A bunch of Utah public lands. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article on the Landdesk.org website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
January 14, 2025
The latest public-land grab attempt is dead — at least for now. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Utah’s lawsuit attempting to seize control of 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. This effectively ends Utah’s bid to take its case directly to the Supreme Court1, albeit not before it had spent over $1 million of the state taxpayer’s cash on legal expenses and a goofy PR campaign that included this bizarre ad aimed at inducing nostalgia for an era that never really was.
One might hope that this defeat at the hands of a conservative court would teach Utah’s elected officials to give up and be grateful for the abundance of public land in their state, which is actually the envy of folks everywhere. But alas, I kind of doubt they’d be that wise, because, well … Utah. So after licking their wounds, they’re likely to come back with some other strategy for purloining public lands.
Perhaps they’ll follow the lead of the Wyoming legislature, which just introduced a resolution “demanding that the United States Congress … extinguish federal title in those public lands and subsurface resources in this state that derive from former federal territory.” Which is to say that Wyoming is ordering the U.S. — i.e. all Americans — to surrender public lands within the state, with the exception of Yellowstone National Park, to the state, thus opening it up to be privatized.
Yes, the hard-right Freedom Caucus has taken control of the Wyoming legislature and, according to reporting by WyoFile, they plan to introduce “bold policies that probably have never had the opportunity to see the light of day” and that are based upon “godly principles.”
This would include public land grabs and repealing gun-free zones because, you know, Jesus was all about AR-15s. And it includes the — I kid you not — “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again” law that would bar the state from designating or treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It would also nix Gov. Mark Gordon’s efforts to establish the state as a leader in carbon capture and sequestration technology and actually would relinquish any primacy over carbon storage to the feds. Go figure.
And just in case Congress isn’t cowed by the threat of a Wyoming-lawmaker-led revolt, then Rep. Harriet Hageman will step in with her own federal legislation. While it doesn’t attempt to transfer public land, it is aimed at neutering the Bureau of Land Management by nullifying management plans that have been years in the making. Hageman recently introduced a bill that would block implementation of the Rock Springs and Buffalo field office resource management plans.
Stay tuned. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of these shenanigans.
The Paradox Valley in western Colorado. The proposed Mustang, née Piñon Ridge, uranium mill would be located on the far side of the valley (center right in the picture). Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
For the past few years, Western Uranium & Vanadium, based in Canada and Nucla, Colorado, has been making a lot of noise about plans to bring its Sunday Mine Complex in the Uravan Mineral Belt into production. It’s also proposing to establish a new uranium mill just outside Green River, Utah — thereby furthering the industrialization of the melon-farming town. So far, however, the mine has not produced any ore, nor has the mill progressed beyond the “baseline data collection” stage.
But that hasn’t stopped the company from keeping the hype going. Yesterday it announced it would begin data collection at the former Piñon Ridge uranium mill site in the Paradox Valley, which it’s now calling the Mustang Mineral Processing Facility.
You may recognize the Piñon Ridge name. Back in 2007, Energy Fuels — the current owner of the White Mesa Uranium Mill — purchased the site and proposed building a uranium mill there. At the time, George Glasier, who currently helms Western Uranium & Vanadium, was Energy Fuel’s CEO. A lot of locals were not so psyched about having a new radioactive site in their midst, and opposition to the proposed mill was fierce.
A twisted saga ensued, finally ending when the state revoked the mill’s permit in 2018. In the interim, Glasier had stepped down from the helm of Energy Fuels, which had acquired the White Mesa Mill, started his own company, and purchased the Piñon Ridge project. Last year, Western U&V acquired the Piñon Ridge project from Glasier’s company. And now Glasier seems to think he can get a newly designed mill permitted (he has yet to apply for a permit). Or maybe he’s just fishing for more investors’ dollars. In any case, the folks who led the resistance to the mill last time are ready to push back once again if necessary.
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Here come those Santa Ana winds again …
The National Weather Service has issued an extreme fire danger bulletin for a good chunk of the greater Los Angeles metro area, including a “particularly dangerous situation” alert, through tomorrow as the Santa Ana winds kick up again. This as the Palisades and Eaton fires continue to burn, having already taken 24 lives and an estimated 12,300 structures.
It’s been stunning to watch the destruction from afar and heartbreaking to imagine the collective sense of loss rippling across the sprawling metropolis of 18 million. The immensity of it all, the rate at which the fires spread, and the way the Santa Anas send flaming embers into the air to spawn their own blazes miles away is horrifying. Equally baffling is the way the tragedy seems to have opened up a firehose of stupidity, finger-pointing, and grandstanding, issuing forth from the President-elect, Elon Musk, political pundits, and and even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who asked: “Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California? They know how to do it.”2
I considered spending a bunch of words explaining how and why these folks are wrong. But even acknowledging their existence and repeating their inane lies makes me vomit a bit in my mouth, and trying to debunk even a fraction of the claims is to play a futile game of whack a mole, though that’s not stopping California’s government from trying. As an antidote, I’ve been reading some smart things about the fires, the Santa Ana winds, and Los Angeles, and I figured it would be nice to share some of them with you.
Start out with Joan Didion’s essay on the Santa Ana winds, in which she reminds us that this month’s raging Santa Anas aren’t entirely unprecedented. A two-week long Thanksgiving-time Santa Ana event in 1957 included 100-mph gusts that toppled oil derricks, propelled heavy objects through the air (some of which killed people), and drove a blaze through the San Gabriels for well over a week. She writes:
Then check out the opening lines of Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind(and how can you stop reading after this!?):
And the late Mike Davis’s “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” should be required reading in these times. And yes, it’s quite a bit more nuanced than the title might suggest. Davis gives a good history of post-colonial fires in the Malibu area and explains how in 1930 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., called for turning 10,000 acres there into a public park (that could have burned in natural cycles, without destroying homes).
Alas, that didn’t happen. Instead, Malibu was developed, and fires roared through there in 1930, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938. The city had the opportunity to acquire 17,000 acres for just $1.1 million and turn it into a preserve in 1938 — it passed up the chance. Housing came, instead, along with more destructive fires. He writes:
Each fire, then, was followed by reconstruction on a larger, more exclusive scale. Malibu went from being a ranching, rural area, to a bohemian enclave, to a high-end suburb. “Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire:,” Davis writes, “those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.”
Joshua Frank mentions Davis’s essay in a poignant piece for CounterPunch in which he asks folks to stop their victim-blaming and have a bit of compassion, even if they don’t like L.A.. He writes:
At his Public Lands Media Substack, George Wuerthner talks about how these are really urban wildfires, not forest fires, and so the old mitigation and prevention techniques don’t necessarily apply.
He argues that prescribed burns and thinning wouldn’t have worked, because the fires started in the chaparral, which has a natural fire regime of about 30 to 100 years. Prescribed burns tend to eliminate native species that are then replaced by more flammable grasses.
In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne also talk about how these fires don’t fit into conventional notions of wildfire. In both the Palisades and Eaton fires, there were unburned trees sitting right next to homes that had been totally destroyed. Cohen:
Here’s hoping for an ember-free day for Los Angeles.
1 This was corrected from saying it effectively ended their legal bid. As reader Slickrock Stranger pointed out, that’s not necessarily the case. Utah could still take its case to the lower courts and keep losing until it ends up at the Supreme Court (which could again decline to hear the case, or something else). But SCOTUS did shoot down this particular strategy of going straight to the Supreme Court for a decision.
2 Oh, that’s right, because “they” modified the weather so that Hurricane Helene would wreck the southeast and keep all those Republicans from voting. Yeah. No. First off, Marge, while the theory behind cloudseeding is legit, there is scant evidence that it significantly increases precipitation. And, even so, it only works if there are already moisture-laden clouds present to seed. Thus the name. Now, maybe if They sent a hurricane to L.A. blowing inland from the Pacific, it would cancel out the Santa Anas, which blow toward the ocean, and then we’d be fine. Alas, They can’t control the weather.
74% of Gen Zers say climate change threatens the clean water supply in the U.S.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jan. 28, 2025 — The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup releaseda new report today examining Gen Z’s experiences with climate change and water issues, shedding light on their concerns about climate events and the potential impact on their generation’s future. The research finds water issues top the list of Gen Z’s climate worries, with individual perspectives shaped by diverse experiences and beliefs.
Of 12 climate-related issues measured in the study, majorities of Gen Zers express “some” or “a great deal” of worry about nine, including five related to water. This is true regardless of location, with water pollution and the health of fish and oceans ranking among the top three concerns in every U.S. Census region. While a majority of Gen Zers nationwide (61%) have reported experiencing a water-related climate issue in the past two years, water-related problems are more commonly reported by those in the Central and Western U.S.
When considering how these issues may affect their future, Gen Zers report concern about the availability of clean water and the potential need to relocate. Those who have experienced climate-related events at a higher rate are more likely to worry about these impacts . T here are notable differences across demographic groups. Hispanic (36%) and Black (34%) Gen Zers are more likely than their White (27%) peers to have experienced unsafe tap water . They are also more likely to believe there will not be enough clean water for their generation to live in the future (41% of Hispanic and 34% of Black Gen Zers, compared with 24% of W hite Gen Zers). Adult Gen Zers are significantly more likely to worry about needing to move due to climate change compared with their 12- to 17-year-old counterparts (40% vs. 27%, respectively).
Denver School Strike for Climate, September 20, 2019.
There is large-scale unity among young people on the importance of protecting water quality. Seventy-four percent of Gen Zers say it is “very important” to protect oceans, lakes and rivers from pollution, with another 19% saying it is “somewhat important.” Gen Z acknowledges the adverse effects of climate change on water resources: 74% of Gen Zers say climate change impacts the amount of clean water available in the U.S. “somewhat” (47%) or “a great deal” (27%). There is solid bipartisan agreement on the inadequacy of current water protection efforts: M ajorities of both Democratic (88%) and Republican (63%) Gen Z adults say the U.S. is “probably” or “definitely” not doing enough to protect water.
“Gen Z is united in their deep concern for water protection and availability, recognizing it as a critical issue that touches us all — regardless of where we live or who we are,” said Moira Mcdonald, Environment Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation. “As we look to the future, there’s a growing sense of urgency. Young people fear inheriting a world where clean water is scarce and climate change continues to worsen. We need to work on solutions to ensure clean, safe water remains accessible for generations to come.”
Looking ahead, Gen Zers are pessimistic about the trajectory of climate change — 67% believe climate change will worsen in their lifetime. And rates of pessimism are about 10 percentage points higher among those who have recently experienced a climate-related issue such as flooding, drought or unsafe tap water. Among voting-age Gen Zers, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans believe it is very or somewhat unlikely that climate change will be stopped.
Methodology
Results are based on a Gallup Panel™ web survey conducted Aug. 6-14, 2024, with a sample of 2,832 12- to 27-year-olds from across the U.S. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults. Data were weighted to match demographic targets of age, gender, education, race, Hispanic ethnicity and Census region for 12- to 27-year-olds, using the most recent five-year population estimates from the American Community Survey.
Twelve- to 17-year-old children, as well as some 18-year-olds, were reached through adult members of the Gallup Panel who indicated they had at least one child aged 18 or younger living in their household. The remaining 18- to 27-year-old respondents are members of the Gallup Panel.
For the total sample of 2,832 respondents, the margin of sampling error is +/-2.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error for subgroups are higher; selected subgroups are reported below. All margins of error reported are adjusted to account for the design effect.
John Kerry, then U.S. secretary of state, with China’s special representative on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, at the 2015 Paris climate conference. FRANCOIS MORI / AP PHOTO
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Joseph Winters & Naveena Sadasivam):
January 20, 2025
Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former president Joe Biden.
Conventional wisdom — and political donations — would indicate that Republicans are friendlier than Democrats to the oil and gas industry. And, in fact, that’s probably true: Democrats are more likely to pass regulations on drilling; Republicans are more likely to give oil corporations massive tax cuts. But in spite of all of that, Over the last fifty years, Republican presidents have been more likely to oversee crude oil production declines, while production has generally increased under Democrats, with the exception of the Clinton administration. In fact, the current surge in production began during Obama’s first year, and has continued through Biden’s entire term. This doesn’t mean that Democrats spur production. What it means is that more regulations don’t hamper production, and rescinding those regulations — and corporate tax cuts — don’t spur production. There are many forces in play, and the occupant of the White House is merely one of them, and a relatively insignificant one at that. Source: EIA, Land Desk.
Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and appointed oil industry executives and climate skeptics to his Cabinet. His first-day actions represent a complete remaking of the country’s climate agenda, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to energy and the environment over the next four years.
‘Drill, baby, drill‘
Among the most significant actions Trump took Monday was declaring “an energy emergency,” which he framed as part of his effort to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living. He pledged to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure,” an unprecedented move that could grant the White House greater authority to expand fossil fuel production. He also signed an executive order “to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf,” and another expediting permitting and leasing in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
“We will have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We are going to drill, baby, drill.”
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can store 714 million barrels of crude oil, but currently holds about 395 million. Under his administration, he said, the cache will be filled “up again right to the top.” He also said the country will export energy “all over the world.”
“We will be a rich nation again,” he said, standing inside the Capitol Rotunda, “and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help.”
Richard Klein, a senior research fellow for the international nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, noted that fossil fuel companies extracted record-high amounts of oil and gas during the Biden administration. Even if it is technologically possible to boost production further, it’s unclear whether that will reduce prices.
Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, said it is a “direct falsehood” that increasing fossil fuel extraction would drive down inflation. He agreed that the U.S. should declare a national energy emergency — but for reasons exactly the opposite of what Trump had in mind. “We need to quickly move to clean energy, to invest in new companies across the U.S.,” Kammen told Grist.
Denver Water’s sustainability operations include generating energy from solar power panels installed on the roof of its Administration Building, parking garage and over its visitor’s parking lot at its Operations Complex near downtown. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Exiting the Paris Agreement (again)
Trump delivered on his promise to once again withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations pact agreed upon by 195 countries to limit global warming that the new president referred to on Monday as a “rip-off.” In addition to signing an executive order saying the U.S. would leave the agreement — titled Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements — Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations to set the departure in motion. Due to the rules governing the accord, it will take one year to formally withdraw, meaning U.S. negotiators will participate in the next round of talks in Brazil at the end of the year. By this time next year, however, the U.S. could join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only nations that aren’t part of the accord.
“It simply makes no sense for the United States to voluntarily give up political influence and pass up opportunities to shape the exploding green energy market,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement. Only 2 in 10 Americans support quitting the Paris Agreement, according to a poll by the Associated Press.
Trump’s announcement came just 10 days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2024 Earth’s hottest year on record, one marked by life-threatening heat waves, wildfires, and flooding around the world. Experts say things will only get worse unless the U.S. and other countries do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions.
“Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled,” climate scientists wrote last October. They noted then, even before Trump’s election, that global policies were expected to cause temperatures to climb 2.7 degrees Celsius (6.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. One analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that a second Trump administration would result in an extra 4 billion metric tons of climate pollution, negating all of the emissions savings from the global deployment of clean energy technologies over the past five years — twice over.
Coyote Gulch’s Leaf in Byers Canyon on the way to Steamboat Springs August 21, 2017.
“In other words, you’ll be able to buy the vehicle of your choice,” he said during his inaugural address — even though there is no national mandate requiring the sale of electric vehicles and consumers are free to purchase any vehicle of their liking. [ed. emphasis mine] The Biden administration did promote the technology by finalizing rules that limit the amount of tailpipe pollution over time so that electric vehicles make up the majority of automobiles sold by 2032. Under Biden, the U.S. also launched a $7,500 tax credit for consumer purchases of EVs manufactured domestically and planned to funnel roughly $7.5 billion toward building charging infrastructure across the country.
“Rolling back incentives to build electric vehicles in the United States is going to cost jobs as well as raise the price of travel,” said Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who served as a senior policy leader in the Biden White House. “Fueling up an electric vehicle costs between one-third and one-half as much as driving on gasoline, not to mention the benefits for reducing air pollution. Ultimately, to lower the price of energy for U.S. consumers, we need to diversify the sources of energy that we’re using and ensure that these are clean, affordable, and reliable.”
Youth activists rally for climate justice in front of the US Capitol in Washington,DC (photo from earlier in the year). Image: Lorie Shaull,CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Rescinding environmental justice initiatives
Trump signed a single executive order undoing nearly 80 Biden administration initiatives, including rescinding a directive to federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their missions. The Biden-era policy protected communities overburdened by pollution and directed agencies to work more closely with them.
That move was part of a broader push that Trump described as an attempt to create a “color-blind society” by stopping the government from “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Klein said the objective was “embarrassing.” Kammen said it was a “huge mistake” to move away from environmental justice priorities.
Cheyenne Ridge, located between Burlington and Cheyenne Wells, near the Kansas border, is one of many wind projects on Colorado’s eastern plains. Soon, new transmission will enable far more wind and solar projects. Photos/Allen Best Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
Blocking new wind energy
Trump officially barred new offshore wind leases and will review federal permitting of wind projects, making good on a promise to “end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.” The move is likely to be met with resistance from members of his own party. The top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red, and unlikely to acquiesce. Even Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, refused to disavow wind power during a hearing last week, saying he would pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy.
Many state and local policymakers, including the members of America Is All In, a climate coalition made up of government leaders and businesses from all 50 states, pledged to take up the mantle of climate action in the absence of federal leadership.
“Regardless of the federal government’s actions, mayors are not backing down on our commitment to the Paris Agreement,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, in a statement. “Our constituents are looking to us to meet the moment and deliver meaningful solutions.”
Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
Januray 24, 2025
Trump Ticker
After last year’s presidential election, I — and many others — predicted that a second Trump term would be even more destructive than the first because this time the administration would be better prepared, and would not be plagued by the same incompetence, legal shoddiness, or misdirection as last time.
I was wrong. During his first few days in office, Trump issued dozens of executive orders, resolutions, pardons, and other “presidential actions.” Some were mere bluster. Others blatantly unconstitutional. Almost none displayed any evidence of forethought or, well, thought. It’s more like a hastily sketched, grievance-laden wish list penned on the back of a faux-silk napkin by lobbyists, ideologues, and oligarchs at one of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago soirees. The list, so far, is the product of greed, spite, right-wing ideology, and power-hunger. Rather than approaching policy — if you can call it that — with more competence and intelligence than before, it appears that Trump and friends are relying on the sheer volume of action to overwhelm any legal challenges.
I’m not going to even try to list them all here. Rather, I’ll take a look at a small sampling that fit under the Land Desk’s usual beat.
Declaring a National Energy Emergency: It takes a few paragraphs to even figure out what is meant by “energy” or, for that matter, “emergency” here. The preamble makes it sound as if the nation’s collective gasoline pumps could run dry at any moment. But that can’t be it, because the U.S. is pumping more crude oil than ever before from the Permian Basin and other fields, it is the largest petroleum producer in the world, and it is a net exporter of petroleum products. There is no danger of any sort of fossil fuel shortage. Surely they know that, right?
Then at paragraph six, we finally get a hint:
Okay, then, they’re talking about electricity. Yeah, that actually makes some sense. No, there’s not an electricity shortage. But the growing number of power-sucking AI and cryptocurrency-mining data centers, electric vehicles, and electrified buildings are significantly increasing demand for power, which threatens to strain the grid and raise electricity prices for everyone else.
That’s why, for better or worse, the Biden administration encouraged utility-scale solar and wind facilities on federal lands, subsidized enhanced geothermal research and development, and subsidized and fast-tracked huge transmission projects — despite hefty opposition and environmental and cultural impacts — such as SunZia. And it’s why both the Biden and California’s Newsom administrations poured billions of dollars into keeping Diablo Canyon nuclear plant running.
In the West, utilities and grid operators are trying to address these issues by creating a regional transmission organization and day-ahead and real-time power markets. These will help get power from where it’s generated to where it’s needed.
Trump’s order, on the other hand, does nothing tangible to address growing electricity demand, strain on the grid, or aging infrastructure. One of the only specific actions is to order the Secretary of Energy to consider allowing the year-round sale of E15 gasoline to meet nationwide fuel shortages. Huh? Did these guys just dust off some order from the 1970s energy crises and add new dates, or what?
Anyway, the good thing about this one is that it will probably have minimal on-the-ground effects, though it may give agencies some cover to ignore rules and regulations. As one energy analyst told RTO Insider, “They are press releases on fancier paper … directions to the agencies, but they’re not specific legal actions.”
Conventional wisdom — and political donations — would indicate that Republicans are friendlier than Democrats to the oil and gas industry. And, in fact, that’s probably true: Democrats are more likely to pass regulations on drilling; Republicans are more likely to give oil corporations massive tax cuts. But in spite of all of that, Over the last fifty years, Republican presidents have been more likely to oversee crude oil production declines, while production has generally increased under Democrats, with the exception of the Clinton administration. In fact, the current surge in production began during Obama’s first year, and has continued through Biden’s entire term. This doesn’t mean that Democrats spur production. What it means is that more regulations don’t hamper production, and rescinding those regulations — and corporate tax cuts — don’t spur production. There are many forces in play, and the occupant of the White House is merely one of them, and a relatively insignificant one at that. Source: EIA, Land Desk.
Unleashing American Energy: Anyone who has been paying attention knows that if American energy is on a “leash,” it’s a very long and flimsy one. I really hate having to repeat this, but a lot of folks seem to be immune to facts: America is producing more oil and natural gas than ever before. Period. Eliminating environmental protections will not increase production, nor will it decrease prices. It will only increase profits for the petroleum corporation. This is not rocket science.
Among the “action” items in this order:
“… eliminate the electric vehicle mandate.” That one’s pretty easy, since there is no federal electric vehicle mandate and there never was one. The administration will consider axing federal EV incentives, and looks to revoke California’s waiver allowing it to phase out gasoline-powered vehicle sales.
“Safeguarding the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances.” Again, Trump’s tiny hands are swatting at straw men. Go into any Home Depot and you will find a virtually unlimited variety of washers, driers, lightbulbs, shower heads, ranges, and toilets. You may or may not be able to find efficient ones, but you can certainly find wasteful ones.
Immediate review of all agency actions that potentially burden the development of domestic energy resources. This one’s funny because in another first-day order, Trump halts all offshore wind leasing and blocks the approval of the Lava Ridge wind facility in Idaho. Isn’t that burdening energy resources?
Terminates the American Climate Corps.
“Unleashing Energy Dominance through Efficient Permitting” and “to expedite and simplify the permitting process.”
Gets rid of analyzing the social cost of carbon and other greenhouse gases.
Terminates the “Green New Deal” (there is no such thing, by the way) and “immediately pauses the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” Again, Trump’s orders contradict one another, demonstrating their shoddiness: Billions upon billions of dollars in these acts were aimed at building up energy infrastructure and addressing grid and power shortfalls. And nearly $1 billion of it was just loaned to the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine in Nevada, which would advance Trump’s quest to increase domestic critical mineral production. This throws all of that into doubt.
Restarts reviews of proposed LNG export projects. Again, the U.S. is currently exporting more LNG than ever before and if the volume continues to increase it will lead to higher natural gas prices in the U.S. That, in turn, will lead to higher electricity prices. Just saying.
“Restoring America’s Mineral Dominance” by removing “undue burdens” on domestic mining. Are you kidding me?
Orders the Interior and Agriculture secretaries to review any mineral withdrawals, which would include the Thompson Divide in Colorado and around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.
Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential: Trump wants to “maximize the development and production of the natural resources” within Alaska by expediting oil and gas leasing and revoking restrictions on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve and to rescind protections on subsistence resource values. And he wants to reopen the Tongass National Forest’s roadless areas to logging. Basically, Trump wants Alaska to be corporations’ natural resource colony.
While this might conjure horrifying images of a battalion of drill rigs pummeling the Arctic tundra, it’s probably not worth worrying too much yet. The oil and gas industry hasn’t shown all that much interest in drilling in ANWR — a lease sale earlier this month drew zero bids — and petroleum company officials say they would prefer to focus on more accessible hot spots like the Permian Basin, which Biden basically offered up as a sacrifice zone.
The state’s elected officials mostly are bubbling with joy over the orders, but they aren’t all on board with Trump’s renaming of Denali, the nation’s highest peak. Trump has switched its title back to Mount McKinley, after the 25th U.S. president known for … well, not much, aside from implementing tariffs — one of Trump’s pet policies and a sure way to increase U.S. consumer prices.
Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, are against the name change.
It’s not an executive order, yet, but Trump and some Republicans in Congress have threatened to withhold federal aid for victims of the Los Angeles fires unless California changes its water policies. And no, they’re not talking about the Imperial Valley alfalfa farmers guzzling up a monster’s share of the Colorado River. Truth is, they don’t really know what they’re talking about.
Basically, Trump has bought into his own lie that diverting water from the northern part of the state to SoCal would have enabled firefighters to easily extinguish the flames. And that Newsom’s environmental policies are to blame. This is patently false. And even if it were true, it’s inexcusable and morally wrong for a president to withhold aid based on a state’s political leanings. In his Los Angeles TimesBoiling Point column, journalist Sammy Roth hits the nail on the head:
Heartless and cruel, indeed.
On that note, I’d urge all of you who have not yet done so to watch the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the Washington National Cathedral as part of the inauguration ceremonies.
As one might expect a reverend to do, she calls for unity and asks the Trump administration to have mercy on those less fortunate than them. Basically, she’s asking the president to practice compassion and empathy, sort of like Jesus — or any other civil and decent human being — might do.
At no point did Budde condemn Trump, or call him a fascist, or burn him in effigy, or make fun of his orange makeup or small hands. She just asked him to show a bit of mercy. And yet, the reaction from Trump and his supporters has been rather ugly and angry. Trump demanded that she apologize to him, while others condemned Budde for uttering, well, Christian teachings. Silly me: I thought that was her job.
Merrimack River, New Hampshire | Merrimack River Watershed Council
Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Leda Hua):
January 22, 2025
Following his inauguration, President Trump issued a number of executive orders focused on climate and energy—actions that could have major impacts on the rivers and clean water that all Americans depend on. President Trump has said he wants our country to have “the cleanest water,” which is why we must prevent any actions that harm our rivers and drinking water sources.
That’s why we need a responsible national energy strategy that is considerate of our water resources. Responsible energy development means meeting the needs of people without damaging the environment that our health and water wealth depend on.
No matter who you are or where you live, we all need clean, safe, reliable drinking water. Most of our country’s water comes from rivers. Public opinion research shows that Republican, Democrat, and Independent voters of all ages and races overwhelmingly support protections for clean water. Clean water is a basic need, a human right, and a nonpartisan issue we can all agree on.
The details and implementation of these executive orders will matter as we pursue the dual goals of energy and water security.
We cannot return to days where polluters were allowed to devastate rural and urban communities and their natural resources. But these executive orders eliminate efforts to safeguard communities from environmental harm, putting their drinking water at risk.
In addition to protecting Americans from pollution, we also need to help families and businesses prepare for increasingly extreme weather. As Asheville, North Carolina and other communities in the Southeast continue to recover from Hurricane Helene, and thousands in Los Angeles are without homes following recent catastrophic fires, we should be bolstering policies to fight climate change and working to strengthen communities in the face of severe floods, droughts, and fires.
Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps.’ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country – in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.
As of mid-January, according to Atlas Public Policy, Colorado had 169,117 EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road. Colorado has a goal of 940,000 EVS by 2030.
Pueblo gets $11.5 million for 260 EV charging ports
Pueblo is getting $11.5 million in federal grants for installation of 260 EV charging ports near low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
Pueblo has plenty of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. It also has a new city administration that in December requested that the city scrap the resolution adopted in 2017 that called for 100% renewable energy by 2035. The ostensible reason given by the mayor was a dislike of the EV fleet for vehicles.
The grant was among 11 announced by the U.S. Department of Transportation totaling $112 million. The money is coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
Denver, Greeley, and Commerce City are also getting transportation grants. The single biggest grant will go to southeastern Colorado, where 12 individual passing lanes are to be created between Pueblo and the Kansas state lane. Total aid: $40 million.
The Roaring Fork Transportation Authority is to get a little over $1 million to help create a new alignment for the VelociRFTA Bus Rapid Transit lane through Glenwood Springs to I-70.
