts are especially harmful to minority and marginalized populations, who are already more vulnerable to COVID-19. In our view, plastic goods are far from being the most hygienic or beneficial to public health, especially over the long term.
States with enacted plastic bag legislation as of Jan. 24, 2020. Preemption means a state has adopted a law barring state or local regulation of plastic bags – measures often promoted by the affected industry. NCSL, CC BY-ND
Building resilience
Crises like the COVID-19 pandemic make it hard to see the bigger picture. No longer having to remember reusable tote bags or coffee mugs can be a relief. But the quick return of single-use disposable products shows that recent restrictions are precarious, and that industries don’t cede profitable markets without a fight.
Waste reduction advocates, such as Upstream Solutions and #BreakFreeFromPlastic, are working to gather data, educate the public and prevent decision-making about plastics that is based on perception rather than scientific reasoning. On June 22, 115 health experts worldwide released a statement arguing that reusables are safe even under pandemic conditions.
Some governments are taking notice. In late June, California reinstated its statewide ban on single-use plastic bags and requirement for plastic bags to contain 40% recycled materials. Massachusetts quickly followed suit, lifting a temporary ban on reusable bags.
For the longer term, it is unclear how COVID-19 disruptions will affect consumerism and waste disposal practices. In our view, one important takeaway is that while mindful consumers are part of the solution to the plastics crisis, individuals cannot and should not carry the full burden.
We believe that at the local and federal levels, policymakers need to build cross-jurisdictional alliances, recognizing shared interests with the waste management industry and emerging businesses like Vessel and Dishcraft. To make progress on reducing plastic waste, advocates need to reinforce measures in place before the next crisis hits.
Governor Jared Polis and members of his administration released a statement following the Trump administration’s increased efforts to rollback the bedrock National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA).
“This bedrock law helps protect the air we breathe and the water that is the lifeblood of our communities. We know NEPA needs to be more streamlined to ensure renewable energy and infrastructure projects can get moving. The voices of Coloradans should be heard on the projects that impact our communities,” said Governor Jared Polis. “Yet the Trump administration continues to put its thumb on the scale in order to favor special interests over hardworking Coloradans who value our environment and support a deliberative, citizen involved government. While I share the goal of cutting red tape, this latest Trump move is a misstep.”
Director Lew and members of the Polis administration testified at a field hearing in Denver in opposition to the Trump administration’s misguided NEPA roll-back
Interstate 70 and a Nestle Purina pet food factory loom above northeast Denver’s Elyria-Swansea neighborhoods. By Matthew Staver
“Our nation’s roads connect our country and economy, but, historically, they divided many communities in their path,” said CDOT Executive Director Shoshana Lew. “Construction of the interstate cut through the heart of many cities and rural areas in America, with right of way often acquired disproportionately from lower-income and minority communities. On the heels of this activity in the 1950s and 1960s, NEPA provided a structured way to ensure a conversation with citizens about how a road, bridge or railway would affect their neighborhood, and to ensure opportunity for them to articulate their views or concerns. We can and should always find ways to improve these processes, but it is critical that we do so in ways that improve our understanding of the cumulative, direct, and indirect impact of projects on both our environment and our neighbors. This action misses the mark.”
“The decision by the Trump Administration to significantly alter NEPA implementation is the wrong direction for our country and Colorado,” said DNR Executive Director Dan Gibbs. “Coloradans highly value clean air and water. They want to protect our wildlife and open spaces, and ensure their communities are safe and healthy. The Trump Administration’s changes reduce safeguards, minimize the need to consider the broader or long-term impacts of federal decisions, and put arbitrary limits on environmental studies. These are contrary to Coloradans’ values and will likely result in further harm to Colorado’s natural resources, our economy, and communities.”
Rush hour on Interstate 25 near Alameda. Screen shot The Denver Post March 9, 2017.
“Colorado’s economy and quality of life depend on clean air, clean water, and a stable climate,” said CEO Executive Director Will Toor. “The Trump administration’s new guidelines appear to be surgically designed to avoid consideration of the climate impacts of projects, will eliminate consideration of the cumulative impacts of fossil fuel development, and will undermine efforts to protect air quality in Colorado and other states.”
The carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa constitute the longest record of direct measurements of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography began measurements in 1958 at the NOAA weather station. NOAA started its own CO2 measurements in May of 1974, and they have run in parallel with those made by Scripps since then. Credit: NOAA and Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
“This is what disempowerment looks like,” said Jill Hunsaker Ryan, Executive Director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment. “The federal government is telling agencies to tune out community voices and ignore the most important issues when making decisions. This includes disregarding or diminishing questions of environmental justice, climate change, ozone pollution, and cumulative impacts. Colorado will once again step into the breach to protect its communities’ health, as well as our air, water and lands.”
David Bernhardt answers a question about climate change from Luke Runyon, December 13, 2019, Colorado River Water Users Association Annual Conference.
Swim class on the San Juan River. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen JournalismFrom Audubon (Andy McGlashen):
A new interpretation of the National Environmental Policy Act limits its power and scope, ignores climate change, and cuts marginalized communities out of decisions, critics say.
When a federal judge ruled last week that the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline must be shut down, it was because the Trump administration had not rigorously studied the project’s impacts as required by the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA. In May, a different federal judge voided 145,000 acres of oil and gas leases in Montana over a similar failure to provide the environmental analysis NEPA requires. One reason that yet another judge last October halted plans to loosen protections for the declining Greater Sage-Grouse? NEPA.
The 50-year-old law is so fundamental and far-reaching that it’s sometimes called the Magna Carta of environmental policy. NEPA says that before federal agencies can issue a permit for logging or drilling, build a highway, adopt a land-management plan, or make other major decisions, the agency must assess how doing so will affect human health, wildlife, air and water quality, greenhouse gas emissions, and more. It also requires that the public get a chance to comment on such decisions, making it an especially important tool for marginalized communities to stop some projects and make others less harmful.
NEPA has been a persistent thorn in the administration’s side as it has sought to advance drilling, mining, and major construction activity. But it will be a lot less irksome to that agenda—and, environmental advocates say, much less protective of public health—under a major reinterpretation of the law that President Trump announced today.
“Today’s action is part of my administration’s fierce commitment to slashing the web of needless bureaucracy that is holding back our citizens,” Trump said during remarks in Atlanta. “This, I would think, is maybe the biggest of all.”
Designed to speed up big projects, the new rule from the White House Council on Environmental Quality restricts environmental reviews to two years and 150 pages—limits that critics call arbitrary and inadequate for major actions. It also enables agencies to skip environmental reviews for actions that have “minimal Federal funding or minimal Federal involvement,” though opponents say such projects can still have major environmental consequences. And, in a change that’s drawn significant criticism, it allows agencies to ignore a proposed action’s effects on climate change by excluding “cumulative” impacts and those that “are remote in time, geographically remote, or the product of a lengthy causal chain,” though it never mentions climate.
