While Donald Trump seems to think he coined terms like “Drill, Baby, Drill,” the fact is, they’ve been around for a long, long time. This sign appeared at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. While Republican candidate John McCain and his VP candidate Sarah Palin were most vocally calling for increased drilling, the Democrats were also getting behind the nascent “fracking” revolution and touting natural gas as a cleaner bridge fuel from coal to solar and wind. And the so-called shale oil and gas drilling boom took off during the Obama administration. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Donald Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail: If elected, he would bring down the cost of groceries (a word that seemed new to him), he would secure the borders, he would end all of the wars on day one, and he would unleash the oil companies so they could “drill, baby, drill” and secure “energy dominance.”
Groceries are still expensive, “border security” is now MAGA-speak for federal agents gunning down innocent bystanders, and not only are the wars still raging, but the administration’s newly named “Department of War” has bombed Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and is now threatening to invade Greenland and even Mexico.
In fact, the only war that Trump can take credit for ending was Biden’s “war” on energy. And that’s only because the “war” didn’t exist in the first place! It was and remains a figment of the GOP’s imagination.
Still, the administration did live up to at least one promise: It used a fabricated “energy emergency” to help increase extractive corporations’ profit margins by rolling back environmental protections, handing out drilling permits like candy at a parade, fast-tracking various mine and oil and gas infrastructure permits, and offering oodles of public land to energy companies.
But has it really achieve the stated goal, to establish “energy dominance” — i.e. boost production, bring down prices, and end oil imports?
Maybe the data will help us figure that one out …
Leasing
As I think we’ve established, the Biden administration did not wage a war on energy or even oil and gas. In fact, under Biden, the nation became the world’s largest oil producer, the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and so on, while also fast-tracking solar, wind, and transmission projects on federal lands.
Biden’s Interior Department did, however, put up some guardrails aimed at protecting some public lands. While it leased out parcels in the Permian Basin without restraint, it also refrained from putting some more sensitive parcels up for auction in more sensitive areas with limited oil and gas production.
The Trump administration has been far more friendly to oil and gas companies looking to bolster their land-holding portfolios, not only offering up hundreds of thousands of acres, but then putting them up for auction a second time if the first round didn’t attract enough bids.
328,000 acres: Amount of public land and minerals the BLM leased to oil and gas companies between Jan. 20 and Dec. 31, 2025. This brought in about $356 million in revenue.
$327 million: Amount a single oil and gas lease sale for 31 parcels, mostly in New Mexico’s Permian Basin, brought in this January, a record per-acre high average bid amount.
0: Number of bids received for 23 offered oil and gas lease parcels in Colorado in January. The sale was a “replacement” sale held after the initial auction failed to attract enough bids.
Drilling Permits
President Trump’s BLM issued an average of 909 permits to drill per month during the first year of his second term. This is almost triple the monthly average for Biden’s administration.
Environmentalists often attacked Biden for issuing more drilling permits for public lands than Trump did during his first administration. The comparison was dumb, but whatever. Trump apparently didn’t like Biden’s apparent energy dominance, so he struck back by issuing more than 5,000 drilling permits last year, far exceeding the Biden administration’s monthly and yearly averages.
1,124: Number of drilling permits the BLM issued to EOG Resources in 2025, mostly in the Permian Basin. That compares to 755 for XTO Permian and XTO Energy; 293 for Anschutz Exploration; 503 to Devon Energy; 338 to OXY USA; 241 to Matador Production; 119 to Chevron; 106 to Middle Fork Energy Uinta; and 80 to ConocoPhillips.
95: Number of drilling permits the BLM’s Farmington Field Office issued in 2025, to Hilcorp, Logos, SIMCOE, DJR Operating, and other companies. While this pales in comparison to the Permian Basin, it is a marked increase from recent years.
8: Number of drilling permits the BLM’s Moab Field Office issued in 2025.
100: Approximate number of drill rigs operating in all of New Mexico during any given week of 2025.
8,949: Number of approved federal drilling permits held by oil and gas companies that were available to drill as of Jan. 2, 2026. That is to say, they have the permits, but haven’t yet used them.
Production
During the past year, domestic crude oil production continued to increase month-to-month, but at a slower rate than it had previously. Oil production on federal lands was down about 2% from fiscal year 2024. This is mostly due to industry’s lack of enthusiasm for more drilling, thanks to a combination of low oil prices and higher expenses due to inflation and tariffs on steel and other equipment. So much for drill, baby, drill.
Oil production from federal and tribal nation lands was down for fiscal year 2025 as of August. Source: U.S. Department of the Interior.
7.9 million: Barrels of crude oil per day the U.S. was importing from other countries in December 2025. That’s marginally less than a year earlier.
2.1 million barrels/day: Net crude oil imports (imports minus exports) to the U.S. in December 2025.
Idle Wells
*GSI/OSI: Gas or oil wells oil well that are capable of producing but have not produced during the production month.
I find this to be, perhaps, the most telling chart of all. It shows the number of idle wells on federal mineral leases (which includes public lands and split-estate private lands) by Western state. A lot of the wells have just been wrung dry and have been abandoned and need to be plugged and reclaimed, probably at the taxpayer’s expense.
Still others, the ones in the GSI (non-producing gas completion) and OSI (non-producing oil completion) columns, are officially capable of producing oil and gas, it’s just that for one reason or another they aren’t producing currently. Dozens of the GSI/OSI wells in Wyoming, for example, are owned by bankrupt companies that were unable to offload them to someone else.
This brings up a question: If we are indeed in an “energy emergency,” as the Trump administration has declared, shouldn’t we be pumping all of the oil and gas from existing wells that we possibly can before issuing thousands of new drilling permits, most of which aren’t even being used?
Let me answer that one: We’re not in an energy emergency.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
I came across this cool old map of the Sangre de Cristo land grant while perusing the Green Fire Times’ tribute to Malcolm Ebright, who was a land grant community advocate and historian. In order to get a high-res version I had to, um, copy this from an online auction site (thus the watermarks). I don’t have much to say about it, except it’s a pretty cool map of a very cool area.
The energy transition was not meant to be a main topic when world leaders and negotiators met at the 2025 United Nations climate summit, COP30, in November in Belém, Brazil. But it took center stage from the start to the very end, bringing attention to the real-world geopolitical energy debate underway and the stakes at hand.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva began the conference by calling for the creation of a formal road map, essentially a strategic process in which countries could participate to “overcome dependence on fossil fuels.” It would take the global decision to transition away from fossil fuels from words to action.
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva speaks at COP30, where he promoted the idea of a road map to help the world speed up its transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. AP Photo/Andre Penner)
More than 80 countries said they supported the idea, ranging from vulnerable small island nations like Vanuatu that are losing land and lives from sea level rise and more intense storms, to countries like Kenya that see business opportunities in clean energy, to Australia, a large fossil-fuel-producing country.
I was in Belém for COP30, and I follow developments closely as former special climate envoy and head of delegation for Germany and senior fellow at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. The fight over whether there should even be a road map shows how much countries that depend on fossil fuels are working to slow down the transition, and how others are positioning themselves to benefit from the growth of renewables. And it is a key area to watch in 2026.
The battle between electro-states and petro-states
Brazilian diplomat and COP30 President André Aranha Corrêa do Lago has committed to lead an effort in 2026 to create two road maps: one on halting and reversing deforestation and another on transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems in a just, orderly and equitable manner.
What those road maps will look like is still unclear. They are likely to be centered on a process for countries to discuss and debate how to reverse deforestation and phase out fossil fuels.
Over the coming months, Corrêa plans to convene high-level meetings among global leaders, including fossil fuel producers and consumers, international organizations, industries, workers, scholars and advocacy groups.
For the road map to both be accepted and be useful, the process will need to address the global market issues of supply and demand, as well as equity. For example, in some fossil fuel-producing countries, oil, gas or coal revenues are the main source of income. What can the road ahead look like for those countries that will need to diversify their economies?
Nigeria’s Bodo community is suing Renaissance Africa Energy Company Limited, an oil consortium that acquired Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary, over two major oil spills in the Niger Delta in 2008. Shell admitted liability and settled with the community in 2014, committing to cleanup efforts. However, the Bodo community has been critical of the quality and transparency of Shell’s cleanup, and is seeking further damages and remediation. Here, activists protest the company’s actions. Leon Neal/Getty Images
Oil exports consistently provide the bulk of Nigeria’s revenue, accounting for around 80% to over 90% of total government revenue and foreign exchange earnings. At the same time, roughly 39% of Nigeria’s population has no access to electricity, which is the highest proportion of people without electricity of any nation. And Nigeria possesses abundant renewable energy resources across the country, which are largely untapped: solar, hydro, geothermal and wind, providing new opportunities.
What a road map might look like
In Belém, representatives talked about creating a road map that would be science-based and aligned with the Paris climate agreement, and would include various pathways to achieve a just transition for fossil-fuel-dependent regions.