Easier to get EV chargers in multifamily housing
Colorado is now allowing for property developers, managers and contractors seeking state grants to install EV charging stations to apply once for multiple locations.
The applications are due no later than Feb. 14. Eligible projects include multifamily housing, work places, tourist destinations and community charging. The standard grants are for up to $250,000, with up to six level-2 charging ports per application.
Unusual climate anomalies in 2023 and 2024. Ocean temperatures (a, b) are presently far outside their historical ranges. These anomalies reflect the combined effect of long-term climate change and short-term variability. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in supplemental file S1. Each line corresponds to a different year, with darker gray representing later years. All of the variables shown are daily estimates. Credit: BioScience
Click the link to access the article on the BioScience website (William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W Gregg, Johan Rockström, Michael E Mann, Naomi Oreskes, Timothy M Lenton, Stefan Rahmstorf, Thomas M Newsome, Chi Xu, Jens-Christian Svenning, Cássio Cardoso Pereira, Beverly E Law, Thomas W Crowther). Here’s the opening few paragraphs:
We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al. 2020). For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al. 2023). Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo (supplemental figure S1; CenCO2PIP Consortium et al. 2023).
Last year, we witnessed record-breaking sea surface temperatures (Cheng et al. 2024), the hottest Northern Hemisphere extratropical summer in 2000 years (Esper et al. 2024), and the breaking of many other climate records (Ripple et al. 2023a). Moreover, we will see much more extreme weather in the coming years (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2021). Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10% (supplemental figure S2).
Our aim in the present article is to communicate directly to researchers, policymakers, and the public. As scientists and academics, we feel it is our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats that we face as clearly as possible and to show leadership in addressing them. In this report, we analyze the latest trends in a wide array of planetary vital signs. We also review notable recent climate-related disasters, spotlight important climate-related topics, and discuss needed policy interventions. This report is part of our series of concise annual updates on the state of the climate.
Screenshot from “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth”
Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Noelle Phillips). Here’s an excerpt:
January 13, 2025
Five new compounds soon will be listed as priority toxic air contaminants in Colorado and, over the next two years, the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment and Air Quality Control Commission will determine out how to regulate them. The state’s Air Pollution Control Division will recommend five compounds to be regulated to the commission during its two meetings that begin Thursday. The creation of the list of toxic air contaminants is the result of a years-long effort from environmentalists and public health advocates who want the state to do more to protect people from the pollution that can cause cancers, such as leukemia and lymphoma, and lung diseases, such as asthma, and can harm women’s reproductive health. For years, environmentalists have complained that air pollution permits issued by the federal and state governments allow companies to pollute with little attention given to how much of those contaminants are dangerous to human health…
Acrolein, which is created when fossil fuels are burned by wood-burning, industrial boilers and reciprocating engines, and it is also used to make a polymer for paints, coatings and adhesives. Acute, short-term inhalation can cause eye and respiratory tract irritation. It is not considered a cancer risk.
Benzene, a carcinogen released when fossil fuels are burned, including in car exhaust and oil and gas extraction and production. It also is created by cement manufacturing, waste disposal and wood burning. Acute exposure may cause drowsiness, dizziness and headaches, as well as eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, and unconsciousness at high levels. Chronic inhalation has caused cancer, various blood disorders and affects women’s reproductive organs, the Environmental Protection Agency has reported.
Ethylene oxide, which is used to make other products such as antifreeze, textiles, adhesives, plastics and detergents. It’s used to sterilize medical equipment, including at Terumo BTC in Lakewood to sanitize medical equipment. It causes cancers in humans, including lymphoma, myeloma, leukemia and breast cancer.
Hydrogen sulfide, highly toxic gas that smells like rotten eggs. It is released by wastewater treatment facilities, meat processing facilities, petroleum refining, manufacturing of asphalt and roofing material and places where large quantities of manure are stored. It can cause people to pass out due to high exposure. Low exposure can cause headaches, memory loss, balance problems and fatigue. It is not considered a carcinogen but data is limited on how it affects children’s health or women’s reproductive health, according to the EPA.
Hexavalent chromium is a by-product of industrial processes such as metal fabricating and by burning coal for electricity. It can leak into water systems and into the air. It can cause cancer and impact the respiratory system, kidneys, liver, skin and eyes, the EPA’s website says.
US Flag at Hoover Dam as the Olympic Torch passed over the dam in 1996
Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile.com website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):
January 14, 2025
It took the U.S. Supreme Court 12 words and one period to dismiss more than 300 pages of legal arguments in which Utah, Wyoming and other Western states sought to establish control and ownership of millions of acres of federally managed public land.
Utah, Wyoming’s lone U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, state legislators, Gov. Mark Gordon and many others sought an emergency hearing to argue that the federal government illegally owns property that rightfully belongs to Western states. Wyoming and other parties filed briefs of their own supporting the Beehive State’s assertion that federal ownership was detrimental to those commonwealths.
The filings appear to be unappreciated by the justices.
“The motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied,” the court said in an order filed Monday.
Utah’s petition generated another 424 pages of legal entreaties by its supporters and critics, a count that includes rebuttals by the United States and the Ute Tribe.
Utah claimed the federal government could not own and control “unappropriated lands,” which are those not specifically designated for use by an enumerated federal power. Utah targeted 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management property belonging to all Americans.
Beehivers first said they wanted the court to “dispose” of the BLM property, then clarified that the state just wanted the court to say it is unconstitutional for the government to hold “unappropriated” acreage.
Hageman claimed that federal ownership is an occupation equivalent to a casus belli, a situation that justifies war or conflict between nations. “[T]he standard is whether the federal government’s actions would amount to an invasion and conquest of that land if—assuming a counterfactual—Utah were a separate sovereign nation,” Hageman’s filing states.
Twenty-six Wyoming lawmakers also saddled up for Utah, urging the court to take up the case and saying their support does not mean they will not seek other federal property for the Equality State. The perturbed posse said its claims could extend to “all former federal territorial lands … now held by the United States … [including] parks, monuments, wilderness, etc.”
Six of the sympathetic signatories — Sens. Tim French (R-Powell), Larry Hicks (R-Baggs), Bob Ide (R-Casper), John Kolb (R-Rock Springs), Dan Laursen (R-Powell) and Cheri Steinmetz (R- Lingle) — voted for a draft bill that would allocate $75 million for the Legislature, independent of the executive branch or other state entities, to litigate against the federal government. Senate File 41 “Federal acts-legal actions authorized” will be considered when the Legislature convenes today.
Gordon was more reserved in Wyoming’s official state plea, alleging “harms that federal ownership … uniquely imposes on western States on a daily basis” as a reason for the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case.
There are high hopes that artificial intelligence (AI) can help tackle some of the world’s biggest environmental emergencies. Among other things, the technology is already being used to map the destructive dredging of sand and chart emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
But when it comes to the environment, there is a negative side to the explosion of AI and its associated infrastructure, according to a growing body of research. The proliferating data centres that house AI servers produce electronic waste. They are large consumers of water, which is becoming scarce in many places. They rely on critical minerals and rare elements, which are often mined unsustainably. And they use massive amounts of electricity, spurring the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases.
“There is still much we don’t know about the environmental impact of AI but some of the data we do have is concerning,” said Golestan (Sally) Radwan, the Chief Digital Officer of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “We need to make sure the net effect of AI on the planet is positive before we deploy the technology at scale.”
This week, UNEP released an issue note that explores AI’s environmental footprint and considers how the technology can be rolled out sustainably. It follows a major UNEP report, Navigating New Horizons, which also examined AI’s promise and perils. Here’s what those publications found.
First of all, what is AI?
AI is a catch-all term for a group of technologies that can process information and, at least superficially, mimic human thinking. Rudimentary forms of AI have been around since the 1950s. But the technology has evolved at a breakneck pace in recent years, in part because of advances in computing power and the explosion of data, which is crucial for training AI models.
Why are people excited about the potential of AI when it comes to the environment?
The big benefit of AI is that it can detect patterns in data, such as anomalies and similarities, and use historic knowledge to accurately predict future outcomes. That could make AI invaluable for monitoring the environment, and helping governments, businesses and individuals make more planet-friendly choices. It can also enhance efficiencies. UNEP, for example, uses AI to detect when oil and gas installations vent methane, a greenhouse gas that drives climate change.
Most large-scale AI deployments are housed in data centres, including those operated by cloud service providers. These data centres can take a heavy toll on the planet. The electronics they house rely on a staggering amount of grist: making a 2 kg computer requires 800 kg of raw materials. As well, the microchips that power AI need rare earth elements, which are often mined in environmentally destructive ways, noted Navigating New Horizons.
The second problem is that data centres produce electronic waste, which often contains hazardous substances, like mercury and lead.
Third, data centres use water during construction and, once operational, to cool electrical components. Globally, AI-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water than Denmark, a country of 6 million, according to one estimate. That is a problem when a quarter of humanity already lacks access to clean water and sanitation.
Finally, to power their complex electronics, data centres that host AI technology need a lot of energy, which in most places still comes from the burning of fossil fuels, producing planet-warming greenhouse gases. A request made through ChatGPT, an AI-based virtual assistant, consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google Search, reported the International Energy Agency. While global data is sparse, the agency estimates that in the tech hub of Ireland, the rise of AI could see data centres account for nearly 35 per cent of the country’s energy use by 2026.
Driven in part by the explosion of AI, the number of data centres has surged to 8 million from 500,000 in 2012, and experts expect the technology’s demands on the planet to keep growing.
Some have said that when it comes to the environment, AI is a wildcard. Why is that?
We have a decent handle on what the environmental impacts of data centres could be. But it’s impossible to predict how AI-based applications themselves will affect the planet. Some experts worry they may have unintended consequences. For example, the development of AI-powered self-driving cars could cause more people to drive instead of cycling or taking public transit, pushing up greenhouse gas emissions. Then there are what experts call higher-order effects. AI, for example, could be used to generate misinformation about climate change, downplaying the threat in the eyes of the public.
Is anybody doing anything about the environmental impacts of AI?
More than 190 countries have adopted a series of non-binding recommendations on the ethical use of AI, which covers the environment. As well, both the European Union and the United States of America have introduced legislation to temper the environmental impact of AI. But policies like those are few and far between, says Radwan.
“Governments are racing to develop national AI strategies but rarely do they take the environment and sustainability into account. The lack of environmental guardrails is no less dangerous than the lack of other AI-related safeguards.”
How can the world rein in the environmental fallout from AI?
In the new issue note, UNEP recommends five main things. Firstly, countries can establish standardized procedures for measuring the environmental impact of AI; right now, there’s a dearth of reliable information on the subject. Secondly, with support from UNEP, governments can develop regulations that require companies to disclose the direct environmental consequences of AI-based products and services. Thirdly, tech companies can make AI algorithms more efficient, reducing their demand for energy, while recycling water and reusing components where feasible. Fourthly, countries can encourage companies to green their data centres, including by using renewable energy and offsetting their carbon emissions. Finally, countries can weave their AI-related policies into their broader environmental regulations.
UNEP is focused on helping the world better navigate the environmental challenges of tomorrow. To do that, we have ramped up our work on strategic foresight, scanning the horizon for emerging threats to the planet. This process culminated in the development of Navigating New Horizons – A Global Foresight Report on Planetary Health and Human Wellbeing, which was published earlier this year. Produced in collaboration with the International Science Council, it examined eight global shifts accelerating the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.
This past year, 2024, was the warmest ever measured for the global ocean, following a record-breaking 2023. In fact, every decade since 1984, when satellite recordkeeping of ocean temperatures started, has been warmer than the previous one.
A warmer ocean means increased evaporation, which in turn results in heavier rains in some areas and droughts in others. It can power hurricanes and downpours. It can also harm the health of coastal marine areas and sea life – coral reefs suffered their most extensive bleaching event on record in 2024, with damage in many parts of the world.
Warming ocean water also affects temperatures on land by changing weather patterns. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced on Jan. 10 that data showed 2024 had also broken the record for the warmest year globally, with global temperatures about 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.6 Celsius) above pre-industrial times. That would mark the first full calendar year with average warming above 1.5 C, a level countries had agreed to try to avoid passing long-term.
Many regions of the world were much warmer than the 1991-2020 average in 2024, including large areas of ocean. C3S / ECMWF, CC BY
Climate change, by and large, takes the blame. Greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere trap heat, and about 90% of the excess heat caused by emissions from burning fossil fuels and other human activities is absorbed by the ocean.
But while it’s clear that the ocean has been warming for quite some time, its temperatures over the past two years have been far above the previous decades. That leaves two mysteries for scientists.
It’s not just El Niño
The cyclic climate pattern of the El Niño Southern Oscillation can explain part of the warmth over the past two years.
During El Niño periods, warm waters that usually accumulate in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean move eastward toward the coastlines of Peru and Chile, leaving the Earth slightly warmer overall. The latest El Niño began in 2023 and caused global average temperatures to rise well into early 2024.
Sea surface temperatures have been running well above average when compared with all years on record, starting in 1981. The orange line is 2024, dark grey is 2023, and red is 2025. The middle dashed line is the 1982-2011 average. ClimateReanalyzer.org/NOAA OISST v2.1, CC BY
But the oceans have been even warmer than scientists expected. For example, global temperatures in 2023-2024 followed a similar growth and decline pattern across the seasons as the previous El Niño event, in 2015-2016, but they were about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 Celsius) higher at all times in 2023-2024.
Scientists are puzzled and left with two problems to solve. They must figure out whether something else contributed to the unexpected warming and whether the past two years have been a sign of a sudden acceleration in global warming.
The role of aerosols
An intriguing idea, tested using climate models, is that a swift reduction in aerosols over the past decade may be one of the culprits.
Aerosols are solid and liquid particles emitted by human and natural sources into the atmosphere. Some of them have been shown to partially counteract the impact of greenhouse gases by reflecting solar radiation back into space. However, they also are responsible for poor air quality and air pollution.
Many of these particles with cooling properties are generated in the process of burning fossil fuels. For example, sulfur aerosols are emitted by ship engines and power plants. In 2020, the shipping industry implemented a nearly 80% cut in sulfur emissions, and many companies shifted to low-sulfur fuels. But the larger impact has come from power plants reducing their emissions, including a big shift in this direction in China. So, while technologies have cut these harmful emissions, that means a brake slowing the pace of warming is weakened.
Is this a warming surge?
The second puzzle is whether the planet is seeing a warming surge or not.
Temperatures are clearly rising, but the past two years have not been warm enough to support the notion that we may be seeing an acceleration in the rate of global warming.
Analysis of four temperature datasets covering the 1850-2023 period has shown that the rate of warming has not shown a significant change since around the 1970s. The same authors, however, noted that only a rate increase of at least 55% – about half a degree Celsius and nearly a full degree Fahrenheit over one year – would make the warming acceleration detectable in a statistical sense.
Chart: The Conversation/CC-BY-NDSource: NOAAGet the dataEmbed Download imageCreated with Datawrapper
From a statistical standpoint, then, scientists cannot exclude the possibility that the 2023-2024 record ocean warming resulted simply from the “usual” warming trend that humans have set the planet on for the past 50 years. A very strong El Niño contributed some natural variability.
From a practical standpoint, however, the extraordinary impacts the planet has witnessed – including extreme weather, heat waves, wildfires, coral bleaching and ecosystem destruction – point to a need to swiftly reduce carbon dioxide emissions to limit ocean warming, regardless of whether this is a continuation of an ongoing trend or an acceleration.
Attendees of the Colorado River Water Users Association watch negotiators Estevan López of New Mexico and Becky Mitchell of Colorado speak on a panel Thursday, December 5, 2024, at the Paris Hotel and Casino. The Upper and Lower basin states are at an impasse about how cuts will be shared and reservoirs operated after 2026. CREDIT: LUKE RUNYON/THE WATER DESK
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Jack Schmidt and Eric Kuhn):
January 9, 2024
The press coverage of the December 2024 Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) meeting mostly focused on the ongoing stalemate between representatives of the Upper and Lower Division States over their competing proposals for how the Colorado River Systems’ big reservoirs will be operated after the 2007 Interim Guidelines terminate in 2026. The headlines included words such as “turbulent”, “bitter”, “bluster”, and “spar”. Indeed, there was tension in the air, and the potential for interstate litigation was a topic of much discussion both on the formal agenda and in the hallways where, traditionally, progress is often made between competing interests.
While the press focus on the tension and divisiveness was unavoidable, I believe that there were good reasons for some guarded optimism.
For the ongoing effort to renegotiate the post-2026 operating guidelines, a consortium of seven environmental NGOs has also made a detailed proposal. Their proposal is referred to as the “Cooperative Conservation” proposal. One of the four action alternatives that Reclamation will analyze, Alternative #3, is patterned after the NGO submittal. At CRWUA, John Berggren of Western Resource Advocates, who along with Jennifer Pitt and others prepared the proposal, made a presentation on the proposal. Like the other submitted proposals, the cooperative conservation alternative proposes sophisticated operational rules for Lakes Mead and Powell based on combined system storage and actual hydrology. Where the Cooperative Conservation proposal breaks new ground is the concept of a Conservation Reserve Pool, and this idea could lead the basin toward a practical on-the-ground solution. Indeed, the Gila River Indian Community introduced at CRWUA a similar concept in the form of a Federal Protection Pool made up of stored water in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These proposals, taken separately, together, or in some combined and moderated form, might serve as a catalyst for compromise.
As proposed, both the Conservation Reserve Pool and the Federal Protection Pool would be filled with water conserved by reductions in consumptive use and perhaps augmentation from programs in both basins and this water could be stored anywhere in the system. This water would be “operationally neutral” and thus invisible to the underlying system management operating rules. From an accounting perspective, this Pool would “float” above other water in the reservoirs. Floating Pools operate separately from and above the prior appropriation system of water allocation on the Lower River and are invisible to the rules that dictate annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam. Thus, these proposals impart important operational flexibility. In many ways, Floating Pools split the baby—they incentivize innovative conservation measures that allow participants to find value they would not have been able to realize under the prior appropriation system—yet they insulate the prior appropriation system and thus are more protective of higher-priority water users than operationally non-neutral ICS. It’s a stretch to say there is something here for everyone, but there may be enough to kick-start otherwise stalled conversations.
In their proposal, the Lower Division States have offered to take up to 1.5 maf/year of mainstem shortages. Where the two basins remain deadlocked is what happens in those years when shortages exceed the amount the Lower Division States are willing to accept. The Lower Division States have proposed that the two basins share the additional required shortages up to a maximum shortage of 3.9 maf/year. The Upper Division States have said, “No, because we already suffer large hydrologic shortages in dry years, and we have not used our full compact entitlement; the Lower Division should cover all of the shortages.” In their presentation, however, the Upper Division Commissioners (UCRC members) left the door open for continuing discussions between the two divisions. In his remarks, New Mexico Commissioner Estevan Lopez stated that under what he referred to as “parallel activities”, the Upper Division States might be willing to discuss conserving “100,000, maybe 200,000 acre-feet per year.”
Water in Floating Pools could be used for a variety of purposes including environmental management, fostering binational programs, and supplementing scheduled water deliveries. During his CRWUA presentation, John Berggren mentioned an obvious use for this pool. Water stored in the Pool by conserved consumptive use programs in the Upper Division States could be used as an Upper Division contribution during years when mainstem shortages to the Lower Division States exceed a negotiated amount. Of course, the Lower Basin is unlikely to accept Upper Basin creation of Floating Pools made up of water for which there is no current consumptive use. This water is already “system water” and is now being used by existing Lower Basin water agency. Thus, it would be necessary to develop a program to account for and certify savings in the Upper Basin. Further, the thorny problem of shepherding (legally protecting the conserved water so that it ends up in system storage) needs to be overcome. For a perspective on this issue, see Heather Sacket. Undeveloped Tribal water is a controversial sticking-point in this regard, with strong feelings and strong arguments on all sides.
If the Upper Division States were to conserve 200,000 acre-feet per year for five years and deposit that saved water in a conservation reserve “Floating Pool”, something like 900,000 acre-feet could be available for shortage sharing (after accounting for reservoir evaporation). (We use 900,000 af as an example only, how much water the Upper Division States would have to contribute and maintain in a Floating Pool would have to be negotiated between the two divisions.) In their presentation, the Lower Division principals pointed out that had their proposal been in place beginning in 2007, there has yet to be a year when shortage sharing would have been required. Note, this conclusion is very sensitive to “initial conditions.” In 2007, total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell was about 8 maf more than it is today. If the 21st century hydrology continues, shortages greater than 1.5 maf/year are likely to occur.
Carefully crafted with appropriate guardrails, Floating Pool concepts can be a catalyst for compromise between the two divisions that give both parties something they need.
How do Floating Pool alternatives fit with the Schmidt, Kuhn, Fleck management approach? Based on our conversations with the authors of the cooperative conservation proposal, we believe the two approaches agree — that our management proposal fits on top of and complements their proposal quite well. In my presentation at CRWUA, I emphasized that, like future hydrology, there is great uncertainty in the future needs of the river’s ecosystem and society’s values. It’s almost a certainty that in the future, prescribed annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam will cause an unacceptable and unanticipated outcome to some river or reservoir resource. When that happens, our flexible management approach and accounting system keeps the basins “whole.”
Is using the concept of Floating Pools as a catalyst to break the stalemate between the two basins without warts? – of course not. There are important considerations regarding the use of undeveloped water—Tribal or otherwise, and the devil is in the details when it comes to developing appropriate guardrails for annual and total accumulation in such a Pool, the number and type of participants, annual debits, and other important qualifications. Even conserving 100,000 acre-feet per year in the Upper Division States, with acceptable verification, could be a stretch, especially if there is less federal money in the future, as there almost certainly will be. Finally, it might put off addressing fundamental problems with the law of the river until the new post-2026 operating rules again expire. When they do, the 1922 Compact and 1944 Treaty with Mexico will still be in place, and these agreements collectively allocate 17.5 maf/year of consumptive use on a river that is only producing 13-13.5 maf/year of water at the international boundary (and runoff continues to decline). What the Floating Pool concept might accomplish is to significantly reduce the temptation and threat of unpredictable interstate litigation, keep the basin’s stakeholders talking to each other, and give us time to move toward more foundational change in how the river is managed.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid.
And when last year is averaged with 2023, both years together also exceed that level of warming, which was noted as a red line marking dangerous climate change by 196 countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.
The temperature figures were seen as so significant that the new annual climate data for 2024 was presented Thursday night as part of the first-ever internationally coordinated release by several institutions that track global temperatures, in part to mark the “exceptional conditions experienced in 2024,” according to a report published today by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service.
On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the World Meteorological Organization will follow up with similar reports, all of which will emphasize not only the record global temperatures, but also the record amount of water vapor in the atmosphere that contributed to severe and record flooding in some parts of the world last year, and also helped supercharge tropical cyclones and hurricanes.
Rather than being fatigued by the barrage of news about heat records and other climate extremes, people should see the information as an opportunity to be thankful that we are not flying blind into dangerous climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.
Thanks to international science, “We do know something about what’s happening,” he said. “We can make some predictions about what’s coming in the future. So rather than being overwhelmed … we should also take this as an opportunity to do something about it, to react to and to inform our decisions in the best possible way with facts and evidence.”
Even with those facts, he added, “We are facing a very new climate and new challenges that our society is not prepared for. … This is a monumental challenge for society.”
According to the Copernicus data, 2024 didn’t just edge past the previous record-warm year, 2023, but surged more than a tenth of 1 degree Celsius all the way to 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.8F) above the pre-industrial level. That was one of the biggest year-on-year jumps on record, said Samantha Burgess, co-director of Copernicus.
She said some of the other global datasets may actually still show the 2024 warming relative to the pre-industrial 1850-1900 average at just below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F), but that the global synthesis of six major datasets by the World Meteorological Organization will also come out to more than 1.5.
Still, she said, that doesn’t mean the limit set by the Paris Agreement has been broken, because it refers to a long-term average over 10 to 30 years.
If the 1.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the pre-industrial average doesn’t seem like a huge deal to some people, she said human bodies provide a good analogy.
“The temperature of the human body is around 37 [degrees Celsius],” she said. “If we have a fever at 39 degrees, it doesn’t sound like much, but the body responds in very negative ways, and we feel terrible. We’re feverish, and the body is doing everything possible to fight that infection.
“The reality is that at a global average change of 1.5 degrees, the frequency and the intensity of extreme events gets more likely,” she said. “Extreme events like wildfires, heat waves, severe storms, droughts, are likely to get more frequent, and they’re likely to be more intense. This is why, when you’ve got this small number but over a very large global average, it’s incredibly important.”
The Copernicus scientists said that the world’s oceans, in particular, were one of the biggest factors driving Earth’s overall annual temperature to a new record. That ocean warmth also had direct impacts like a global wave of coral bleaching and reef die-offs, as well as mass die-offs of marine mammals and seabirds.
On land, the persistently high global fever of the last few years led to deadly heat waves, with more than 47,000 heat-related deaths in Europe alone during 2023. Final figures for the number of such deaths in 2024 are yet to be calculated.
The new data on record warmth comes at a time when some governments and companies are already rolling back previous climate action pledges. The internationally coordinated release of global climate data could also be seen as an acknowledgment that global warming isn’t going to slow down and wait for humanity to solve other vexing social, political and economic problems.
Asked if those rollbacks in the face of record heat are worrying to him as a climate scientist, Buontempo said that, “From a physical point of view, the mechanism is well explained. What drives this warming temperature is, to a very large extent, increasing greenhouse gases.”
If the goal is to stabilize the global temperature, then governments need to move toward reducing emissions to zero “in the most rapid possible way,” he said.
What will the future of the warming stripes be?2024 could be the start of a stabilisation of global temperatures, or it might appear to be a cool year.Which one of these stories becomes reality depends on our choices today, and every day until then.We are likely to regret not acting sooner.
QTS Data Center Aurora June 2024. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
January 2, 2025
Gov. Polis and many utilities say that data centers can benefit just about everybody in Colorado. But others fear impacts to rates and potential setbacks in reduction of emissions.
Under the umbrella of the energy transition were dozens of interesting, important stories in Colorado during 2024, including:
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association got the lifeline it so desperately needed to make the transition from coal in the form of $679 million in assistance from the federal government. Sen. Michael Bennet — a key partner in the Inflation Reduction Act sausage-making in D.C. in 2022 — was there to commemorate it. And United Power, itself independent of Tri-State on May 1, is getting $261.6 million.
Pueblo talked a lot about nuclear — and inexplicably began cleaving itself from the renewable energy that had been very nearly the sole bright spot of its economy in recent years.
Holy Cross Energy achieved 90% renewable generation for a month this fall.
United Power broke ground on a natural gas plant, and Platte River Power Authority and everybody else laid plans similar plans for natural gas.
Seeds were planted for geothermal to become a viable part of Colorado’s energy story in Vail, Steamboat and easily a dozen other places across Colorado.
Important stories — these and many others in this energy transition. But easily surpassing them was the story of data centers and their voracious hunger for energy. Could their looming demand derail Colorado’s decarbonization plans? Defenders say no, but they are not convincing. And will interests of ratepayers be protected?
Figuring out the public policy to balance public interests and private gain will be a major issue in the 2025 legislative session.
Three years ago, few people outside of Virginia’s data center alley were talking about data centers. In 2019, there was a half- or less-baked idea of a cryptocurrency mill in Pueblo. Later came a crypto outfit near Montrose.
The era of hyperscale data centers — hyperscale is often defined as having “massive” power needs — arrived in early 2022 when Microsoft purchased a 260-acre parcel in Aurora, south of DIA, for $63.5 million.
In February 2023, Mile High CRE, an online news site about commercial development, described the purchase as the first in metropolitan Denver for a hyperscale data center.
“Denver has an edge over more established markets like Silicon Valley or Northern Virginia in that cost of power, cost of land, and cost of construction are lower, environmental risks are not as high, and the central location grants access to a plethora of networks,” it said. What Colorado lacked, the article added, was a competitive incentive package.
In February 2024, State Sen. Kevin Priola introduced a bill that would have extended more tax breaks to data center developers. Big Pivots did write about that in a column that got broad play across Colorado. See: “Why do data center need tax breaks in Colorado? They’re coming anyway.” A few weeks later came news that the data center subsidy bill was postponed. It never got one committee hearing.
