[June 18, 2021], President Joe Biden announced his intent to nominate the following seven individuals to serve in key roles:
Xochitl Torres Small, Nominee for Under Secretary of Rural Development, Department of Agriculture
Laura Daniel-Davis, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, Department of Interior
Hampton Dellinger, Nominee for Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy, Department of Justice
M. Camille Calimlim Touton, Commissioner, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Interior
Christi Grimm, Nominee for Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services
Xochitl Torres Small, Nominee for Under Secretary of Rural Development, Department of Agriculture
The granddaughter of migrant farmworkers, Xochitl Torres Small grew up in the borderlands of New Mexico. In 2008, she came home from college to work as a field organizer, working in colonias in southern New Mexico. She continued serving rural New Mexico as a field representative for Senator Tom Udall, where she collaborated with local grassroots leaders, business owners, elected officials, and regional and state economic development officials to help communities access American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds. Inspired by Senator Udall’s work on water in the West, Torres Small studied water law and worked closely with rural water utilities. In 2018, Torres Small became the first woman and first person of color to represent New Mexico’s second congressional district, the largest district that isn’t its own state.
In the midst of the COVID-19 crisis, Representative Torres Small kept a rural hospital from closing its doors, improved constituent access to healthcare over the phone, and helped secure tens of millions of dollars for broadband in New Mexico through USDA’s ReConnect Program. Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, Torres Small raised the alarm on broadband disparities, serving on Majority Whip James Clyburn’s Rural Broadband Taskforce and as an original cosponsor of the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act. As a member of the House Agriculture Committee, Torres Small helped build the case for dairy farmers harmed by Canada’s violation of the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, and drafted legislation to help local farmers and rural communities invest in infrastructure to navigate new markets. Torres Small also partnered with Senator Udall to introduce the Western Water Security Act, and helped secure key provisions of the legislation in the FY 2021 Appropriations Omnibus. In addition, Torres Small worked closely with the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure to secure New Mexico water priorities in the Water Resources Development Act, including Rio Grande ecosystem restoration from Sandia Pueblo to Isleta Pueblo and increased authorization for the Tribal Partnership Program within the United States Army Corps of Engineers. Throughout her career, Torres Small has employed her experience organizing in vulnerable, rural communities to achieve lasting investments that combat persistent poverty.
Laura Daniel-Davis, Nominee for Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management, Department of Interior
Laura Daniel-Davis currently serves as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for Lands and Minerals Management, overseeing the important activities of the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement and the Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement.
Daniel-Davis has worked to conserve public lands, protect wildlife and address climate change for three decades, prioritizing a collaborative and partnership-based approach. She previously served in the Interior Department during the Clinton and Obama Administrations, serving as Chief of Staff to Interior Secretaries Sally Jewell and Ken Salazar in the Obama administration and Chief of Staff to the Deputy Secretary of the Interior in the Clinton Administration.
She was most recently the Chief of Policy and Advocacy for the National Wildlife Federation and led NWF’s bipartisan efforts on implementing natural infrastructure solutions, including habitat restoration work, along with supporting enactment of the historic Great American Outdoors Act. Daniel-Davis also has experience working in the U.S. House of Representatives, serving as Deputy Chief of Staff to Rep. Mark Udall (D-CO).
Daniel-Davis lives in Alexandria, VA with her husband, daughter, two dogs and a cat, and enjoys hiking on public lands and identifying bird calls. She holds a BA in Political Science from Wake Forest University.
Hampton Dellinger, Nominee for Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Policy, Department of Justice
Hampton Dellinger is a former Deputy Attorney General in the North Carolina Department of Justice and served as Chief Legal Counsel in the Office of the North Carolina Governor from 2001-2003 where his responsibilities included overseeing the judicial appointment process. In the private sector, he has devoted a significant amount of time to pro bono matters including representing an international coalition of women’s soccer players challenging gender discrimination at the 2015 World Cup.
Dellinger has written on a wide range of legal topics including publications in the Harvard Law Review, the North Carolina Law Review, and for SCOTUSBlog. Other essays he has authored have appeared in Atlantic.com, Politico, Slate, and the National Law Journal.