Some inspiration for helping fossil-fuel-producing countries transition to cleaner energy could come from Brazil and Norway.
In Brazil, Lula asked his ministries to prepare guidelines for developing a road map for gradually reducing Brazil’s dependency on fossil fuels and find a way to financially support the changes.
His decree specifically mentions creating an energy transition fund, which could be supported by government revenues from oil and gas exploration. While Brazil supports moving away from fossil fuels, it is also still a large oil producer and recently approved new exploratory drilling near the mouth of the Amazon River.
Norway, a major oil and gas producer, is establishing a formal transition commission to study and plan its economy’s shift away from fossil fuels, particularly focusing on how the workforce and the natural resources of Norway can be used more effectively to create new and different jobs.
Both countries are just getting started, but their work could help point the way for other countries and inform a global road map process.
In the U.S., the Trump administration has made clear through its policymaking and diplomacy that it is pursuing the opposite approach: to keep fossil fuels as the main energy source for decades to come.
The International Energy Agency still expects to see renewable energy grow faster than any other major energy source in all scenarios going forward, as renewable energy’s lower costs make it an attractive option in many countries. Globally, the agency expects investment in renewable energy in 2025 to be twice that of fossil fuels.
At the same time, however, fossil fuel investments are also rising with fast-growing energy demand.
The IEA’s World Energy Outlook described a surge in new funding for liquefied natural gas, or LNG, projects in 2025. It now expects a 50% increase in global LNG supply by 2030, about half of that from the U.S. However, the World Energy Outlook notes that “questions still linger about where all the new LNG will go” once it’s produced.
What to watch for
The Belém road map dialogue and how it balances countries’ needs will reflect on the world’s ability to handle climate change.
Corrêa plans to report on its progress at the next annual U.N. climate conference, COP31, in late 2026. The conference will be hosted by Turkey, but Australia, which supported the call for a road map, will be leading the negotiations.
With more time to discuss and prepare, COP31 may just bring a transition away from fossil fuels back into the global negotiations.
Jennifer Morgan, Senior Fellow, Center for International Environment and Resource Policy and Climate Policy Lab, Tufts University
Five years ago today, President Donald Trump incited an angry mob of his followers to attack the nation’s Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the presidential election that he had just lost. He was trying to launch a coup to overthrow America’s democracy. At the time, many of us expected him to be impeached, and maybe even go to jail for this deplorable act. Little could we have guessed that just half a decade later he’d not only be President once again, but would actually be succeeding in his bid to dismantle democracy, and would be doing it with the tacit and explicit support of Congress, the Supreme Court, and his many supporters who don’t seem to be bothered by his cognitive decline, authoritarianism, broken promises, lies, close association with a convicted sex trafficker and pedophile, disregard for the Constitution, and reckless tinkering with the U.S. economy, international affairs, and his constituents’ well-being.
The administration’s invasion of Venezuela is simply the latest, most egregious example. The military went in, lit up Caracas with explosives and gunfire, killed civilians, kidnapped the nation’s leader (who, admittedly, was a nasty authoritarian), and sowed chaos, all without authorization from Congress. The reason? Trump himself says it was to turn the country’s vast oil reserves over to American corporations, which donated generously to Trump’s campaign. But Trump and his minions were equally motivated by the need to stroke Trump’s fragile ego — which has taken a beating thanks to other failures and low approval ratings, and to distract from his ubiquity in the Epstein files (which the DOJ has yet to release as Congress ordered it to do). Don’t be surprised if they invade Greenland or Cuba or even Mexico, next, as stupid as such a scenario might be.
But let’s focus on the oil factor, since that’s the one that’s most likely to trickle down into the Land Desk beat.
Venezuela has a lot of oil, reportedly the largest proved reserves in the world, and it’s mostly made up of heavy, sour crude (more on this in a minute). It’s currently not extracting very much of that oil, for various reasons (the U.S. produces about 20 times more per day than Venezuela). Trump is encouraging American oil companies to go to Venezuela and develop the oil fields and upgrade the infrastructure. This will take time and money, and it’s not clear that petroleum corporations will be interested in this kind of investment while oil prices are low (as they are, currently). Prices are low because demand and supply are more or less balanced, meaning the world doesn’t really need Venezuelan’s oil — at least not now.
Like fine wine, oil is imbued with terroir. That is, its composition varies depending on where it’s from. Most U.S.-produced oil is tight (from tight shales), light (low density), sweet (low sulfur content) crude that requires less processing than heavy (dense), sour (high sulfur) crude. Thing is, many Gulf Coast refineries were constructed before the shale revolution and are equipped to process heavy, sour crude, like the kind that comes from Venezuela. So there is a domestic demand for the stuff.
The active drilling rig count, the most accurate indicator of oil and gas activity, remains stagnant, despite Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill,” thanks to persistently low oil and gas prices. If Venezuelan oil production increases — and that remains a big “if” — it could further deflate crude prices and dampen enthusiasm for domestic drilling. Source: Baker Hughes
If and when Venezuelan production increases, it will add supply to both the global and domestic markets, which could bring prices down even further. That will lower the cost of driving American gas guzzlers around, and increase greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, but it will also reduce incentives to drill new wells, which could ease industry pressure on public lands in the U.S. In the meantime, the Trump administration continues to issue drilling permits at a blistering rate, even though companies aren’t all that interested in using them.
Last week, the Durango Herald quoted a National Weather Service meteorologist as saying that the snowpack in the southwestern part of the state was “not too bad.” I guess that depends on your definition of “not too bad.” Because it sure as heck isn’t looking good!
Red Mountain Pass has about half as much snow as it normally does this time of year. Only 1990, 2000, and 2018 rivaled this year for meagre snow levels. Source: NRCS.
The San Juan Mountain snowpack levels are currently at about 50% of normal for the first week of January, and they are tied for third lowest snowpack level on record for this date. That’s not “too bad,” it’s downright dismal. And snow cover is even more meagre in other parts of the state: The Colorado River’s headwaters SNOTEL station is experiencing the lowest snowpack since it started recording in 1986.
No bueno! Source: NRCS.
Still, it may be too early for snow lovers to abandon hope altogether, since a full recovery would not be unprecedented. Take the winter of 1989-90, when the early January snowpack was even worse than it is now. It was my first year in college, and when I came home for Christmas we played volleyball and went hiking in the mostly bare La Plata Mountains instead of going sledding or skiing. (At the time it seemed downright apocalyptic, since it followed the unusually wet 1980s, when snow would pile up in Durango and halt car traffic and turn the streets into nordic ski tracks.) But that March the snows finally came and continued into May, leading to some nice spring skiing and a decent spring runoff. The snowpack of 95-96 followed a similar pattern, as did 1999-2000.
During those years, however, the lack of snow was caused by a lack of precipitation. This year, it’s the result of a combination of light winter precipitation and unusually warm temperatures throughout December and early January. A recovery will require not only more snowfall, but also cooler temperatures, making the outlook a little grimmer.
The Upper Colorado River region has experienced some of its highest daily average temperatures on record this winter. On Christmas Eve, the daily average was a whopping 18° F higher than the median for that day. Source: NRCS.
Parts of the West were hit with five or six times as much precipitation than normal in December, but temperatures were above normal almost everywhere, too, diminishing snowpack. Source: Western Regional Climate Center.
The Phillips Bench SNOTEL station near Teton Pass, Wyoming, shows how the atmospheric rivers have helped the snowpack their rebound.
As of mid-December, the snow drought covered most of the West, but a series of atmospheric rivers pounded the West Coast and the Northern Rockies, bringing snow to higher elevations and more northern latitudes (and big rain and flooding to California). Heavy, wet snow piled up on Teton Pass near Jackson, Wyoming, bringing snow water equivalent levels from far below average to above normal for this date. Road crews triggered a huge avalanche that covered the highway in about 30 feet of snow. And, after the skies cleared, a couple of backcountry skiers triggered a slide near Teton Pass; one of the skiers was caught, buried, and killed. It was the nation’s second avalanche-related fatality this season. A few days later, two Mammoth Mountain ski patrollers were caught in a slide while doing avalanche mitigation work and one of them died.
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
Now for a little New Year’s treat for all of you weather/map nerds: The Colorado Avalanche Information Center has launched an interactive map that shows 24-hour and 48-hour snowfall and snow water equivalents at various locations across the state’s mountains, letting you see at a click where the good powder is and isn’t. You can click on each station and get all the details, including current temperature and snow depth.
The Bureau of Reclamation today released a draft Environmental Impact Statement evaluating a range of operational alternatives for managing of Colorado River reservoirs after 2026, when the current operating agreements expire. The draft EIS evaluates a broad range of potential operating strategies. It does not designate a preferred alternative, ensuring flexibility for a potential collective agreement.
Prolonged drought conditions over the past 25 years, combined with forecasts for continued dry conditions, have made development of future operating guidelines for the Colorado River particularly challenging.