Colorado already has one hyperscale data center. It’s in Aurora, and Mark Jaffee of the Colorado Sun broke the story about QTS in October 2023. (Big Pivots was too busy on a series about water and urban landscapes to chase it).
Two guest columnists in Big Pivots weighed in on the value of data centers. Morey Wolfson, a one-time staffer at the Colorado Energy Office and at the PUC, in September argued against subsidies. Jeff Ackermann, a former chair of the PUC as well as director of the state energy office, in October argued that data centers can have upsides. Meanwhile, the Economist, the New York Times and the Washington Post began writing frequently about data centers — including this story from last week: “Energy hungry AI firms bet on these moonshot technologies.”
Xcel Energy in October delivered the statistics that made this a compelling Colorado story. The electrical utility, responsible for more than half of electrical sales in Colorado, said it needed a staggering 12,500 to 14,000 megawatts of new generation to meet rising demand. To put that into perspective, Rush Creek, Xcel’s wind farm between Limon and Colorado Springs, has a capacity of 600 megawatts.
After average annual growth of 0.7% during the preceding five years, said Xcel, it projected 4% growth compounded annually from 2023 to 2031.
Data centers lie at the center of this projected growth, 62% for energy growth overall and 72% for peak demand, according to Xcel’s Jack Ihle. In an Oct. 15 filing with Colorado regulators, he also said the same base-case forecast saw electric vehicles producing 19% and building electrification 12% of its new demand.
Even without this new demand, Xcel has had trouble getting renewable energy across the finish line. These are projects approved through the electric resource plan from 2021. Supply chain issues have something to do with that.
How will Xcel be able to meet burgeoning demand? And does this imperil Colorado’s drive to meet its 2030 goal of 50% economy wide reduction in emissions? The state’s existing modeling already showed the state falling short, and that was without the data centers becoming a major part of the equation. Now comes speculation — and, at this point it is merely that, speculation — that Xcel may find it necessary to keep Comanche 3, its newest and largest coal-fired unit, operating beyond 2030.
That speculation is not completely out of the blue. That is indeed what has happened in Virginia.
Here, I have described Xcel Energy. But data centers could be part of the stories of Tri-State and its members as well as Platte River Power Authority, Black Hills Energy and perhaps others. Even Fort Morgan — a town of 12,000 northeast of Denver, which is supplied by electricity by the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska. A Wyoming company, Prometheus Energy, says it intends to create a data center there as well as in Pueblo in 2026, according to one report.
Chris Hansen, one of Colorado’s most important state legislators in the energy transition, told Big Pivots in November that one of his larger disappointments in leaving the Legislature to manage La Plata Electric was that he wouldn’t be able to advance legislation to address the data center issue and help Colorado avoid the problems of Virginia. Hansen has handed the work off to State Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat from Louisville. Brown has a background in health care, and he will never have the adroit voice of a Chris Hansen or a Steve Fenberg, but he has demonstrated in his two years that he is a capable, solid legislator.
Yesterday, Gov. Jared Polis was in my neighborhood, and I got in a few minutes to talk with him about passenger rail and data centers. I asked him explicitly whether the growth in demand from data centers would imperil Colorado’s goal of achieving 50% economy wide decarbonization.
No, he said. Done right, growth in data centers can be a win-win for consumers and the utilities.
“Data centers are a broad category of electricity users, but I would say in the right time, in the right place, data centers can play a very important role in improving the reliability and sustainability of the grid, just like if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, they can add transmission costs,” he replied. “It’s really about what, when and where, and how that factors into grid resiliency as we move towards clean energy.”
I persisted with a question about the need for legislation. He did not answer directly:
“If there’s a way to bring in more data centers working with some of the larger providers in areas that make sense, that help us reduce costs for Colorado consumers and improve grid resiliency, then we should explore those.”
I suspect Xcel would be happy with his phrasing. However, we are already seeing upward price pressures in renewables because of supply chain and other issues. If that upward migration coupled with rapid growth in demand produces sharply higher consumer costs, there could be strong pushback. That could delay Colorado’s progress toward its decarbonization goals. The debate in the PUC proceedings about Xcel’s just transition electric-resource plan in coming months should be lively. That applies, too, to the debates in the Colorado Legislature.
There’s lots of good journalism to be had here for Big Pivots going into 2025. It’s one of many good stories across Colorado deserving deeper dives.
Xcel was reluctant to go forward with its first major wind farm, completed in 2004, but now has much wind — and will add far more in the next few yeas. Photo near Cheyenne Wells, Allen Best
When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024 is our annual report, published this year for the first time.
Every December, people ask us how severe the year’s extreme weather events were. To answer this question, we’ve partnered with Climate Central to produce a report that reviews some of the most significant events and highlights findings from our attribution studies. It also includes new analysis looking at the number of dangerous heat days added by climate change in 2024 and global resolutions for 2025 to work toward a safer, more sustainable world.
Key messages
Extreme weather reached dangerous new heights in 2024. This year’s record-breaking temperatures fueled unrelenting heatwaves, drought, wildfire, storms and floods that killed thousands of people and forced millions from their homes. This exceptional year of extreme weather shows how dangerous life has already become with 1.3°C of human-induced warming, and highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
Climate change contributed to the deaths of at least 3,700 people and the displacement of millions in 26 weather events we studied in 2024. These were just a small fraction of the 219 events that met our trigger criteria, used to identify the most impactful weather events. It’s likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands.
Globally, climate change added on average 41 additional days of dangerous heat in 2024 that threatened people’s health, according to new analysis by Climate Central. The countries that experienced the highest number of dangerous heat days are overwhelmingly small island and developing states, who are highly vulnerable and considered to be on the frontlines of climate change. The analysis highlights the wide reaching impacts of extreme heat that are underreported and not well understood.
Many extreme events that took place in the beginning of 2024 were influenced by El Niño. However, most of our studies found that climate change played a bigger role than El Niño in fueling these events, including the historic drought in the Amazon. This is consistent with the fact that, as the planet warms, the influence of climate change increasingly overrides other natural phenomena affecting the weather. [ed. emphasis mine]
Record-breaking global temperatures in 2024 translated to record-breaking downpours. From Kathmandu, to Dubai, to Rio Grande do Sul, to the Southern Appalachians, the last 12 months have been marked by a large number of devastating floods. Of the 16 floods we studied, 15 were driven by climate change-amplified rainfall. The result reflects the basic physics of climate change — a warmer atmosphere tends to hold more moisture, leading to heavier downpours. Shortfalls in early warning and evacuation plans likely contributed to huge death tolls, while floods in Sudan and Brazil highlighted the importance of maintaining and upgrading flood defences.
The Amazon rainforest and Pantanal Wetland were hit hard by climate change in 2024, with severe droughts and wildfires leading to huge biodiversity loss. The Amazon is the world’s most important land-based carbon sink, making it crucial for the stability of the global climate. Ending deforestation will protect both ecosystems from drought and wildfire, as dense vegetation is able to absorb and retain moisture.
Hot seas and warmer air fueled more destructive storms, including Hurricane Helene and Typhoon Gaemi. Individual attribution studies have shown how these storms have stronger winds and are dropping more rain. Research by Climate Central found that climate change increased the intensity of most Atlantic hurricanes between 2019 and 2023 – of the 38 hurricanes analysed, 30 had wind speeds that were one category higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale than they would have been without human-caused warming, while our analysis found that the risk of multiple Category 3-5 typhoons hitting the Philippines in a given year is increasing as the climate warms.
Figure 1: World Weather Attribution studies in 2024.
Resolutions for 2025
A faster shift away from fossil fuels – The burning of oil, gas and coal are the cause of warming and the primary reason extreme weather is becoming more severe. Last year at COP28, the world finally agreed to ‘transition away from fossil fuels,’ but new oil and gas fields continue to be opened around the world, despite warnings that doing so will result in a long term commitment to more than 1.5°C and therefore costs to people around the world. Extremes will continue to worsen with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming. A rapid move to renewable energy will help make the world a safer, healthier, wealthier and more stable place.
Improvements in early warning – Weather disasters in 2024 highlighted the importance of early warning systems, which are one of the cheapest and most effective ways to minimise fatalities. Warnings need to be targeted, given days ahead of a dangerous weather event, and outline clear instructions on what people need to do. Most extreme weather is well forecast, even in developing nations. Every country needs to implement, test and continually improve early warning systems to ensure people are not in harm’s way.
Real-time reporting of heat deaths – Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather. However, the dangers of high temperatures are underappreciated and underreported. In April, a hospital in Mali reported a surge in excess deaths as temperatures climbed to nearly 50°C. Reported by local media, the announcement was a rare example of health professionals raising the alarm about the dangers of extreme heat in real-time. Health systems worldwide are stretched, but informing local journalists when emergency departments are overwhelmed is a simple way to alert the public that extreme heat can be deadly.
Finance for developing countries – COP29 recently discussed ways to increase finance for poor countries to help them cope with the impacts of extreme weather. Developing countries are responsible for a small amount of historic carbon emissions, but as our research has highlighted this year, are being hit the hardest by extreme weather. Back-to-back disasters, like the Philippines typhoons, or devastating floods that followed a multi-year drought in East Africa, are cancelling out developmental gains and forcing governments to reach deeper and deeper into their pockets to respond and recover from extreme weather. Ensuring developing countries have the means to invest in adaptation will protect lives and livelihoods, and create a stabler and more equitable world.
Some people say that the movement toward renewable energy cannot be stopped by a single regressive administration. But Colorado could be badly harmed if its efforts to transition to clean energy are put on hold. Millions of dollars in investments for rural co-ops, community-based solar, and grid hardening could be in jeopardy, striking a heavy blow to our more resilient future. Worse still, that’s only one piece of what could be coming under a new federal regime.
Colorado’s public lands and water supplies are also in grave peril under the incoming Congress and president. This is despite decades of hard, locally-driven work to secure protections for vital headwaters, hunting lands, forests and habitat, many from a century-long history of extraction. And it’s regardless of rapid warming, persistent drought and an imperiled Colorado River system with no good solutions in sight.
Healthy natural systems guard against ecological collapse. But now various environmental tipping points, that moment in a system where it moves into a new norm and change becomes irreversible, appear at their most precarious moments. During 2024 humans pumped out more climate-choking pollution than ever before. That’s almost 10 years after the acclaimed Paris Agreement, which our president-elect and his cabinet have vowed to abandon.
Global warming presents a clear and present danger to all our livelihoods and well-being. And the United States is already the No. 1 oil and gas producer in the world and a top polluter behind only China. 2024 is likely to be the hottest year ever recorded. Without the sufficient response we careen toward calamity. To meet this moment, the incoming administration and Congress have pledged to pollute more and care less.
That is bad news not only for our lands and water supplies, but for the economic future, too. Our ledgers will already never be free of climate risk. Which is why the debate at the global climate summits is now about who ends up with the bill for loss and damages done and coming. That matters here, too: A recent study correlates rising insurance costs with climate vulnerability and puts much of Colorado in the dark red hazard zone.
In a state where housing is increasingly unaffordable, putting science deniers in charge of our future is just a bad idea. Moving federal agency offices or installing Colorado-based cabinet-members won’t matter if the new administration is just rearranging deck chairs to ensure its patrons have the best seats to watch this escalating disaster.
In fact, fossil fuel “dominance” could make a mess of Colorado, as it does most places it asserts itself. This puts at risk our lands and communities with oil trains, backdoor schemes to subsidize legacy polluters, policies that favor extraction over conservation, and more pipelines for more fracked gas exports. The alternative to slamming head on into a worst future is to stop the harm now and to make systems more resilient to coming disruptions. That means less fossil energy and more conservation of natural places. [ed. emphasis mine]
Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Standing up for Colorado’s liveable future means fighting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and defending places Coloradans have fought for decades to protect – such as Thompson Divide, the Dolores River canyons, or the forests and public lands surrounding critical watersheds and farmlands in places like the North Fork Valley.
That will best limit the extent of further harm and will better secure our natural capital as a hedge against future disruption. By investing in ecological systems through resilient watersheds and healthy lands we guard against uncertainty. By defending these cherished places, we will keep intact critical sources of sustenance and enjoyment for the future and return dividends to those who live, work, and visit here today.
The Dolores River, below Slickrock, and above Bedrock. The Dolores River Canyon is included in a proposed National Conservation Area. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism.
Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.
While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?
In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.
The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.
We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.
In the Atlantic Ocean circulation, the relatively warm and salty surface water near the equator flows toward Greenland. During its journey it crosses the Caribbean Sea, loops up into the Gulf of Mexico, and then flows along the U.S. East Coast before crossing the Atlantic.
This current, also known as the Gulf Stream, brings heat to Europe. As it flows northward and cools, the water mass becomes heavier. By the time it reaches Greenland, it starts to sink and flow southward. The sinking of water near Greenland pulls water from elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and the cycle repeats, like a conveyor belt.
This is where our study comes in. We performed an experiment with a detailed climate model to find the tipping point for an abrupt shutdown by slowly increasing the input of fresh water.
We found that once it reaches the tipping point, the conveyor belt shuts down within 100 years. The heat transport toward the north is strongly reduced, leading to abrupt climate shifts.
The result: Dangerous cold in the North
Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.
The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36 F (0.2 C) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36 F (20 C). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.
The annual mean temperature changes after the conveyor belt stops reflect an extreme temperature drop in northern Europe in particular. René M. van Westen
These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.
The conveyor belt shutting down would also affect sea level and precipitation patterns, which can push other ecosystems closer to their tipping points. For example, the Amazon rainforest is vulnerable to declining precipitation. If its forest ecosystem turned to grassland, the transition would release carbon to the atmosphere and result in the loss of a valuable carbon sink, further accelerating climate change.
The Atlantic circulation has slowed significantly in the distant past. During glacial periods when ice sheets that covered large parts of the planet were melting, the influx of fresh water slowed the Atlantic circulation, triggering huge climate fluctuations.
So, when will we see this tipping point?
The big question – when will the Atlantic circulation reach a tipping point – remains unanswered. Observations don’t go back far enough to provide a clear result. While a recent study suggested that the conveyor belt is rapidly approaching its tipping point, possibly within a few years, these statistical analyses made several assumptions that give rise to uncertainty.
Instead, we were able to develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal involving the salinity transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic Ocean. Once a threshold is reached, the tipping point is likely to follow in one to four decades.
A climate model experiment shows how quickly the AMOC slows once it reaches a tipping point with a threshold of fresh water entering the ocean. How soon that will happen remains an open question. René M. van Westen
The climate impacts from our study underline the severity of such an abrupt conveyor belt collapse. The temperature, sea level and precipitation changes will severely affect society, and the climate shifts are unstoppable on human time scales.
It might seem counterintuitive to worry about extreme cold as the planet warms, but if the main Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down from too much meltwater pouring in, that’s the risk ahead.
This article was updated on Feb. 11, 2024, to fix a typo: The experiment found temperatures in parts of Europe changed by more than 5 F per decade.
Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States.Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.
In mid-November, 10 days after 77 million of our fellow Americans chose Donald J. Trump to be their next president, I found myself at the old Navajo Bridge, which spans Marble Canyon and the Colorado River downstream from Lees Ferry in northern Arizona. I got out of my car, stretched and ambled toward the pedestrian bridge, which mirrors the newer one for automobiles.
As I reached the bridge, I noticed some onlookers looking intently downstream with binoculars. I followed their gaze to see a trio of giant, bald-headed, feathered creatures perched on the steel beams of the automobile bridge, looking a bit like the flying monkeys in the old Wizard of Oz film. They were California condors, maybe 10 in all, apparently waiting for an afternoon carrion snack to float by on the slow-moving emerald waters far below.
I wandered back and forth on the bridge for the next hour or so, stopping frequently to snap another photo, meditate vertiginously on the river and limestone cliffs or to gaze again in awe at the magnificent, uncanny creatures. Politics and the election results became irrelevant, at least for a moment, and it was with a newfound sense of serenity that I finally got back into the car and headed north.
Condors 6Y and 2A (I’m sure they have their own, more interesting names, but …) at the Navajo Bridge. According to condorspotter.com, 6Y is a male born in March 2019 at the Oregon Zoo. And 2A is a female hatched at the World Center for Birds of Prey in May 2021. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
My mental calm was quickly shattered, however, as news trickled out about Trump’s Cabinet picks and plans. It is becoming increasingly clear that we are entering a perilous political era in which the federal government’s role is fundamentally altered. This includes a multi-pronged assault on our public lands and the rules, regulations, laws and agencies designed to protect them. Those condors on the Colorado River could be among the many victims.
Judging from the record of Trump’s first term, his campaign platform, his Cabinet picks so far and Project 2025, the right wing’s “presidential playbook,” it’s clear that he will once again attempt to dismantle the administrative state — and he’ll likely be better at it this time. The destruction will include gutting federal agencies, replacing experienced staffers with Trump loyalists and eviscerating protections for human health and the environment. The goal is to shrink the government, slash spending on safety nets and social programs to fund more tax cuts for the wealthy, and (of course) remove regulatory barriers standing in the way of ever-growing corporate profits. With the likes of Elon Musk buying his way into the administration, it promises to be a government of the billionaires, by the billionaires, and for the billionaires.
Trump actually summed up this ethos better than I ever could in a social media post, when he vowed to give anyone who invested at least $1 billion “in the United States of America … fully expedited approvals and permits, including, but in no way limited to, all Environmental approvals. GET READY TO ROCK!!!” He seemed to be responding to global mining corporation Rio Tinto, which is behind the proposed Resolution Copper Mine at Oak Flat in Arizona, urging the new administration to weaken environmental laws and expedite permitting for big mines.
During his first term, Trump made his hostility toward public lands clear as he reduced national monuments and rolled back regulations on fossil fuel extraction. This time, he promises a repeat performance, backed by a GOP-dominated Congress, a conservative-leaning Supreme Court and an army of professional ideologues who have been eagerly preparing for this moment for the last four years.
We can expect him to try to shrink or entirely rescind national monuments — particularly Bears Ears, Grand Staircase-Escalante and the Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon — potentially reopening hundreds of thousands of acres of uranium-rich lands to new mining claims during a time when the domestic uranium industry is experiencing a revival.
He will likely reward petroleum companies for donating generously to his campaign by implementing his “drill baby drill” policies. He’ll open up more public land to oil and gas leasing, including in the Alaskan Arctic, and rescind drilling bans on Thompson Divide in western Colorado and around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico. He’ll roll back new EPA rules aimed at reducing greenhouse gas and mercury pollution from coal power plants.
If Trump’s hunger for “energy dominance” and corporate freedom don’t come for your public lands, the “Cult of Efficiency” probably will. Musk donated $277 million to Trump’s campaign. In return, he has been chosen to co-chair the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, where he has vowed to slash some $2 trillion in allegedly “wasteful” spending.
What this will actually mean remains unclear. But Trump’s suggestion that he may try to privatize the U.S. Postal Service because it’s not “profitable” and must be “subsidized” gives a good indication of what Musk’s quasi-department will be targeting. The USPS is designed to provide a public good, not a profit, and its priorities are fulfilling that mission, not maximizing efficiency. After all, how could delivering a letter to some remote rural backwater for some 50 cents ever be efficient?
And if the USPS is a problem, then what about public lands and the agencies that manage them? Sure, they provide ecological benefits, stewardship of and free access to millions of acres of stunning landscapes, wildlife habitat and so much more. And yet, they are “subsidized” to the tune of tens of billions of dollars each year, making them ripe for Musk’s chopping block. Utah, with the support of other conservative states, has offered to make Musk’s job easier with a lawsuit seeking to seize control of the “unappropriated” federal land in its midst. Because those states can’t afford to manage those lands at a loss, they would almost certainly sell them off to private interests.
And what about those condors? For years, industry and conservative politicians have tried to weaken the Endangered Species Act because it stood in the way of development and profits. Project 2025 calls for an escalation of these efforts, which now have more support in Congress — and from the efficiency cult.
The federal government has spent at least $35 million so far on the California condor program. It’s an effort that has so far paid off by helping to bring the species back from the brink of extinction; the wild population is up to almost 600 from an 1980s low of just 22 birds. Public goods such as species restoration simply don’t fit into narrow Musk’s profit-focused vision. And the condor remains fragile, threatened by lead poisoning, power lines, wind turbines and avian influenza, and it is not yet self-sustaining.
In the weeks since the election, I’ve seen a number of pundits, politicians and even advocates calling on land, water and air defenders to take a more conciliatory approach, to forge alliances with oil and gas companies, to abandon calls to “keep it in the ground,” to work with Republicans to speed up permitting reform in order to expedite renewable energy development, even if it does mean more fossil fuel development as well. Yet if ever there was a time not to give in, this is it. America’s public lands are under unprecedented attack from nearly every front. Now we need to be even more vigilant and fierce in our defense of it. [ed. emphasis mine]
Out on that bridge, something compelled me to hang my body a little too far over the rail so I could gaze straight through the empty space toward the river. My vertigo was overcome by the thrill of seeing, just below me on a steel girder, a juvenile condor, its pink beak jutting from a thatch of dark brown feathers. That, I thought, is certainly worth fighting for.
Condors perched on steel girders some 450 feet above the Colorado River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The court agreed that the state’s energy policies violated Montanans’ constitutional right to a clean environment.
The Montana Supreme Court on Wednesday upheld a landmark victory for youth climate activists, affirming a decision by a lower court last year that the state’s energy policies violated their constitutional rights to a clean environment. Many of the 16 young people who brought the case, Held v. Montana, testified during the trial about the extreme weather they had witnessed in their home state, which is a major player in oil, gas and coal. They argued that a state law barring consideration of climate in setting energy policy was unconstitutional. The burning of fossil fuels produces the greenhouse gases that are dangerously warming the world. Rikki Held, 23, the named plaintiff in the case, was among those who testified. On Wednesday, she hailed the court’s decision. “This ruling is a victory not just for us, but for every young person whose future is threatened by climate change,” she said…
The plaintiffs were represented by lawyers from the nonprofits Our Children’s Trust and Western Environmental Law Center. Nate Bellinger, the activists’ lead counsel, said the decision showed that “the future of our children cannot be sacrificed for fossil fuel interests.”
[…]
Patrick Parenteau, professor of law emeritus and senior fellow for climate policy at the Environmental Law Center at Vermont Law and Graduate School, said that Montana was among a handful of states with environmental provisions in its constitution, and perhaps has the strongest of them. He said he expected to see similar lawsuits filed in other states now. Mr. Parenteau said the strong language in the opinion last year by Judge Kathy Seeley of Montana District Court had cleared the path for the decision to be upheld. Because the matter is squarely within the bounds of state law, he added, he did not see a pathway to appeal to the United States Supreme Court.
“It’s a landmark because it’s the first court in the U.S. to recognize a constitutional right to a stable climate,” he said. But it could run up against political realities, as the fossil fuel industry continues to receive strong support from state officials.
Colorado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 19, 2024
Transmission line in southeast Colorado a cause for guarded optimism among utility leaders
Interstate highways have transformed Colorado and America altogether. People growing up in the 1950s rarely had fresh fruit or vegetables in winter. Now, broccoli beheaded yesterday in a field near Yuma, Ariz., can be on a store shelf in metro Denver within a day or two. Much of that journey will be on an interstate highway.
High-voltage transmission lines are our four-lane highways of electricity. They worked well enough when giant coal plants provided most of our electricity. Now, as Colorado and other states strive to replace fossil fuels with renewables, new connections must be built, to knit us together across broader areas.
A federal agency this week delivered cause for cautious optimism. The Department of Energy has picked three transmission corridors among 10 national candidates for advanced work. One of them, the Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, would begin in southeast Colorado near Lamar, and work south into New Mexico and then somewhat west.
The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law authorized the secretary of energy to designate any geographic area as a national interest electric transmission corridor. The energy department has found that absence of transmission harms consumers. With more transmission, we can share low-cost renewable generation across broader areas. We need an electric grid larger than one weather system and covering more than one time zone.
The existing transmission network is akin to our highways of 50 to 60 years ago. We have transmission, but it’s as if Interstate 70 stopped at the state line. In fact, transmission lines do. Colorado is in the Western electrical grid of 10 states and some adjoining areas. This grid, however, is better understood as a collection of 34 different islands connected by narrow causeways.
“A cautious hurrah,” said Mark Gabriel, the CEO of United Power when I asked his reaction. The Brighton-based electrical cooperative supplies 113,000 members from the foothills to Weld County’s oil and gas fields, including many new industrial centers along I-76.
“Anything that promotes additional transmission is a good thing,” said Gabriel. “However, the challenge remains in actually getting something constructed in a reasonable period of time to make a difference.”
Gabriel pointed out that more than $40 billion in transmission projects have been announced. “Only a fraction are actually being built.”
Permitting has been the bane of many transmission projects. For example, it took 18 years before the TransWest Express Transmission project that will ferry wind-generated electricity from southern Wyoming to Utah and West Coast markets finally broke ground in 2023. It nicks the corner of northwest Colorado.
A bill being negotiated in Congress would ease federal permitting requirements to allow more rapid creation of transmission lines. Other provisions of the Energy Permitting Reform Act of 2024 would also benefit oil and gas extraction.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the wholesale provider for 17 of Colorado’s 22 electrical cooperatives, pointed to the need for streamlined permitting in its reaction to the transmission line in southeastern Colorado.
Transmission doesn’t come cheap. And just as interstate highways have their unsavory aspects — my companion and I can routinely hear I-70 roaring a mile away — transmission lines have their downsides. Who wants one in their backyard?
Baca County has Colorado’s best wind resource and it gets plenty of sunshine. Lacking has been transmission. Top photo transmission in Colroado Springs. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Some want to believe nuclear energy will solve all of our problems. The Pueblo City Council, while saying nice things about nuclear, intends to scrap a goal of 100% renewables by 2035. Maybe nuclear will be an answer, but recent projects have had eye-bulging costs. Natural gas has problems, too, as was evident in Winter Storm Uri of February 2021 when costs soared.
Chris Hansen, as a state legislator from Denver, sponsored key legislation to push transmission planning in Colorado. Now in Durango as CEO of La Plata Electric, he has started working on guiding his electrical cooperative to 97% emission-free electricity in the next decade. Transmission, he says, will be crucial.
Capacity of existing transmission lines can be expanded by reconductoring and other technology. But we altogether need to be better connected east and west, north and south.
One crucial question, says Hansen, is whether Denver-based Chris Wright, the choice of Donald Trump to be secretary of energy, will support continued transmission planning. His Colorado-based career has been in oil and gas. Wright sees renewables as a distant solution.
Southeastern Colorado brims with renewable energy potential. Baca County has Colorado’s best wind, according to a 2017 study by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. It also has strong solar. That’s why corn grows so well there — assuming it has water. The water of the Ogallala Aquifer won’t last, but the solar and wind almost certainly will. What it lacks now is a farm-to-market transmission highway.
Click the link to read the release on the UN website (Fragkiska Megaloudi, Gloria Pallares, Terry Collins):
December 9, 2024
Aridity: The ‘existential crisis’ redefining life on Earth
Five billion people could be affected by 2100
Even as dramatic water-related disasters such as floods and storms intensified in some parts of the world, more than three-quarters of Earth’s land became permanently drier in recent decades, UN scientists warned today in a stark new analysis.
Some 77.6% of Earth’s land experienced drier conditions during the three decades leading up to 2020 compared to the previous 30-year period, according to the landmark report from the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
Over the same period, drylands expanded by about 4.3 million km2 – an area nearly a third larger than India, the world’s 7th largest country – and now cover 40.6% of all land on Earth (excluding Antarctica).
In recent decades some 7.6% of global lands – an area larger than Canada – were pushed across aridity thresholds (i.e. from non-drylands to drylands, or from less arid dryland classes to more arid classes).
Most of these areas have transitioned from humid landscapes to drylands, with dire implications for agriculture, ecosystems, and the people living there.
And the research warns that, if the world fails to curb greenhouse gas emissions, another 3% of the world’s humid areas will become drylands by the end of this century.
In high greenhouse gas emissions scenarios, expanding drylands are forecast across the Midwestern United States, central Mexico, northern Venezuela, north-eastern Brazil, south-eastern Argentina, the entire Mediterranean Region, the Black Sea coast, large parts of southern Africa, and southern Australia.