“We have lost approximately 3 billion North American birds since 1970 and climate change threatens extinction for two-thirds of bird species,” said Nada Culver, vice president of public lands and senior policy counsel for the National Audubon Society, in a statement. “Inscribing the administration’s willful ignorance of the need to address climate change into regulations is irresponsible and dangerous.”
Conservation advocates say the new rule is a giveaway to industries that have lobbied for less regulation, and one of the most harmful rollbacks from an administration that’s taken steps to weaken around 100 environmental policies.
“What the Trump administration wants to do is have no speed humps, no guardrails, nothing whatsoever with any development projects. The goal is simple: Get it done and make as much money as you can,” says David Jenkins, president of the nonprofit Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship. “All the changes they’re trying to make, I think they’re just completely contrary to the intent of Congress when they passed NEPA, or Nixon when he signed it into law.”
The changes will be most harmful to Black Americans, low-income families, and others who are exposed to more pollution and are more likely to die from it, environmental justice advocates say. “NEPA is one of the best ways that communities of color can actually get into court where there is a project that has a disproportionate adverse impact” on them, says Chandra Taylor, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center.
Dropping the required review of cumulative impacts is one of Taylor’s biggest concerns with the new rule. “If there’s not a requirement that cumulative impacts have to be analyzed, it eliminates the big picture of the environmental burden that a community is already facing,” she says. “That area may already be burdened by a landfill and a smokestack, and then there’s a new road proposed.”
She also warns that the rule limits public input by requiring that public comments be specific and should “include or describe the data sources and methodologies” to support any request for changes to a proposed project. “That is going to be a real burden for communities that don’t have a lot of money and aren’t already tied in to technical expertise,” she says. “It discounts the on-the-ground experience of environmental justice communities.”
Industry groups, meanwhile, praised the new rule as a needed reduction in red tape. “Today’s action is essential to U.S. energy leadership and environmental progress, providing more certainty to jumpstart not only the modernized pipeline infrastructure we need to deliver cleaner fuels but highways, bridges and renewable energy,” said American Petroleum Institute President and CEO Mike Sommers in a statement. Environmental impact statements now average 650 pages and take four and a half years to complete, the White House says.
But opponents of the rollback say it’s a false premise that the law’s environmental review requirements are holding back needed infrastructure. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service in 2012 found that delays in federal highway projects were rarely caused by NEPA and were more often due to funding issues, local opposition, and other factors.
“Despite NEPA, we haven’t exactly seen a stop of development, a stop of infrastructure projects,” says Jenkins, from the conservative conservation group. “You go anywhere in this country and you see constant building, constant road-widening, constant new housing developments. The NEPA process has never stopped this kind of development.”
The rule is set to take effect 60 days after it is published in the Federal Register, which should happen Thursday. Depending on how November’s election goes, however, Democratic lawmakers could kill the rule early next year, using their authority under the Congressional Review Act. More immediately, it will undoubtedly face legal challenges.
“We’re not going to sit back and allow a decision that could harm public health during a public health crisis go unscathed,” said Earthjustice staff attorney Kristen Boyles in a press release. “We’ll be seeing them in court.”
The Northern Integrated Supply Project moved a step closer to construction Wednesday when the Larimer County Planning Commission recommended approval of the reservoir storage project.
Four members of the volunteer planning board voted to recommend that the Larimer County Board of Commissioners approve a 1041 permit for the project that would include a new reservoir west of Fort Collins for water storage and recreation. Two voted against it, and the other three members stepped back from the decision because of perceived conflicts of interest.
Planning Commission member Curtis Miller, a Loveland resident, said he is convinced that the project meets all the criteria for the permit and will be a benefit for the entire region…
Drake resident Abbie Pontius, a member of the Planning Commission, also spoke in favor…
However, Nancy Wallace, chair of the Planning Commission and a Fort Collins resident, voted against the project. She said that the water primarily will benefit residents outside Larimer County, and the reservoir would draw unwanted and unneeded traffic to the region…
John Barnett, a Fort Collins resident on the Planning Commission, also voted against the project after saying he worries that it will affect water levels in the river downstream from Mulberry Street, particularly at several natural areas…
The main approval for the project will come from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which after more than a decade of analysis, is expected sometime in 2020.
But the project also requires a 1041 permit from the county on issues including the pipeline, realignment of U.S. 287 and recreation. A 1041 permit allows the county to make requirements on certain aspects of the project that would affect county residents.
The Larimer County commissioners have the final say on the permit. That elected board has a public hearing scheduled over four consecutive Mondays starting Aug. 17. A final decision will come at the end of that hearing and will include consideration of the recommendation from the planning board…
The last night of the Planning Commission hearing, on Wednesday, included several representatives of Northern Water answering questions previously posed by members of the Planning Commission as well as response to public comments. Those include:
Stephanie Cecil, water resources engineer, and Brad Wind, general manager, both said they realized that Northern Water needs to do a better job reaching out to people who live near the proposed Glade Reservoir and associated pipeline. Both committed to doing better at reaching residents, especially those who live in the Eagle Lake subdivision through which the pipeline will run. “Based on what we heard at the last meeting we missed the mark,” Cecil said.
The reservoir and dam will be built in an area that includes the North Fork and Bellvue faults. Jennifer Williams, a civil engineer with AECOM, a consultant hired by Northern Water, stressed that both faults are considered inactive, meaning they have not shown movement in the last 1.3 million years. In fact, the most recent movement is estimated to be 30 million to 60 million years ago, Williams said.
The project would require a new route for a section of U.S. 287 northwest of Fort Collins. This new stretch of highway would be completed before the existing route is decommissioned, and construction of the highway would commence at the same time as construction begins on Glade Reservoir. A specific schedule depends upon the timing of permits that are still outstanding. The new route will be about 1.6 miles longer than the existing highway.
Northern Water also clarified that the NISP participants have committed to paying $16.35 million, or 75%, of the construction of recreation facilities on the land around Glade Reservoir. The remaining 25% would be paid by other partners. Those have not been determined yet but could include corporate sponsors, grants or even Larimer County, which is looking to manage recreation at the reservoir.
Wallace, who voted against the permit, disagreed with that piece, saying that she believes that boating at the proposed reservoir should be changed to wakeless only without motorboats, and that associated savings could reduce the costs potentially paid by Larimer County…
Miller and Jeff Jensen, another Planning Commission member from Fort Collins, strongly disagreed, saying that there is a demand for recreation including motorized boating. They said this added reservoir would help meet that need and provide a resource to Larimer County residents.
The initial proposal was that Northern Water and Larimer County pursue a 25-year recreation lease with the option for a 25-year renewal. At Jensen’s suggestion, the Planning Commission voted to recommend a 35-year lease also with the option for renewal to manage recreation at Glade Reservoir in the future.