Dellinger received his B.A. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1989. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1993 and served as a senior editor on the Yale Law Journal. He was a law clerk for United States Court of Appeals Judge J. Dickson Phillips, Jr. He and his spouse, Professor Jolynn Childers Dellinger, live in Durham, N.C. and have two grown children.
M Camille Calimlim Touton MIT via Twitter (@mitwater)
M. Camille Calimlim Touton, Commissioner, Bureau of Reclamation, Department of Interior
M. Camille Calimlim Touton is a Nevadan who has spent her career focusing on water policy. Prior to joining Interior, Camille served as Senior Professional Staff for the U.S. House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. Camille’s congressional experience also includes serving as Professional Staff for the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee and the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee, the authorizing committees for the Department of the Interior. Camille also served as the Department of the Interior Deputy Assistant Secretary for Water and Science under the Obama Administration.
Camille holds a BS in Engineering (Civil) and a BA in Communication Studies from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and a Master of Public Policy from George Mason University. While her heart is in the west, Camille, her husband Matthew, and their daughters call Arlington, VA home.
Christi Grimm, Nominee for Inspector General, Department of Health and Human Services
Christi A. Grimm is the Department of Health and Human Services’ Principal Deputy Inspector General (PDIG) and has been performing the duties of the Inspector General since January 2020. As the senior-most executive for the largest federal Office of Inspector General, Ms. Grimm leads an independent and objective organization of more than 1,600 auditors, evaluators, investigators, lawyers, and management professionals who carry out OIG’s mission of protecting the integrity of HHS programs as well as the health and welfare of program beneficiaries. Ms. Grimm has more than 20 years of experience leading organizations, individuals, and teams to deploy creative solutions, overcome challenges, and achieve positive outcomes.
Ms. Grimm began her career with the Department of Health and Human Services at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services before joining HHS-OIG in 1999. She has held a number of leadership roles during her service at HHS-OIG including, Senior Policy Advisor to the Principal Deputy and Inspector General, Director of Policy and Programs, and Chief of Staff. In her current role, Ms. Grimm has led HHS-OIG through great challenges, while sustaining the agency’s mission and impact. She has been a crucial voice in guiding and informing key stakeholders, including those in the Executive and Legislative Branches, on important topics such as oversight of the Unaccompanied Children Program, federal health and human services’ response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and the intersection of healthcare and technology. Further, she is a leading expert in HHS program integrity issues and has authored more than a dozen articles and delivered multiple speeches that have established her at the forefront of developments in the healthcare arena. In addition, Ms. Grimm spearheaded several programs within HHS-OIG to strengthen the organization and better serve the American people through important efforts such as creating the first-ever OIG Executive Engagement Committee and building OIG’s capacity to address diversity, equity, and inclusion. Ms. Grimm provides valuable healthcare oversight and program integrity expertise to the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) as HHS-OIG’s representative to the PRAC and the leader of the Health Care Subgroup.
Ms. Grimm has received numerous awards for her leadership and achievements, including the Council of the Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency Award for Excellence in Management in 2019 and the Secretary’s Award for Excellence in Management in 2015. Ms. Grimm holds a Master of Public Administration from New York University and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Colorado, Denver. She is a graduate of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Senior Managers in Government. Ms. Grimm is a native of Denver, Colorado and currently resides in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband and daughter.
President Joe Biden has nominated longtime water policy adviser Camille Touton to lead the agency that oversees water and power in the U.S. West.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation commissioner will be a central figure in negotiations among several states over the future of the Colorado River…
Touton is a native of Nevada and previously served as the deputy assistant secretary for water and science in the Interior Department under the Obama administration.
FromColorado Public Radio (Michael Elizabeth Sakas):
Lake Powell’s water level is the lowest it’s been in decades, and the latest 24-month projections from the Arizona and Utah reservoir show that it’s likely to drop even further — below a critical threshold of 3,525 feet by next year.