The report, The Global Threat of Drying Lands: Regional and global aridity trends and future projections, was launched at the 16th conference of UNCCD’s nearly 200 Parties in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia (COP16), the largest UN land conference to date, and the first UNCCD COP to be held in the Middle East, a region profoundly affected by impacts from aridity.
“This analysis finally dispels an uncertainty that has long surrounded global drying trends,” says Ibrahim Thiaw, UNCCD Executive Secretary. “For the first time, the aridity crisis has been documented with scientific clarity, revealing an existential threat affecting billions around the globe.”
“Unlike droughts—temporary periods of low rainfall—aridity represents a permanent, unrelenting transformation,” he adds. “Droughts end. When an area’s climate becomes drier, however, the ability to return to previous conditions is lost. The drier climates now affecting vast lands across the globe will not return to how they were and this change is redefining life on Earth.”
The report by UNCCD Science-Policy Interface (SPI) — the UN body for assessing the science of land degradation and drought — points to human-caused climate change as the primary driver of this shift. Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation, transport, industry and land use changes warm the planet and other human activities warm the planet and affect rainfall, evaporation and plant life, creating the conditions that increase aridity.
Global aridity index (AI) data track these conditions and reveal widespread change over the decades.
For the first time, the aridity crisis has been documented with scientific clarity, revealing an existential threat affecting billions around the globe. The report points to human-caused climate change as the primary driver of this shift. Greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation, transport, industry and land use changes warm the planet and other human activities warm the planet and affect rainfall, evaporation and plant life, creating the conditions that increase aridity. Credit: UN
Aridification hotspots
Areas particularly hard-hit by the drying trend include almost all of Europe (95.9% of its land), parts of the western United States, Brazil, parts of Asia (notably eastern Asia), and central Africa.
Parts of the Western United States and Brazil: Significant drying trends, with water scarcity and wildfires becoming perennial hazards.
Mediterranean and Southern Europe: Once considered agricultural breadbaskets, these areas face a stark future as semi-arid conditions expand.
Central Africa and parts of Asia: Biologically megadiverse areas are experiencing ecosystem degradation and desertification, endangering countless species.
By contrast, less than a quarter of the planet’s land (22.4%) experienced wetter conditions, with areas in the central United States, Angola’s Atlantic coast, and parts of Southeast Asia showing some gains in moisture.
The overarching trend, however, is clear: drylands are expanding, pushing ecosystems and societies to suffer from aridity’s life-threatening impacts.
The report names South Sudan and Tanzania as nations with the largest percentage of land transitioning to drylands, and China as the country experiencing the largest total area shifting from non-drylands into drylands.
For the 2.3 billion people – well over 25% of the world’s population – living in the expanding drylands, this new normal requires lasting, adaptive solutions. Aridity-related land degradation, known as desertification, represents a dire threat to human well-being and ecological stability.
And as the planet continues to warm, report projections in the worst-case scenario suggest up to 5 billion people could live in drylands by the century’s end, grappling with depleted soils, dwindling water resources, and the diminishment or collapse of once-thriving ecosystems.
Forced migration is one of aridity’s most visible consequences. As land becomes uninhabitable, families and entire communities facing water scarcity and agricultural collapse often have no choice but to abandon their homes, leading to social and political challenges worldwide. From the Middle East to Africa and South Asia, millions are already on the move—a trend set to intensify in coming decades.
Map of Africa. Credit: Geology.comq
Aridity’s devastating impact
The effects of rising aridity are cascading and multifaceted, touching nearly every aspect of life and society, the report says.
It warns that one fifth of all land could experience abrupt ecosystem transformations from rising aridity by the end of the century, causing dramatic shifts (such as forests becoming grasslands and other changes) and leading to extinctions among many of the world’s plants, animals and other life.
Aridity is considered the world’s largest single driver behind the degradation of agricultural systems, affecting 40% of Earth’s arable lands
Rising aridity has been blamed for a 12% decline in gross domestic product (GDP) recorded for African countries between 1990–2015
More than two thirds of all land on the planet (excluding Greenland and Antarctica) is projected to store less water by the end of the century, if greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise even modestly
Aridity is considered one of the world’s five most important causes of land degradation (along with land erosion, salinization, organic carbon loss and vegetation degradation)
Rising aridity in the Middle East has been linked to the region’s more frequent and larger sand and dust storms
Increasing aridity is expected to play a role in larger and more intense wildfires in the climate-altered future—not least because of its impacts on tree deaths in semi-arid forests and the consequent growing availability of dry biomass for burning
Rising aridity’s impacts on poverty, water scarcity, land degradation and insufficient food production have been linked to increasing rates of sickness and death globally —especially among children and women
Rising aridity and drought play a key role in increasing human migration around the world—particularly in the hyper-arid and arid areas of southern Europe, the Middle East and North Africa and southern Asia.
Report marks a turning point
For years, documenting the rise of aridity proved a challenge, the report states. Its long-term nature and the intricate interplay of factors such as rainfall, evaporation, and plant transpiration made analysis difficult. Early studies produced conflicting results, often muddied by scientific caution.
The new report marks a turning point, leveraging advanced climate models and standardized methodologies to deliver a definitive assessment of global drying trends, confirming the inexorable rise of aridity, while providing critical insights into its underlying drivers and potential future trajectory.
Recommendations
The report offers a comprehensive roadmap for tackling aridity, emphasizing both mitigation and adaptation. Among its recommendations:
Strengthen aridity monitoring Integrate aridity metrics into existing drought monitoring systems. This approach would enable early detection of changes and help guide interventions before conditions worsen. Platforms like the new Aridity Visual Information Tool provide policymakers and researchers with valuable data, allowing for early warnings and timely interventions. Standardized assessments can enhance global cooperation and inform local adaptation strategies.
Improve land use practices Incentivizing sustainable land use systems can mitigate the impacts of rising aridity, particularly in vulnerable regions. Innovative, holistic, sustainable approaches to land management are the focus of another new UNCCD SPI report, Sustainable Land Use Systems: The path to collectively achieving Land Degradation Neutrality, available at https://bit.ly/3ZwkLZ3. It considers how land-use at one location affect others elsewhere, makes resilience to climate change or other shocks a priority, and encourages participation and buy-in by Indigenous and local communities as well as all levels of government. Projects like the Great Green Wall—a land restoration initiative spanning Africa—demonstrate the potential for large-scale, holistic efforts to combat aridity and restore ecosystems, while creating jobs and stabilizing economies.
Invest in water efficiency Technologies such as rainwater harvesting, drip irrigation, and wastewater recycling offer practical solutions for managing scarce water resources in dry regions.
Build resilience in vulnerable communities Local knowledge, capacity building, social justice and holistic thinking are vital to resilience. Sustainable land use systems encourage decision makers to apply responsible governance, protect human rights (including secure land access) and ensure accountability and transparency. Capacity-building programmes, financial support, education programmes, climate information services and community-driven initiatives empower those most affected by aridity to adapt to changing conditions. Farmers switching to drought-resistant crops or pastoralists adopting more arid-tolerant livestock exemplify incremental adaptation.
Develop international frameworks and cooperation The UNCCD’s Land Degradation Neutrality framework provides a model for aligning national policies with international goals, ensuring a unified response to the crisis. National Adaptation Plans must incorporate aridity alongside drought planning to create cohesive strategies that address water and land management challenges. Cross-sectoral collaboration at the global level, facilitated by frameworks like the UNCCD, is essential for scaling solutions.
Comments
“For decades, the world’s scientists have signalled that our growing greenhouse gas emissions are behind global warming. Now, for the first time, a UN scientific body is warning that burning fossil fuels is causing permanent drying across much of the world, too—with potentially catastrophic impacts affecting access to water that could push people and nature even closer to disastrous tipping points. As large tracts of the world’s land become more arid, the consequences of inaction grow increasingly dire and adaptation is no longer optional—it is imperative.” – UNCCD Chief Scientist Barron Orr
“Without concerted efforts, billions face a future marked by hunger, displacement, and economic decline. Yet, by embracing innovative solutions and fostering global solidarity, humanity can rise to meet this challenge. The question is not whether we have the tools to respond—it is whether we have the will to act.” – Nichole Barger, Chair, UNCCD Science-Policy Interface
“The report’s clarity is a wake-up call for policymakers: tackling aridity demands more than just science—it requires a diversity of perspectives and knowledge systems. By weaving Indigenous and local knowledge with cutting-edge data, we can craft stronger, smarter strategies to slow aridity’s advance, mitigate its impacts and thrive in a drying world.” – Sergio Vicente-Serrano, co-lead author of the report and an aridity expert with Spain’s Pyrenean Institute of Ecology
“This report underscores the critical need to address aridity as a defining global challenge of our time. By uniting diverse expertise and leveraging breakthrough technologies, we are not just measuring change—we are crafting a roadmap for resilience. Tackling aridity demands a collaborative vision that integrates innovation, adaptive solutions, and a commitment to securing a sustainable future for all.” – Narcisa Pricope, co-lead author, professor of geosciences and associate vice president for research at Mississippi State University, USA.
“The timeliness of this report cannot be overstated. Rising aridity will reshape the global landscape, challenging traditional ways of life and forcing societies to reimagine their relationship with land and water. As with climate change and biodiversity loss, addressing aridity requires coordinated international action and an unwavering commitment to sustainable development.” – Andrea Toreti, co-lead author and senior scientist, European Commission’s Joint Research Centre
By the Numbers:
Key global trends / projections
77.6%: Proportion of Earth’s land that experienced drier climates from 1990–2020 compared to the previous 30 years.
40.6%: Global land mass (excluding Antarctica) classified as drylands, up from 37.5% over the last 30 years.
4.3 million km²: Humid lands transformed into drylands in the last three decades, an area one-third larger than India
40%: Global arable land affected by aridity—the leading driver of agricultural degradation.
30.9%: Global population living in drylands in 2020, up from 22.5% in 1990
2.3 billion: People living in drylands in 2020, a doubling from 1990, projected to more than double again by 2100 under a worst-case climate change scenario.
1.35 billion: Dryland inhabitants in Asia—more than half the global total.
620 million: Dryland inhabitants in Africa—nearly half of the continent’s population.
9.1%: Portion of Earth’s land classified as hyperarid, including the Atacama (Chile), Sahara (Africa), Namib (Africa), and Gobi (China/Mongolia) deserts.
23%: Increase in global land at “moderate” to “very high” desertification risk by 2100 under the worst-case emissions scenario
+8% at “very high” risk
+5% at “high” risk
+10% at “moderate” risk
Environmental degradation
5: Key drivers of land degradation: Rising aridity, land erosion, salinization, organic carbon loss, and vegetation degradation
20%: Global land at risk of abrupt ecosystem transformations by 2100 due to rising aridity
55%: Species (mammals, reptiles, fish, amphibians, and birds) at risk of habitat loss from aridity. Hotspots: (Arid regions): West Africa, Western Australia, Iberian Peninsula; (Humid regions): Southern Mexico, northern Amazon rainforest
Economics
12%: African GDP decline attributed to aridity, 1990–2015
16% / 6.7%: Projected GDP losses in Africa / Asia by 2079 under a moderate emissions scenario
20M tons maize, 21M tons wheat, 19M tons rice: Expected losses in global crop yields by 2040 due to expanding aridity
50%: Projected drop in maize yields in Kenya by 2050 under a high emissions scenario
Los Cedros, the iconic cloud forest reserve in Ecuador’s Western Andes, which is under concession for copper and gold mining to Canadian company Cornerstone and Australian BHP. Photo credit: The Rainforest Project
Water
90%: Rainfall in drylands that evaporates back into the atmosphere, leaving 10% for plant growth
67%: Global land expected to store less water by 2100, even under moderate emission scenarios
75%: Decline in water availability in the Middle East and North Africa since the 1950s
40%: Predicted Andean runoff decline by 2100 under a high emissions scenario, threatening water supplies in South America
Just above the horizon here, a haboob (dust storm) can be seen heading north.
This was shot at what remains of the Salton Sea Naval Test Station. Photo credit: slworking2/Flickr
Health
55%: Increase in severe child stunting in sub-Saharan Africa under a medium emissions scenario due to combined effects of aridity and climate warming
Up to 12.5%: Estimated rise in mortality risks during sand and dust storms in China, 2013–2018
57% / 38%: Increases in fine and coarse atmospheric dust levels, respectively, in the southwestern U.S. by 2100 under worst case climate scenarios
220%: Projected increase in premature deaths due to airborne dust in the southwestern United States by 2100 under the high-emissions scenario
160%: Expected rise in hospitalizations linked to airborne dust in the same region
The General Sherman sequoia tree is wrapped in fire-resistant foil to protect it from the KNP Complex fire. (National Park Service)
Wildfires and forests
74%: Expected increase in wildfire-burned areas in California by 2100 under high emission scenarios
40: Additional annual high fire danger days in Greece by 2100 compared to late 20th century levels
Notes to editors:
Aridity versus drought
Highly arid regions are places in which a persistent, long-term climatic condition lacks available moisture to support most forms of life and atmospheric evaporative demand significantly exceeds rainfall.
Drought, on the other hand, is an anomalous, shorter-term period of water shortage affecting ecosystems and people and often attributed to low precipitation, high temperatures, low air humidity and/or anomalies in wind.
While drought is part of natural climate variability and can occur in almost any climatic regime, aridity is a stable condition for which changes occur over extremely long-time scales under significant forcing.
Fig. 1. Contributions of P′ and PET′ to the WUS drought. (A) Drought severity time series of 12-month moving cumulative P′−PET′, P′, and −PET′ during 1948–2022 averaged over the WUS (with cosine latitude weighting); the thin lines represent 12-month cumulative values, while the thick lines are their 20-year moving average; the yellow-shaded area represents drought periods identified when average P′−PET′ falls below its 30th percentile value for the 1948–1999 climatological period (marked by the gray dashed horizontal line); the vertical dotted line separates 1948–1999 (P1) and 2000–2022 (P2). We multiply PET′ by −1 for direct comparison with P′. (B) Time series of drought coverage and contributions from P′ and −PET′; thin lines represent total areas within the WUS (11 contiguous US states, 3.12 × 106 km2 in total) that are in drought condition (local P′−PET′ below the 30th percentile value for any grid point; black) and those where PET′ (red line) or P′ (blue line) alone was strong enough to cause drought (Materials and Methods); thick lines are their 20-year moving average. (C) Map of averaged PET′ contribution to drought severity, i.e., −PET′/(P′−PET′), during drought periods in P1; the thick black line marks the boundary of the WUS region. (D) Same as (C), but for drought periods in P2. (E) Change of PET′ contribution from P1 to P2, i.e., the difference between (D) and (C); gray dotted areas indicate insignificant change (P ≥ 0.05; P values are adjusted using the false discovery rate (FDR) criterion of αFDR < 0.05).
Historically, meteorological drought in the western United States (WUS) has been driven primarily by precipitation deficits. However, our observational analysis shows that, since around 2000, rising surface temperature and the resulting high evaporative demand have contributed more to drought severity (62%) and coverage (66%) over the WUS than precipitation deficit. This increase in evaporative demand during droughts, mostly attributable to anthropogenic warming according to analyses of both observations and climate model simulations, is the main cause of the increased drought severity and coverage. The unprecedented 2020–2022 WUS drought exemplifies this shift in drought drivers, with high evaporative demand accounting for 61% of its severity, compared to 39% from precipitation deficit. Climate model simulations corroborate this shift and project that, under the fossil-fueled development scenario (SSP5-8.5), droughts like the 2020–2022 event will transition from a one-in-more-than-a-thousand-year event in the pre-2022 period to a 1-in-60-year event by the mid-21st century and to a 1-in-6-year event by the late-21st century.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
As observed by the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) and GRACE Follow On (GRACE-FO) missions, global terrestrial water storage (TWS), excluding ice sheets and glaciers, declined rapidly between May 2014 and March 2016. By 2023, it had not yet recovered, with the upper end of its range remaining 1 cm equivalent height of water below the upper end of the earlier range. Beginning with a record-setting drought in northeastern South America, a series of droughts on five continents helped to prevent global TWS from rebounding. While back-to-back El Niño events are largely responsible for the South American drought and others in the 2014–2016 timeframe, the possibility exists that global warming has contributed to a net drying of the land since then, through enhanced evapotranspiration and increasing frequency and intensity of drought. Corollary to the decline in global TWS since 2015 has been a rise in barystatic sea level (i.e., global mean ocean mass). However, we find no evidence that it is anything other than a coincidence that, also in 2015, two estimates of barystatic sea level change, one from GRACE/FO and the other from a combination of satellite altimetry and Argo float ocean temperature measurements, began to diverge. Herein, we discuss both the mechanisms that account for the abrupt decline in terrestrial water storage and the possible explanations for the divergence of the barystatic sea level change estimates.
Article Highlights
Global terrestrial water storage, excluding glaciers and ice sheets, declined abruptly between May 2014 and March 2016, with a corollary increase in sea level
A series of droughts, possibly linked to global warming, has since helped to prevent global terrestrial water storage from recovering
Also around 2015, two independent estimates of barystatic sea level began to diverge, but we find no evidence of a connection with the terrestrial water storage decline
Illustration of the NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment Follow-On (GRACE-FO) spacecraft, which will track changes in the distribution of Earth’s mass, providing insights into climate, Earth system processes and the impacts of some human activities. GRACE-FO is a partnership between NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences.
Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
100 years of average September-October-November temperature anomalies over land areas through 2024… Data from NOAAGlobalTemp v6.0.0: http://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/lan…
President Joe Biden signs H.R. 5376, the “Inflation Reduction Act of 2022”, Tuesday, August 16, 2022, in the State Dining Room of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)
President Joe Biden’s signature climate change law passed Congress by the narrowest of margins, without a single Republican in favor. GOP leaders have attacked the bill and promised to repeal it.
Yet despite the law’s hyper-partisan creation story, the Inflation Reduction Act, or IRA, could prove difficult to roll back, whatever the outcome of next month’s election.
The IRA was the nation’s largest single investment in reducing climate-warming pollution, with an array of programs that are beginning to shower the economy with grants, loans and tax incentives. The total sum is expected to reach into the hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade, funding that will leverage much more in private investment. And by design, the money is flowing throughout the country, with most of it being spent in conservative-leaning states.
One report by E2, a pro-environment business group, identified at least 334 “clean energy and clean vehicle” projects announced since the law’s enactment, with the potential to create 110,000 jobs. Those projects were spread across 40 states, with nearly 60 percent in congressional districts represented by Republicans.
Another assessment, by the Rhodium Group, examined total “clean technologies and infrastructure” investment by businesses and consumers in the two years after the bill’s enactment, and found it had climbed to nearly $500 billion, a 71 percent increase from the two preceding years.
“This is a huge investment. We are really seeing its impacts,” said Jackie Wong, a senior advisor to the NRDC Action Fund, an environmental political advocacy group that has endorsed Kamala Harris. “This isn’t just about climate. This is also about public health and about jobs and about revitalizing American manufacturing.”
Trump and his advisers and spokespeople have said he would seek to roll back the law’s spending, a step Wong said “would be devastating for climate and economic health.”
And yet all the spending that has begun going out helps explain why there might not be much appetite in Congress for a wholesale repeal. In August, 18 House Republicans sent a letter to Speaker Mike Johnson urging caution in any efforts to reform or repeal the law, noting that its tax credits for clean energy “have spurred innovation, incentivized investment, and created good jobs in many parts of the country—including many districts represented by members of our conference.”
The law’s design—which created, expanded or extended a wide array of tax credits for everything from wind and solar power generation to battery manufacturing, electric vehicles, clean hydrogen production and sustainable aviation fuel—has made it broadly popular among businesses big and small. Now that those credits are in place, industry leaders expect them to last, said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell LLP, a law and lobbying firm that represents clients across the energy industry.
“They think this is not going away because of the good things it can do,” Maisano said. He added that the bill included policies that have generally drawn bipartisan support, and that while it may get tweaked, “I don’t think Congress is going to go back on these things that are happening in their districts.”
But if a full repeal is unlikely, many of the law’s supporters worry that a second Trump administration or a Republican-controlled Congress could use executive authority, hearings or oversight to constrain or reshape spending in ways that would undermine the law’s goals.
The tax credits, for example, require guidance issued by the Treasury Department to help define which projects are eligible. In the case of a clean hydrogen tax credit, a Trump administration could issue guidance that would skew the credit toward more polluting fossil fuel projects. For electric vehicles or wind and solar generation, new guidance could restrict how many vehicles or projects qualify for the credits or could simply cast uncertainty over the programs’ future, discouraging private investment.
Derek Sylvan, strategy director at the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University, said the tax credits have the potential to drive tremendous emissions cuts with hundreds of billions of dollars in benefits. But many, like the hydrogen credit, have the potential to be skewed in favor of fossil fuels or other polluting technologies.
“That could be really huge,” Sylvan said. “You could imagine that for any particular tax credit, if that changes and suddenly a lot of funds are going to activities that have pretty limited or even negative climate benefits, that could certainly undermine the climate impacts of the IRA.”
A study published last year in Science estimated that the IRA is expected to slash the nation’s climate pollution 43 percent to 48 percent below 2005 levels by 2035, compared to an expected reduction of 27 percent to 35 percent without the legislation.
This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML
Many of the IRA’s programs came in the form of grants, loans or direct spending that has already been committed. One of the largest is the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, a $27 billion “green bank” program. Most of that money was awarded in August to nonprofits, which will now be able to lend the funds directly to emissions-cutting projects or distribute them to a network of green banks around the country. Some of its programs are intended to benefit communities that have limited access to financing for things like rooftop solar or energy-efficiency retrofits.
Reed Hundt, chief executive of the Coalition for Green Capital, one of the recipients, said the fund differs from tax credits because his group can choose projects that will have outsized climate impacts. It is also looking to fund projects in rural and often conservative states that might be less likely to get commercial loans for renewable energy projects, Hundt said.
The Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund money has been obligated, meaning it would take violating a contract to pull it back. But a hostile administration or Congress could use hearings, oversight or staff cuts to make it harder for the banks to spend the money, said Kyle Kammien, policy director of the Green For All program at Dream.org, an advocacy group focused on green jobs and criminal justice.
“In some ways it’s safe, but you could see how political levers could make it less effective or slow it down,” Kammien said.
For other programs, simply cutting staffing at agencies could make it harder to spend money that’s already been obligated.
Still, the architects of the IRA designed it with elections in mind, said Kate Gordon, a former senior adviser to U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm and now chief executive of California Forward, an economic development nonprofit. The bill’s timelines, its broad distribution of funding across the economy and the country, were all meant to make it more popular and durable.
“It brings a lot more people and places into the conversation versus your typical government policy that says, ‘We are going to build a big thing,’” Gordon said. She told the story of a visit she made to a summit in Wyoming organized by the state’s governor and senators, neither of whom had voted for the IRA.
“They didn’t vote for it for political reasons, I’m sure, but they were 100 percent in in taking advantage of it,” Gordon said. She compared the IRA to President Barack Obama’s health care legislation, which was attacked for years but has remained in place.
“My gut is that there will be a lot of talk about repealing things,” she said, “and not a lot of action.”
This summer, the Biden administration offered Wyoming $35 million to help the state plug and clean up abandoned oil and gas wells. When Wyoming turned down the cash, it seemed hard to believe.
It could cost the state more than twice that amount to reclaim its 1,000 or so defunct wells that remain unplugged. Economists have also warned that market forces will continue to diminish the state’s main revenue source—severance taxes on fossil fuels.
That’s not all. Last year, Wyoming turned down federal money for electric vehicle charging stations. Then, when Governor Mark Gordon refused to take part in the EPA’s pollution reduction program, the state lost tens of millions of dollars in federal funding.
Meanwhile, the state is spending millions of taxpayers’ dollars on lawsuits seeking to eviscerate Biden administration rules aimed at protecting the environment and human health and mitigating harmful effects of climate change.
It’s all part of a disturbing shift among Western Republicans and the states they dominate. They are veering away from the more pragmatic conservatism of Teddy Roosevelt or even Ronald Reagan, and into the hard right, anti-government quagmire.
Governor Gordon has been swept up in this shift. Gordon was born in New York City and grew up on the family ranch in Kaycee, Wyoming. He registered as a Republican at age 18, attended Vermont’s Middlebury College, then came back to Wyoming to continue ranching. At the same time, he pushed back on the coalbed-methane drilling boom that was ravaging his state, a fact missing from his official biographies.
Gordon’s activism included serving on environmental groups’ boards and he went on record attacking the energy industry for turning Buffalo into “the place that stinks on the way to Casper.” Nevertheless, he later worked for an oil company as its conservation director.
He still straddled the fence politically, donating to both Republican and Democratic candidates and committees on a state and national level during the 1990s and early 2000s. But he was not an anomaly; this sort of ideological flexibility was once common in Western states.
When Gordon ran for Congress as a moderate in 2008, he said both the Republican Party and the Sierra Club had “gotten off track,” with the GOP moving too far to the right and abandoning Roosevelt-style conservationism. He said environmentalists also became less willing to compromise, particularly on public-land grazing issues.
Gordon ended up losing the primary to hardliner Cynthia Lummis—now a U.S. senator—after she attacked Gordon for his environmental ties and bipartisan tendencies. But Gordon stuck to his relatively moderate stance when he ran for governor in 2018 and defeated hardliner Harriet Hageman—who would later unseat Liz Cheney.
As governor, Gordon has acknowledged human-caused climate change and supported clean-energy development, while also looking to keep the fossil fuel industry afloat by pushing carbon capture rather than closing coal plants or regulating drilling.
He was forceful and eloquent in condemning the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, tweeting: “Interfering with the peaceful transfer of power is an affront to the very Constitution that has made our country what it is. I believe America will not—cannot—stand for this assault on our democracy.”
This centrism has played well with voters. Gordon easily won a second term in 2022. But the radical right-wing, climate-denying branch of Wyoming’s legislature, the Freedom Caucus, has relentlessly blasted him for it.
In purple states, such as Arizona, the radicalization of the GOP has been met with backlash from moderates, who can seek refuge in a growing Democratic Party. But in Wyoming, newcomers fleeing more liberal states are turning the legislature a deeper shade of red, lending power and members to the Freedom Caucus.
The Wyoming governor has struggled to hold his ground. His rhetoric on Biden’s purported “war on fossil fuels”—and the state’s legal challenges to common-sense environmental protections—have grown more strident, even though Gordon knows full well that market forces, not regulations, are behind the industries’ decline.
The intent here is not to heap criticism on Gordon; he gets enough of that from his party members. Rather it is to lament the imminent extinction of the moderate, conservation-leaning, pragmatic Western Republican.
Jonathan Thompson
Think of all those missed opportunities. In today’s political climate, Gordon either must adapt or be thrown out of office, and that’s not good for Wyoming or the West.
Jonathon Thompson is a contributor to writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is the editor of The Land Desk and a longtime Western author and writer.
[3:00am EDT Oct 10] A Flash Flood Emergency continues over portions of west-central Florida.
Hurricane #Milton continues to move ENE across the Florida Peninsula. http://hurricanes.gov/#Milton
Click the link to read the newsletter on The Crucial Years website (Bill McKibben). Here’s an excerpt:
October 9, 2024
Since I couldn’t sleep, I figured I might as well write. I couldn’t sleep because of the picture in my mind—that tightly coiled ball of physics we’re calling Hurricane Milton as it tracks mercilessly across the Gulf of Mexico, headed toward a landfall tonight along the west coast of Florida. It scares me, for two reasons.
The first is the unrivaled speed with which it spun up, from tropical storm to Category 5 monster inside a day. This “rapid intensification” has become an increasingly common feature of hurricanes, because the heat content in the ocean is so high that the old models no longer suffice. We live, more and more, in a world of instant chaos: where wildfires can “blow up” in a matter of minutes because the fuels that feed them are so desiccated, where “flash” floods can, in minutes, turn a record rain into a street clogged with bobbing cars. These things have always been possible, but now they are common: we have in our minds the idea that the world changes at a geologic pace, moving in stately fashion through epochs and eras. But right now—as carbon dioxide accumulates more quickly in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 500 million years—”geologic pace” is measured in months. Hell, glaciers—our metaphor for moving slowly—disappear from one winter to the next.