Jensen, too, spoke strongly in favor of NISP and voted to recommend approval of the 1041 permit by the commissioners.
The Planning Commission voted 4-2 to recommend approval of the permit, with commissioners Nancy Wallace and John Barnett in opposition.
Commissioners said the long-debated project, which would provide water to 15 regional communities and water districts, would be a benefit to the county and the state.
Commissioner Curtis Miller said the proposal met all of the county’s criteria for approval…
The requested 1041 permit – named for the state law that grants local governments permitting authority over certain infrastructure projects – is for siting Glade Reservoir and its proposed recreational facilities, including a visitor center, campgrounds and boat ramps…
The permit also covers the routes of four pipelines needed to convey water from Glade, including one that would release water into the Poudre River to run through Fort Collins and another to take it out again for delivery to communities to the south.
As part of the project, Northern would build recreational facilities that would be managed by the Larimer County Natural Resources Department. The department manages recreation at Carter Lake and Horsetooth, Pinewood and Flatiron reservoirs…
Under a condition of approval added by the Planning Commission, the county would have a 35-year management agreement for recreation on the reservoir with an option for another 25 years. The condition was one of more than 80 recommended by the commission and county staff…
Representatives of Northern Water had answers for each of the objections, in part citing the exhaustive research and planning that went into a federal Environmental Impact Statement process for NISP that began in 2004.
NISP would pay $53 million to mitigate its impacts to wildlife and the environment, with more than 90% of that funding spent in Larimer County, Northern Water officials said.
NISP would provide 40,000 acre-feet of water annually to its participants, which include the Fort Collins-Loveland Water District and Windsor…
A decision of record on the Environmental Impact Statement for NISP is expected to be released this year by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The project has received water quality certification from state regulators.
What’s next
The Larimer County Board of County Commissioners has scheduled the following hearings on NISP:
6 p.m., Aug. 17 – Presentations only; no public testimony.
2 p.m. Aug. 24 (break from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.)
3 p.m. Aug. 31 (break from 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m.)
6:30 p.m. Sept. 2 – questions, final deliberation and decision
Testimony will be taken in person and online. Registration to speak will be available online beginning Aug. 3.
Speakers will be limited to 2 minutes each. Borrowing, lending or grouping time will not be allowed.
Click on a thumbnail graphic to view a gallery of drought data from the US Drought Monitor.
US Drought Monitor July 14, 2020.
West Drought Monitor July 14, 2020.
Colorado Drought Monitor July 14, 2020.
Click here to go to the US Drought Monitor website. Here’s and excerpt:
This Week’s Drought Summary
The active Atlantic hurricane season continued (with respect to number of named storms) as minimal Tropical Storm Fay formed off the Carolina coast, moved northward, and made landfall in New Jersey. Rainfall from Fay was beneficial for parts of the Northeast, especially the Delmarva Peninsula, New Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and western New York, where 2-3 inches of rain, locally to 7 inches, brought widespread relief from growing short-term dryness and drought. Lighter totals also fell on most of New England, but most areas did not receive enough rain to make any marked improvements. Elsewhere, a series of slow-moving fronts drifted across the lower 48 States, generating MCCs (Mesoscale Convective Complexes) with swaths of decent rain across parts of the central Plains, Midwest, and Southeast. Several fronts produced scattered but heavy thunderstorms across the upper Midwest. Unfortunately, many areas received little or no precipitation this week, including much of the West (from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast), the southern Plains, lower and middle Mississippi River Valleys, and most of the Appalachians and Piedmont. Unfortunately, the dryness was accompanied by excessive heat (weekly temperatures averaged more than 4 degrees F above normal) in the southwestern and northeastern quarters of the Nation. For example, Borger, TX, set an all-time record high of 116 degrees F on July 11. The combination of heat and minimal rainfall was a concern for many agricultural areas as crops are at critical stages of growth and reproduction, and with high evapotranspiration rates during the summer heat, topsoil moisture can become rapidly depleted and stress the crops. In contrast, the Northwest recorded subnormal temperatures (2 to 6 degrees F below normal), along with some light precipitation in northernmost regions. In Alaska, light to moderate precipitation fell on southern, central, and southeastern sections, while Hawaii saw some windward showers early in the period but not enough for any improvement. Heavy rains (2-5 inches) fell again on non-drought portions of northwestern Puerto Rico and along eastern sections (2-6 inches), slightly trimming away some of the D2 there…
Northern and western states had seen an improvement trend the past several weeks as wetter and cooler conditions have gradually eased drought and dryness from Montana and the Dakotas. However, southern states have seen a gradual deterioration this summer, with some or most of Wyoming, Colorado, Nebraska, and Kansas in drought (D1 or drier). Fortunately, several MCCs formed in the north-central and central Plains this week, bringing welcome rainfall (1-3 inches, locally 5 inches) to southern South Dakota, central Nebraska, and central Kansas. As a result, some D0 was removed from northern and eastern Montana, southwestern South Dakota, and parts of central Nebraska and Kansas. D1 was improved to D0 in northern and western North Dakota, southwestern South Dakota, northeastern Nebraska (but expanded into eastern Nebraska and western Iowa), and southeastern Kansas. Lighter amounts (an inch or less) also fell on northern and eastern Montana, most of the Dakotas and Nebraska, northeastern Colorado, and most of Kansas. However, high heat negated the effects of the rain in the southern and central High Plains, causing expansion of D0 and drought (D1-D3) in much of Colorado, southern Wyoming, western Nebraska, and western Kansas. According to USDA/NASS on July 12, topsoil moisture rated short to very short was at 74% (WY), 60% (CO), 47% (NE), 45% (KS), and under 25% in the Dakotas and Montana. Similarly, pasture and range conditions rated poor to very poor was 44% in Colorado, 36% in Wyoming, 22% in Kansas, and 18% in Nebraska. Montana and the Dakotas were also in the teens, but these numbers have fallen (improved) the past few weeks in response to the favorable weather…
Dry weather prevailed across much of the West, with the southwest monsoon yet to arrive in the Southwest. While temperatures averaged near or below normal in the northern half of the region, above to much above normal readings baked parts of the Southwest, southern Rockies, and southern High Plains. With the late start to the summer monsoon and oppressive heat, deteriorations were made in New Mexico, Colorado, southern Nevada, southwest Utah, parts of central coastal California, and portions of Oregon. In New Mexico, the combination of extreme heat stress and high ET on what rain that had fallen over the past few weeks included coverage of D0 in southwestern sections, D1 expansion in central and southeastern portions, and some D3 increase in the northwest, northeast, and southeast. Field reports indicated ranchers selling cattle, cutting yearlings off due to no grass, and feeding cake cubes and buying hay. In California, D1 was extended across Santa Clara County and Santa Cruz Mountains due to significant drying of fuels, while southern Nevada went to D1 from D0 due to short-term impacts, lack of WY precipitation, and recent wildfire activity. In Oregon, WYTD SPIs suggested expanding D3 areas as well as field reports for stream flows and soil moisture drying out. In Klamath County, widespread ag, livestock, and surface water impacts necessitated a downgrade to D2…