“The Department of the Interior is moving forward with this process to ensure environmental compliance is in place so operations can continue without interruption when the current guidelines expire,” Assistant Secretary – Water and Science Andrea Travnicek said. “The river and the 40 million people who depend on it cannot wait. In the face of an ongoing severe drought, inaction is not an option.”
The draft EIS evaluates a broad range of operational alternatives for post-2026 reservoir management informed through input and extensive collaborative engagement with stakeholders, including the seven basin states, tribes, conservation organizations, other federal agencies, other Basin water users, and the public. It includes the following alternatives that capture operational elements and potential environmental impacts:
No Action
Basic Coordination
Enhanced Coordination
Maximum Operational Flexibility
Supply Driven
The document will be published in the Federal Register on January 16, 2026, initiating a 45-day comment period that will end on March 2, 2026. The draft EIS and additional information on the alternatives are available on Reclamation’s website.
“Given the importance of a consensus-based approach to operations for the stability of the system, Reclamation has not yet identified a preferred alternative,” said Acting Commissioner Scott Cameron. “However, Reclamation anticipates that when an agreement is reached, it will incorporate elements or variations of these five alternatives and will be fully analyzed in the Final EIS enabling the sustainable and effective management of the Colorado River.”
The Colorado River provides water for more than 40 million people and fuels hydropower resources in seven states. It serves as a vital resource for 30 Tribal Nations and two Mexican states, sustaining 5.5 million acres of farmland and agricultural communities throughout the West, while also supporting critical ecosystems and protecting endangered species.
The Draft EIS addresses only domestic river operations. A separate binational process addressing water deliveries to Mexico is underway and the Department is committed to continued collaboration with the Republic of Mexico. The Department will conduct all necessary and appropriate discussions regarding post-2026 operations and implementation of the 1944 Water Treaty with Mexico through the International Boundary and Water Commission in consultation with the Department of State.
To provide certainty for communities, tribes, and water users, a decision regarding operations after 2026 will be made prior to October 1, 2026 – the start of the 2027 water year.
Photo shows Lake Mead with a water elevation of 1078. Credit: USBR
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
The consensus-based effort to develop new rules to manage the Colorado River system hasn’t worked – it’s time for a new approach
Federal leadership and the credible threat of managing reservoirs to protect the system is that new approach
Missing Deadlines
Way back at the end of the last century, at the annual Colorado River conference in Vegas, Marc Reisner repeated the Margaret Thatcher quote that consensus is the absence of leadership. On Veterans Day, the seven Colorado River basin states missed yet another deadline to reach consensus on a conceptual plan for managing the shrinking Colorado River after the current rules expire in 2026. Valentine’s Day marks the next holiday deadline, this time for a detailed plan, but multiple missed deadlines give no indication that the states will reach consensus then, either.
The basin state negotiators have met for years behind closed doors, without success. It’s time for a new approach. Aggressive federal intervention and the credible threat of a federally-imposed Colorado River management plan would offer political cover – or a political imperative – for the negotiators. The credible threat of a federal plan would give the negotiators the space to compromise without having to do so unilaterally and then being accused of not protecting their state’s interests.
But federal leadership alone is not enough – it must be coupled with a plausible federal plan that compels the states to act and can meet the magnitude of the ongoing crisis. As the Department of the Interior announced in its 6/15/2023 press release, the purpose of and need for the post-2026 guidelines is “to develop future operating guidelines and strategies to protect the stability and sustainability of the Colorado River.” To date, the development of the post-2026 guidelines has prioritized routine operations of Glen Canyon and Hoover dams over the system as a whole, a focus inconsistent with the magnitude and urgency of the problem. Prioritizing routine dam operations and hydropower generation over water delivery and environmental protection elevates the tool over the task. Seeking to preserve routine operations of the dams while imposing draconian cuts on water users is not a path to resilience and precludes alternatives that would help stabilize the system.
The Plan
Instead, by early next year, the Secretary should announce that Interior will implement a federal plan incorporating the following elements:
As a condition precedent, the Lower Basin states agree not to place a “compact call” for the duration of the agreement.
Implement annual Lower Basin water use reductions for the following calendar year based on total system contents on August 1:
75% – 60%: cuts to Lower Basin water uses increasing from 0 to 1.5 MAF<60% – 38%: static cut to Lower Basin water uses of 1.5 MAF<38% – 23%: increasing cuts to Lower Basin water uses of up to 3.0 MAF total
below 23% of total system contents – cut Lower Basin water uses to the minimum required to protect human health and safety and satisfy present perfected rights
If the Lower Basin states do not satisfy the condition precedent in #3 above, Reclamation limits Lower Basin deliveries to the minimum required to satisfy present perfected rights when total system contents are <75%.
Recover water stored in federal Upper Basin reservoirs unless the Upper Basin states reduce annual water use based on total system contents:
<34% – 23%: Assuming the first 0.25 MAF “reduction” would be contributed by the elimination of Powell’s evaporative losses and gains from Glen Canyon bank storage, reduce Upper Basin water uses up to 0.65 MAF
below 23% of total system contents – limit total Upper Basin water uses to 3.56 MAF (the minimum volume reported this century)
Expand the pool of parties eligible to create Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS) beyond existing Colorado River contractors, to include water agencies and other entities with agreements to use Colorado River water.
Eliminate the existing limits on the total quantity of Extraordinary Conservation ICS and DCP ICS that may be accumulated in ICS and DCP ICS accounts, while maintaining existing limits on delivery of such water.
Fully mitigate the on-stream and off-stream community and environmental impacts of the water use reductions identified above.
After a three-year phase-in period, condition Colorado River diversions on a clear “reasonable and beneficial use” standard predicated on existing best practices for water efficiency, including but not limited to the examples listed below (state(s) that already have such standards):
Require removal of non-functional turf grass (California, Nevada)
Incentivize landscape conversion and turf removal statewide (California, Colorado, Utah)
Adopt stronger efficiency standards for plumbing and equipment (Colorado, California, and Nevada)
Require urban utilities to report distribution system leakage, and to meet standards for reducing water losses (California)
Require all new urban landscapes to be water-efficient (California)
Require metering of landscape irrigation turnouts (Utah)
Ensure that existing buildings are water-efficient when they are sold or leased (Los Angeles, San Diego)
Require agricultural water deliveries to be metered and priced at least in part by volume (California)
Many of the elements listed above raise important questions about federal authorities, accounting and data challenges, the roles and obligations of state water officials to implement coordinated actions in-state, water access for disadvantaged communities, environmental compliance, and potential economic and social costs, among others. For each item listed, many details will need to be refined. Similarly, the plan’s duration will need to be determined. But as temperatures again climb into the high 40s in the Rockies near the Colorado River’s headwaters (in mid-December!), drying soils and reducing next year’s runoff, and the National Weather Service issues red flag fire warnings for Colorado’s Front Range, the need for bold action is clear.
The Dominy Bypass
Recovering water stored in Lake Powell will require the construction of new bypass tunnels around Glen Canyon Dam. Former Reclamation Commissioner Floyd Dominy sketched the design of such tunnels almost thirty years ago (see image). Such tunnels would enable the recovery of about 5.6 MAF of water stored below the minimum power pool elevation – more water than the Upper Basin states consume each year. Current operating rules and the scope of the current planning process effectively treat this massive volume of water as “dead storage” – a luxury the system can no longer afford. After Reclamation constructs the bypass tunnels, water recovery should be timed to maximize environmental and recreational benefits in the Grand Canyon.
John Wesley Powell at his desk—same desk used by the USGS Director today via the USGS
Running the River
Almost 160 years ago, John Wesley Powell – the reservoir’s namesake – demonstrated bold leadership, going where no (white) man had gone before. With leadership and a clear goal, he charted a route through the Colorado River’s iconic canyons. Now is the time for more bold leadership, a clear goal, and a plan to get there.
About the author
Michael Cohen. Photo credit: Pacific Institute
Since 1998, Michael Cohen’s work with the Pacific Institute has focused on water use in the Colorado River basin and delta region and the management and revitalization of the Salton Sea ecosystem. Michael received a B.A. in Government from Cornell University and has a Master’s degree in Geography, with a concentration in Resources and Environmental Quality, from San Diego State University.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Bedrock Energy’s drilling rig digs a 1,000-foot borehole as part of a geothermal network that’ll keep energy costs low for companies that move into a new Hayden business park. (Alison F. Takemura/Canary Media)
For decades, Dallas Robinson’s family excavation company developed coal mines and power plants in the rugged, fossil-fuel-rich region of northwest Colorado. It was a good business to be in, one that helped hamlets like Hayden grow from outposts to bustling mountain towns — and kept families like Robinson’s rooted in place for generations.
“This area, with the exception of agriculture, was built on oil and gas and coal,” said Robinson, a former town councilor for Hayden.