And the second reason is: this speeded up physics is increasingly crashing into the heart of the civilizations that we’ve built. Given the size of the planet, it’s more likely than not that a disaster will happen in somewhere sparsely populated—the boreal forests of Canada burned last summer, displacing Indigenous people of the north but mostly avoiding cities. Even Hurricane Helene last week came ashore in the Big Bend country north of Cedar Key, where people are thin on the ground. But just as California’s wildfires eventually and inevitably started taking out whole towns, Milton is aimed at one of the most built-up and vulnerable landscapes on earth. I think—from this morning’s bearings—that the very worst outcome may be dodged: if the hurricane comes in just south of Tampa Bay, its counterclockwise winds will work to drive the storm surge off that body of water. But if so it will mean sheer agony for somewhere further south, somewhere almost as overbuilt. Sarasota? Port Charlotte? And in very short order that will mean deep trouble for the insurance industry, already tottering in Florida
(It’s worth noting, if only in passing, that the two places Americans of my age thought of as refuges, idylls, dreams of the easy life were California and Florida. No longer).
We’ve spent some time in recent years worrying that there was too much fear-mongering and doom-saying in the way we talked about climate change—that it was wearing people out. And indeed there’s truth there—if we’re going to do what we must, the story in the years ahead needs to be as much about the adventure of turning our planet solar as the dread that we’ll turn our planet Venus.
But there are important moments when fear is a crucial resource. A week ago, in the wake of Helene, the veteran climate activist and North Carolina native Anna Jane Joyner wrote this dispatch from New York’s “Climate Week”
And yesterday, on air, the veteran Florida weatherman John Morales let his fear show through. As Cara Buckley recounted in the Times,
This kind of fear is entirely useful—there are, I have no doubt, people who left their homes and drove north towards Georgia after hearing the break in Morales’ voice. He saved lives. And he did it entirely honestly. “You know what’s driving that,” he said to viewers. “I don’t need to tell you. Global warming. Climate change.” It’s honest fear, driven by deep understanding.
Bill McKibben, right, conferring with Land Institute founder Wes Jackson at the 2019 Prairie Festival, has strongly motivated many, including some CRES members. Photo/Allen Best
Gore has been talking about carbon emissions for more than 40 years. Now he includes a “hope budget.”
At a congressional hearing on the greenhouse effect in 1981, Al Gore, then a member of the House of Representatives from Tennessee, remarked that it was hard to come to terms with the fact that rising carbon dioxide emissions could radically alter our world. “Quite frankly, my first reaction to it several years ago was one of disbelief,” he said. “Since then, I have been waiting patiently for it to go away, but it has not gone away.”
Gore’s hearings didn’t spark the epiphany he’d hoped among his fellow members of Congress. More than four decades later, the problem still hasn’t resonated with many of them, even as the devastating weather changes scientists warned about have become reality. Wildfires have turned towns to ash, and the rains unleashed by storms like Hurricane Helene have left even so-called climate havens like Asheville, North Carolina, in a post-apocalyptic state, with power lines tossed around like spaghetti.
“I’ll have to admit to you that I’ve been surprised at how difficult it’s been to implement the kinds of policies that will solve the climate crisis,” Gore said in an interview with Grist.
So he isn’t exactly surprised that the issue is on the back burner this election season. When asked about their plans to fight climate change in the presidential debate last month, Vice President Kamala Harris assured voters she wasn’t against fracking for natural gas, while former President Donald Trump went on a tangent about domestic vehicle manufacturing. The subject took on a more prominent role in the vice presidential debate last Tuesday, when the Republican, Senator J.D. Vance of Ohio, hedged by calling global warming “weird science” while not actually dismissing it, and the Democrat, Governor Tim Walz of Minnesota, envisioned America “becoming an energy superpower for the future.” And that was about it.
“Since the struggle for votes is almost always focused on undecided voters, most of them in the center of the political spectrum, it’s not at all unusual to see immediate, visceral issues like jobs and the economy take the foreground,” Gore said.
As told in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Gore’s interest in climate change was first sparked at Harvard University, where Gore took a population studies class taught by the Roger Revelle, a climate scientist who had played a pivotal role in setting up experiments to measure rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It was the 1960s, a decade in which the American public first started learning about the dangers of burning fossil fuels. Gore was stunned by the evidence Revelle presented, but “never imagined for a second that it would take over my life.”
He’s spent the decades since advocating for climate action. As vice president under President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, he unsuccessfully pushed to pass the Kyoto Protocol, the first international attempt to push countries to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. Six years after he lost the presidential election to George W. Bush in 2000, An Inconvenient Truth, the documentary that turned his traveling climate change slideshow into a hit, launched the issue into the national conversation. Today, he leads the educational nonprofit The Climate Reality Project, which trains people how to mobilize their neighbors to elect climate champions, counter greenwashing, and advance green solutions.
Coyote Gulch graduation March 4, 2017. @ClimateReality #ActOnClimate
As a prominent Democrat, Gore’s impassioned advocacy has been blamed for making climate change seem like a liberal thing to care about. To Gore, that’s an example of attacking the messenger without looking at the deeper reasons why climate change is politically contentious in the first place. “Even when Pope Francis, for goodness’ sake, speaks out on it, they attack him and say that he’s meddling in partisanship.” If there’s anyone to blame for polarization, he said, it’s the fossil fuel industry, which has tried to take control of the conversation about climate change.
“This is the most powerful and wealthiest business lobby in the history of the world, and they spare no effort and no expense to try to block any progress,” Gore said. “Whoever sticks his or her head up above the parapet draws fire from fossil fuel polluters, and they use their legacy networks of economic and political power to try to block any solutions of any sort that might reduce the consumption of fossil fuels.”
In his decades of talking to the public about climate change, he says he’s learned a few things. You have to keep in mind a “time budget” that people will give you to speak with them, as well as a “complexity budget” so that you avoid dumping facts and numbers onto people. Finally, he says, you need to allot a “hope budget” so they don’t get too overwhelmed and depressed.
Electricity generation in 2022 (dark blue) from key fuel sources and countries, terawatt-hours (TWh). Red bars indicate estimated electricity generation from the renewables built in 2019-2023 and set to be built in 2024-2028, according to the IEA’s “main case” forecast. Source: Carbon Brief analysis by Simon Evans of figures from the IEA Renewables 2023 and Renewables 2022 reports, the IEA world energy outlook 2023 and the Ember data explorer.
Even while progress has been slower than he’d hoped, Gore sees signs that things are moving in the right direction. Last year, 86 percent of new electricity generation installed worldwide came from renewables, for example. Not to mention that Congress, where climate legislation had long gone to die, finally managed to pass a landmark climate law in 2022, the Inflation Reduction Act, which aims to drastically trim U.S. emissions through green incentives and rebates.
“It’s the kind of challenge that is so compelling — once you pick it up, you can’t put it back down again — because it really requires any person of conscience, I think, to keep working on it until we get the kind of progress that’s needed.”
The year 2023 marked the driest year for global rivers in over three decades, according to a new report coordinated by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), which signaled critical changes in water availability in an era of growing demand.
Key messages
2023 was driest year for global rivers in 33 years
Glaciers suffer largest mass loss in 50 years
Climate change makes hydrological cycle becomes more erratic
Early Warnings for All must tackle water-related hazards
WMO calls for better monitoring and data sharing
State of Global Water Resources report. Photo credit: WMO
The last five consecutive years have recorded widespread below-normal conditions for river flows, with reservoir inflows following a similar pattern. This reduces the amount of water available for communities, agriculture and ecosystems, further stressing global water supplies, according to the State of Global Water Resources report.
Glaciers suffered the largest mass loss ever registered in the last five decades. 2023 is the second consecutive year in which all regions in the world with glaciers reported iceloss.
With 2023 being the hottest year on record, elevated temperatures and widespread dry conditions contributed to prolonged droughts. But there were also a significant number of floods around the world. The extreme hydrological events were influenced by naturally occurring climate conditions – the transition from La Niña to El Niño in mid-2023 – as well as human induced climate change.
“Water is the canary in the coalmine of climate change. We receive distress signals in the form of increasingly extreme rainfall, floods and droughts which wreak a heavy toll on lives, ecosystems and economies. Melting ice and glaciers threaten long-term water security for many millions of people. And yet we are not taking the necessary urgent action,” said WMO Secretary-General Celeste Saulo. [ed. emphasis mine]
“As a result of rising temperatures, the hydrological cycle has accelerated. It has also become more erratic and unpredictable, and we are facing growing problems of either too much or too little water. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture which is conducive to heavy rainfall. More rapid evaporation and drying of soils worsen drought conditions,” she said.
“And yet, far too little is known about the true state of the world’s freshwater resources. We cannot manage what we do not measure. This report seeks to contribute to improved monitoring, data-sharing, cross-border collaboration and assessments,” said Celeste Saulo. “This is urgently needed.”
The State of Global Water Resources report series offers a comprehensive and consistent overview of water resources worldwide. It is based on input from dozens of National Meteorological and Hydrological Services and other organizations and experts. It seeks to inform decision makers in water-sensitive sectors and disaster risk reduction professionals. It complements WMO’s flagship State of the Global Climate series.
The State of the Global Water Resources report is now in its third year and is the most comprehensive to date, with new information on lake and reservoir volumes, soil moisture data, and more details on glaciers and snow water equivalent.
The report seeks to create an extensive global dataset of hydrological variables, which includes observed and modelled data from a wide array of sources. It aligns with the focus of the global Early Warnings for All initiative on improving data quality and access for water-related hazard monitoring and forecasting,and providing early warning systems for all by 2027.
Currently, 3.6 billion people face inadequate access to water at least a month per year and this is expected to increase to more than 5 billion by 2050, according to UN Water, and the world is far of track Sustainable Development Goal 6 on water and sanitation.
Highlights
Hydrological extremes
The year 2023 was the hottest year on record. The transition from La Niña to El Niño conditions in mid-2023, as well as the positive phase of the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) influenced extreme weather.
Africa was the most impacted in terms of human casualties. In Libya, two dams collapsed due to a major flood in September 2023, claiming more than 11,000 lives and affecting 22% of the population. Floods also affected the Greater Horn of Africa, Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, Mozambique and Malawi.
Southern USA, Central America, Argentina, Uruguay, Peru and Brazil were affected by widespread drought conditions, which led to 3% gross domestic product loss in Argentina and lowest water levels ever observed in Amazon and in Lake Titicaca.
River discharge
The year 2023 was marked by mostly drier-than-normal to normal river discharge conditions compared to the historical period. Similar to 2022 and 2021, over 50% of global catchment areas showed abnormal conditions, with most of them being in deficit. Fewer basins showed above normal conditions.
Large territories of Northern, Central and South America suffered severe drought and reduced river discharge conditions in 2023. The Mississippi and Amazon basins saw record low water levels. In Asia and Oceania, the large Ganges, Brahmaputra and Mekongriver basins experienced lower-than-normal conditions almost over the entire basin territories.
The East coast of Africa had above and much above-normal discharge and flooding. North Island of New Zealand and the Philippines exhibited much above normal annual discharge conditions. In Northern Europe, the entire territory of the UK and Ireland saw above-normal discharge, also Finland and South Sweden.
2023: Half of the globe had dry river flow conditions. Credit: WMO
Reservoirs and lakes
The inflows into reservoirs showed a similar pattern to the global river discharge trends: India, North, South and Central America, parts of Australia experiencing below-normal inflow conditions. The basin-wide reservoir storage varied significantly, reflecting the influence of water management, with much above-normal levels in basins like the Amazon and Parana, where river discharge was much-below-normal in 2023.
Lake Coari in the Amazon faced below-normal levels, leading to extreme water temperature. Lake Turkana, shared between Kenya and Ethiopia, had above-normal water volumes, following much above-normal river discharge conditions.
Groundwater Levels
In South Africa, most wells showed above-normal groundwater levels, following above-average precipitation, as did India, Ireland, Australia, and Israel. Notable depletion in groundwater availability was observed in parts of North America and Europe due to prolonged drought. In Chile and Jordan groundwater levels were below normal, with the long-term declines due to over-abstraction rather than climatic factors.
Soil moisture and evapotranspiration
Levels of soil moisture were predominantly below or much below normal across large territories globally, with North America, South America, North Africa, and the Middle East particularly dry during June-August. Central and South America, especially Brazil and Argentina, faced much below-normal actual evapotranspiration in September-October-November. For Mexico, this lasted almost the entire year because of drought conditions.
In contrast, certain regions, including Alaska, northeast Canada, India, parts of Russia, parts of Australia and New Zealand experienced much above-normal soil moisture levels.
Snow water equivalent
Most catchments in the Northern Hemisphere had below to much-below normal snow water equivalent in March. Seasonal peak snow mass for 2023 was much above normal in parts of North America and much-below normal in Eurasian continent.
Glaciers
Glaciers lost more than 600 Gigatonnes of water, the worst in 50 years of observations, according to preliminary data for September 2022 – August 2023. This severe loss is mainly due to extreme melting in western North America and the European Alps, where Switzerland’s glaciers have lost about 10% of their remaining volume over the past two years. Snow cover in the northern hemisphere has been decreasing in late spring and summer: in May 2023, the snow cover extent was the eighth lowest on record (1967–2023). For North America the May snow cover was the lowest in the same period
Summer ice mass loss over the past years indicated that glaciers in Europe, Scandinavia, Caucasus, Western Canada North, South Asia West, and New Zealand have passed peak water (maximum melt rate of a retreating glacier; leading to reduced water storage and availability afterwards), while Southern Andes (dominated by the Patagonian region), Russian Arctic, and Svalbard seem to still present increasing melt rates.
Retreating Glaciers: Glaciers suffer largest mass loss in 50 years. Credit: WMO
Notes to Editors
The State of Global Water Resources report contains input from a wide network of hydrological experts, including National Meteorological and Hydrological Services, Global Data Centres, global hydrological modelling community members and supporting organizations such as NASA and the German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ).
The number of river discharge measurement stations increased from 273 in 14 countries to 713 in 33 countries, and the groundwater data collection expanded to 35459 wells in 40 countries, compared to 8,246 wells in 10 countries in the previous year (Figure 1). However, despite improvements in observational data sharing, still Africa, South America, and Asia remain underrepresented in hydrological data collection, highlighting the need for improved monitoring and data sharing, particularly in the Global South.
The report seeks to enhance the accessibility and availability of observational data (both through better monitoring and improved data sharing), further integrate relevant variables into the report, and encourage country participation to better understand and report water cycle dynamics.
Future reports are anticipated to include even more observational data, supported by initiatives like the WMO’s Global Hydrological Status and Outlook System (HydroSOS), the WMO Hydrological Observing System (WHOS), and collaboration with global data centers.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation in atmospheric science and meteorology.
WMO monitors weather, climate, and water resources and provides support to its Members in forecasting and disaster mitigation. The organization is committed to advancing scientific knowledge and improving public safety and well-being through its work.
Taylor Park Dam. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
September 25, 2024
When work was completed on Colorado’s Taylor Park Dam in 1937, at least some thought existed that it would eventually be modified to produce electricity.
In 2024, it is finally happening. The first commercial power production has or will very soon happen in the first days of autumn.
The new 500-kilowatt hydroelectric turbine and generator installed in the dam will operate at or near full capacity 24/7/365. It is projected to produce an average 3.8 million kilowatt-hours annually. That compares to a 2.5-megawatt fixed-til solar array.
The electricity will get used by Gunnison County Electric Association. Mike McBride, the manager, says the electricity delivered will immediately save the cooperative money compared to the power delivered by Tri-State Generation and Transmission.
Under its contract with Tri-State, Gunnison County Electric can generate up to 5% of its own power. This hydroelectric facility will get it to 3%. The association is working to gain the other 2% from local solar array developments, one near Crested Butte and the other near Gunnison.
The Taylor River originates on the west side of Cottonwood Pass in the Sawatch Range. The road across the pass connects Buena Vista and Crested Butte and Gunnison. After being impounded by the dam that creates Taylor Park Reservoir, the river descends to meet the East River, which originates near Crested Butte. Together they become the Gunnison River.
Grand opening of the Gunnison Tunnel in Colorado 1909. Photo credit USBR.
The 206-foot-high earthen dam is owned by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation but operated by the Uncompahgre Valley Water Users Association, which delivers water to the Montrose and Delta area via [the Gunnison Tunnel].
In 2020, that water association joined with the Gunnison County Electric Association to form a legal entity to finance the $3.6 million project.
George Sibley, a historian of all things water in the Gunnison Basin (and beyond), said the dam was originally intended for storing water for July through September.
In the 1970s that changed in a collaboration of the Bureau, the Uncompahgre water district, and Upper Gunnison Regional Water Conservation District. That collaboration allowed them to store water from Taylor in Blue Mesa Reservoir. This allowed water to be released continuously through the year.
“That year-round flow potential made it more possible to think of the Taylor Dam as a possible year-round power source,” he says.
But the coal-burning units at Craig were delivering plenty of cheap power. Only in the last couple of decades have the electrical cooperative started getting pressure from some members and “other cultural entities” to reduce emissions associated with their electricity, he says.
A study was commissioned in 2009 and wrapped up in March 2010. Beyond were more complications — but now success.
Although Vice President Kamala Harris touts clean energy and Donald Trump makes misleading assertionsand false claims about it, neither candidate has set forth a comprehensive energy plan. Even if they do, a gridlocked Congress would be unlikely to pass it.
Instead, the next president’s greatest influence on clean energy will come through their handling of legislation and regulations put in place since 2021 under the Biden-Harris administration. As an environmental engineer who studies energy and climate change, I expect that Harris, who has strongly supported these policies, would follow through on them, while Trump’s record as president suggests that he would try to roll them back. Trade policies toward China, the leading producer of clean energy technologies, will also be key. https://www.youtube.com/embed/hoycdE1G0C0?wmode=transparent&start=0 Donald Trump and Kamala Harris discuss clean energy policy during their presidential campaign debate on Sept. 10, 2024.
Legislation and regulations
Three bills passed by Congress under Biden and Harris – the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act – have transformed U.S. energy policy. The three bills allocated hundreds of billions of dollars for building infrastructure, providing incentives for clean energy manufacturing and purchases, and funding clean energy research.
None of these measures is likely to be completely overturned, since each funds numerous projects in red states. But implementation by the next administration will determine how effectively they stimulate clean energy growth.
View of Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant construction in Glenwood Canyon (Garfield County) Colorado; shows the Colorado River, the dam, sheds, a footbridge, and the workmen’s camp. Creator: McClure, Louis Charles, 1867-1957. Credit: Denver Public Library Digital Collections
The 2024 Annual Water Seminar was hosted by the Colorado River District at Colorado Mesa University. The event featured many big names in the community including John Marshall, Andy Mueller, David Payne, Merrit Linke, Bart Miller, Cleave Simpson, and many more…Their goal was to highlight the challenges the Western Slope faces now and will face in the future. These challenges pertain to the ever-present climate change crisis and bureaucracy…
According to Andy Mueller, the general manager of the Colorado River Water Conservation District, one of those bureaucratic obstacles is an agreement that was signed in the 1920s. This limits our entitlement to around 55% of the flow of the Colorado River. Another issue he tells us is communities in the Lower Basin—areas in California and Arizona—are keen on securing water. And with a growing population on the Front Range, Mueller says there is a heightened emphasis on securing the Shoshone Water Rights. “We are concerned that if we do not lock in the Shoshone Water Rights, we will see more water leave the Colorado River Basin, and there will be less water for the population and environment on the Western Slope.”
The Shoshone Water Plant is expected to have a $99 million price tag and is slated to increase the amount of available water to farmers and consumers. So far, we are told $56 million has been raised.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
Click the link to read “Climatologist: Warming of state almost certain to continue” on the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel website. Here’s an excerpt:
September 21, 2024
On the heels of Grand Junction’s hottest summer on record, Colorado’s state climatologist advised Friday that the state’s warming trend over recent decades is all but certain to continue in coming ones. Russ Schumacher, also director of the Colorado Climate Center at Colorado State University, said at an event at Colorado Mesa University that temperatures in Colorado and globally have been warming and the projection is for continued warming in the future, “and there is very high confidence in that.”
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Becky Bolinger/Colorado Climate Center
There’s less certainty about what the future holds for precipitation levels in the future in the state, other than that they will continue to be highly variable. But increasing temperatures will have water-related impacts even if precipitation patterns don’t change much, he said during the Colorado River District’s annual water seminar. He said seven of Colorado’s nine warmest years on record, averaged across the state, have occurred since 2012 and the warming trend has been particularly notable in the summer and fall. This year’s climatological summer, from June through August, tied for the sixth-warmest on record in the state, and the nine hottest summers all have been since 2000, he said. The average summer temperature at the Grand Junction Regional Airport this year was the hottest on record, he said…lows in the Colorado River have been declining since 2000. Annual flows at Lees Ferry below Lake Powell averaged 15 million acre feet during the 20th century but have averaged about 12.5 million acre feet since 2000, which has had some very dry years, he said…
The Colorado Climate Center addressed the impacts of climate change in the state in a report it issued in January. It projects that by 2050, under a medium-low carbon emissions scenario, Colorado statewide annual temperatures will warm between 2.5 to 5.5 degrees Fahrenheit compared to a 1971-2000 baseline, and 1 to 4 degrees compared to today.
Shumacher said that although there’s less certainty how climate change will affect precipitation in the state, warmer temperatures along with wind and low humidity result in increased evaporative demand, with dry air pulling moisture from trees, soils, crops and surface waters. That means there are times even when precipitation levels are higher that the water doesn’t go as far. Higher evaporative demand also increases the odds of drought happening and makes droughts more intense…At the Colorado River at Dotsero, peak flows already are declining and there has been about a 25% decline in flows in July and August, he said. Climate projections for the river at Dotsero show increased streamflows in the spring as runoff happens earlier due to earlier snowmelt, but then big declines in flows in July and August, “which is when you really need (water), especially if you don’t have storage,” Schumacher said. The changing climate also is expected to result in a continued trend of more and bigger wildfires, and possibly cause more extreme precipitation and flooding, among other hazards. But Schumacher said it’s important to remember that what is projected to happen in the Colorado Climate Center report isn’t all locked in, as it is a trajectory based on where things are headed now in terms of carbon emissions and the climate policies currently in place.
The upcoming election may be the most important one of your lifetime. It is no less than a referendum on our climate and our future. It is that serious and urgent.
According to a study by the nonprofit Climate Central, large fires that burn 1,000 acres or more have tripled in the Western U.S. between 1970 and 2015. Last year was the warmest on record, a trend that is expected to continue. The country has been warming more rapidly than the global average since the late 1970s, and the West and Alaska have been at the forefront of that trend.
Concerns about the economy, housing, transportation infrastructure, farming, public health are climate issues, too — and increasingly so. Any vote this election, whether local or national, will be a vote on the climate.
I’m not trying to fan your doomsday fears. Quite the opposite: I want to try to drive us all into action. We must move from climate despair to climate repair, even though that can feel so abstract and seemingly insurmountable.
One reason climate repair feels out of reach involves the kind of people we’ve been choosing to represent us. Currently, there are 123 climate deniers in the U.S. Congress who have received lifetime fossil fuel contributions totaling $52,071,133, according to data analyzed by the Center for American Progress policy institute. If you happen to live in Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Arizona, California, Nevada or Oregon, you have elected officials who may be single-handedly blocking the way to climate-friendly policies. Three-fourths of the congressional representatives of Western states publicly claim that climate change isn’t real and are therefore unwilling to invest any time and resources in climate solutions.
These public officials aren’t just refusing to work on solutions to our climate reality — they are outright denying that a problem exists. If that doesn’t make you mad, it should. But what are you going to do about it? Anger, like repair, can be abstract and insurmountable; anger can even be harmful unless we can channel it toward change. Toward votes.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this since last year, when the Pew Research Center found that half of people living in the West said that climate change is going make life in their region harder over the next three decades. As someone who has lived in the Southwest for most of my adult life, I have witnessed those rising temperatures and longer wildfire seasons and worsening drought conditions, and I share in this collective fear.
But here’s what else last year’s Pew data pointed to: Younger adults are more likely than older adults to expect adverse impacts from climate change in their communities. Whether they lean Democratic or Republican or are unaffiliated, people between 18 and 29 years old say that they are more concerned about climate impacts than the rest of us. The older we get and the farther we live from the reality of wildfires and the floods, the less alarmed we seem to be about climate change.
This shouldn’t surprise anyone. Young people have been carrying the climate action torch these last few years, filing lawsuits against Big Oil and protesting fossil fuel-friendly public officials. And now, just two months before the presidential election, polls are showing that the teenagers and the 20- and 30-year-olds will continue to lead the rest of us.
Earlier this summer I spoke with Magaly Saenz, a 33-year-old small-business owner who runs Tres Leches Café in Phoenix with her partner. In her free time, she volunteers with Chispa Arizona, a grassroots group that invites local Latinos into environmental justice actions and conversations. She also volunteers with the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, advocating for the protection of Arizona public lands.
“Historically, when our (the Democratic) party is in office, when we have a majority in the House and in the Senate, we get very complacent and we make excuses (for public officials),” she told me. “We’ll say, ‘At least they’re not that guy.’” So, Magaly said, when she compared them to other politicians that were even worse on climate issues, she generally let it go. Magaly told me that she used to be the kind of person who thought of voting as a document you sign every four years. She would cast her vote, but didn’t push to get measures into the ballot to begin with. Then, five years ago, she began volunteering and protesting, talking with other Latino families and encouraging them to do the same. Her coffee shop has become a hub for grassroots political activism, a place where people come to brainstorm about the best ways to use their civic muscle.
“Younger generations are looking at (most politicians today) and saying, ‘Nope.’ They’re lighting a lot of fires,” she said. “And hopefully this will inspire other people to run for office.”
There is already some change underway: The number of climate deniers in Congress continues to go down — from 150 four years ago, around the time Magaly became politically engaged, to 123 today. If we want to see more public officials embrace climate repair in the way we need, we need to take that one basic first step: Vote for the right people. Do your part. (If you aren’t yet registered to vote, you can do it here: https://www.usa.gov/register-to-vote .)
“Encounters” is a serial column exploring life and landscape during the climate crisis.
Click the link to read the release on the Tó Nizhóní Ání website (Mike Eisenfeld, Jane Pargiter, Robyn Jackson, Eleanor Smith, Rose Rushing):
August 24, 2024
Advocates have been working for years to facilitate a transition to clean energy, ending coal’s polluting legacy and the region’s economic over-dependence on fossil fuels.
Waterflow, N.M. – At 9 a.m. on Saturday morning, explosions rocked the bases of the four massive smokestacks that dotted the horizon just west of Farmington for a half century, and they then came crashing down in a thundering cloud of dust. The demolition of the 400-foot-tall behemoths at San Juan Generating Station (“SJGS”) marks the close of yet another chapter in more than 50 years of coal and its domination of the economy in the Four Corners region.
The San Juan Generating Station in mid-June of 2022 The two middle units (#2 and #3) were shut down in 2017 to help the plant comply with air pollution limits. Unit #1 shut down mid-June 2022 and #4 was shut down on September 30, 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
The plant opened in 1973 and originally had four coal-burning units. Units 2 and 3 were closed in 2017 and Units 1 and 4 continued operating until September 2022, when they were also retired permanently. Units 1 and 2 were jointly owned by Public Service of New Mexico (“PNM”) and Tucson Electric Power. Units 3 and 4 provided power to PNM and a mix of municipal utilities and rural electric cooperatives in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah and as far as California.
Operating at full capacity, the plant was a major source of pollution, pumping more than 12 million tons a year of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and emitting more than 10,000 tons of nitrogen oxides annually, a major component of the region’s notoriously smoggy air. It also consumed billions of gallons of water every year from the San Juan River.
Following are reactions of local and regional advocates who collectively have been working for decades to accelerate the region’s transition from polluting fossil fuels to renewable resources for generating electricity, most of which serves distant communities.