Similar to the Southeast, decent rainfall was generally lacking except for a few areas. Unexpected moderate to heavy (1-3 inches, locally to 6 inches) rains from a couple of MCCs fell on the south-central Great Plains (central Kansas and eastern half of Oklahoma), providing some relief from drying conditions. Tulsa, OK, measured only 0.11” of rain in June, but has 4.00” the first 13 days of July. The rains also ended excessive heat over the weekend when Borger, TX, set its all-time highest reading at 116 degrees F on July 11, and numerous Oklahoma sites exceeded 115 degrees F for their heat index (two sites hit 120 degrees F). Heavy (1.5-5 inches) rains also fell on west-central Tennessee, but mostly missed the three small D0 areas of western and central Tennessee. Accordingly, the D0 in western Tennessee expanded, along with a new D1 area near Memphis, and a new D0 in northeastern Tennessee. Scattered light amounts (inch or less) were observed in the Texas Panhandle, across central and east-central Texas, most of Louisiana and Arkansas, and the southern two-thirds of Mississippi. In contrast, little or no rain combined with excessive heat (weekly temperatures averaging 4-10 degrees F above normal) exacerbated conditions in southwestern Texas, the Texas and Oklahoma Panhandles, and much of New Mexico. According to USDA/NASS for the week ending July 12, topsoil moisture short to very short (in parentheses) gained percent points from the past week in Texas (67%), Louisiana (20%), Arkansas (35%), Tennessee (29%), and Mississippi (14%), but dropped in Oklahoma (45%) as expected with the widespread rains. Not surprising, July 12 crop conditions in Texas rated very poor or poor was: corn (12%); cotton (41%); sorghum (22%); peanuts (17%); oats (22%); and pastures and ranges (39%). South Texas remained wet at 60-days and beyond, but continued lack of rain and heat should soon start taking a toll on the soil moisture and agriculture…
Looking Ahead
During the next 5 days (July 16-20), WPC’s QPF forecasts light to moderate (1 to 3 inches) rains across the middle Mississippi River Valley, upper Midwest, and southern Florida. Lighter totals are expected in the southern Rockies and south-central High Plains, along the central Gulf Coast, and in the Appalachians. Little or no rain is anticipated in the West, southern Plains, portions of the Southeast, and along the Northeast Coast. Most of the lower 48 States should expect above-normal temperatures, with subnormal readings limited to the northern Plains.
The Climate Prediction Center’s 6-10 day outlook (July 21-25) favors above-normal rainfall across the northeastern quarter of the contiguous U.S., along the western Gulf Coast, in Arizona and Utah, and in western Alaska. Odds for subnormal precipitation are likely in the Pacific Northwest, the central Plains, and along the southern coast of Alaska. A tilt toward above-normal temperature probabilities were found across much of the lower 48 States and along Alaska’s southern coast, but highest odds were found in the central Plains and northeastern quarter of the Nation. Subnormal readings were limited to the northern two-thirds of Alaska.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending July 14, 2020.
Brad Udall: Here’s the latest version of my 4-Panel plot thru Water Year (Oct-Sep) of 2019 of the #coriver big reservoirs, natural flows, precipitation, and temperature. Data goes back or 1906 (or 1935 for reservoirs.) This updates previous work with @GreatLakesPeck
Click here to read the report. Here’s the Executive Summary:
The Upper Division States of the Colorado River Basin are currently investigating the feasibility of a potential Demand Management program. Demand Management is defined as temporary, voluntary, and compensated reductions in consumptive use. The Demand Management Storage Agreement, one element of the Drought Contingency Plan (DCP) finalized by the Colorado River Basin States in 2019, provides the authorization for the Upper Division States to store water created pursuant to a Demand Management program in Lake Powell. The water would only be used for Compact compliance purposes at the direction of the Upper Colorado River Commission. Whether a program is set up and how such a program would operate are still open questions. Each Upper Division State must make an initial determination that Demand Management is feasible before moving forward with creating a potential program.
The Colorado Water Conservation Board is Colorado’s agency charged with setting the State’s water policy, and is therefore the agency with authority to determine whether Demand Management is feasible for Colorado. Following adoption of the DCP in March 2019, the CWCB Board adopted the 2019 Work Plan to help guide the initial stage of this feasibility investigation, to take place in Fiscal Year 2019-2020. The Work Plan had three primary components: (1) establish workgroups comprised of subject-matter experts and key Colorado River stakeholders, which were directed to meet publicly at least four times in Fiscal Year 2019-20, and to identify key threshold issues for board consideration; (2) regional workshops designed to facilitate the public discussion around Demand Management and provide opportunities for CWCB staff updates on the feasibility investigation; and (3) continued education and outreach. In addition, the Board directed staff to facilitate a literature review, currently underway by consultants hired following a Request for Proposal process.
The purpose of this Report is to provide an update of work done pursuant to the 2019 Work Plan. This report will assist the CWCB Board in considering the key threshold issues associated with a potential Demand Management program. The purpose of the report is not to provide guidance on next steps of the feasibility investigation. However, it may help shape the discussions and decision-making about the next phases of Colorado’s feasibility investigation. While the complete report provides a full summary of workgroup discussions and other work, below is a summary of each workgroup’s main discussion points.
Agricultural Impacts
To encourage agricultural participation, a potential program must be viewed as equitable and proportional while remaining voluntary; furthermore, it must be adequately communicated that the potential program is necessary to achieve the objectives set out in the Upper Basin Drought Contingency Plan and will serve as an insurance policy against mandatory curtailment.
In designing a potential program, care must be given to program design to minimize and mitigate on-farm and off- farm agronomic impacts such as reductions in crop yield and soil erosion, including the provision of technical assistance and information; furthermore, the program should account for secondary economic impacts and evaluate potential benefits.
Non-injury to water right holders and non-participants is critical and can be achieved through the possible consideration of utilizing existing change of water use approval processes and providing additional mitigation expenses to agricultural water providers to account for potential operational impacts.
Structuring the potential program application, review, and the contracting process should consider alignment with the timing of when producers make critical operational decisions and allow for some operational flexibility; furthermore, payments should consider all potential impacts including both agronomic and operational changes.
In considering the design of a potential Demand Management program, current programs in place similar to a potential Demand Management program, such as the Federal Conservation Reserve Program and Colorado Fallow-Leasing Pilot Program should be further analyzed; furthermore, pilot and demonstration projects could be useful in better understanding potential impacts and effects of temporary irrigation reductions and should be explored with an effort to capture the potential diversity of projects.
Economic Impacts and Local Government
Any potential Demand Management program will be voluntary; those who do not wish to participate should not do so.