Graphic credit: USBR
A 20-year megadrought and a hotter climate has contributed to shrinking water supplies in the Colorado River. If Lake Powell’s levels continue to dwindle, it could set off litigation between the seven states and the 40 million people that all rely on the Colorado River.
“This is really new territory for us,” said Amy Ostdiek, deputy section chief of the federal, interstate and water information section of the Colorado Water Conservation Board…
States agree Lake Powell must stay above certain level
Ostdiek said it’s a “universally-accepted goal” among the seven states to avoid that situation. That’s why they agreed to the 2019 Colorado River Drought-Contingency Plan, which includes the provision that if Lake Powell drops below 3,525 feet, the upper-basin states and the Bureau of Reclamation have a plan in place to send more water to Lake Powell.
Those meetings are happening. Ostdiek said the upper-basin states have recently switched to planning mode due to the low water levels forecasted for Lake Powell. The plan to protect Powell could involve releasing water from upstream reservoirs of Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa, and Navajo in Utah, Colorado and New Mexico.
But the hope is to avoid the need for that plan by keeping Powell above the 3,525-foot threshold.
At capacity, Lake Powell holds more than 26 million acre-feet of water that originates as snowpack from the Upper Basin. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Reclamation via the Water Education Foundation)
FromThe Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Charles Ashby):
Because of the ongoing drought and no expectation that it will end anytime soon, the Ute Water Conservancy District is having to pump water directly out of the Colorado River.
That’s something it hasn’t had to do in its 65-year existence, district officials said Friday.
As a result, the district that supplies drinking water to more than 85,000 Grand Valley customers is imposing a special 2% “drought pumping rate” on all bills to cover the increased electrical cost of pumping that water…
Currently, the district rates the current drought at its highest “D-4 level,” which means extreme drought…
RESERVOIRS NOT ENOUGH
Normally, the district draws its water from snowmelt off of Grand Mesa, primarily through a Plateau Creek pipeline in a gravity-flow system, meaning it doesn’t need to be pumped. That water flows into two of the district’s terminal reservoirs, Jerry Creek No. 1 and No. 2, and then into the district’s water treatment plant.
A call on that water from water users with more senior water rights, however, is forcing the district to stop drawing from it, something that’s happened in the past, but never this early in the year, Clever said.
And because the water from the Colorado River is below the elevation of the treatment plant, by about 420 feet, it needs to be pumped uphill, which is done through two pump stations the district already has and recently upgraded…
USERS MAY SEE A DIFFERENCE
Despite the extra water treatment, consumers may notice the difference in how it tastes and the residue it leaves behind, such as mineral salts. They’ll see it with increased spottiness on their dishes and more residue in their swamp coolers.
Clever said the increase cost to consumers will be nominal, about 47 to 48 cents a month, or about $6 a year.
Rains forecast for the northern Midwest and Great Plains this weekend and next week will bring relief to some areas. But the severe moisture deficits suggest crop yields in key U.S. production areas remain at risk.
Drought has already scorched much of the U.S. West, prompting farmers in California to leave fields fallow and triggering water and energy rationing in several states.
Crop development in the central U.S. is highly watched this year as grain and oilseed prices hover around the highest in a nearly a decade and global supplies tighten…
About 41% of Iowa, the nation’s top corn producer and No. 2 soybean state, was under severe drought as of Tuesday, up from less than 10% a week earlier, according to the weekly U.S. drought monitor published on Thursday…
Conditions in North Dakota, the top producer of high-protein spring wheat that is used in bread and pizza dough, remained dire, with about two-thirds of the state under extreme or exceptional drought, the most severe categories.
October to April was the driest stretch in North Dakota history since record keeping began 127 years ago, Gov. Doug Burgum told a town hall meeting in Washburn, North Dakota, on Wednesday…
More than 100,000 acres, or 156 square miles, of North Dakota have already burned in wildfires this year, up from about 12,000 for the entire fire season last year, Burgum said…
Drought in the western Corn Belt has already likely trimmed the U.S. corn yield average by 2 to 4 bushels per acre, said Dan Basse, president of AgResource Co in Chicago.