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“Indigenous advocates have long brought attention to the many adverse public health, land, and water quality impacts resulting from the operations at SJGS and Four Corners Power Plant (“FCPP”), pointing out the environmental injustice that Indigenous and local communities were saddled with in living so close to two coal mines and plants”, said Robyn Jackson, executive director of Diné C.A.R.E. “We can remember the terrible air quality that both plants produced in our region. It therefore came as no surprise that health disparities existed among our population, compared to the rest of the U.S. general population when it came to childhood asthma, as well as other illnesses like heart disease, cancer, and stroke. Our tribal-led organization recognizes that it is necessary and inevitable that our local economy be rebuilt around development that is renewable, sustainable, and regenerative. The health of our communities, economy and climate will require a transition away from fossil fuels if we are to survive and succeed.”
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“We are hopeful that after the demolition of San Juan Generating Station, the Four Corners area and its communities will no longer have to sacrifice our health and safety for fossil fuels,” said Rose Rushing, attorney at Western Environmental Law Center. “There is work to be done to ensure that the region can transition to a sustainable, diversified economy, starting with fulfilling the commitments of the Energy Transition Act. We look forward to working with community groups in the next year to make sure our community receives the full benefits the Energy Transition Act promises.”
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“The closure and demolition of PNM’s San Juan Generating Station marks yet another milestone, a step in the right direction away from fossil fuels and a step toward what we hope will be a just and equitable transition to more fossil-free energies such as wind, solar, and other sustainable, renewable, and real solutions that will truly combat climate change, said Eleanor Smith, Community Organizer of the Diné grassroots community organization Tó Nizhóní Ání. “Our hope is also that false solutions such as blue hydrogen and carbon capture sequestration are not sought nor implemented. The Navajo Nation and the Four Corners area have long histories of environmental injustices that continue to contribute to the climate chaos we are in. Now is the time for us, the impacted people who live and work in the Four Corners area, to plan and write the narrative of our fossil-free energy future, rather than the historical dictation by industry, energy companies, or others. We must say K’adí (stop) the harm to Nihimá Nahasdzáán, our Mother Earth, which includes us all.”
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“I’ve lived in Farmington for 26 years, and it wasn’t until 2022 when the plant finally shut down that the brown haze lifted and we could see to the horizon,” said Mike Eisenfeld, the climate and energy program director for San Juan Citizens Alliance. “It’s always difficult to close one chapter and begin a new one, but knowing that children can breathe air that isn’t as polluted and being able to see this region for its beauty, which has been cloaked in smog for 50 years, is a good thing. There is huge potential for clean energy development and for diversifying our economy beyond just energy, and the demolition of these smokestacks is important symbolically for turning that page.”
After less than two years of careful mitigation efforts and demolition work, the former Martin Drake Power Plant has been taken to ground level. Thank you to @CSUtilities and the Utilities Board for their leadership in helping to chart a bright future for our city. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/Lrr09EgrEl
Thank you to Colorado Springs Utilities and the Utilities Board for their leadership in helping to chart a bright future for our city. A changing energy future means a fresh outlook on what is possible, including new opportunities. I appreciate Utilities’ work and diligence in implementing the right balance of clean energy, cost management and reliability while also prioritizing the needs of our community.
The San Juan Generating Station in mid-June of 2022 The two middle units (#2 and #3) were shut down in 2017 to help the plant comply with air pollution limits. Unit #1 shut down mid-June 2022 and #4 was shut down on September 30, 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Click the link to read the article (and to view the cool video from EcoFlight.com) on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
After five decades of spewing sulfur dioxide, ash, mercury, arsenic, carbon dioxide, and other pollutants into the northwestern New Mexico air, the four stacks of the San Juan Generating Station were brought down in spectacular fashion this past weekend. Sadly, I missed it in real life, but even the videos leave me feeling a bit giddy, as the controlled demolition heralds a new, cleaner, hopefully more just era in the Four Corners.
It’s symbolic, of course: The real action happened in September 2022, when the last of the plant’s four units burned through the final ton of coal and the turbine [quit] turning for good. But what a symbol it is, for the region and for me, personally: The power plant, and, to an even larger degree, it’s older, bigger sister plant, Four Corners, have loomed over my existence ever since I was very young.
Four Corners was constructed in 1964, and was the flagship of a massive effort by a consortium of utilities called WEST, or Western Energy Supply and Transmission Associates. They hoped to construct six massive coal-fired power plants and accompanying mines across the Colorado Plateau, which would then ship power hundreds of miles to rapidly growing Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, Phoenix, and Albuquerque across high-voltage lines.
Not only did the growing supply of cheap power — and air-conditioning and water pumping — help the population of the Southwest’s cities soar, but the marketing caused the average American’s electricity consumption to grow four-fold between 1946 and 1968. “We are, in short, on an energy binge,” Harvey Mudd, Director of the Santa Fe-based Central Clearing House told the congressional committee in 1971, “which, like all binges, can only end in disaster.”
Four Corners Power Plant was the first of the six to go online, sprouting on the edge of the Navajo Nation, atop the Fruitland formation, about 15 miles from Farmington. The relatively sparse population, along with the dearth of environmental regulations, allowed the mine and plant largely to be built under the radar. But once it started churning out juice, and pollution — to the tune of over 400 tons of particulate matter per day, along with sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury — no one could miss the behemoth. The facility, along with the smog its pollutants gave way to, became a smoke-spewing symbol of energy colonialism, landscape-scale industrialization, and humans’ ability to spoil the environment.
But the impassioned rhetoric fell on deaf ears. After Four Corners came Mojave, Navajo Generating Station near Lake Powell, Huntington in Utah, and San Juan Generating Station, just across the river from Four Corners. They all had better pollution control systems than Four Corners did initially, but together they still kicked out thousands of tons of pollutants along with tens of millions of tons of planet-warming carbon dioxide each year, leaving the Four Corners Region to appear as if it had once again been inundated by a vast sea, only instead of water it was comprised of smog. Only the largest of all those slated to be built, the 5,000-megawatt Kaipairowitz plant, which would have sat on the western shore of Lake Powell eating up coal from land that was later included in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, was not constructed.
I was born in the midst of the Big Buildup in 1970, and not long after I became conscious of the world around me I learned that the haze in the air that blotted out the once-expansive views of my homeland was not natural. And I learned that the main culprit were the new coal-burning power plants that loomed over the sere landscape. It was probably my first understanding of environmental destruction.
A decade and some years later, on a mid-summer’s eve, when I was in my late teens or early 20s, I drove my 1967 AMC Rambler station wagon west from my dad’s house in Cortez, over undulating gravel roads past hay fields, with their perfectly cubical hay bales lined up in a row, casting long shadows across the bright green, monsoon-moistened, freshly cut field. I was headed to The Point, atop the McElmo Dome, out beyond the last bean and hay fields. It was a nice place to camp because of its proximity to Cortez, but more importantly because of the views. You could see all the way to Monument Valley and Navajo Mountain — if the air was clear, which was rare.
I didn’t like the smog, but I also didn’t really know anything different, since the smog was there before I was, and never really abated, given that the power plants churned round-the-clock, every day of the year. I had resigned myself to it; call it normalized degradation.
Navajo Mountain March 2023. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
After watching the smog-enhanced sunset, punctuated by distant lightning strikes, I lay out my sleeping bag on the sandstone rim and covered it with a tarp and fell asleep. Deep in the night I was woken by lightning and thunder and huge raindrops pelting the tarp. I snuggled up underneath and let it lull me back asleep. When I awoke before sunrise I was startled by the clarity of the air. I not only could see the landforms of Monument Valley and the dark curve of Navajo Mountain, but I could see fissures in the sandstone and canyons on the mountainside. It was truly glorious to watch the sunlight spread across the landscape like that.
But my revery soon was interrupted. A yellowish-gray amoeba, coming from the south, oozed its way up the canyons toward me. It was no mystery. It was smog, rushing in from the Four Corners and San Juan plants to replace the stuff that had been washed out by the night’s heavy rains. A sadness and anger rose up in me then, and I think it’s lingered ever since, motivating much of what I do.
So it was with a sense of satisfaction that I watched the video of the smokestacks falling into a cloud of their own demise.
This graph shows the full record of monthly mean carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa Observatory, Hawaii. The carbon dioxide data on Mauna Loa constitute the longest record of direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere. They were started by C. David Keeling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in March of 1958 at the NOAA Weather Station on Mauna Loa volcano. NOAA started its own CO2 measurements in May of 1974, and they have run in parallel with those made by Scripps since. (Image credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory)
Weather is weird. Always has been. But the last few weeks have been especially wacky in the West, as massive wildfires and resulting smoke meet up with record-breaking high temperatures, monsoonal deluges, and the resulting landslides and flash floods.
We’ve covered the high temps here, so let’s look at the moisture, which should bring relief, but actually wreaks destruction.
For the third time this summer, the monsoon mobbed Moab as a series of thunderstorms pounded the area and triggered flash flooding in and around the town. The National Weather Service showed rainfall amounts ranging from .76 inches at the Arches National Park HQ, to .95 inches at Canyonlands, to 1.01 inches at La Sal — all falling in a very short period of time. Mill Creek, which is normally a clear, gurgling brook that flows through the south side of downtown, turned into a raging, chocolate-milk-colored, debris-tossing monster — peaking out at 6,810 cubic feet per second, according to the USGS streamgage. And this one put the “flash” back into “flash flood”: On the morning of Aug. 23, the stream was a mere trickle at .36 cfs; by 8 p.m. that night it had ballooned up to 900 cfs; and it hit its 6,810 cfs high point at 8:30 p.m. before rapidly subsiding.
The streamflow gage reading for Mill Creek below its The streamflow gage reading for Mill Creek below its confluence with confluence with Pack Creek in Moab. Notice how fast it rose and subsided. Source: USGS.
Havasu Falls in the Grand Canyon — known for its luminous blue waters — swelled up so quickly after intense rainfall that it overwhelmed the stream gage: The readings simply disappear during the highest flows. But the torrent, which killed one hiker and forced the helicopter evacuation of more than 100 others, was recorded in other forms and it looks like it was a whopper. The Havasupai tribal council has closed their lands to tourists indefinitely in the flood’s aftermath. Good view of how the falls went from captivating to terrifying in a matter of minutes.
The dry winter in the Northern Rockies is coming home to roost in the form of big wildfires in northern Wyoming and southern Montana, including:
Flat Rock and Constitution Fires: Together they have charred nearly 80,000 acres near the massive coal mines and in the coalbed methane fields near Gillette, Wyoming.
House Draw Fire has burned across about 175,000 acres east and south of Buffalo, Wyoming.
The Remington Fire has scorched nearly 200,000 acres straddling the Wyoming-Montana border east of Sheridan.
The Fish Creek Fire in Teton County is around 11,000 acres.
And, in Alaska, unusually intense rainfall triggered a landslide/debris flow on a slope in Ketchikan, killing one person, injuring three more, and destroying homes and infrastructure.
It can be tempting to attribute all of this wackiness to climate change — some media outlets are even blaming it for a freak yacht-sinking off of Sicily — it’s not prudent and probably not accurate to do so. Neither the rainfall, nor the floods that resulted, are unprecedented (okay, it’s hard to know with Havasu Falls since the gage failed at the moment of truth). USGS data show that peak streamflows on Mill Creek in Moab, for example, are trending downward over time.
But it is fair to say that as the planet warms, we can expect weather to get wackier and more extreme. What we’re seeing now may just be a mild prelude to what’s yet to come.
I watched this morning the smokestack implosion at San Juan Generating Station near Farmington, New Mexico. These tall vertical pipes were part of the landscape for decades. It took seconds for them to collapse. pic.twitter.com/ZAGbeD7yt1
Painting by Henry C. Pitz showing John Wesley Powell and his party descending the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, presumably during the historic 1869 expedition. (Image credit: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology)
Intensifying extreme weather events and an insurance crisis are likely to cause significant economic and political disruption in the U.S. sometime in the next 15 years.
The words of explorer John Wesley Powell on the eve of his departure into the unexplored depths of the Grand Canyon in 1869 best describe how I see our path ahead as we brave the unknown rapids of climate change:
Powell’s expedition made it through the canyon, but the explorers endured great hardship, suffering near-drownings, the destruction of two of their four boats, and the loss of much of their supplies. In the end, only six of the nine men survived.
Likewise, we find ourselves in an ever-deepening chasm of climate change impacts, forced to run a perilous course through dangerous rapids of unknown ferocity. Our path will be fraught with great peril, and there will be tremendous suffering, great loss of life, and the destruction of much that is precious.
It is inevitable that climate change will stop being a hazy future concern and will someday turn everyday life upside down. Very hard times are coming. At the risk of causing counterproductive climate anxiety and doomism, I offer here some observations and speculations on how the planetary crisis may play out, using my 45 years of experience as a meteorologist, including four years of flying with the Hurricane Hunters and 20 years blogging about extreme weather and climate change. The scenarios that I depict as the most likely are much harsher than what other experts might choose, but I’ve seen repeatedly that uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to climate change. This will be a long and intense ride, but if you stick through the end, I promise there will be a rainbow.
By late this century, I am optimistic that we will have successfully ridden the rapids of the climate crisis, emerging into a new era of non-polluting energy with a stabilizing climate. There are too many talented and dedicated people who understand the problem and are working hard on solutions for us to fail.
Figure 1. America is about as unprepared for a dangerous trip down the rapids of climate change as this group would have been going down the rapids of the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. Photo taken at the Colorado River crossing at Hite Ferry, Utah, in 1946. (Image credit: Utah Historical Society)
The 1974 made-for-TV movie Hurricane included a subplot loosely based on the hurricane party that allegedly occurred during the 1969 landfall of category 5 Hurricane Camille in Mississippi. The predictable catastrophic end to the party is depicted at 0:05-second mark of the trailer above. Though the party never happened, legendary TV anchorman Walter Cronkite perpetuated the hurricane party story during one of his broadcasts after the hurricane. As the camera panned over the cement slab littered with debris that marked the former location of the Richelieu Apartments, Cronkite narrated: “This is the site of the Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian, Mississippi. This is the place where 23 people laughed in the face of death. And where 23 people died.”
Although there is a major climate change hurricane approaching, we’re busy throwing a hurricane party, charging up our planetary credit card to pay for the expenses, with little regard to the approaching storm that is already cutting off our escape routes. This great storm will fundamentally rip at the fabric of society, creating chaos and a crisis likely to last for many decades.
The intensifying climate change storm will soon reach a threshold I think of as a category 1 hurricane for humanity — when long-term global warming surpasses 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, a value increasingly characterized over the last decade as “dangerous” climate change.
Assuming that we don’t work exceptionally hard to reduce emissions in the next 10 years, the world is expected to reach 2 degrees Celsius of warming between 2045 and 2051. In my estimation, that will be akin to a major category 3 hurricane for humanity — devastating, but not catastrophic.
Allowing global warming to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius will cause category 4-level damage to civilization — approaching the catastrophic level. And warming in excess of 3 degrees Celsius will likely be a catastrophic category 5-level superstorm of destruction that will crash civilization.
We must take strong action rapidly to rein in our emissions of heat-trapping gases to avoid that outcome — and build great resilience to the extreme climate of the 21st century that we have so foolishly brought upon ourselves.
According to the Carbon Action Tracker (see tweet below), we are on track for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming; if the nations of the world meet their targets for reducing heat-trapping climate pollution, warming will be limited to 2.1 degrees. There’s a big difference between being hit by a Cat 4 versus a Cat 3, and every tenth of a degree of warming that we prevent will be critical.
Two years on from Glasgow and our warming estimates for government action have barely moved. Governments appear oblivious to the extreme events of the past year, somehow thinking treading water will deal with the flood of impacts? https://t.co/fbM4xY9OJepic.twitter.com/MekGIeU1Z3
As climate scientist Michael Mann explains in his latest book, “Our Fragile Moment,” great climate science communicator Stephen Schneider once said, “The ‘end of the world’ or ‘good for you’ are the two least likely among the spectrum of potential [climate] outcomes.” So forget sci-fi depictions of planetary apocalypse. That will not be our long-term climate change fate.
But the impacts of climate change will be apocalyptic for many nations and people — particularly those that are not rich and White. People and communities with the least resources tend to be the first and hardest hit by climate change, not only because poorer people and communities are inherently more vulnerable to the impacts of any disaster, but also because the extremes induced by climate change tend to be worse in the tropics and subtropics, home to many poor nations.
In the U.S., climate change has already turned life upside down for numerous communities. For example, in North Carolina, the financially strapped, Black-majority towns of Fair Bluff and Princeville are in danger of abandonment from hurricane-related flooding (from Hurricane Floyd in 1999, Matthew in 2016, and Florence in 2018). Seven Springs, North Carolina (population 207 in 1960, now just 55) is largely abandoned.
Climate change was a key contributor to these floods; a 2021 study found that about one-third of the cost of major U.S. flood events since 1988, totaling $79 billion, could be attributed to climate change. And for the town of Paradise, California — utterly destroyed by the devastating Camp Fire of 2018, which killed 85 and caused over $16 billion in damage — climate change has been apocalyptic.
In the U.S., the most likely major economic disruption from climate change over the next few years might well be a collapse of the housing market in flood-prone and wildfire-prone states. Billion-dollar weather disasters — which cause about 76% of all weather-related damages — have steadily increased in number and expense in recent years and would be even worse were it not for improved weather forecasts and better building codes. The recent increase in weather-disaster losses has brought on an insurance crisis — especially in Florida, Louisiana, California, and Texas — which threatens one of the bedrocks of the U.S. economy, the housing and real estate market.
In California, the insurer of last resort, the FAIR plan, had only about $250 million in cash on hand as of March 2024.
“One major fire near Lake Arrowhead, where the Plan holds $8 billion in policies, would plunge the whole scheme into insolvency,” observed Harvard’s Susan Crawford, author of “Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm.”
It is widely acknowledged that higher weather disaster losses result primarily from an increase in exposure: more people with more stuff moving into vulnerable places, including those at risk of floods. Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophic peril, said in a 2022 AP interview that two-thirds, perhaps more, of the recent rise in weather-related disaster losses is the result of more people and things in harm’s way.
But this balance will likely shift in the coming decades. Increased exposure will continue to drive increased weather disaster losses, but the fractional contribution of climate change to disaster losses — at least for wildfire, hurricane, and flood disasters — is likely to increase rapidly, making the insurance crisis accelerate.
Figure 2. County-level overvaluation of property from flood risk. Florida had the highest property overvaluation — about $50 billion. In 2021, Florida’s real estate industry accounted for $294 billion, or 24% of the gross state product, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors. (Image credit: Gourevitch et al., 2023, Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in US housing markets, Nature Climate Change volume 13, pages 250–257)
A 2023 study (Fig. 2) drew attention to a massive real estate bubble in the U.S.: the vast number of properties whose purported value doesn’t account for the true costs of floods. The study estimated that across the U.S., residential properties are overvalued by a total of $121-$237 billion under current flood risks. This bubble will likely continue to grow as sea levels rise, storms dump heavier rains, and unwise risky development continues.
Likewise, U.S. properties at risk of wildfires are collectively overvalued by about $317 billion, according to David Burt, a financial guru who foresaw the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Insurers are already pulling out of the areas most at risk, threatening to make property ownership too expensive for millions and posing a serious threat to the economically critical real estate industry.
Climate futurist Alex Steffen has described the climate change-worsened real estate bubble this way:
Something brittle is prone to a sudden, catastrophic failure and cannot easily be repaired once broken. The popping of the real estate Brittleness Bubble will potentially trigger panic selling and a housing market collapse like a miniature version of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 but focused on the 20% of American homes in wildfire and flood risk zones. In his 2023 Congressional testimony, Burt estimated that a wildfire and flood-induced repricing of risk of the U.S. housing market could have a quarter to half the impact of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.
However, the 2008 crisis was relatively short-lived, as fixes to the financial system and a massive federal bailout led to a rebound in property values after a few years. A climate change-induced housing crisis will likely be resistant to a similar fix because the underlying cause will worsen: Sea levels will continue to rise, flooding heavy rains will intensify, and wildfires will grow more severe, increasing risk.
Science writer Eugene Linden wrote in 2023, “as we saw in 2008, a housing crisis can quickly morph into a systemic financial crisis because banks own most of the value, and thus the risk, in housing and commercial real estate.”
Crawford of Harvard recently wrote: “Because insurance can help communities and households recover more quickly from disasters, and because so much of the U.S. economy is driven by spending on housing, the inaccessibility and unaffordability of insurance poses a threat to the stability of the entire economy.”
As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said earlier this year, “The thing about economic crises is that they come on slowly, until they come on fast.”
How the insurance crisis may play out: the “Wholly irrational and completely ad-hoc pirate capitalism” solution
In his blunt 2023 essay, “Insurance Politics at the End of the World,” journalist Hamilton Nolan offers these thoughts on the potential ways this climate change-induced insurance crisis could be addressed:
When will the Brittleness Bubble pop?
When might this “crash into the wall of reality” happen and the Brittleness Bubble pop? Politicians are working extremely hard to keep their jobs by delaying this day of reckoning, artificially limiting insurance rate rises and offering state-run insurance plans of last resort. This approach — the equivalent of giving a blood transfusion to the injured, without stopping the bleeding — does not fix the underlying problem and all but guarantees that the pain of the eventual national reckoning will be much larger. Insurance is designed to transfer risk, but risk is rising everywhere. [ed. emphasis mine]
As the hurricane season is set to begin soon and wildfire risk gradually increasing, private insurers in some states are fleeing areas considered at high risk.
Crawford addressed the issue in a 2024 essay, “Who ends up holding the bag when risky real estate markets collapse?” Citing financial guru Burt, she concluded: “2025 or 2026 is when things give way and it becomes very difficult to offload houses and buildings in risky places where mortgages are suddenly hard to get, much less insurance.” When asked in an interview with Marketplace if the market is due for another correction, as homeowners in places with growing risk of flooding and wildfire have to pay more for insurance, Burt said:
In the same Marketplace story, though, Ben Keys, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said, “The idea that we would expect there to be a huge wave of defaults or delinquencies feels relatively unlikely.”
But like Burt, climate change futurist Steffen predicts the real estate Brittleness Bubble will pop within five years (10 at the most).
People are beginning to grasp the seismic implications of a widespread loss of home insurance. Good.
But the economic shocks created by finally being forced to acknowledge that our society is unprepared for the realities of climate chaos won't end there.
This reckoning could come sooner for Florida if another $100-billion hurricane hits. The Florida insurance and coastal property market did manage to withstand the $117-billion cost of Category 4 Hurricane Ian of 2022, but another blow like that might well cause a severe downward spiral in the Florida real estate market from which it might never fully recover. This vulnerability was underscored by Florida Gov. DeSantis during a 2023 radio interview with a Boston host, when DeSantis suggested homeowners should “knock on wood” and hope the state didn’t get hit by a hurricane in 2024.
But “knocking on wood” is not an effective climate adaptation strategy for Florida. Because of climate change, Mother Nature is now able to whip heavier bowling balls with more devastating impact down Hurricane Alley. It’s only a matter of time before she hurls a strike into a major Florida city, causing an intensified coastal real estate and insurance crisis. And the odds of such a strike are higher than average in 2024 because of record-warm ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, combined with a developing La Niña event.
Like this hyper-strike rolling robot, Mother Nature is now able to whip heavier bowling balls with more devastating impact down hurricane alley because of the extra heat energy in the oceans from human-caused global warming.
Watch out for increased coastal flooding in the mid-2030s
We may manage to avoid a coastal real estate market crash in the next 10 years if we get lucky with hurricanes and if our politicians continue to pump huge amounts of money to bail out the failing system.
But it will become increasingly difficult to keep the coastal property market propped up beginning in the mid-2030s, because of accelerating sea level rise combined with an 18.6-year wobble in the moon’s orbit. Thus, I expect that the longest we might stave off the popping of the coastal real estate Brittleness Bubble is 15 years.
Figure 3. Predicted change in minor flooding days (>1.74 feet above high tide) in St. Petersburg, Florida, under an “intermediate-high” sea level rise scenario (5.33 feet of sea level rise in 2100 compared to 2000). (Image credit: NASA sea level rise tool)
As I wrote in my 2023 post, 30 great tools to determine your flood risk in the U.S., beginning in 2033, the moon will be in a position favorable for bringing higher tides to locations where one high tide and low tide per day dominate. This will bring a rapid increase in high tide flooding to the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, the Southeast, the West Coast, and Hawaii. This expected acceleration in the mid-2030s is obvious for St. Petersburg (Fig. 3), plotted using NASA’s Flooding Analysis Tool and Flooding Days Projection Tool. The rapid acceleration in coastal flooding simultaneously along a huge swathe of heavily developed U.S. coast in the mid-2030s will be sure to significantly stress the coastal housing market. And according to the Coastal Flood Resilience Project, the nation is flying blind on the possible impacts: There are no national assessments of the potential loss of major, critical infrastructure assets to coastal storms and rising seas.
Another immediate danger: a series of global extreme weather events affecting agriculture, causing global economic turmoil.
In my 2024 post, “What are the odds that extreme weather will lead to a global food shock?” I reviewed a 2023 report by insurance giant Lloyd’s, which modeled the odds of a globally disruptive extreme food shock event bringing simultaneous droughts in key global food-growing breadbaskets. The authors estimated that a “major” food shock scenario costing $3 trillion globally over a five-year period had a 2.3% chance of happening per year (Fig. 4). Over a 30-year period, those odds equate to about a 50% probability of occurrence — assuming the risks are not increasing each year, which, in fact, they are.
Figure 4. The 2023 ‘Extreme weather leading to food and water shock’ scenario from Lloyd’s. (Image credit: modified from this image)
Yet another concern for the U.S. is the risk of wholly unanticipated “black swan” extreme weather events that scientists didn’t see coming. As Harvard climate scientists Paul Epstein and James McCarthy wrote in a 2004 paper, “Assessing Climate Instability”: “We are already observing signs of instability within the climate system. There is no assurance that the rate of greenhouse gas buildup will not force the system to oscillate erratically and yield significant and punishing surprises.”
One example of such a punishing surprise was Superstorm Sandy of 2012, that unholy hybrid spawn of a Caribbean hurricane/extratropical storm that became the largest hurricane ever observed and one of the most damaging, costing $88 billion. And who anticipated that a siege of climate-change-intensified wildfires in western North America beginning in 2017, causing multiple summers of horrific air quality that would significantly degrade the quality of life in the West? Or the jet stream experiencing a sudden increase in unusually extreme configurations over the past 20 years, leading to prolonged periods of intense extreme weather over multiple portions of the globe simultaneously? As the late climate scientist Wally Broecker once said, “Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking at it with sticks.”
Just as concerning might be future “gray swan” events — extreme weather events that climate models anticipate could happen but exceed anything in the historical record. (“Gray swan” is an expression first coined by hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel in his 2016 paper, “Grey swan tropical cyclones.”) Several potential gray swan events I have written about include a $1 trillion California “ARkStorm” flood, the potential failure of the Old River Control Structure during an extreme flood that allows the Mississippi River to change course, or a storm like 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, with winds over 200 mph, hitting Miami, Galveston/Houston, Tampa, or New Orleans. The risk of gray swan events is steadily increasing.
I’m often asked if the absurdly extreme weather events we’ve been experiencing recently are the new normal. “No!” I reply. “Heat is energy, so the energy to fuel more intense extreme weather events will increase until we reach net-zero emissions. At that time, the climate will finally stabilize at a new normal with a highly dangerous level of extreme weather events.”
Barring a series of extraordinary volcanic eruptions or a major geoengineering effort, even under an optimistic “low” emissions climate scenario, the earliest the climate might stabilize is in the mid-2070s (Fig. 5); thus, the weather will grow more extreme, on average, for at least the next 50 years. Considering that CO2 emissions have not yet peaked and may be following the “Intermediate” pathway shown below, there is considerable danger that the weather will still be growing more extreme when today’s children are very old early next century. But even when net zero emissions are reached, sea level rise will continue to occur at a pace difficult to adapt to, and the climate crisis will continue to intensify.