In designing any potential Demand Management program, the initial goal should be to “do no harm,” meaning to minimize and mitigate any adverse impacts to communities. A number of factors should be considered in analyzing this question, including but not limited to the type of water use, the duration of the Demand Management program, the length of individual project participation, and the geographic location and concentration of projects.
Any potential program should create benefits for individuals, the community, and the economy wherever possible. Potential benefits may include avoidance of Compact administration actions, increased revenue to local economies, environmental benefits, and opportunities to improve long-term management of water and land.
A number of process considerations should be taken into account when considering how to assure no harm is done to communities where possible, or mitigated if there is harm.
In operating a potential Demand Management program, the process should be transparent and collaborative.
Education and Outreach
Workgroup members identified many challenges in helping the State explore threshold questions related to communication, education, and outreach needs around a potential Demand Management program.
In lieu of assisting with a communication plan for the active “investigation” process or a future program, the workgroup focused their expertise around priority considerations should the CWCB elect to continue with feasibility, project pilots, or full program development.
While it is essential to develop a communications plan well before a Demand Management program is enacted, content substance is needed to proceed in which common terms are defined across workgroups and state partners, clear frames are developed to help unite messaging across stakeholder groups, and essential content from FY19- 20 workgroups are considered by CWCB and incorporated into an agreement on a Demand Management program’s general (initial/draft) shape.
At this stage, there is a branding problem, as different stakeholders have different ideas of what a program may look like, how it can be explained, and how often communication is carried to individuals’ direct communities.
This workgroup recommends immediate messaging discussions to identify shared priority framing. Several guiding examples are presented in the workgroup’s final deliverable.
Throughout the investigation, workgroup members identified the need to help stabilize communication chains, the need for extra transparency, and the need to maintain an open line for all users to communicate concerns and ideas to/from CWCB and to/from one another.
Environmental Considerations
A Demand Management program could provide opportunities for projects with net environmental benefits that would not be available under potential Compact administration.
A Demand Management program should not harm the environment, should build in considerations to minimize adverse environmental effects, and should incentivize projects that provide net environmental benefits.
A Demand Management program should use the suggestions in the Environmental Considerations document to evaluate project environmental benefits and impacts without creating an unnecessarily burdensome process for applicants. The suggestions should also be used as part of the criteria to prioritize projects. Potential environmental benefits are location and project specific and would need to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis.
A Demand Management program should identify project impacts and benefits to environmental resources including changes to flow regimes, instream flows, water quality standards, critical habitat, management/planning documents, and conservation needs and strategies if evaluation tools are readily available and applicable (for a more detailed list of potential resources impacted, see Environmental Considerations document).
Research and data gaps exist for evaluating environmental benefits and impacts, such as information on changes to hydrology, return flows, and wetlands. Streamlined approaches and methods are needed to make these assessments.
Funding
The funding workgroup initially identified a number of questions to help frame the conversation around funding a potential Demand Management program, including how much funding would such a program require.
To help quantify potential funding needs, workgroup members discussed factors that could affect a Demand Management program and built scenarios around them.
The factors included: volume of water needed, cost of potential program (i.e. $/acre-foot), percent of water savings expected from a Demand Management program (versus funded investments in infrastructure), acute or chronic need, year by which water is needed, and reservoir storage options.
Workgroup members came up with a preliminary list of funding ideas noting that not one concept, but rather a portfolio (potentially paired with a reverse auction model) would be beneficial: statewide tax (income, sales, property), regional tax, statewide fee, Bureau of Reclamation contribution, hydropower user fee, export user fee (i.e. Front Range water user rate increase).
Even with a diverse portfolio, COIVD-19 fundamentally changed the calculus and workgroup members expect we will likely see transformations in many water use sectors and the larger economies of the Western US if hydrology continues to deteriorate and Compact Administration becomes necessary.
Law and Policy
There are several open legal and policy questions relating to a potential Demand Management program, and the conclusions drawn could impact how a program operates and whether it works within existing law. These key legal and policy issues include, but are not limited to:
Would participation in a potential program be considered a beneficial use under Colorado law? What is the definition of Compact compliance?
How is program eligibility determined?
How is conserved consumptive use defined for purposes of participation in a potential program?
What is the appropriate definition of “temporary” in the context of a potential Demand Management program?
What is the appropriate procedure for project review and approval?
Monitoring and Verification
Quantification, measurement, monitoring, and verification must be honest, accurate, and defensible.
Participation and monitoring and verification must be protective of other water users.
Participation must result in added water to the system.
Participation and monitoring and verification must be as simple, easy, and flexible as possible while still meeting the first three principles.
Water Rights Administration and Accounting
Any potential program should take into consideration the appropriate process for changing the use of a water right from its current use to Demand Management.
The question of whether Demand Management is a beneficial use of water should be considered before a potential program is established.
Changes in administration and accounting for storage should be considered in establishing a potential program.
Appropriate scrutiny for any program should be balanced against the need for ease and flexibility.
Click here to go to their website to read the briefing. Here’s an excerpt:
Despite above average rain in some portions of the region, drought conditions expanded slightly and worsened by one drought category across the region. During June, areas of above average precipitation fell in parts of eastern Utah and western Colorado and Wyoming; much of Colorado, southwest Utah and eastern Wyoming saw below average precipitation. After extremely warm regional temperatures in April and May, the western half of the region experienced near-normal temperatures while eastern Colorado and Wyoming saw temperatures 2-6 degrees above normal.
June precipitation was much above average in northern and eastern Utah, western Wyoming and northwestern Colorado Western US Seasonal Precipitation. Although June precipitation was 150% – 300% of average in many locations, it is important to note that average June precipitation is typically low (1 -2”) and above-average June precipitation was not significant enough to overcome long-term deficits needed to improve drought conditions. Very little precipitation fell in southwestern Utah, and precipitation was much below normal in eastern Wyoming and much of Colorado except for isolated storms that produced pockets of near-normal precipitation.
Temperatures in the Intermountain West were generally near average in Utah, western Wyoming and northwestern Colorado in June (+/- 2 degrees of normal) Western US Seasonal Precipitation. June temperatures in eastern Wyoming and much of Colorado were 2 6 degrees above normal. High temperatures in Colorado and Wyoming contributed to the persistence and exacerbation of long-term drought.
All Snotel sites in the Intermountain West have melted out and most rivers have returned to near-baseflow conditions. Rivers in much of Utah, Wyoming and northern Colorado are flowing at near-average volumes. Below-average streamflows are occurring in rivers of western Colorado, central and eastern Utah and southwestern Wyoming. The NOAA CBRFC July 1st forecast for the April-July inflow to Lake Powell on the Colorado River is 3.93 MAF (55% of average). Since April 1st, the seasonal inflow forecast for Lake Powell decreased by over 1.5 MAF from an April 1st forecast of 5.7 MAF and 79% of average. The large decrease in forecasted streamflow volume for Lake Powell was due to far-below-normal precipitation and above-normal temperatures for the Upper Basin in April June.