But that era is coming to a close. Across the United States, bad economics and even worse environmental impacts are driving coal companies out of business. The 441-megawatt coal-burning power plant just outside Hayden is no exception: It’s shutting down by the end of 2028. The Twentymile mine that feeds it is expected to follow.
Coal closures can gut communities like Hayden, a town of about 2,000 people. That story has been playing out for decades, particularly in Appalachia, where coal regions with depressed economies have seen populations decline as people strike out for better opportunities elsewhere. Robinson, a friendly, gregarious guy, fears the same could happen in Hayden.
“I grew up here, so I know everyone,” he said. “It’s hard to see people lose their jobs and have to move away. … These are families that sweat and bled and been through the good and the bad times in small towns like this.”
Struggling American coal towns need an economic rebirth as the fossil-fuel industry fades. Hayden has a vision that, at first, doesn’t sound all that unusual. The town is developing a 58-acre business and industrial park to attract a diverse array of new employers.
The innovative part: companies that move in will get cheap energy bills at a time of surging utility costs. The town is installing tech that’s still uncommon but gaining traction — a geothermal heating-and-cooling system, which will draw energy from 1,000 feet underground.
In short, Hayden is tapping abundant renewable energy to help invigorate its economy. That’s a playbook that could serve other communities looking to rise from the coal dust.
At an all-day event hosted by geothermal drilling startup Bedrock Energy this summer, I saw the ambitious project in progress. Under a blazing sun, a Bedrock drilling rig chewed methodically into the region’s ochre dirt. Once it finished this borehole — one of about 150 — it would feed in a massive spool of black pipe to transfer heat.
Bedrock will complete the project, providing 2 megawatts of thermal energy, in phases, with roughly half the district done in 2026 and the whole job finished by 2028. Along the way, constructed buildings will be able to connect with portions of the district as they’re ready.
“We see it as a long-term bet,” Mathew Mendisco, city manager of Hayden, later told me, describing the town as full of grit and good people. Geothermal energy “is literally so sustainable — like, you could generate those megawatts forever. You’re never going to have to be reliant on the delivery of coal or natural gas. … You drill it on-site, the heat comes out.”
“We disagree on the urgency of addressing climate change, [but] this is something that Chris Wright and I agree on,” Colorado Senator John Hickenlooper (D), a trained geologist, told a packed conference-room crowd on the day of the event. “Geothermal energy has … unbelievable potential to, at scale, create clean energy.”
Charting a post-coal economy
The eventual closure of the Hayden Station coal plant, which has operated for more than half a century, has loomed over the town since Xcel Energy announced an early shutdown in 2021.
The power plant and the mine employ about 240 people. Property taxes from those businesses have historically provided more than half the funding for the town’s fire management and school districts — though that fraction is shrinking thanks to recent efforts to diversify Hayden’s economy, Mendisco said.
Taking into account the other businesses that serve the coal industry and its workers, according to Mendisco, the economic fallout from the closures is projected to be a whopping $319 million per year.
“Really, the highest-paying jobs, the most stable jobs, with the best benefits [and] the best retirement, are in coal and coal-fired power plants,” Robinson said.
Hayden aims for its business park to help the town weather this transition. With 15 lots to be available for purchase, the development is designed to provide more than 70 jobs and help offset a portion of the tax losses from Hayden Station’s closure, according to Mendisco.
“We are not going to sit on our hands and wait for something to come save us,” Mayor Ryan Banks told me at the event.
Companies that move into the business park won’t have a gas bill. They’ll be insulated from fossil-fuel price spikes, like those that occurred in December 2022, when gas prices leapt in the West and customers’ bills skyrocketed by 75% on average from December 2021.
In the Hayden development, businesses will be charged for their energy use by the electric utility and by a geothermal municipal utility that Hayden is forming to oversee the thermal energy network. Rather than forcing customers to pay for the infrastructure upfront, the town will spread out those costs on energy bills over time — like investor-owned utilities do. Unlike a private utility, though, Hayden will take no profit. Mendisco said he expects the geothermal district to cut energy costs by roughly 40%, compared with other heating systems.
Municipally owned geothermal districts are rare in the U.S., but the approach has legs. Pagosa Springs, Colorado, has run its geothermal network since the early 1980s, when it scrambled to combat fuel scarcity during the 1970s oil embargo. New Haven, Connecticut, recently broke ground on a geothermal project for its train station and a new public housing complex. And Ann Arbor, Michigan, has plans to build a geothermal district to help make one neighborhood carbon-neutral.
Hayden’s infrastructure investment is already attracting business owners. An industrial painting company has bought a plot, and so has a regional alcohol distributor, Mendisco said.
One couple is particularly excited to be a part of the town’s clean energy venture. Nate and Steph Yarbrough own DIY off-grid-electrical startup Explorist.Life; renewable power is in the company’s DNA. The Yarbroughs teach people how to put solar panels and batteries on camper vans, boats, and cabins to fuel their outdoor adventures, and Explorist.Life sells the necessary gear.
“When we bought that property, it was largely because of the whole geothermal concept,” Nate Yarbrough told me. “We thought it made a whole bunch of sense with what we do.”
Reducing reliance on hydrocarbons, he noted, is “a good thing for society overall.”
Geothermal tech heats up
The geothermal network that could transform Hayden’s future is mostly invisible from aboveground. Besides the drilling rig and a trench, the most prominent features I spotted were flexible tubes jutting from the earth like bunny ears.
Those ends of buried U-shaped pipes will eventually connect to a main distribution loop for businesses to hook up to. Throughout the network, pipes will ferry a nontoxic mix of water and glycol — a heat-carrying fluid that electric heat pumps can tap to keep buildings toasty in the winter and chilled in the summer.
As part of Hayden’s geothermal network, a loop of U-shaped pipe will collect constant heat from the earth, no matter how bitter the winter. Its two ends — the only parts visible — will connect to a distribution loop. (Alison F. Takemura/Canary Media)
Despite their superior efficiency, these heat pumps are far less common than the kind that pull from the ambient air, largely due to project cost. Because you have to drill to install a ground-source heat pump, the systems are typically about twice as expensive as air-source heat pumps.
But the underground infrastructure lasts 50 years or more, and the systems pay for themselves in fuel-cost savings more quickly in places that endure frostier temperatures, including Rocky Mountain municipalities like Hayden. Those long-term cost benefits were too attractive to ignore, Mendisco said.
Hayden’s project “is 100% replicable today,” Mendisco told attendees at the event, which included leaders of other mountain towns. Geothermal tech is ready; the money is out there, he added: “You can do this.”
Colorado certainly believes that — and it’s giving first-mover communities a boost.
In October, the state energy office announced $7.3 million in merit-based tax-credit awards for four geothermal projects. Vail is getting nearly $1.8 million for a network, into which the ice arena can dump heat and the library can soak it up. Colorado Springs will use its $5 million award to keep a downtown high school comfortable year-round. Steamboat Springs and a Denver neighborhood will share the rest of the funding.
At least one other northwest Colorado coal community is also getting on board with geothermal. In the prior round of state awards, the energy office granted $58,000 to the town of Craig’s Memorial Regional Health to explore a project for its medical campus.
With dozens of communities warming to the notion, “it’s an exciting time for geothermal in Colorado,” said Bryce Carter, geothermal program manager at the state energy office.
So far, the state has pumped $30.5 million into geothermal developments — with over $27 million going toward heating-and-cooling projects specifically — through its grant and tax-credit programs. The larger tax-credit incentive still has about $13.8 million left in its coffers.
Hayden, for its part, is also taking advantage of the federal tax credits to save up to 50% on the cost of its geothermal district. That includes a 10% bonus credit that the community qualifies for because of its coal legacy. After also accounting for a bonanza of state incentives, the $14-million project will only be $2.2 million, Mendisco said.
Tech innovation could further improve geothermal’s prospects, even in areas with less generous inducements than Colorado’s. Bedrock Energy, for one, aims to drive down costs by using advanced sensing technology that allows it to see the subsurface and make computationally guided decisions while drilling.
“In Hayden, we have gone from about 25 hours for a 1,000-foot bore to about nine hours for a 1,000-foot bore — in just the last couple of months,” Joselyn Lai, Bedrock’s co-founder and CEO, told me at the event. Overall, the firm’s subsurface construction costs from the first quarter of 2025 to the second quarter fell by about 16%, she noted.
When drilling, Bedrock Energy harnesses a constant stream of data to navigate underground obstacles from boulders to fractures. (Alison F. Takemura/Canary Media)
Hayden is likely just at the start of its geothermal journey. If all goes well with the business park, the town aims to retrofit its municipal buildings with these systems to comply with the state’s climate-pollution limits on big buildings, Mendisco said. Hayden’s community center could be the first to get a geothermal makeover starting in 2027, he added.
Robinson, despite coal’s salience in the region and his family’s legacy in its extraction, believes in Hayden’s vision: Geothermal could be a winner in a post-coal economy. In fact, he’s interested in investing in the geothermal industry and installing a system in a new house he’s building, he said.