Figure 5. Wishful thinking: We’ve reached a “new normal” of extreme weather. In reality, the weather will keep growing more extreme until net-zero emissions are reached. Under the optimistic “Low” scenario presented here, that will not occur until the mid-2070s. (Image credit: 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment, with annotation added)
The high probability that the weather will grow more extreme throughout the lifetime of everybody reading this essay means that we have to take seriously some very bad long-term threats. As I wrote in my 2022 post, “The future of global catastrophic risk events from climate change,” a global catastrophic risk event is defined as a catastrophe global in impact that kills over 10 million people or causes over $10 trillion (2022 USD) in damage. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been only three such events: World War I, World War II, and the COVID-19 pandemic. But climate change is a threat multiplier, increasing the risk of five types of global catastrophic risk events:
Drought
War
Coastal flooding from sea-level rise and land subsidence
Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the powerful currents that circulate warm water in the tropical Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic and back (an August 2024 study gave a 59% chance of an AMOC collapse occurring before 2050)
The likeliest of these is a global catastrophic risk event from sea level rise, which is highly likely to occur by the end of the century. For example, a moderate global warming scenario will put $7.9-12.7 trillion dollars of global coastal assets at risk of flooding from sea level rise by 2100, according to a 2020 study, “Projections of global-scale extreme sea levels and resulting episodic coastal flooding over the 21st century.” Although this study did not take into account assets that inevitably will be protected by new coastal defenses, neither did it consider the indirect costs of sea level rise from increased storm surge damage, mass migration away from the coast, increased saltiness of fresh water supplies, and many other factors. A 2019 report by the Global Commission on Adaptation estimated that sea level rise will lead to damages of more than $1 trillion per year globally by 2050.
Furthermore, sea level rise, combined with other stressors, might bring about megacity collapse — a frightening possibility when infrastructure destruction, salinification of freshwater resources, and a real estate collapse potentially combine to create a mass exodus of people from a major city, reducing its tax base to the point that it can no longer provide basic services. The collapse of even one megacity might have severe impacts on the global economy, creating increased chances of a cascade of global catastrophic risk events. One megacity potentially at risk of this fate is the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, with a population of 10 million. Land subsidence of up to two inches per year and sea level rise of about an eighth of an inch per year are causing so much flooding in Jakarta that Indonesia is constructing a new capital city in Borneo.
Is the #AMOC approaching a tipping point? Here's my take after researching this topic for over 30 years. Open access, peer-reviewed, in full colour & understandable for non-experts.https://t.co/gMu6Zw5mR7pic.twitter.com/mrgzO9NMxR
— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) April 11, 2024
I also expect one or more climate change-amplified global catastrophic risk events from drought will occur this century. Mexico City, with a metro area population of 22 million, has suffered record heat over the past year, is in danger of its reservoirs running dry, and is drilling ever-deeper wells to tap an overtaxed aquifer. Though the city will muddle through the crisis now that the summer rains have come this year, what is the plan for 30 years from now, when the climate is expected to be drier and much, much hotter? Although Mexico City can greatly improve its water situation by fixing a poorly maintained system that has a 40% loss rate, it is unclear how the city will be able to survive the much hotter and drier climate of 30 years from now. And at least 10 other major cities are in a similar bind.
Technology can help us adapt to a hotter climate by providing air conditioning (if you are rich enough), but technological solutions to create more water availability when the taps run dry are much more difficult to achieve. I believe water shortages will drive a partial collapse of and mass migration out of multiple major cities 20-40 years from now, significantly amplifying global political and economic turmoil. For example, a 2010 study, “Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico-US cross-border migration,” found that a 10% reduction in crop yields in Mexico leads to an additional 2% of the population emigrating to the United States.
In his frightening 2019 book “Food or War,” science writer Julian Cribb documents 25 food conflicts that have led to famine, war, and the deaths of more than a million people — mostly caused by drought. Since 1960, Cribb says, 40-60% of armed conflicts have been linked to resource scarcity, and 80% of major armed conflicts occurred in vulnerable dry ecosystems. Hungry people are not peaceful people, Cribb argues.
Though climate change itself is not accelerating faster than what climate scientists and climate models predicted, devastating impacts from climate change do seem to be accelerating. That is because the new climate is crossing thresholds beyond which an infrastructure designed for the 20th century can withstand. These breaches are occurring in tandem with an increase in exposure — more people with more stuff living in harm’s way — which is the dominant cause of the sharp increase in weather-disaster losses in recent years. It’s sobering to realize that the current U.S. insurance crisis has primarily been driven by increased exposure and foolish insurance policies that promote development in risky places — not climate change — and that climate change’s relative contribution to the crisis is set to grow significantly.
Accelerating sea level rise alone is sure to cause a massive shock to the U.S. economy; according to a 2022 report from NOAA, sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10-12 inches (0.25-0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020-2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920-2020). At this level, 13.6 million homes might be at risk of flooding by 2051, triggering a mass migration of millions of people away from the coast.
If we add to sea-level-rise-induced migration the additional migration that will result from climate change-intensified wildfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes, we are forced to acknowledge the reality that a nation-challenging Hurricane Katrina-level climate change storm has already begun in the U.S., one which has the potential to cause catastrophic damage. As I wrote in my June post, The U.S. is finally making serious efforts to adapt to climate change, there have been some encouraging efforts to prepare for the coming mass migration. But, as I argued in my follow-up post, The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change, we remain woefully unprepared for what is coming.
And my subsequent post, Can a colossal extreme weather event galvanize action on the climate crisis?, argues that we should not expect that any future extreme weather event or breakdown of the climate system will galvanize the type of response needed — we’ve already had at least 13 events since 1988 that should have done so, yet have not. Even if such an event did prompt strong, transformative change, it’s too late to avoid having life turned upside-down by climate change. It’s like we’ve waited until our skin started getting red before seeking shade from the sun, and we’re only now taking our first stumbling steps toward shade. Well, it’s a long hike to shade, and a blistering sunburn is unavoidable.
Given the unprecedented nature and complexity of this planetary crisis, there is huge uncertainty on how this drama may unfold; there are climate scientists who offer a more optimistic outlook than I do (for example, Hannah Ritchie, author of “Not the End of the World”), and those who are more pessimistic (James Hansen).
I suggest that you make the most of the current “calm before the storm” and prepare for the chaotic times ahead, which could begin at any time. I will offer my recommendations on how to do this in my next post in this series, “What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm?”
The urgency to rapidly deal with the climate crisis was succinctly summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest summary report: “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”
But taking advantage of that window of opportunity is difficult because of human psychological and political realities. In climate scientist Peter Gleick’s 2023 book, “The Three Ages of Water,” he quotes Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology, who perhaps said it best: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
The boat of civilization has already hit multiple rocks along the rapids of climate change and is taking on water. Perilous rapids with even more dangerous rocks and waterfalls lie before us, but the course of our boat cannot be so easily altered to avoid the rocks, because of our Paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions. As a result, we may have only a few more years — or perhaps as long as 15 years — of relative normalcy in our everyday lives here in the U.S. before the approaching climate change storm ends our golden age of prosperity. But this “golden age” was made of fool’s gold, paid for with wealth plundered from future generations.
Figure 6. The North Rose window of Chartres Cathedral, France, 1190-1220 CE. The stained glass window shows scenes of Jesus Christ, the prophets and 12 kings of Judah. (Image credit: Walwyn) Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC.
Though this essay has dwelt on some grim realities, I am optimistic that we will prevent climate change from becoming a civilization-destroying category 5-level catastrophe. But we must fight extremely hard to correct the course of our boat and not allow its inertia to carry us into the rocks that stud the rapids of climate change. This is not a task that can be accomplished in our lifetimes.
Susan Joy Hassol, the climate communication veteran who served as a senior science writer on three National Climate Assessments, put it this way in an interview with Yale Climate Connections contributor Daisy Simmons: “This is the fight of our lives, and it’s a multigenerational task. We need what’s been called ‘cathedral thinking.’ That is, the people who started working on that stone foundation, they never saw the thing finished. It took generations to get these major works done. This is that kind of problem. And we have to all do our part. The more I act, the better I feel, because I know I’m part of the solution.”
Actions we take now will yield enormous future benefits, and the faster we undertake transformative actions to adapt to the new climate reality, the less suffering will occur. The Global Commission on Adaptation says that “every $1 invested in adaptation could yield up to $10 in net economic benefits, depending on the activity.” We should work to build our cathedral of the future with the thought that each action we take now will multiply by a factor of 10 in importance in the future.
An excellent @nytimes article on rapid growth of wind, solar, & EVs, including factories, in the US. Costs are below fossil and nuclear (see graphs). Reasons why, graphs with how fast, pictures of it happening. https://t.co/uglQDnE97tpic.twitter.com/oIpLmlp28v
But some of the hardest work has been done: The cornerstone of this cathedral of the future has already been laid. The clean energy revolution is here and has progressed far more rapidly than I had dared hope. Passage of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2023 Inflation Reduction Act has been instrumental in getting this cornerstone laid. Solar energy is now the cheapest source of energy in world history, and the costs of wind power and battery technology have also plummeted. Two recent reports were optimistic that climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions had finally peaked in 2023, and GDP growth has decoupled from carbon dioxide emissions in recent years, giving hope that economic growth can still occur without making the planet hotter.
At its heart, the root of the climate crisis is humanity’s spiritual inharmoniousness: We overvalue the pursuit of material wealth and we worship billionaires but undervalue growing more connected to our spiritual selves and acting to preserve and appreciate the natural systems that sustain us. Making yourself more peaceful and loving through quiet spiritual pursuits and time spent in nature will help counteract the anxiety and fear sparked by the climate crisis. But in tandem with your increased peace must come a righteous anger to “throw the money changers out of the temple” and topple the might of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.
So put your shoulder to an oar! Help us power the boat of civilization through the rapids of climate change. All of humanity shares the same boat, and you have the opportunity to make your own unique and valuable contribution to the effort.
We're loving this exercise created by @AyanaEliza & shared by @allwecansave for figuring out what you should do about the climate crisis:
Make a Venn diagram and notice what's at the center: 1. What brings you joy? 2. What is the work that needs doing? 3. What are you good at? pic.twitter.com/m0uVd6ctug
Figure 7. A portion of a 360-degree rainbow seen from a NOAA P-3 hurricane hunter aircraft as it flew through a rain shower near South Florida in 1988. (Image credit: Jeff Masters)
As promised, here is the rainbow at the end. It’s the intro image from my first and last Weather Underground blog posts, “The 360-degree Rainbow,” and “So long, wunderground!” My unique and valuable contribution to building our new cathedral has not yet reached the end of the rainbow, for a rainbow has no end — it is a full circle. One just has to fly high in a rainstorm where the sun is shining to see it.
I will continue to make my voice heard as long as climate science-denying politicians, corporations, media pundits, and wealthy individuals continue to row the boat of civilization into the rocks of climate-change catastrophe. I encourage those of you who have learned about extreme weather and climate change from me to do the same. To get started, learn from one of the best communicators in the business, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe:
a Schematic fold-bifurcation diagram of a model tipping element with global mean temperature (GMT) as a forcing parameter and two stable states separated by the unstable manifold. The red arrows indicate the feedback direction of the entire system if a forcing occurs. This means, that if the system is pushed across the unstable manifold, it will move towards the opposite stable equilibrium state. b Illustrative time-evolution of one sample model run of each tipping element: Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS), West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), Amazon Rainforest (AMAZ), including the threshold for state evaluation (dashed grey line). Credit: Nature Communications
Under current emission trajectories, temporarily overshooting the Paris global warming limit of 1.5 °C is a distinct possibility. Permanently exceeding this limit would substantially increase the probability of triggering climate tipping elements. Here, we investigate the tipping risks associated with several policy-relevant future emission scenarios, using a stylised Earth system model of four interconnected climate tipping elements. We show that following current policies this century would commit to a 45% tipping risk by 2300 (median, 10–90% range: 23–71%), even if temperatures are brought back to below 1.5 °C. We find that tipping risk by 2300 increases with every additional 0.1 °C of overshoot above 1.5 °C and strongly accelerates for peak warming above 2.0 °C. Achieving and maintaining at least net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2100 is paramount to minimise tipping risk in the long term. Our results underscore that stringent emission reductions in the current decade are critical for planetary stability. [ed. emphasis mine]
Opening ceremony Summer Olympics Paris 2024. Photo credit: Olympics.com
Click the link to read the article on the Heated website (Emily Atkin). Here’s an excerpt:
August 1, 2024
I haven’t had time to analyze media coverage of the 2024 Olympic Games. So I’m not sure how many stories about Tuesday’s dangerous heat in Paris mentioned that the high temperatures were fueled by climate change. But just in case you didn’t see, here’s an important stat: Fossil fuels, deforestation, and animal agriculture made outdoor temperatures at Tuesday’s Olympics about 5.2°F degrees hotter than they would have normally been.
The reason we know this is because of incredible recent advancements in attribution science, which uses observational data and statistical methods to figure out how likely and severe an extreme weather event would be today, compared to how it would have played out in a world un-warmed by human activities. Specifically, the 5.2°F number comes from a “super rapid analysis” published Wednesday by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international group dedicated to conducting and communicating attribution science. It found the heat wave that’s plagued France and other Mediterranean countries this July would have been anywhere from 4.5°F (2.5°C) to 5.9°F (3.3°C) cooler in a pre-climate-changed world. The average of that range is 5.2°F.
I spell all this out because I want to make it clear: If we want the summer Olympics to continue to exist and be safe for athletes, we need to rapidly reduce emissions from these sectors. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: It’s not enough to say that “climate change” is screwing with the things we love. Communicators have to also be clear about why climate change is happening, so it’s equally clear what must be done.
Three years ago, climate researchers shocked drought-weary Californians when they revealed that the American West was experiencing its driest 22-year period in 1,200 years, and that this severe megadrought was being intensified by global warming. Now, a UCLA climate scientist has reexamined the data and found that, even after two wet winters, the last 25 years are still likely the driest quarter-century since the year 800.
”The dryness still wins out over the wetness, big time,” said UCLA professor Park Williams.
The latest climate data show that the years since 2000 in western North America — from Montana to California to northern Mexico — have been slightly drier on average than a similar megadrought in the late 1500s. Williams shared his findings with the Los Angeles Times, providing an update to his widely cited 2022 study, which he co-authored with scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The new findings reveal that even the unusually wet conditions that drenched the West since the start of 2023 pale in comparison to the long stretch of mostly dry years over the previous 23 years. And that dryness hasn’t been driven by natural cycles alone. Williams and his colleagues have estimated that a significant portion of the drought’s severity — roughly 40% — is attributable to warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases. The warming that has occurred in the region, an increase of more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since recordkeeping began more than a century ago, has intensified the dry conditions, making the latest megadrought significantly more severe than it would be without climate change.
But are we still in a megadrought? How will we know when the megadrought is finally over? Williams said those questions will take some time to answer, and the conclusions will only become clear in hindsight.
“Based on the definition of megadrought that we’ve been using, which involves looking at the past 10 years to see if dry or wet conditions prevailed, we can only see the termination of a megadrought in hindsight,” Williams said. “If the next few years are on average wet, that will mark the end of the megadrought. If they’re dry, the megadrought will continue.”
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. On the geologic time scale, the increase to today’s levels (orange dashed line) looks virtually instantaneous. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from Lüthi et al., 2008, via the NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.
Coal fired plant near Hayden with the Yampa River 2015. Photo credit: Ken Nuebecker
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 17, 2024
Will there be a water bonus as we close coal plants? In the short term, yes. It’s harder to say in the long term. Here’s why.
Use it or lose it. That’s a basic premise of Colorado water law. Those with water rights must put the water to beneficial use or risk losing the rights to somebody who can. It’s fundamentally anti-speculative. But Colorado legislators this year created a major exception for two electric utilities that draw water from the Yampa River for coal-burning power plants. They did so through Senate Bill 24-197, which Gov. Jared Polis signed into law in Steamboat Springs in late May.
The two utilities, Xcel Energy and Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, plan to retire the five coal-burning units — two at Hayden and three at Craig — they operate in the Yampa River Basin by late 2028. These units represent Colorado’s largest concentration of coal plants, 1,874 megawatts of generating capacity altogether. That’s 40% of Colorado’s total coal-fired electrical generation. Together, they use some 19,000 acre-feet of water each year.
What will become of those water rights when the turbines cease to spin? And what will replace that power? The short answer is that the utilities don’t know. That’s the point of the legislation. It gives the utilities until 2050 to figure out their future.
While the legislation is unique to the Yampa Valley, questions of future water use echo across Colorado as its coal plants — two units at Pueblo, one near Colorado Springs, one north of Fort Collins, and one at Brush — all will close or be converted to natural gas by the end of 2030.
This story was originally published in the July 2024 issue of Headwaters Magazine. Photo above of the Hayden Generating Station and the Yampa River was taken by Ken Neubecker in spring 2015. All other photos by Allen Best unless otherwise noted.
Both Xcel and Tri-State expect that at least 70% of the electricity they deliver in 2030 will come from wind and solar. The final stretch to 100%? That’s the hard question facing utilities across Colorado — and the nation and world.
Natural gas is expected to play a continued role as backup to the intermittency of renewables. Moving completely beyond fossil fuels? No one technology or even a suite of technologies has yet emerged as cost-effective. At least some of the technologies that Xcel and Tri-State are looking at involve water.
Fossil fuel plants use less than 1% of all of Colorado’s water. Yet in a state with virtually no raw water resources left to develop, even relatively small uses have gained attention. Colorado’s power future will have implications for its communities and their water, but how exactly that will look remains unknown.
Emissions Goals
The year 2019 was pivotal in Colorado’s energy transition. State lawmakers adopted legislation that specified a 50% economy-wide reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 and 100% by 2050. A decade before, that bill would have been laughed out of the Colorado Capitol. Even in 2019, some thought it unrealistic. But proponents had the votes, and a governor who had run on a platform of renewable energy.
Something approaching consensus had been achieved regarding the risks posed by climate change. Costs of renewables had plummeted during the prior decade, 70% for wind and 89% for solar, according to the 2019 report by Lazard, a financial analyst. Utilities had learned how to integrate high levels of renewables into their power supplies without imperiling reliability. Lithium-ion batteries that can store up to four hours of energy were also dropping in price.
Colorado lawmakers have adopted dozens of laws since 2019 intended to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Tied at the legislative hip to the targets adopted in 2019 were mandates to Colorado’s two investor-owned electric utilities, Xcel Energy and Black Hills Energy. By 2030 they must reduce emissions by at least 80% compared to 2005 levels. Both aim to do even better.
Xcel, the largest electrical utility in Colorado, was already pivoting. In 2017, it received bids from wind and solar developers in response to an all-sources solicitation that caused jaws across the nation to drop. In December 2018 shortly after the election of Gov. Polis, Xcel officials gathered in Denver to boldly declare plans to reduce emissions by 80% by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, the provider for Fort Collins and three other cities in the northern Front Range, later that month adopted a highly conditioned 100% goal. In January 2020, Tri-State announced its plans to close coal plants and accelerate its shift to renewables — it plans to reduce emissions by 89% by 2030. In December 2021, Holy Cross Energy, the electrical cooperative serving the Vail and Aspen areas, adopted a 100% goal for 2030. It expects to get to 91% by 2025.
Colorado Springs Utilities burned the last coal at the Martin Drake power plant along Fountain Creek in August 2022. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Colorado’s emissions-reduction goals are economy wide, not just for power production. In practice, this means replacing technologies in transportation, buildings and other sectors that produce greenhouse gas emissions with low- or no-emissions energy sources. As coal plants have closed, transportation has become the highest-emitting sector. Colorado had 126,000 registered electric vehicles and hybrids as of June but hopes to have 940,000 registered by 2030. Buildings pose a greater challenge because most of us don’t replace houses the way we do cars or cell phones. Solutions vary, but many involve increased use of electricity instead of natural gas.
A final twist that has some bearing on water is Colorado’s goal of a “just transition.” House Bill 19-1314 declared that coal-sector workers and communities were not to be cast aside. Efforts would be made to keep them economically and culturally whole.
Possible Water Dividends
The Cherokee Generating Station north of downtown Denver is now a natural gas-fired power plant.
Where does this leave water? That’s unclear and, as the 2024 legislation regarding the Yampa Valley spelled out, it is likely to remain unclear for some time. The law prohibits the Division 6 water judge — for the Yampa, White and North Platte river basins — from considering the decrease in use or nonuse of a water right owned by an electric utility in the Yampa Valley.
In other words, they can sit on these water rights through 2050 while they try to figure what technologies will emerge as cost competitive. Xcel Energy and Tri-State will not lose their water rights simply because they’re not using them during this time as would, at least theoretically, be the case with other water users in Colorado.
Conversion of the Cherokee power plant north of downtown Denver from coal to natural gas provides one case study of how energy shifts can affect water resources. Xcel converted the plant to natural gas between 2010 and 2015. Its capacity is now 928 megawatts.
Richard Belt, a water resources consultant for Xcel, says that when Cherokee still burned coal, it used 7,000 to 8,000 acre-feet of water per year; since 2017, when natural gas replaced coal, it uses 3,000 to 3,500 acre-feet per year.
Does that saved water now flow downstream to farmers in northeastern Colorado?
“If the wind is really blowing, there could be some water heading downstream on certain days,” Belt answered. In other words, there’s so much renewable energy in the grid that production from the gas plant at times is not needed. A more concrete way to look at this conversion, Belt says, is to step back and look at Xcel’s water use more broadly across its system. It also has the Rocky Mountain Energy Center, a 685-megawatt combined-cycle natural gas plant along Interstate 76 near Keenesburg that it bought in 2009 and began operating in 2012. With the plant came a water contract from Aurora Water.
Xcel has been renegotiating that contract, which it projects will be effective in early 2025. The new contract will allow Xcel to take water saved at Cherokee and instead use it at the Rocky Mountain Energy Center. That will allow it to use 2,000 acre-feet less of the water it has been leasing from Aurora each year. Belt says it will save Xcel customers around $1 million a year in water costs.
“Another way to look at this dividend is that we’re going to hand [Aurora] two-thirds of this contract volume, around 2,000 acre-feet a year, and they can use that water within their system,” Belt explains.
Other coal-burning power plants have also closed in recent years, with water dividends of their own. One small coal plant in southwestern Colorado at Nucla, operated by Tri-State, was closed in 2019. In 2022, Xcel shut down one of its three coal units at the Comanche Generating Station in Pueblo.
Colorado Springs Utilities stopped burning coal at its Martin Drake coal-fired plant in 2021, which is located near the city’s center, and replaced it with natural gas. It used some 2,000 acre-feet of water per year in the early 2000s, and was down to only 14 acre-feet per year in 2023. Colorado Springs Utilities — a provider of both electricity and water — delivers 70,000 to 75,000 acre-feet of water annually to its customers. Whatever water savings were achieved in that transition will be folded into the broader operations. The city’s remaining coal plant, Ray Nixon, burns both coal and natural gas. The city delivers about 2,000 acre-feet per year to Nixon to augment groundwater use there.
The 280-megawatt Rawhide coal-fired power plant north of Fort Collins is to be shut down by 2030. Platte River Power Authority, which owns and operates the plant, had not yet chosen a replacement power source as of June 2024. Platte River delivers electricity to Estes Park, Fort Collins, Longmont and Loveland.
The Cherokee plant along the South Platte River north of downtown Denver uses significantly less water since tis conversion from coal to natural gas. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
That leaves just the 505-megawatt Pawnee among Colorado’s existing coal plants. The plant near Brush is to be retrofitted to burn natural gas by 2026. The water dividend? Xcel is trying to keep its options open.
The one commonality among all the possible power-generating technologies that Xcel may use to achieve its goal of emissions-free energy by 2050 is that, with the exception of some battery technologies, they all require water, says Belt. And that, he says, means it would be unwise to relinquish water without first making decisions about the future.
That’s why this year’s bill was needed. Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers, Xcel and Tri-State, both with coal plants retiring in the Yampa Valley, have questions unanswered.
The Future of Energy
Strontia Springs Dam and Reservoir, located on the South Platte River within Waterton Canyon. It is ranked #32 out of 45 hydroelectric power plants in Colorado in terms of total annual net electricity generation. Photo by Milehightraveler/iStock
What comes next? Obviously, lots more wind and solar. Lots. The graph of projected solar power in Colorado through this decade looks like the Great Plains rising up to Longs Peak. Construction of Xcel’s Colorado Power Pathway, a 450-mile transmission line looping around the Eastern Plains, will expedite renewables coming online. Tri-State is also constructing new transmission lines in eastern Colorado. The plains landscape, San Luis Valley, and other locations could look very different by the end of the decade.
Very little water is needed for renewables, at least once the towers and panels are put into place.
You may well point out that the sun goes down, and the wind doesn’t always blow. Storage is one holy grail in this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries can store energy for four hours. That works very effectively until it doesn’t. Needed are new cost-effective technologies or far more application of known technologies.
One possible storage method, called iron-rust, will likely be tested at Pueblo in 2025 by a collaboration between Xcel and Form Energy, a company that proclaims it will transform the grid. It could provide 100 hours of storage. Tri-State’s electric resource plan identifies the same technology.
Granby Dam was retrofitted at a cost of $5.1 million to produce hydroelectricity effective May 2016. It produces enough electricity for about 570 homes. Photo/Northern Water
Other potential storage technologies involve water. Pumped-storage hydropower is an old and proven technology. It requires vertical differences in elevation, and Colorado has that. In practice, finding the right spots for the two reservoirs, higher and lower, is difficult.
Xcel Energy’s Cabin Creek project between Georgetown and Guanella Pass began electrical production in 1967. In this closed-loop system, water from the higher reservoir is released through a three-quarter-mile tunnel to the second reservoir 1,192 feet lower in elevation. This generates a maximum 324 megawatts to help meet peak demands or to provide power when it’s dark or the wind stops blowing. When electricity is more freely available, the water can be pumped back to the higher reservoir. Very little water is lost.
Near Leadville, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has a pumped-storage hydropower project at Twin Lakes, the Mt. Elbert Power Plant, with a more modest elevation difference. The plant can generate up to 200 megawatts of electricity.
Graphic credit: Joan Carstensen
A private developer with something similar in mind has reported reaching agreements with private landowners along the Yampa River between Hayden and Craig. With private landowners, the approval process would be far easier than if this were located on federal lands. Cost is estimated at $1.5 billion.
Belt points out that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has streamlined the permitting process for pumped-storage hydro but that technology remains expensive and projects will take probably 10 to 12 years to develop if everything goes well.
“During that 10 to 12 years, does something new come along? And if you’re committed to pumped storage, then you can’t pivot to this new thing without a financial impact,” he says, explaining a hesitancy around pumped storage.
Green hydrogen is another leading candidate in the Yampa Valley and elsewhere. It uses electrolysis to separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water. Renewable energy can be used to fuel the electrolysis. That’s why it is called green hydrogen as distinct from blue hydrogen, which uses natural gas as a catalyst. A news story in 2023 called it a “distant proposition.” Costs remain high but are falling. Tax incentives seek to spur that innovation.
Gov. Polis’ administration remains optimistic about hydrogen. It participated in a proposal for federal funding that would have created underground hydrogen storage near Brush. That proposal was rejected, but Will Toor, the chief executive of the Colorado Energy Office, has made it clear that green hydrogen and other emerging technologies remain on the table. Xcel says the same thing. “It’s not something we are going to give up on quite yet,” says Belt. The water savings from the conversion of coal to natural gas could possibly play into those plans.
Gov. Jared Polis stopped by the Good Vibes River Gear in Craig in March 2020 prior to attending a just transition workshop. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Polis is bullish on geothermal, both kinds. The easier geothermal uses the relatively constant 55 degree temperatures found 8 to 10 feet below ground to heat and cool buildings. The Colorado Capitol has geothermal heating, but the most famous example is Colorado Mesa University, where geothermal heats and cools about 80% of the campus. This technology may come on strong in Colorado, especially in new construction.
Can heat found at greater depths, say 10,000 feet or from particularly hot spots near the surface, be mined to produce electricity? California generates 10.1% from enhanced geothermal, Nevada 5.1%, and Utah 1.5%. Colorado generates zero. At a June conference, Polis said he thought geothermal could produce 4% to even 8% of the state’s electricity by 2040. Geothermal for electric production would require modest water resources.
Nuclear? Those plants, like coal, require water. Many smart people believe it may be the only way that civilization can reduce emissions as rapidly as climate scientists say is necessary to avoid catastrophic repercussions. Others see it as a way to accomplish just transition as coal plants retire.