During June, drought conditions in large areas of Utah and Wyoming worsened by one drought category and the overall coverage of abnormally dry or drought conditions expanded slightly in the region WY Drought Monitor. Drought or abnormally dry conditions now cover 96% of Utah, 84% of Colorado and 74% of Wyoming by land area. Although areal coverage of drought expanded only slightly during June, drought conditions significantly worsened in all three states, especially in Wyoming where D1 drought expanded from only 1% of the state on June 2nd to over 50% of the state by July 7th. In Colorado, D2 and D3 drought expanded to cover 22% and 34% of the state, respectively. D3 drought now covers nearly all of southern Colorado. In Utah, abnormally dry or drought conditions cover the entire state except the northeast corner and a sliver of northern Utah. Aside for the northern Wasatch Front (Cache and Box Elder Counties) where drought conditions improved by one category, drought conditions worsened in much of the state. D2 drought expanded across all of central Utah and D3 drought emerged in Juab County during June.
Pacific Ocean temperatures continued a slow cooling trend during June and ranged from 0.5°C above normal to 1.0°C below normal. Sea surface temperatures are projected to remain slightly below normal, but still in a neutral ENSO phase throughout the remainder of the summer and into early fall. ENSO has near equal probabilities (40-55%) to be in its neutral or La Niña phase through the summer and fall . The NOAA Climate Prediction Center issued a La Niña Watch on July 9th. The La Niña Watch indicates that there is a 50-55% chance of La Niña conditions developing in fall 2020 and a 50% chance of La Niña conditions The NOAA one-month temperature outlook for July shows slightly enhanced odds of above-average temperatures for all of the region except northern Utah and northwestern Wyoming. Except for northern Wyoming, there are also slightly enhanced odds of below-average precipitation in July. Over the next three months (JulySeptember), temperatures are more likely to be above average for the region, with the highest probability of higher-than-normal temperatures in Utah and southwestern Colorado. There is a slight tilt towards below-average precipitation for much of the region during the July-September period.
Significant weather event for June. On June 6-7, a rare derecho swept northeastward through eastern Utah, much of Colorado and Wyoming, and then through western Nebraska, South Dakota and North Dakota. A derecho is a fast-moving and extensive line of thunderstorms associated with long-duration and destructive winds. The storm produced 272 reports of wind gusts greater than 50 knots, 44 reports of gusts greater than 65 knots, 67 reports of wind damage, and a maximum wind gust of 110 miles per hour in northern Colorado. Two tornadoes and hail up to 1.75” in diameter were also reported. Only two other derecho events have been reported in the western United States: one in 1994 and the other in 2002.
The image of scientists standing beside governors, mayors or the president has become common during the pandemic. Even the most cynical politician knows this public health emergency cannot be properly addressed without relying on the scientific knowledge possessed by these experts.
Yet, ultimately, U.S. government health experts have limited power. They work at the discretion of the White House, leaving their guidance subject to the whims of politicians and them less able to take urgent action to contain the pandemic.
In the realm of monetary policy, however, there is an agency with experts trusted to make decisions on their own in the best interests of the U.S. economy: the Federal Reserve. As I describe in my recent book, “Stewards of the Market,” the Fed’s independence allowed it to take politically risky actions that helped rescue the economy during the financial crisis of 2008.
That’s why I believe we should give the CDC the same type of authority as the Fed so that it can effectively guide the public through health emergencies without fear of running afoul of politicians.
The paradox of expertise
There is a paradox inherent in the relationship between political leaders and technical experts in government.
Experts have the training and skill to apply scientific knowledge in complex biological and economic systems, yet democratically elected political leaders may overrule or ignore their advice for ill or good.
The ability of elected leaders to ignore scientists – or the scientists’ acquiescence to policies they believe are detrimental to public welfare – is facilitated by many politicians’ penchant for confident assertion of knowledge and the scientist’s trained reluctance to do so.
Compare Fauci’s repeated comment that “there is much we don’t know about the virus” with President Donald Trump’s confident assertion that “we have it totally under control.”
Experts with independence
Given these constraints on technical expertise, the performance of the Fed in the financial crisis of 2008 offers an informative example that may be usefully applied to the CDC today.
The Federal Reserve is not an executive agency under the president, though it is chartered and overseen by Congress. It was created in 1913 to provide economic stability, and its powers have expanded to guard against both depression and crippling inflation.
At its founding, the structure of the Fed was a political compromise designed make it independent within the government in order to de-politicize its economic policy decisions. Today its decisions are made by a seven-member board of governors and a 12-member Federal Open Market Committee. The members, almost all Ph.D. economists, have had careers in academia, business and government. They come together to analyze economic data, develop a common understanding of what they believe is happening and create policy that matches their shared analysis. This group policymaking is optimal when circumstances are highly uncertain, such as in 2008 when the global financial system was melting down.
The Fed was the lead actor in preventing the system’s collapse and spent several trillion dollars buying risky financial assets and lending to foreign central banks – decisions that were pivotal in calming financial markets but would have been much harder or may not have happened at all without its independent authority.
Trump slammed Fed Chair Jerome Powell repeatedly in 2019 over interest rate policy. Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Putting experts at the wheel
A health crisis needs trusted experts to guide decision-making no less than an economic one does. This suggests the CDC or some re-imagined version of it should be made into an independent agency.
Like the Fed, the CDC is run by technical experts who are often among the best minds in their fields. Like the Fed, the CDC is responsible for both analysis and crisis response. Like the Fed, the domain of the CDC is prone to politicization that may interfere with rational response. And like the Fed, the CDC is responsible for decisions that affect fundamental aspects of the quality of life in the United States.
Were the CDC independent right now, we would likely see a centralized crisis management effort that relies on the best science, as opposed to the current patchwork approach that has failed to contain the outbreak nationally. We would also likely see stronger and consistent recommendations on masks, social distancing and the safest way to reopen the economy and schools.
Independence will not eliminate the paradox of technical expertise in government. The Fed itself has at times succumbed to political pressure. And Trump would likely try to undermine an independent CDC’s legitimacy if its policies conflicted with his political agenda – as he has tried to do with the central bank.
But independence provides a strong shield that would make it much more likely that when political calculations are at odds with science, science wins.
The San Juan River, below Navajo Reservoir. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):
In response to decreasing flows in the San Juan River Basin, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled an increase in the release from Navajo Dam from 800 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 850 cfs on Thursday, July 16th, starting at 4:00 AM. Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell).
The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program has recommended base flows as close to 500 cfs as possible for the summer of 2020. This is within their normal recommended range of 500 to 1,000 cfs. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell. This release is calculated to be that necessary to maintain the minimum target baseflow.