“I’ve lived a lot of my life making a living by exploiting natural resources. I understand the value of that — as well as lessening our impact and being able to find new and better,” Robinson said. “This is the next step, right?”
This article was originally published by Canary Media and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global effort to boost coverage of climate change.
The coal-fired Tri-State Generation and Transmission plant in Craig provides much of the power used in Western Colorado, including in Aspen and Pitkin County. Will Toor, executive director of the Colorado Energy Office has a plan to move the state’s electric grid to 100 percent renewable energy by 2040. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Platte River Power Authority’s general manager says he disagrees with a federal order requiring one of the coal plants it owns a stake in to remain open past its scheduled retirement and is waiting to learn what it might cost Fort Collins’ wholesale electricity provider…PRPA is a joint owner of the plant with PacifiCorp, Xcel Energy, Salt River Project and Tri-State Generation and Transmission, which operates the facility. PRPA owns 18% of the Craig 1 and 2 coal units…
The Department of Energy’s emergency order contends there is a shortage of electric energy and facilities in the Western Electricity Coordinating Council Northwest assessment area, which includes Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. The order, signed by Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, states that peak demand in the area is expected to grow 8.5% in the next decade, while many coal plants in the region have been retired, with more retirements planned…Wright cites supply chain issues with building battery storage systems to help replace the energy from those retirements. The emergency order also cited two executive orders from President Donald Trump. One declared a national energy emergency due to “insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation.” The other declares the United States is experiencing an unprecedented surge in electricity demand driven by rapid technological advancements, like the expansion of AI data centers and domestic manufacturing…
But PRPA General Manager and CEO Jason Frisbie says PRPA does not need the Craig 1 unit because it has already replaced the energy that came from it.
“We have planned for the retirement of Craig Unit 1 for nearly a decade and have proactively replaced the capacity and energy from new sources,” Frisbie said in a statement provided to the Coloradoan.
A Yale Climate Connections analysis of electricity prices has found that data centers and other commercial electricity users are consuming more kilowatts than ever, but the price they pay for that electricity has risen only a little. And industrial users of electricity are actually paying lower prices, on average, than they were two years ago.
But between 2020 and 2024, residential electricity prices in the U.S. increased by 25%. In other words, people using their toasters, laptops, and electric heating and cooking at home are paying ever-increasing prices, while the data centers that are driving rapid growth in electricity demand are scoring handsome discounts.
A word of warning: this analysis might make you mad, but hopefully in a productive way.
Since 2008, residential bills have been rising more than in other sectors
Electricity customers are sorted into use types: residential for homes, commercialfor businesses and data centers, and industrial for facilities like factories or refineries. The graph below shows how the prices paid by these three sectors have shifted over time.
Data analysis and image by Karin Kirk for Yale Climate Connections
From 1997 through 2007, electricity prices for all three categories of users rose and fell at a similar pace.
In 2008, that trend stopped. That year, electricity prices went up for residences but down for businesses and industries.
Over the next decade, home uses of electricity became more expensive, while electricity prices for businesses stayed nearly flat.
In 2021, the trend shifted again. Electricity prices for all three sectors began to rise steeply, but unequally. The gap between home energy use and business/industrial energy use became even larger. In the last two years, these differences became especially stark, as shown in the chart below.
Data analysis and image by Karin Kirk for Yale Climate Connections
In just two years, starting in 2022, residential electricity prices rose by 10%, while commercial prices increased by only 3%, and industrial electricity prices fell by 2%.
This is an example of the “K-shaped economy,” where things improve for some groups while getting worse for others. The lines on a K-shaped graph head off in different directions, illustrating an ever-larger gap between those benefiting and those left out.
Recent increases in electricity demand are mostly due to the commercial sector, which includes data centers
If any one sector is driving the growth in electricity usage, it would make sense for that sector to foot the bill for the power plants and power lines needed to serve their demand. So let’s look at how electricity use is growing in each sector.
The chart below shows how the amount of electricity used by each sector has changed since 1997. Industrial use has stayed relatively flat, while commercial and residential use both grew at fairly similar rates and are now consuming about 40% more power than they were in 1997.
Data analysis and image by Karin Kirk for Yale Climate Connections
But a new pattern emerged in the last three years, as seen in the chart below. Commercial demand for electricity rose sharply and steadily, using 9% more power over just a three-year span.
Glenn McGrath, an electricity data analyst at the U.S. Energy Information Administration, wrote in an email that the growing energy needs of data centers “are likely a significant factor” behind increasing electricity use in the commercial sector.
Data analysis and image by Karin Kirk for Yale Climate Connections
To sum up the situation in recent years, household electricity use has grown the least of the three sectors, but that’s where prices have gone up the most.
The data illustrates how residential users are subsidizing the energy bills of A.I. and data centers, a perspective backed up by other recent analyses. A report by the Harvard Law School Environmental and Energy Law Program, Extracting Profits from the Public, lays out some of the reasons why Big Tech is able to off-load its costs onto the public and outlines specific steps policymakers can take to restore balance.
A big part of the problem is that the three sectors of electricity users are far from equal when it comes to their leverage. The report explains that companies that use large amounts of electricity can often negotiate lower pricing with energy suppliers, and in some cases, these contracts are secret. Complex rules and rate structures make it hard for the public – as well as regulators – to follow or engage with the process. Furthermore, policymakers have an incentive to attract new economic development in their state as technology companies shop around for the best pricing.
But for individual consumers, the situation is the opposite. In many states, people have no choice in their energy provider or their energy prices, and they can’t look elsewhere for a better deal. In the parlance of the energy industry, everyday people are often called “captive ratepayers” because we have little choice but to be the ever-faithful customers of a monopoly utility.
Expensive electricity can make life harder
Rising electricity bills can trigger a host of negative consequences. High energy costs may prevent people from adequately heating or cooling their homes, which can contribute to both physical and mental health problems. Expensive energy can also lead people to forego necessities in other areas of their lives in order to keep up with rising bills and avoid having their service shut off. These burdens fall disproportionately on low-income, Black, Hispanic, and disadvantaged households, who spend a large portion of their income on energy bills.
Higher electricity prices could also slow the adoption of modern, climate-friendly technology such as electric vehicles, heat pumps, and induction stoves that rely on electricity. That said, electric cars and appliances are more efficient than their fossil-fuel counterparts, so the trade-off is often still worth it.
And in some cases, expensive electricity can spur faster adoption of climate solutions. Home solar panels pay for themselves more quickly, and energy conservation measures make even more financial sense than before.
A stressed system that’s become fundamentally unfair
The electricity system in the U.S. is undergoing multiple stresses at once. Data centers seem to have an unquenchable thirst for energy, as extreme weather – often made worse by our warming climate – destabilizes the grid and causes spikes in electricity demand. At the same time, electricity generation is slowly transitioning from large, centralized power plants to numerous, distributed forms of electricity generation.
But at the root of it all, the data suggests that everyday people are footing the bill while companies that consume ever more power are paying less. At a time when corporations seem to enjoy many structural advantages over consumers, from lower tax rates to relaxed pollution requirements, the burden of rising energy bills can make one feel powerless. And yes, the pun was intentional.
Ratepayers do have a voice
Decisions about electricity rates are made by public utility commissions, which don’t usually get much attention – but that may be changing. In the November 2025 elections in Georgia, two incumbent public utility commissioners were resoundingly defeatedafter residential electricity prices climbed by 41% in just four years. Commissions are increasingly criticized for rubber-stamping price hikes and not protecting ratepayers who are caught inside a monopolistic system.
If you’re interested in learning more about the electricity decision-making process near you, here’s a directory of public utility commissions in every state, and Canary Media wrote a user-friendly guide to engaging with your electricity regulators. The deck may feel stacked against the common person, but that might just be all the more reason to get involved.
Colorado State University researcher Perry Cabot talks to a group about forage crops at the Fruita field station. Cabot studies the effects of irrigation withdrawal and forage crops that use less water. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
The findings of recent water-conservation studies on the Western Slope could have implications for lawmakers and water managers as they plan for a future with less water.
Researchers from Colorado State University have found that removing irrigation water from high-elevation grass pastures for an entire season could have long-lasting effects and may not conserve much water compared with lower-elevation crops. Western Slope water users prefer conservation programs that don’t require them to withhold water for the entire irrigation season, and having the Front Range simultaneously reduce its water use may persuade more people to participate. Researchers also found that water users who are resistant to conservation programs don’t feel much individual responsibility to contribute to what is a Colorado River basinwide water shortage.
“It’s not a simple economic calculus to get somebody to the table and get them to sign a contract for a conservation agreement,” said Seth Mason, a Carbondale-based hydrologist and one of the researchers. “It involves a lot of nuance. It involves a lot of thinking about tradeoffs.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Over the past 25 years, a historic drought and the effects of climate change have robbed the Colorado River of its flows, meaning there is increasing competition for a dwindling resource. In 2022, water levels in Lake Powell fell to their lowest point ever, prompting federal officials to call on the seven states that share the river for unprecedented levels of water conservation.
The Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) have experimented for the past decade with pilot programs that pay agricultural water users to voluntarily and temporarily cut back by not irrigating some of their fields for a season or part of a season.
The most recent program was the federally funded System Conservation Pilot Program, which ran in the Upper Basin in 2023 and 2024, and saved about 100,000 acre-feet of water at a cost of $45 million. The Upper Basin has been facing mounting pressure to cut back on its use, and although some type of future conservation program seems certain, Upper Basin officials say conservation must be voluntary, not mandatory.
Despite dabbling in these pilot conservation programs, Upper Basin water managers have resisted calls for cuts, saying their water users already suffer shortages in dry years and blaming the plummeting reservoirs on the Lower Basin states (California, Nevada and Arizona). Plus, the Upper Basin has never used its entire allocation of 7.5 million acre-feet a year promised to it under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, while the Lower Basin uses more than its fair share.
Sketches by Floyd Dominy show the way he’d end the Glen Canyon Dam. From the article “Floyd Dominy built the Glen Canyon Dam, then he sketched its end on a napkin” on the Salt Lake Tribune website
But as climate change continues to fuel shortages, makes a mockery of century-old agreements and pushes Colorado River management into crisis mode, the Upper Basin can no longer avoid scrutiny about how it uses water.
“We need a stable system in order to protect rivers,” said Matt Rice, director of the Southwest region at environmental group American Rivers, which helped fund and conduct the research. “(Upper Basin conservation) is not a silver bullet. But it’s an important contributing factor, it’s politically important and it’s inevitable.”
Researchers from Colorado State University used this monitoring station to track water use on fields near Kremmling. Researchers have found that Western Slope water users are more likely to participate in conservation programs if there is a corresponding Front Range match in water use reduction. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Findings
Papers by the researchers outline how water savings on Colorado’s high-elevation grass pastures — which represent the majority of irrigated acres on the Western Slope — are much less than on lower-elevation fields with other annual crops. Elevation can be thought of as a proxy for temperature; fewer frost-free days means a shorter growing season and less water use by the plants.
“Our results suggest that to get the equivalent conserved consumptive-use benefit that you might achieve on one acre of cornfield in Delta would require five acres of grass pasture if you were up near Granby, for example,” said Mason, who is a doctoral candidate at CSU. “This is a pretty important constraint as we’re thinking about what it means to do conservation in different locations across the West Slope.”
In addition to the science of water savings, Mason’s research also looked at the social aspects of how water users decide to participate in conservation programs. He surveyed 573 agricultural water users across the Western Slope and found that attitudes toward conservation and tendencies toward risk aversion — not just how much money was offered — played a role in participation.
Many who said they would not participate had a low sense of individual responsibility to act and a limited sense of agency that they could meaningfully contribute to a basinwide problem.
If you don’t pay attention to the attitudes of water users, you could end up with an overly rosy picture of the likelihood of participation, Mason said.
“It may do well to think less about how you optimize conservation contracts on price and do more thinking about how you might structure public outreach campaigns to change hearts and minds, how you might shift language as a policymaker,” he said. “A lot of the commentary that we hear around us is that maybe this isn’t our problem, that this is the Lower Basin’s problem. [ed. emphasis mine] The more you hear that, the less likely you are to internalize a notion of responsibility.”
Mason also found that a corresponding reduction in Front Range water use may boost participation by Western Slope water users. The fact that Front Range water providers take about 500,000 acre-feet annually from the headwaters of the Colorado River is a sore spot for many on the Western Slope, who feel the growth of Front Range cities has come at their expense. These transmountain diversions can leave Western Slope streams depleted.
Western Slope water users often describe feeling as if they have a target on their back as the quickest and easiest place to find water savings.
“I think they tend to be appreciative of notions that have some element of burden sharing built into them,” Mason said. “So they aren’t the only ones being looked at to contribute as part of a solution to a problem.”
Perry Cabot, a CSU researcher who studies the effects of irrigation withdrawal and forage crops that use less water, headed up a study on fields near Kremmling to see what happens when they aren’t irrigated for a full season or part of a season. The findings showed that fields where irrigation water was removed for the entire season produced less hay, even several years after full irrigation was resumed. Fields where water was removed for only part of the season had minimal yield loss and faster recovery.
“In the full season, you can have a three-year legacy effect, so that’s where the risk really comes in if you’re a producer participating in these programs,” Cabot said. “For three years after, you’re not getting paid even though you’ve diminished that yield.”
At the CSU research station in Fruita, Cabot is studying a legume called sainfoin, a forage crop and potentially an alternative to grass or alfalfa. He said sainfoin shows promise as a drought-tolerant crop that can be cut early in the season, allowing producers to have their cake and eat it too: They could maintain the income from growing a crop, avoid some of the worst impacts of a full-season fallowing, and still participate in a partial-season conservation program.
“I’d like to see flexible options that allow us to think about conservation happening on fields that still have green stuff out there,” Cabot said.
This field near Kremmling participated in an early study on the effects of removing irrigation water. Researchers found the effects of full-season fallowing can have lasting impacts. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Part of the solution
The Glenwood Springs-based Colorado River Water Conservation District has been one of the loudest voices weighing in on conservation in recent years, helping to fund Cabot’s and Mason’s studies, as well as conducting its own. The River District, which represents 15 counties on the Western Slope, is not a fan of conservation programs, but it has long accepted their inevitability. It has advocated for local control and strict guidelines around a program’s implementation to avoid negative impacts to rural agricultural communities.
River District General Manager Andy Mueller said there is still a lot of resistance to a conservation program in Colorado — especially if the saved water is being used downstream to fuel the growth of residential subdivisions, computer-chip factories and data centers in Arizona. In addition to wanting the Front Range to share their pain, Western Slope water users don’t want to make sacrifices for the benefit of the Lower Basin. [ed. emphasis mine]
“They want to be part of the solution, but they don’t want to suffer so that others can thrive,” Mueller said. “That’s what I keep hearing over and over again from our producers on the ground: They are willing to step up, but they want everybody to step up with them.”
Water experts agree Upper Basin conservation is not a quick solution that will keep the system from crashing. Complicated questions remain about how to make sure the conserved water gets to Lake Powell and how a program would be funded.
And as recent studies show, the tricky social issues that influence program participation, multiseason impacts to fields when water is removed and the scant water savings from high-elevation pastures mean the state may struggle to contribute a meaningful amount of water to the Colorado River system through a conservation program.
“If the dry conditions continue, it’s hard to produce the volumes of water that make a difference in that system,” Mueller said. “But are we willing to try? Absolutely. It has to be done really carefully.”
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Chris Wright has argued that energy scarcity poses a greater threat to quality of life than climate change. Here, he speaks to reporters in April 2025 while Martin Keller, then the director of NREL, looks on. Photo/Allen Best. Top image/National Laboratory of the Rockies.
Following the Trump administration’s last-minute invocation of an energy “emergency” to order a Colorado coal plant to postpone its scheduled retirement, the electricity provider that co-owns the plant is warning that the high costs of continuing to operate it will be shouldered by Colorado utility customers.
Located in Moffat County, Craig Generating Station’s 446-megawatt Unit 1 had been scheduled to go offline on Dec. 31, 2025, part of a wave of coal retirements planned across Colorado through 2030. But an emergency order issued Dec. 30 by the Department of Energy requires the plant to “take all measures necessary to ensure that Craig Unit 1 is available to operate” until at least March 30, 2026.
Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association, co-owner of Craig Generating Station, said in a press release that the “additional investments in operations, repairs, maintenance and, potentially, fuel supply” required by the order will raise costs for the plant’s customers, which include dozens of electric utilities and rural co-ops. Unit 1 was already offline due to a mechanical failure on Dec. 19, Tri-State said.
“We are continuing to review the order to determine what this means for Craig Station employees and operations, and the financial impacts,” said Tri-State CEO Duane Highley. “As a not-for-profit cooperative, our membership will bear the costs of compliance with this order unless we can identify a method to share costs with those in the region. There is not a clear path for doing so, but we will continue to evaluate our options.”
The five-page DOE order, signed by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, cites “growing resource adequacy concerns” as justification for the move, which followed similar actions in Indiana and Washington.
Shortly after taking office last year, President Donald Trump declared a “national energy emergency” in an executive order blasted by environmental advocates as a pretext for advancing the interests of fossil-fuel companies. Despite the declaration’s stated concerns about “insufficient energy production,” the administration has continued to cancel and delay major wind and solar projects.
An analysis released in December by the Sierra Club estimated that keeping Craig’s Unit 1 open for 90 days would cost ratepayers at least $20 million. Critics of the administration anticipate that the DOE’s orders will continue to be renewed every 90 days under the authority granted to the department by Federal Power Act, raising costs by $85 million to $150 million annually.