Costs of traditional nuclear remain daunting. Critics point to projects in other states. In Georgia, for example, a pair of reactors called Vogtle have been completed but seven years late and at a cost of $35 billion, more than double the project’s initially estimated $14 billion price tag. The two reactors have a combined generating capacity of 2,430 megawatts.
New reactor designs may lower costs. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2023 certified design of a small-modular reactor by NuScale. It was heralded as a breakthrough, but NuScale cancelled a contract later that year for a plant in Idaho, citing escalating costs.
With a sodium fast reactor, integrated energy storage and flexible power production, the Natrium technology offers carbon-free energy at a competitive cost and is ready to integrate seamlessly into electric grids with high levels of renewables. Graphic credit: http://NatriumPower.com
Greater optimism has buoyed plans in Wyoming by the Bill Gates-backed TerraPower for a 345-megawatt nuclear plant near the site of a coal plant at Kemmerer. It has several innovations, including molten salt for energy storage and a design that allows more flexible generation, creating a better fit with renewables. Ground was broken in June for one building. An application for the design is pending with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Gates has invested $1 billion and expects to invest many billions more in what he estimates will be a $10 billion final cost. He also hopes to see about 100 similar plants and reduced costs. Other companies with still other designs and ideas say they can also reduce costs. All these lower-cost nuclear solutions exist in models, not on the ground. Uranium supply remains problematic, at least for now, but more difficult yet is the question of radioactive waste disposal.
Into The Future
The potential for nuclear is balled up in the issue of just transition. Legislators in 2019 said that coal communities would not be left on their own to figure out their futures. What this means in practice remains fuzzy.
Consider Pueblo. Xcel Energy on August 1 is scheduled to submit to the Colorado Public Utilities Commission what is being called the Pueblo Just Transition Electric Resource Plan. Through that plan, Xcel must determine to what extent it can, through new generating sources, leave Pueblo economically whole after it closes the coal plants. Existing jobs will be lost, although others in post-closure remediation of the site will be gained. What, then, constitutes a just transition for Pueblo?
What will Xcel propose in October for Pueblo as it makes plans for the retired of the last of the Comanche coal-burning units in 2030? Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
A task force assembled by Xcel Energy in January delivered its conclusions after nearly a year of study: “Of all of the technologies that we studied, only advanced nuclear generation will make Pueblo whole and also provide a path to prosperity,” concluded the task force. They advised that a natural gas plant with carbon capture would be a distinctly secondary choice.
What will happen with the water in Pueblo? Xcel Energy has a take-or-pay water contract with Pueblo Water for 12,783 acre-feet per year for the Comanche Generating Station. It must pay for the water even if it does not take it. Pueblo Water has a similar take-or-pay contract for 1,000 acre-feet annually for the 440-megawatt natural gas plant operated by Black Hills Energy near the Pueblo airport.
The draw of these water leases from the Arkansas River isn’t that notable, says Chris Woodka, president of the Pueblo Water board, even in what he describes as a “small year,” with low flows in the river. These water leases constitute some 5% or less of the river’s water, Woodka says. Xcel could tap that same lease for whatever it plans at Pueblo. And if it has no use? “We haven’t had many conversations around what we would do if that lease goes away, because it is so far out in the future.”
Xcel and Tri-State both own considerable water rights in the lower Arkansas Valley, near Las Animas and Lamar. Neither utility has shared plans for using the water, as the ideas of coal or nuclear power plants that initially inspired the water purchases never moved forward. Water in both cases has been leased since its acquisition to Arkansas Basin agricultural producers in order to maintain an ongoing beneficial use.
Yampa River. Photo credit: Yampa River Integrated Water Management Plan website
Why don’t Tri-State and Xcel lease their water in the Yampa River as they do in the Arkansas? Jackie Brown, the senior water and natural resources advisor for Tri-State, explains that there is no demand for additional agricultural water in the Yampa Basin. About 99% of all lands capable of supporting irrigated agriculture already get water. This is almost exclusively for animal forage. This is a valley of hay.
However, the Yampa River itself needs more water. The lower portion in recent years has routinely suffered from low flows during the rising heat of summer. Some summers, flows at Deerlodge, near the entrance to Dinosaur National Monument, have drooped to 20 cubic feet per second. Even in Steamboat, upstream from the power plants, fishing and other forms of recreation, such as tubing, have at times been restricted.
One question asked in drafting the legislation this year was whether to seek protection with a temporary instream flow right for some of the 45 cfs that Tri-State and Xcel together use at the plants at Craig and Hayden. The intent would have been to protect the delivery of some portion of that water to Dinosaur National Monument through 2050. That idea met resistance from stakeholders.
Instead, a do-nothing approach was adopted. Those framing the bill expect that most of the time, most of the water will flow downstream to Dinosaur anyway. In most years, no demands are placed on the river from November through the end of June. The challenge comes from July through October. The amount of water, used formerly by coal plants, that reaches Dinosaur will depend upon conditions at any particular time. Have the soils been drying out? Has the summer monsoon arrived?
The Yampa River at Deerlodge Park July 24, 2021 downstream from the confluence with the Little Snake River. There was a ditch running in Maybell above this location. Irrigated hay looked good. Dryland hay not so much.
“Even if you’re adding even half of that [45 cfs], it is a big deal,” says Brown. “If you can double the flow of a river when it’s in dire circumstances it’s a big deal.”
A study conducted by the Colorado River Water Conservation District several years ago examined how much water released from Elkhead Reservoir, located near Hayden, would reach Dinosaur. The result: 88% to 90% did.
Brown says river managers will be closely studying whether the extra water can assist with recovery of endangered fish species and other issues. “There’s a lot of learning to be done. My key takeaway is that that’s really going to contribute to the volume of knowledge that we have and the future management decisions that are made.”
A larger takeaway about this new law is that it gives Colorado’s two biggest electrical providers time. Xcel and Tri-State don’t know all the answers as we stretch to eradicate emissions from our energy by mid-century. Many balls are in the air, some interconnected, each representing a technology that may be useful or necessary to complement the enormous potential of wind and solar generation now being created. All of these new technologies will require water. Some water in the conversion from coal is being saved now, but it’s possible it will be needed in the future.
No wonder Xcel’s Belt says its “imprudent in a very water-constrained region to let go of a water asset that you may not get back, until you know how some of these balls are going to land.”
The coal mining industry reacted with outrage when the Bureau of Land Management recently announced plans to stop issuing new coal leases on the eastern plains of Wyoming and Montana.
From its headquarters in Washington, D.C., the National Mining Association predicted “a severe economic blow to mining states and communities,” while the industry’s political allies likened the move to declaring “war” on coal communities.
The truth is that coal has been steadily falling from its past dominance as energy king for nearly two decades. Domestic coal consumption dropped to 512 million tons in 2022, down 55 percent since its 2007 peak.
With the downward trajectory expected to continue, the Biden administration’s decision to end coal leasing in the Powder River Basin—the nation’s largest coal-producing region—reflects clear market trends. And far from killing coal, the administration’s plan allows mining to continue as the market transitions.
Billions of tons of previously leased federal coal remain available for mining from 270 tracts across the nation, which combined cover an area larger than Rocky Mountain National Park. One Montana mine has enough coal to keep operating until 2060. Taken together, economic effects related to ending new coal leasing in the Powder River Basin may not be felt until the 2040s and beyond.
Coal companies are well aware that U.S. energy markets have rapidly changed, a fact they soberly tell investors: “Over the last few years, customers have shifted to long-term supply agreements with shorter durations, driven by the reduced utilization of (coal) plants and plant retirements, fluidity of natural gas pricing and the increased use of renewable energy sources,” Wyoming’s largest coal producer, Peabody Energy, disclosed in its 2023 financial filing.
Even with declining markets, the Biden administration did not come to the decision on its own. Arguing that BLM’s past reviews of coal’s contributions to climate change were inadequate, a coalition of environmental groups sued the government and won. That forced the agency to revisit whether more coal leasing was warranted.
“For decades, mining has affected public health, our local land, air, and water, and the global climate,” said Lynne Huskinson, a retired coal miner. She’s a member of the Powder River Basin Resource Council, a Wyoming landowners’ group that was among the plaintiffs.
Now, she said, “we look forward to BLM working with state and local partners to ensure a just economic transition for the Powder River Basin as we move toward a clean energy future.”
Huskinson lives in Gillette, Wyoming, where a dozen highly mechanized strip mines sprawl across the grasslands of the Powder River Basin. The Wyoming mines alone produce 40 percent of U.S. coal while employing less than 10 percent of the nation’s 44,000 coal workers.
The Basin’s mines have leased 8 billion tons of federal coal since the 1990s, a cheap and plentiful supply for the industry. The leasing process allows companies to nominate desired tracts, and then bid with little or no competition. Winning bidders often pay less than $1 a ton for coal, plus a nominal annual rent and a royalty after final sale.
There is little question that leasing helped launch and sustain the region’s energy boom. But in his 2022 decision, Judge Brian Morris of the Federal District Court of Montana cast his eye toward the future. Morris wrote that federal law required BLM to consider “long-term needs of future generations” that included “recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific, and historical values.”
The judge also gave the federal agency an out: “Coal mining represents a potentially allowable use of public lands, but BLM is not required to lease public lands.”
Morris’ words cleared the way for BLM to stop leasing, a decision that dovetails with a Colorado College poll that found most residents in eight Rocky Mountain states—including Wyoming and Montana—want Congress to prioritize conservation over energy development on public lands.
Peter Gartrell
The legal wrangling will likely continue, with the BLM reviewing protests from the coal industry and its political allies that lay the groundwork for more lawsuits. For now, though, it seems the Biden administration’s decision to keep coal in the ground not only follows the market and the law, but public opinion, too.
Peter Gartrell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is a consultant in Washington, D.C., and covered coal leasing issues as a journalist and congressional staffer.
A truck-and-shovel crew removes overburden at the North Antelope Rochelle mine in Wyoming’s Powder River Basin in January 2020, as a coal shovel works below. (Alan Nash/WyoFile)
An aerial view of Assignation Ridge in the Thompson Divide area of Colorado. Project 2025 calls to restore mining claims and oil and gas leases in the Thompson Divide withdrawal area. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)
Written by former members of the Trump administration and other conservative leaders, Mandate for Leadership exhorts its readers to “go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative state.” Among many other measures, it calls for radical reductions in the federal workforce and in federal environmental protections, and for advancing a “Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda.”
The full text of Mandate for Leadership is below, preceded by an agency-by-agency overview of the proposals that could have the greatest impact on Western land, water and wildlife — as well as on Westerners themselves.
DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR (p. 517)
The Project 2025 recommendations for the Department of the Interior were primarily authored by attorney William Perry Pendley, a vociferous opponent of protections for public lands and wildlife. As acting director of the Bureau of Land Management during the Trump administration, he transformed the agency into what one high-level employee described as a “a ghost ship,” in which “suspicion,” “fear” and “low morale” abounded.
Energy Policy
Pendley notes that the energy section was written “in its entirety” by Kathleen Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance, an oil and gas industry group; Dan Kish of the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank long skeptical of human-caused climate change; and Katie Tubb of The Heritage Foundation. They recommend reviving the “Trump-era Energy Dominance Agenda” by:
reinstating a dozen industry-friendly orders issued by the Trump administration’s secretaries of the Interior (p. 522);
expanding oil and gas lease sales onshore and offshore (p. 522);
and weakening the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires environmental reviews of federally funded projects, by restoring Trump-era changes that set time limits for reviews, allowed agencies to skip some reviews altogether and eliminated any consideration of a project’s climate impacts (p. 533).
Land Conservation
The project aims to undo large landscape protections by:
The Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument was expanded via proclamation from President Obama in 2017, making the new monument approximately 112,000 acres. Bob Wick/Bureau of Land Management
Wildlife
Pendley expresses particular hostility toward the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose work he described as “the product of ‘species cartels’ afflicted with group-think, confirmation bias, and a common desire to preserve the prestige, power, and appropriations of the agency that pays or employs them.” He recommends:
delisting the grizzly bear in the Greater Yellowstone and Northern Continental Divide Ecosystems (p. 534);
ending the reintroduction of “experimental populations” outside a species’ historic range (p. 534);
abolishing the Biological Resources Division of the U.S. Geological Survey — which will be difficult to do, as it no longer exists as such and is now part of the National Park Service(p. 534);
The free-market advocate behind Project 2025’s section on the USDA has long railed against the subsidies and food stamp programs administered by the agency. As a fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Daren Bakst penned a lengthy report, Farms and Free Enterprise, that objects to many aspects of the farm bill, which funds annual food assistance and rural development programs. His vision, documented in the report, is present throughout Project 2025’s proposed agency overhaul.
Agency Organization
Project 2025 seeks to limit regulation in favor of market forces by:
reducing annual agency spending, including subsidy rates for crop insurance and additional programs that support farmers for lost crops (p. 296);
eliminating the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to enrich and protect parts of their land from agricultural production (p. 304);
removing climate change and equity from the agency’s mission (p. 290, 293);
and working with Congress to undo the federal labeling law, which requires consumer products to disclose where they were made and what they contain, as well as encouraging voluntary labeling (p. 307).
Forestry
The project will reduce forests on public lands by:
and rescinding the Biden administration’s Roadless Rule for the Tongass National Forest, which preserves 9.37 million acres of the world’s largest temperate rainforest and puts a cap on logging in the region (p. 531).
Logging within the Cougar Park timber sale in Kaibab National Forest in 2018. The timber project was part of an initiative intended to treat more than 2.4 million acres of ponderosa pine forest across northern Arizona. Dyan Bone/U.S. Forest Service
ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY (p. 417)
Prior to serving as the EPA’s chief of staff during the Trump administration, Mandy Gunasekara was famous for handing Republican Sen. James Inhofe a snowball to disprove the existence of human-caused climate change. At the EPA, she played a key role in the United States’ withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and in the dismantling of the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. Gunasekara’s vision for the EPA is characterized by staff layoffs, office closures and the embrace of public comment over peer-reviewed science.
Agency Organization
The plan will diminish the agency’s scope of work by:
reducing full-time staff and cutting “low-value” programs (p. 422);
eliminating all research that is not explicitly authorized by Congress (p. 436);
restructuring scientific advisory boards and engaging the public in ongoing scrutiny of the agency’s science — potentially opening the door to a wave of pushback against the international consensus on climate change (p. 422, 436-438);
eliminating the use of catastrophic climate change scenarios in drafting regulation (p. 436);
relocating a restructured American Indian Office to the West (p. 440);
partially shifting personnel from headquarters to regional offices (p. 430);
and striking the regulations, including a program to reduce methane and VOC emissions, that enable the EPA to work with external groups to help enforce laws (p. 424).
Natural Resources
The project would jeopardize clean air and water by:
limiting California’s effort to reduce air pollution from vehicles by ensuring that its standards and those of other states avoid any reference to greenhouse gas emissions or climate change (p.426);
supporting the reform of the Endangered Species Act to ensure a full cost-benefit analysis during pesticide approval (p. 434-435);
repealing some regulations imposed by the Biden administration to limit hydrofluorocarbons, a particularly potent greenhouse gas (p. 425);
and undoing the expansion of the Good Neighbor Program, which requires states to reduce their nitrogen oxide emissions, beyond power plants to include industrial facilities like iron and steel mills (p. 424).
More than 350 prominent climate advocates on Tuesday endorsed Vice President Harris for president, a sign that environmental leaders believe hercampaign will energize like-mindedvoters in a way that President Biden could not. In a letter shared first with The Washington Post, big names in the environmental movement — including former U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D)— wrote that Harris has long prioritized climate action and would continue to do so as president.
“We know that protecting our planet for ourselves and future generations requires the kind of bold leadership that Kamala Harris has demonstrated her whole life,” they wrote. “We are proud to support her and be in the fight against climate change with her.”
Inslee, whose ambitious climate proposals during his 2020 presidential campaign influenced Biden’s climate policies, said Harris could help mobilize young voters, a crucial Democratic constituency. Polls show that climate change is a top concern for young people, who are more likely than older generations to face raging wildfires, rising seas and stronger storms in their lifetimes.
“Her candidacy instantly lit an electric spark under young people across the country,” Inslee said. “That’s going to bode well for our fortunes.”
Kerry, who left the Biden administration in March, said in an interview that Harris was a “terrific ally” on climate policy. He noted that she was an early advocate of the United States reaching net-zero emissions by mid-century, and she delivered a forceful speech at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Dubai last fall.
Three years ago, climate researchers shocked drought-weary Californians when they revealed that the American West was experiencing its driest 22-year period in 1,200 years, and that this severe megadrought was being intensified by global warming. Now, a UCLA climate scientist has reexamined the data and found that, even after two wet winters, the last 25 years are still likely the driest quarter-century since the year 800.
”The dryness still wins out over the wetness, big time,” said UCLA professor Park Williams.
The latest climate data show that the years since 2000 in western North America — from Montana to California to northern Mexico — have been slightly drier on average than a similar megadrought in the late 1500s…Williams shared his findings with the Los Angeles Times, providing an update to his widely cited 2022 study, which he coauthored with scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The new findings reveal that even the unusually wet conditions that drenched the West since the start of 2023 pale in comparison to the long stretch of mostly dry years over the previous 23 years. And that dryness hasn’t been driven by natural cycles alone. Williams and his colleagues have estimated that a significant portion of the drought’s severity — roughly 40% — is attributable to warming driven by the burning of fossil fuels and rising levels of greenhouse gases. The warming that has occurred in the region, an increase of more than 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit since recordkeeping began more than a century ago, has intensified the dry conditions, making the latest megadrought significantly more severe than it would be without climate change…Scientists and policy experts widely agree that adapting to aridification driven by climate change in the western U.S. will require major changes in how limited water supplies are managed for farms, cities and the environment.
“Regardless of what happens in the next few years, which will be dictated mostly by the randomness of weather, as the atmosphere continues to warm we should expect it to continue to degrade our water supply,” Williams said. “A warmer atmosphere is a thirstier atmosphere, and without a compensating increase in precipitation, which has not occurred, humans and ecosystems will be left with less water.”
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations (CO2) in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years. On the geologic time scale, the increase to today’s levels (orange dashed line) looks virtually instantaneous. Graph by NOAA Climate.gov based on data from Lüthi et al., 2008, via the NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.
Visitors walk past a sign reading ‘Stop: Extreme Heat Danger’ in Death Valley National Park during a heat wave on July 7, 2024. Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images
A month into summer 2024, the vast majority of the U.S. population had already experienced at least one extreme heat wave, and millions of people were under heat alerts, with forecasts warning of more ahead.
Globally, the planet had its hottest day in at least eight decades of recordkeeping on July 21 – and then broke the record again on July 22, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service.
The extreme heat is part of a longer trend: Each of the past 13 months has been the hottest on record for that month globally, including the hottest June, the EU service reported in early July. It also found that the average temperature for the previous 12 months had been at least 1.5 C (2.7 F) warmer than the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average.
The 1.5 C warming threshold can be confusing, so let’s take a closer look at what that means. In the Paris climate agreement, countries worldwide agreed to work to keep global warming under 1.5 C, however that refers to the temperature change averaged over a 30-year period. A 30-year average is used to limit the influence of natural year-to-year fluctuations.
So far, the Earth has only crossed that threshold for a single year. However, it is still extremely concerning. We study weather patternsinvolving heat. The world appears to be on track to cross the 30-year average threshold of 1.5 C within 10 years.
Heat is becoming a global problem
Several countries have experienced record heat across the Americas, Africa, Europe and Asia in 2024. In Mexico and Central America, weeks of persistent heat starting in spring 2024 combined with prolonged drought led to severe water shortages and dozens of deaths.
Muslim pilgrims spent hours in extreme temperatures and humidity during the Hajj in June 2024 in Saudi Arabia. Over 1,000 people died in the heat. AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool
Hospitals in Karachi, Pakistan, were overwhelmed amid weeks of high heat, frequent power outages, and water shortages in some areas. Neighboring India faced temperatures around 120 F (48.9 C) for several days in April and May that affected millions of people, many of them without air conditioning.
Although heat waves are a natural part of the climate, the severity and extent of the heat waves so far in 2024 are not “just summer.”
A scientific assessment of the fierce heat wave in the eastern U.S. in June 2024 estimates that heat so severe and long-lasting was two to four times more likely to occur today because of human-caused climate change than it would have been without it. This conclusion is consistent with the rapid increase over the past several decades in the number of U.S. heat waves and their occurrence outside the peak of summer.
These record heat waves are happening in a climate that’s globally more than 2.2 F (1.2 C) warmer – when looking at the 30-year average – than it was before the industrial revolution, when humans began releasing large amounts of greenhouse gas emissions that warm the climate.
Global surface temperatures have risen faster per decade in the past 30 years than over the past 120. NOAA NCEI
While a temperature difference of a degree or two when you walk into a different room might not even be noticeable, even fractions of a degree make a large difference in the global climate.
At the peak of the last ice age, some 20,000 years ago, when the Northeast U.S. was under thousands of feet of ice, the globally averaged temperature was only about 11 F (6 C) cooler than now. So, it is not surprising that 2.2 F (1.2 C) of warming so far is already rapidly changing the climate.
If you thought this was hot
While this summer is likely be one of the hottest on record, it is important to realize that it may also be one of the coldest summers of the future.
Actions to reduce warming can limit a wide range of hazards and create numerous near-term benefits and opportunities. National Climate Assessment 2023
There is much that humanity can do to limit future warming if countries, companies and people everywhere act with urgency. Rapidly reducing fossil fuel emissions can help avoid a warmer future with even worse heat waves and droughts, while also providing other benefits, including improving public health, creating jobs and reducing risks to ecosystems.
It’s Friday, it’s hot, the world seems to be collapsing in multiple ways, so I thought I’d bring you a bit of good news for a change: Coal’s big breakdown is back. Okay, so it’s not great news for coal-company CEOs, or for the industry workers who will lose their jobs. But for the planet and all the folks who have had to live with coal mining and coal burning and all of its deleterious effects, it’s got to be a relief.
In his excellent book, Fire on the Plateau, the late, great scholar Charles Wilkinson coined the term “Big Buildup” to describe the flurry of postwar development of coal plants (and dams, uranium mining, oil and gas, etc.) on the Colorado Plateau. The Big Breakdown refers to the decline of the coal industry in the West, as big coal plants are mothballed and the mines shut down and, hopefully, reclaimed, and the air cleans itself up as a result.
The Breakdown began back in 2008, during the global financial crisis, when power consumption plummeted. The economy recovered. Coal did not — it had become more expensive than other energy alternatives and is dirtier, besides, so utilities rushed to rid themselves of the old smoke-spewing behemoths. But then, in the wake of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, coal bounced back, sparking a bit of panic among clean air lovers everywhere. And lawmakers in Utah, Wyoming, and other fossil-fuel-fetishizing states rushed to pass laws to interfere in the free market and prop up the dying industry.
Alas, it isn’t working, as today’s chart — showing both electricity consumption and coal consumption — reveals. I’ve run this chart here before, but I wanted to update y’all because I really like it. Not only does it show how the grid is getting cleaner, but also provides a nice graphic look at U.S. energy history over the last 75 years.
Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
A. Coal was the king of the Industrial Age, of course, providing power to run mines and mills and factories and trains, while also heating homes. But by the 1950s the industry was struggling somewhat, as diesel locomotives supplanted the steam ones, natural gas gained ground for heating and cooking, and huge hydroelectric dams blocked rivers across the West to generate power. As of 1955, only 10% of the Western Grid’s power was generated from coal; nearly all the rest was from hydropower.
B. Congress established the Office of Coal Research in 1960 “to encourage and stimulate the production … of coal (and to) maximize the contribution of coal to the overall energy market.”
C. The Big Buildup began in the 1960s with the construction of Four Corners Power Plant on the Navajo Nation in northwestern New Mexico. The construction and operation of the plant and adjacent mine were rife with environmental injustice.
D. The Clean Air Act passed in 1970. You might think that would be the death knell for coal, pretty much the dirtiest fuel out there. But no, it did little to slow coal-burning and it actually boosted relatively low-sulfur coal from Western mines which emits less sulfur dioxide when burned.
E. In 1973 OPEC stopped sending oil and natural gas to the U.S. and its allies to retaliate for U.S. support of Israel in the Yom Kippur War. Further unrest in the Middle East continued to drive up oil and natural gas prices, motivating utilities to burn more coal to generate power.
F. President Jimmy Carter took office during these crises in 1977, the same year Atlantic Richfield Company opened its Black Thunder Mine in the Powder River Basin, which would go on to become the world’s largest coal mine. Carter was a walking contradiction, boosting solar and other clean energy and public lands protections on the one hand, and going all in on coal mining and burning on the other. He pushed domestic coal to displace oil or natural gas (much of which was imported) then used to generate power. Carter also hoped to make synthetic transportation fuels from coal and oil shale and he and Congress put billions toward synfuel subsidies.
G. In 1978 Congress passed the Industrial Fuels Power Act, which basically banned the construction of any new natural gas power plants (another reaction to the energy crises). Coal was the big winner of that one.
H. Carter was also a big pusher of conservation, in rhetoric and policy, and high energy prices bolstered his cause. Electricity consumption flattened and even dropped in the 1980s for the first time in three decades. Yet coal use shot up tremendously at the same time. Under Reagan, electricity use climbed again, but coal consumption dropped. Why? Because OPEC decided to flood the market with oil, lowering oil and gas prices to make them the cheapest fossil fuels for generating electricity.
I. Congress amends the Clean Air Act to tackle the acid rain problem, especially in the East and Midwest. Instead of hurting the coal industry, however, it again gave an even bigger boost to the Western mines. The Powder River Basin solidified its status as the nation’s coal bin.
J. Peak Coal occurred in 2007. There is virtually no chance U.S. mines will ever produce or plants burn as much coal as they did that year.
K. Electricity use plummeted during the 2008 Financial Crisis and coal use dropped with it. As the economy recovered, something strange happened: Electricity use stayed fairly flat, thanks to efficiency and other measures. Coal burning started to recover, but …
L. In 2009 natural gas prices crashed after the combination of horizontal drilling and multi-stage hydraulic fracturing opened up vast stores of methane previously believed to be unrecoverable. That glutted the market with gas, making it cost-competitive with coal. Meanwhile, Democrats and even some national environmental groups were pushing natural gas as a “bridge fuel” to get from dirty coal to renewables. At the same time, oodles of solar and wind generating capacity were being brought online, in part thanks to federal incentives. All of this combined to knock King Coal off its throne. It’s been in freefall (with a blip or two) ever since due mostly to fluctuations in natural gas prices.
M. The first wave of the pandemic and measures taken to slow its spread helped Americans reduce their electricity use considerably. Because coal was one of the most expensive sources of power on the grid, utilities ditched it first, so the dirty fuel took an even bigger blow. Coal plant retirement plans accelerated and it seemed as if coal could be in its final throes.
N. But then the economy recovered along with power use. At the same time, extreme heat drove up demand for more power, hydropower waned, and utilities needed to fill the gap between supply and demand. They turned first to natural gas, which caused prices of that fuel to increase, and then to coal. Thus the Big Breakdown’s dramatic pause in 2021.
But the Big Breakdown is back on. In 2023, coal use plummeted once again. And judging by the first quarter of 2024, there will be even less use this year, even as power demand creeps higher.
“Power Madness” in America, the Big Buildup of coal, and a Senate hearing from five decades ago — JONATHAN P. THOMPSON OCTOBER 1, 2020
There’s a lot of big fires burning out there, with dozens of new starts daily across the West. The McDonald Fire in Alaska was first noticed on July 9; it’s now up to about 150,000 acres. The Cow Valley Fire in Malheur County, Oregon, has grown to 20,000 acres; it was ignited just yesterday. The Silver King Fire in Utah’s Tushar Mountains has charred through about 14,000 acres and forced the cancellation of a major gravel bike race there. There’s also the Babylon Fire south of Dark Canyon within the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument. It’s grown to about 200 acres in a remote location that, frankly, could use a little bit of therapeutic burning (thanks to our favorite fire lookout readers for tipping us off to it.) Be careful out there, folks!
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
A datura flower in southern Utah: shy by day; flirtatious and lascivious by night. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