A new report insists that ‘renewable natural gas’ has too many problems for widespread use. And in Colorado, natural gas may be on the November ballot
Several years ago, a speaker at the Colorado Oil and Gas Association annual conference became exuberant. At the time, natural gas was hailed as a bridge fuel, one that burned cleaner than coal. That simple fact had produced a tenuous alliance between environmental groups and drillers, who both saw advantages in dismantling coal, with Democratic governors Bill Ritter and John Hickenlooper enjoying support in both camps.
Enough talk about natural gas as a bridge, the speaker at the Denver conference exclaimed. It was the future.
Now, that future is being challenged as renewables, not natural gas, fills the void created in the retreat of coal. And, with climate scientists issuing throat-clearing warnings about the grave risk if emission are not tamed rapidly, environmental advocates have turned their attention to gas. The bridge, they say, has been crossed.
This new tension has flared prominently in California, where scores of jurisdictions last year banned natural gas in new buildings. None have done so in Colorado—yet. But the Colorado oil and gas industry has taken preemptory action to ensure it doesn’t, hurrying to get a ballot measure that would preclude local bans of natural gas.
The fundamental problem is the tendency of methane, the primary constituent of natural gas, to leak. Methane is far more potent in the shorter term than carbon dioxide. The report cites research published in the journal Science in 2018 that found the leakage rate in the U.S. gas supply chain equaled 2.3% of U.S. gross gas production, 60% higher than the EPA’s official estimate.
The Sierra Club is particularly worried about the rise of what it calls fossil gas alternatives, including what some companies are calling RNG, or renewable natural gas. RNG can include biogas, such as comes from wastewater treatment plant, landfills and livestock operations, or—using thermal gasification – forest and agriculture residues. There’s also synthetic gas, in which electricity is turned into hydrogen and then synthetic methane.
Of these, the only one that meets the smell test, so to speak, is biogas, as it would otherwise be emitted into the atmosphere. But the study estimates that only enough methane from landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and similar sources could be captured to meet less than 1% of current gas demand.
“The rest must be intentionally produced and will pose the risk of additional methane leakage that can offset any potential emission reductions.”
The Sierra Club report says these fossil gas alternatives have roles, but very limited ones, such as for delivering high industrial heat for steel production or powering air or marine transportation.
“Biogas and synthetic gas as well as other renewable liquid fuels, have several advantages over electricity. Though costly, limited and inefficient to produce, they are energy dense, can be stored and transported more readily than electricity, and work with existing infrastructure that must rely on combustion,” the report says.
“In optimizing their use, the advantages of renewable fuels (e.g. flexible, combustible, dispatchable) should be weighed against their disadvantages (cost, leakage, limited supply) and the availability of alternatives such as electrification and demand management. Because heat pumps and electric vehicles offer super efficiency and eliminate end-use air pollution, direct use of electricity should be used to the maximum extent feasible in buildings and transport.”
Building electrification is not the same as that which occurred in the 1970s. With the aid of efficient air-source heat pumps, which can extract heat from the outside air, and better understanding of circulation, natural gas is being eliminated from some buildings. Geos neighborhood in Arvada, Colo., is one such project, and the Basalt Vista in Basalt, Colo., another. Boulder and Bouilder County are using a program called Comfort 365 to encourage fuel and technology switching.
Those are voluntary. Now come bans of new natural gas infrastructure. In California, Berkeley in July 2019 adopted the first ban in the country on natural gas in new buildings. By February, when the New York Times took note of the trend, 22 other California cities and counties had also adopted similar bans, as had several jurisdictions across the country.
None have in Colorado, although a climate change task force report to Denver’s elected officials issued last week calls for building electrification when natural gas infrastructure fails but also net-zero homes and buildings being part of all new buildings in the 2027 base building code.
In California, battle lines have been drawn. The Los Angeles Times in October 2019 reported that Southern California Gas Co., which has 22 million customers in California, had already started working to convince local officials that policies aimed at replacing gas with electricity would be wildly unpopular. Called SoCalGas, the company had already released a strategy paper that calls for the company to replace 20% of the fossil gas in the company’s pipelines with renewable gas by 2030 and later adding large amounts of hydrogen and other non-fossil fuels. It makes its case on this web page.
Maximilian Auffhammer, an environmental economist at UC Berkeley, compared SoCalGas’ dilemma to that of a company selling hay to feed horses at a moment in time when horse-drawn carriages were being replaced by cars. Electrification, he said, posed a similarly existential threat to gas utilities.
Colorado looks to be hurrying toward a similar battle over public minds. In a July 6 posting, S&P Global Platts reported that a group backed by the Colorado oil and gas industry is pursuing a ballot initiative meant to prevent local governments from banning the use of natural gas in new residential and commercial developments. The ballot initiative must get signatures from 142,632 registered voters by Aug. 3 to qualify for Colorado’s election ballot in October.
Protect Colorado bundles the ballot initiative as a message for consumer choice.
“Initiative 284 prevents governments from removing your consumer choice when it comes to what energy is used in homes and businesses for cooking, heating homes and water, and generators,” it says on its website. “If passed, local and state governments could not enact any laws banning natural gas usage in new construction.”
The measure has already received support from the dominant newspaper in Colorado Springs, the Gazette. Stop the fringe from prohibiting natural gas.”
But the majority of the Colorado Legislature in 2019 adopted laws calling for rapid decarbonization of Colorado’s economy. The first target of 26% by 2025 can be met by closing coal plants and some other measures. Much harder will be the 50% reduction by 2050. For that, decisive steps will be required in the built environment. This is even more true of the 2050 deadline of 90% reduction.
Even if no local jurisdictions have been reported to be considering natural gas bans, the issues will likely arise in the next legislative session. State Sen. Chris Hansen, D-Denver, says he is considering legislation that would, if adopted, create a social cost of methane, similar to the social cost of carbon adopted by Colorado in 2019. That cost, $46 a ton, has legally become a consideration for the Colorado Public Utilities Commission when considering plans proposed by regulated electrical utilities.
Hansen also expects to reintroduce a bill, SB20-150, which got shelved in the covid-crimped 2020 session. The bill proposed to create a renewable natural gas standard, to spur the use of existing methane emissions from landfills, dairies and other such sources.
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Signing ceremony for the Colorado River upper and lower basin Drought Contingency Plans. Back Row Left to Right: James Eklund (CO), John D’Antonio (NM), Pat Tyrell (WY), Eric Melis (UT), Tom Buschatzke (AZ), Peter Nelson (CA), John Entsminger (NV), Front Row: Brenda Burman (US), and from DOI – Assistant Secretary of Water and Science Tim Petty. Photo credit: Colorado River Water Users Association
The Imperial Irrigation District has filed its opening brief in a case against the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California that it launched last year in an attempt to halt the implementation of the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan for the Colorado River. IID wants to see it paused until the Salton Sea is also considered.