“Keeping this dirty and outdated coal plant online will harm the health of surrounding communities and hurt all of our pocketbooks,” said Michael Hiatt of environmental group Earthjustice. “This unlawful order will benefit no one but the struggling coal industry.”
The DOE order comes amid a series of Trump administration actions targeting Colorado that are widely viewed as retaliation for the ongoing incarceration of Trump ally and former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who was convicted on felony charges for her role in a breach of her own office’s secure election equipment in 2021.
Colorado U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet voted to confirm Wright, a former Denver oil executive, as Trump’s pick for Energy Secretary in January 2025, calling Wright “passionate about strengthening America’s energy independence and lowering costs for Colorado families.” In a statement Wednesday, Bennet, a Democrat who is running for Colorado governor, said he was “disappointed but not surprised by this continued revenge tour.”
“The DOE order is the latest in a string of attacks against Colorado, because we refuse to bend to the President,” Bennet said. “President Trump continues to take out his personal and political grievances on Coloradans who are already struggling to make ends meet.”
The three units of Craig Station were constructed from 1974 to 1984. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Craig Station. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 31, 2025
Trump orders Craig coal unit planned for retirement to stay open. But it so happens the unit is broken. Ludicrous says Polis team. Sierra Club challenges basis for emergency declaration.
It was no surprise. Tri-State Generation and Transmission has said for at least three months that it expected to get orders from the Trump administration to continue operating a coal-burning unit at Craig, in northwest Colorado, beyond its scheduled retirement on Dec. 31, 2025.
The order was posted at 6 p.m. MST Tuesday. Citing emergency authority claimed by President Donald Trump, Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered the coal unit to remain in operation through March 2026. The order cited a sudden increase in demand for electricity, or a shortage of generation capacity.
The irony of the order is that it was issued when the 427-megawatt unit was out of operation, according to a statement issued by the office of Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
“Ludicrously, the coal plant isn’t even operational right now, meaning repairs — to the tune of millions of dollars — just to get it running, all on the backs of rural Colorado ratepayers!” Polis said.
“Going backwards is an attempt to force local communities to foot the bill to extend plant operations and will cost energy consumers more. Today’s action flies in the face of this careful planning, is inconsistent with market forces, and will hurt Coloradans.”
The Polis team estimated continued operations would cost tens of millions of dollars “to keep a coal plant open that is broken and not needed.”
Tri-State, in a statement on Wednesday morning, explained that the unit “went into an outage” on Dec. 19, 2025, due to a mechanical failure of a valve. “Tri-State and the other co-owners will need to take the necessary steps to repair the valve in a timely manner,” the statement said.
“Tri-State has a policy of 100% compliance, and we will work with Unit 1 co-owners, and federal and state governments to determine the most cost-effective path to that end,” said Duane Highley, Tri-State CEO. “We are continuing to review the order to determine what this means for Craig Station employees and operations, and the financial impacts. As a not-for-profit cooperative, our membership will bear the costs of compliance with this order unless we can identify a method to share costs with those in the region. There is not a clear path for doing so, but we will continue to evaluate our options.”
As a result of the order, retaining Unit 1 will likely require additional investments in operations, repairs, maintenance and, potentially, fuel supply, all factors increasing costs, Tri-State said. “Tri-State is continuing to review the order to determine how best to comply while limiting the costs to its members, and the impacts to its employees and operations.”
Highley told Big Pivots in October that the wholesale supplier for cooperatives in Colorado and three other states did not need the electrical production at this time, as it is actually producing more than it needs.
Wright, in his order, No. 202-25-14, cited several justifications.
One justification was a 2024 report by the Western Electricity Coordinating Council that forecast growth of 8.5% in peak demand during the next decade in Colorado and several adjoining states.
The order also said that Tri-State and its co-owners — Fort Collins-based Platte River Power Authority, Phoenix-based Salt River Project, Salt Lake City-based PacifiCorp., and Denver-based Xcel Energy — “take all measures necessary” to ensure that Craig Unit 1 is available to operate at the direction of either Western Area Power Administration in its role as a balancing authority or the Southwest Power Pool West in its role as the reliability coordinator.
The Sierra Club emphasized the cost of operating Craig No. 1. It cited a recent report by Grid Strategies that found operating the unit past the retirement deadline will cost the plant owners $85 million per year. This is distinct from repairs that may be necessary.
“Trump is playing politics with coal,” said Margaret Kran-Annexstein, director of the Colorado chapter, in a statement issued shortly after the order was posted.
Matthew Gerhart, the senior attorney for the Sierra Club at its Denver office, had even stronger language in an interview with Big Pivots.
“I think this order is a joke even by this administration’s standards,” he said. “This is quite clearly just a political move. None of the documents they cite even come close to saying there is an emergency.”
Wright’s order cited the 2025-2026 Winter Reliability Assessment issued by the North America Electric Reliability Corporation. That report in November noted total and net internal demand increases of almost 1% driven primarily by data centers and commercial and industrial customer growth. Even so, the operating reserve margins in the Rocky Mountain were expected to be met before imports in all winter scenarios.
That being said, Xcel Energy almost a year ago began expressing concerns about resource adequacy.
Gerhart also found fault with Wright’s order that the unit be available to operate at the direction of the Southwest Power Pool West in its role as the reliability coordinator. SPP exists, but not the configuration — a regional transmission organization — that would allow SPP to do this, he said. SPP has a day-ahead market and also a balancing market but not the apparatus set up to manage the operation of Craig No. 1, he said.
Will Toor, director of the Colorado Energy Office, also pointed to the report from the North America Reliability Corporation that found no short-term or long-term elevated reliability risks in the Rocky Mountain region,
“These orders will take money out of the pockets of Colorado ratepayers, and especially harm rural communities across the West who could be forced to absorb the unnecessary excess costs required to keep this plant operational,” he said. “The Trump administration is engaging in Soviet-style central planning, driven by ideology rather than the realities of the electric grid, that will drive dirtier air and higher electric rates across our state. These orders are unlawful and will not improve energy security in Colorado or the region.”
Trump has claimed authority to order coal plants remain in operation under the Federal Power Act. That nearly century-old law explicitly gives presidents authority to order electrical plants to operate under duress of war or weather emergencies. Since last April, Trump has sought to expand the power, citing emergencies caused by concerns about resource adequacy. The concerns, he has said, result from retiring fossil fuel and nuclear plants, dramatic growth in demand, and the intermittency of renewables.
U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet, a gubernatorial candidate, also pushed back: “The DOE order is the latest in a string of attacks against Colorado, because we refuse to bend to the President. President Trump continues to take out his personal and political grievances on Coloradans who are already struggling to make ends meet. Federal intervention like this makes long-term planning impossible – this is not how you operate a business, plan an electric grid, or help a community stay prosperous. I am disappointed but not surprised by this continued revenge tour.”
Wright’s order said that 417.3 megawatts of coal-fired generating capacity across six units at three locations have retired in Colorado since 2019. It cited the Western Electricity Coordinating Council. “Looking forward, by 2029, about 3,700 megawatts of coal-fired generating capacity in Colorado is scheduled to be retired.” The order said that during that time, 675.6 megawatts of natural gas-fired generating capacity in Colorado will retire as well.
Wind turbines near Pawnee Buttes in northeastern Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
In 2025, wind accounted for over 5,300 megawatts of Colorado’s electricity generating capacity, the order noted.
Wright’s order described wind as intermittent. Of course, coal can be intermittent, too. That has been demonstrated repeatedly at Pueblo, particularly in the case of Comanche 3. The coal unit went down again in August and is not expected to be restored into operation until June 2026. In its absence, Xcel asked — and the Polis administration agreed — that Comanche 2 would not be retired this month, as had been planned for several years.
As for Craig No. 1, its retirement was planned in an agreement reached almost a decade ago. Air quality standards in Rocky Mountain National Park and other national parks and wilderness areas are being violated in part because of emissions from the unit. The regional haze standards were federally created and state enforced. The agreement with the Colordo Air Quality Control Commission was reached in 2016.
Tri-State’s electric resource plan of 2023 showed adequate resources to maintain reliability on Tri-State’s system following the retirement of Craig No. 1 as well as two other units at Craig Station that are scheduled to close in 2028. Unit 2, which Tri-State owns with its other partners in Unit 1, has a capacity of 410 megawatts. Tri-State owns 100% of Unit 3, which has a capacity of 448 megawatts. The three units were constructed and went on line in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Colorado River water could enable a pumped storage hydropower project intended to make the region’s electric grid more resilient.
KEY POINTS
One of the longest-duration pumped storage hydropower projects in the country is proposed for Navajo Nation land in the Four Corners region.
The project received a $7.1 million Department of Energy grant this year for feasibility studies.
Pumped storage hydropower is the largest form of energy storage in the U.S.
Standing in a breezy parking lot on Navajo land in the state’s far northwest corner, Tom Taylor looked toward the western horizon and then upwards at the furrowed mass of the Carrizo Mountains less than 10 miles away.