However, conditions in July and August, critical months for corn and soybeans, respectively, will determine the extent of yield losses and the price response, he said.
Grain and soybean futures on the Chicago Board of Trade fell sharply on Thursday as rain in the near-term forecast triggered risk-off selling.
Comparison of overlapping one-year estimates at 6-month intervals of net top-of-the-atmosphere annual energy flux from CERES (solid orange line) and an in situ observational estimate of uptake of energy by Earth climate system (solid turquoise line).
Credits: NASA/Tim Marvel
Researchers have found that Earth’s energy imbalance approximately doubled during the 14-year period from 2005 to 2019.
Earth’s climate is determined by a delicate balance between how much of the Sun’s radiative energy is absorbed in the atmosphere and at the surface and how much thermal infrared radiation Earth emits to space. A positive energy imbalance means the Earth system is gaining energy, causing the planet to heat up. The doubling of the energy imbalance is the topic of a recent study, the results of which were published June 15 in Geophysical Research Letters.
Scientists at NASA and NOAA compared data from two independent measurements. NASA’s Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) suite of satellite sensors measure how much energy enters and leaves Earth’s system. In addition, data from a global array of ocean floats, called Argo, enable an accurate estimate of the rate at which the world’s oceans are heating up. Since approximately 90 percent of the excess energy from an energy imbalance ends up in the ocean, the overall trends of incoming and outgoing radiation should broadly agree with changes in ocean heat content.
“The two very independent ways of looking at changes in Earth’s energy imbalance are in really, really good agreement, and they’re both showing this very large trend, which gives us a lot of confidence that what we’re seeing is a real phenomenon and not just an instrumental artifact, ” said Norman Loeb, lead author for the study and principal investigator for CERES at NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. “The trends we found were quite alarming in a sense.”
Increases in emissions of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane due to human activity trap heat in the atmosphere, capturing outgoing radiation that would otherwise escape into space. The warming drives other changes, such as snow and ice melt, and increased water vapor and cloud changes that can further enhance the warming. Earth’s energy imbalance is the net effect of all these factors. In order to determine the primary factors driving the imbalance, the investigators used a method that looked at changes in clouds, water vapor, combined contributions from trace gases and the output of light from the Sun, surface albedo (the amount of light reflected by the Earth’s surface), tiny atmospheric particles called aerosols, and changes in surface and atmospheric temperature distributions.
The study finds that the doubling of the imbalance is partially the result an increase in greenhouse gases due to human activity, also known as anthropogenic forcing, along with increases in water vapor are trapping more outgoing longwave radiation, further contributing to Earth’s energy imbalance. Additionally, the related decrease in clouds and sea ice lead to more absorption of solar energy.
The researchers also found that a flip of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) from a cool phase to a warm phase likely played a major role in the intensification of the energy imbalance. The PDO is a pattern of Pacific climate variability. Its fingerprint includes a massive wedge of water in the eastern Pacific that goes through cool and warm phases. This naturally occurring internal variability in the Earth system can have far-reaching effects on weather and climate. An intensely warm PDO phase that began around 2014 and continued until 2020 caused a widespread reduction in cloud coverage over the ocean and a corresponding increase in the absorption of solar radiation.
“It’s likely a mix of anthropogenic forcing and internal variability,” said Loeb. “And over this period they’re both causing warming, which leads to a fairly large change in Earth’s energy imbalance. The magnitude of the increase is unprecedented.”
Loeb cautions that the study is only a snapshot relative to long-term climate change, and that it’s not possible to predict with any certainty what the coming decades might look like for the balance of Earth’s energy budget. The study does conclude, however, that unless the rate of heat uptake subsides, greater changes in climate than are already occurring should be expected.
“The lengthening and highly complementary records from Argo and CERES have allowed us both to pin down Earth’s energy imbalance with increasing accuracy, and to study its variations and trends with increasing insight, as time goes on.” said Gregory Johnson, co-author on the study and physical oceanographer at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. “Observing the magnitude and variations of this energy imbalance are vital to understanding Earth’s changing climate.”