The two behemoths in the world of Western water are locking horns in court over the plan, which is an agreement made between California, Nevada and Arizona to keep more water in Lake Mead, the man-made lake created by the Hoover Dam. Nearly 40 million people rely on water from the Colorado River system, but growing demand across the West and a warming climate are threatening the important waterway…
In its 38-page brief filed on July 8, IID attorneys argue that Metropolitan’s approval of the Drought Contingency Plan in March 2019 was improper because it did not include an environmental analysis conducted under the California Environmental Quality Act. IID asked the court to stop Metropolitan from acting on its plan until a CEQA review had been completed…
In a statement sent to The Desert Sun, Metropolitan General Manager Jeffrey Kightlinger said the the two water agencies already spoke about the Salton Sea when the Drought Contingency Plan was created.
“During that negotiation, we worked closely with IID to ensure that the agreement has no adverse impacts on the Salton Sea, as the water contributions made to Lake Mead will not affect the amount of water flowing into the sea,” Kightlinger said.
But in its court filing, IID questioned the math underpinning Metropolitan’s contribution to the Drought Contingency Plan, saying it “relied on statistical slight-of-hand” that needed to be studied further.
Caption: Imperial Valley, Salton Sea, CA / ModelRelease: N/A / PropertyRelease: N/A (Newscom TagID: ndxphotos113984) [Photo via Newscom]
Between amendments to the plan in December 2018 and March 2019, Metropolitan said it would take over what had originally been IID’s responsibility to keep 250,000 acre feet of water in Lake Mead over the first two years when it eventually fell to the level that would trigger the Drought Contingency Plan. This was a “sudden and abrupt departure” from earlier decisions and cut IID out from the negotiations, the rural water agency alleged in its court filings…
The Coachella Valley Water District, the Palo Verde Irrigation District in Blythe and the city of Needles are also listed as interested parties on the brief, as they are the other three agencies within California that have rights to divert water from the Colorado River.
Ortega said Metropolitan has until September 25 to file its response.
The state’s Water Quality Control Commission voted unanimously Tuesday to enact a policy to put new limits on per-and poly-fluoroalkyl substances, better known as PFAS. The class of chemicals is a common ingredient in everything from nonstick pans to foam used to smother flames from jet fuel.
A growing body of scientific evidence has linked the chemicals to a range of health problems, including cancer and pregnancy issues. Meanwhile, federal efforts to regulate the chemicals have lagged, leaving states to take action on their own.
Liz Rosenbaum, founder of the Fountain Valley Clean Water Coalition, was relieved to see Colorado join the list of states cracking down on the chemicals…
Rosenbaum’s community just south of Colorado Springs is widely seen as ground-zero for Colorado’s growing PFAS pollution crisis. In 2016, scientists found elevated levels of a specific PFAS in the drinking water for Security, Widefield and Fountain. The study traced the contamination to firefighting foam used at Peterson Airforce Base. Two years later, another study found elevated levels of the same chemical in community members’ blood.
Further testing has since revealed the chemicals in waterways across the state. Recent results from a state study found four water sources where levels exceeded a health guideline set by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2008. All of the samples had some detectable levels of the chemicals.
In an effort to control the problem, the Colorado Water Quality Control Division proposed rules to require wastewater treatment plants and industrial sites to monitor the chemicals. It also established the authority for the state to limit the chemicals in future wastewater permits.
But the focus on wastewater was met with a fierce backlash from cities and private interests.
Three days before the commission hearing, Aurora, Colorado Springs and Greeley joined utilities and water districts in demanding regulators pause deliberations over the new rules. The motion to vacate claimed the rules focused on wastewater treatment plants, which do not add PFAS to water systems.
The groups called on the regulators to instead focus the source of the chemicals, like companies making carpet products or consumers using nonstick pans.
The Metro Wastewater Reclamation District, which serves more than 2 million people around metro Denver, put an especially shocking number behind their objection. If the state required wastewater districts to clean up the chemicals, it could cost ratepayers over $700 million.
Representatives for the Colorado Water Quality Control Division dismissed those concerns. Manufacturers and airfields would also face new scrutiny to clean up the chemicals, which means the wastewater district probably wouldn’t end up stuck with the problem. Under the rules, the district also likely wouldn’t face any of the new limits on PFAS until 2031. Meg Parish, a permit manager with the division, said by then it could be far cheaper to clean up the chemicals.
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Dennis Webb):
With the continuing dry conditions, the local National Weather Service is starting to be asked the annual seasonal question: Are we seeing any signs of the imminent arrival of monsoon season with its welcome rainfall?
“There’s hope. Let’s just put it that way. There’s some hope,” said Tom Renwick, a forecaster with the agency’s Grand Junction office.
The National Weather Service in Tucson says in an online forecast discussion for that Arizona city that the monsoon season there “finally looks to be getting into the swing,” and cites the anticipated moisture levels with storms expected into next week. The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson reported Sunday that the monsoon season’s first storm helped lead to 92% containment of a major wildfire in that part of the state. In Albuquerque, New Mexico, the National Weather Service is forecasting “wetting storms” this week as monsoon moisture increases there.
And so monsoon season has made its way to the Southwest. But Renwick adds, “It’s just not reaching here.”
But he takes some heart in a shift in the local weather pattern that could presage the monsoon season’s arrival.
The season occurs in mid to later summer as a high pressure system sets up with winds circulating around it clockwise to funnel moisture up into the region from the Gulf of Mexico. Renwick said high pressure is moving into Texas, but not yet far enough east for the monsoon to reach Colorado.
North American Monsoon graphic via Hunter College.
Renwick said the region is seeing typical summer convection activity over higher terrain where rising air and the presence of some moisture can produce brief thunderstorms of the kind weather forecasters call “pop-and-drop” storms. Monsoon season by contrast is marked by a persistent pattern of sometimes moisture-laden storms. Renwick said those storms can contain enough water to cause flash flooding.
Monsoonal moisture would be welcomed by area agricultural producers, municipal water providers worried about water supplies, and firefighting agencies dealing with tinder-dry conditions and a growing number of wildfires in the region. Mesa County is currently in severe drought, according to the federal U.S. Drought Monitor.
West Drought Monitor July 7, 2020.
Renwick said precipitation in Grand Junction for the year so far has totaled 2.85 inches, compared to 4.5 inches on average.
June is typically the driest month of the year in the city, averaging 0.44 inches based on historical National Weather Service data from 1900-2006. This June brought 0.51 inches of precipitation, still less than the average amount that falls locally any other month than June.
In July average precipitation locally inches up to 0.61 inches, and in August it reaches 0.99 inches. Much of that jump is due to monsoon rain.
Renwick said the monsoon can arrive by mid-July or earlier locally, but usually shows up in force by later July into August…
Just 0.1 inches of measurable rain has fallen in Grand Junction so far this month, being recorded on Sunday. Renwick said that compares to just 0.21 inches on average by this point in July.