If all goes to plan, the infrastructure that could one day spill from the mountain’s flanks and through its core will become an essential piece of the region’s electric grid, able to store surplus electricity from renewable energy and other power sources for when it is needed later.
Fighting the wind that chilly November morning, Taylor used both hands to pin a detailed map against the hood of his Porsche Macan. A jumble of dashed lines and blue splotches representing proposed power lines, reservoirs, a water-supply pipeline, and access roads were printed atop the real-world geography on display in front of us.
“This will be a battery that lasts a long time,” Taylor said, holding tightly to the map.
JOAN CARSTENSEN
The project is the $5 billion Carrizo Four Corners Pumped Storage Hydro Center, which is designed to be one of the largest long-duration energy storage projects in the country. Pumped storage moves water between two reservoirs at different elevations. Water is pumped uphill when excess electricity is available and released to generate electricity when power demand warrants it.
Taylor, a former mayor of Farmington and a state House representative from 2000 to 2014, is employed by Kinetic Power, the three-person, Santa Fe-based outfit behind the Carrizo proposal. The company sees the project as a way to make the region’s electric grid more durable and cost-effective, not only by smoothing the intermittent nature of wind and solar but also as a bulwark against energy emergencies like the winter storm in 2021 that caused blackouts and 246 deaths in Texas. The twinned reservoirs, using water sourced from a Colorado River tributary nearby, would have the capacity to generate 1,500 megawatts over 70 hours – a form of battery that could provide the equivalent output of a large nuclear plant for nearly three days.
“We believe that the key is delivering economic value,” said Thomas Conroy, Kinetic Power’s co-founder, who has four decades of experience developing energy projects.
What seems straightforward when placing lines on a map is much less so in three dimensions. Carrizo Four Corners, which is still in the exploratory stage and is at least five years away from breaking ground, has nearly as many questions as answers at this point. What is the geology within the Carrizo Mountains? Will it support a 3,300-foot-deep shaft, a subterranean powerhouse, and dam abutments? How will drought affect the water supply? What cultural sites and wildlife might be at risk from construction? What are the power market dynamics?
Answering those questions is the goal of a $7.1 million, two-and-a-half-year Department of Energy grant that Kinetic and its six university and research partners secured in August. (The state of New Mexico and the research partners are also contributing $7.1 million.) On the political side, will future Navajo administrations feel as favorably toward Carrizo as current president Buu Nygren?
The technical questions are but one piece of an ambitious project that touches many of the most pressing questions about natural resources in the American West today: energy development, water use, and the relationship between federal law and tribal law.
Connecting Water and Energy
Though the details are still to be worked out, the project can be described in broad strokes.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees federal hydropower licensing, granted Kinetic a preliminary permit in 2021. In February 2025 FERC extended the permit, which allows for site investigations but no construction work, for another four years.
The company envisions two “off-channel” reservoirs that would not dam a flowing river. The lower reservoir will be near Beclabito. The upper, in the high reaches of the Carrizo Mountains. Both are on Navajo land, but on different sides of the Arizona-New Mexico border.
The powerhouse that holds the electricity-generating turbines will be located underground, some 3,300 feet below the upper reservoir. Some of the longest pumped storage tunnels in the country will be required to connect the reservoirs and the powerhouse.
Despite the geotechnical challenges, Conroy is particularly enthused by the site, which he said is the most optimal in Arizona and New Mexico – and possibly the entire country – to locate a pumped storage hydropower project.
The site stands out for four reasons, he said. It is near existing transmission corridors and grid connections due to the region’s legacy of enormous coal-fired power plants. And it will have a comparatively low capital cost for the energy it will produce.
The other two reasons relate to water. Because of the extreme height differential between the upper and lower reservoirs – almost three Empire State Buildings – less water will be required to produce a unit of energy than for reservoirs with a gentler gradient. And because the upper reservoir site is a deep canyon, surface area and thus evaporation will be minimized.
“Water is just top of mind here in the Southwest,” Conroy said. “And our project is as water-efficient as can be made.”
Water to fill the reservoirs would be drawn from the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado, via pipeline. The water would come from the Navajo Nation’s San Juan rights, which have been quantified but are not fully used.
How much water? In its FERC permit application, Kinetic estimated that the initial fill, which will take one and a half to two years, would require 38,300 acre-feet. To cover subsequent evaporation losses, the reservoirs would need to be topped up with 2,635 acre-feet per year. Those numbers will be refined in the feasibility studies.
“It’s what, about 1,300 acres of corn?” Taylor said, doing a rough mental calculation of the equivalent water consumption for the annual evaporation loss. “I think this is more valuable than 1,300 acres of corn.”
Saving for Tomorrow
So far the project has threaded the federal government’s fraught energy politics. The Trump administration is hostile to wind and solar, which in their eyes reek of liberal values. Two water-based technologies – hydropower and geothermal – have escaped condemnation and are listed in the administration’s energy dominance documents. The DOE grant that Carrizo secured is a holdover from the Biden administration’s infrastructure bill, which provided up to $10 million for feasibility studies for pumped storage projects that would store renewable energy generated on tribal lands.
Storage is the holy grail of renewable energy. Human civilization has advanced, from the dawn of agriculture to the artificial intelligence revolution today, by being able to carry a surplus from one season and one year to the next. So it is with wind and solar. To maximize their utility and counteract their intermittent nature, engineers have been searching for cost-effective ways to store energy when the sun shines and when the wind blows for the days when neither of those things happen.
“If you want to improve the resiliency of the system, you either build more firm capacity instead of more renewable, or you build longer storage,” said Fengyu Wang, a New Mexico State University assistant professor who is the principal investigator for the DOE grant.
Storage has taken many forms. Some are fantastic mechanical configurations – lifting heavy objects and dropping them, or forcing air into caverns and releasing it. Thermal options use molten salt to trap the sun’s heat. The most familiar are batteries, which leverage chemical energy. But the most common, at least in the U.S., is pumped storage hydropower.
The 43 pumped storage facilities in the U.S. represent the bulk of the country’s utility-scale energy storage. They accounted for 88 percent of the total in 2024, according to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That is changing quickly, however, as more battery storage comes online. The share for pumped storage was 96 percent in 2022.
Still, long-duration storage is where pumped storage shines. According to Oak Ridge, the median battery storage is two hours. For pumped storage, it is 12 hours. Longer duration provides more buffer, not only from day to day but also season to season.
In that regard, Carrizo would signify a huge leap. The only comparable pumped storage project under consideration in the U.S. is Cat Creek, in Idaho. Even though its duration is 121 hours, its generating capacity is less than half, at 720 megawatts.
Carrizo will have a different use case than other U.S. pumped storage projects, Conroy said. Many facilities have one customer and one generator. A nuclear plant, for instance, might be paired with a pumped storage system so that the nuclear plant can run continuously.
For Carrizo, there might be a consortium of utilities that have multiple generating sources feeding into this project and moving the water uphill. They would take delivery of that power across a large region with different climatic conditions and different needs for when and how they use the stored power. That means operating the facility will be more complicated than a traditional pumped storage project. One thing is certain, Conroy said: the Navajo will have an equity stake.
Tribal Outlook
Caution on the part of the Navajo would be understandable. The tribe’s lands have long been the center of energy developments with environmentally ruinous but economically helpful outcomes.
Uranium mining to fuel the Manhattan Project and then the nation’s reactors polluted rivers and groundwater, as did the coal mines that fed Four Corners Power Plant and the now-shuttered Navajo Generating Station and San Juan Generating Station. On the other hand, these developments provided employment and income. Navajo Mine, which supplies Four Corners Power Plant, accounts for about 35 percent of the Navajo Nation’s general fund.
Navajo and other tribal lands in the Four Corners region have been the target for a handful of pumped storage proposals in recent years. The Navajo Nation opposed three projects proposed for the Little Colorado River watershed, which were either withdrawn by the developer or denied a permit by FERC. Two other projects – Carrizo and Sweetwater, both using San Juan River water – are still in development. Sweetwater, a smaller project with eight hours duration, is being co-developed with the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe. A third project, Western Navajo Pumped Storage, which would be located near the former Navajo Generating Station, received a FERC preliminary permit in August.
Carrizo has not run into the same level of opposition as the other proposals. In part that is due to the proposed use of the San Juan River instead of groundwater, said Erika Pirotte, an assistant attorney general in the Navajo Nation’s water rights unit. Many Navajo communities rely on groundwater, and using it for pumped storage was viewed as unreasonable.
The lack of strong opposition is also because of Kinetic’s engagement with the Navajo Nation. The company has held meetings with the Beclabito, Red Valley, and Teec Nos Pos chapters, in addition to meetings with Navajo Nation agencies and Buu Nygren, the Navajo Nation president. Kinetic has a memorandum of understanding with Nygren, who also signed a letter of support for the project’s DOE grant application.
“We have the support of the council,” Conroy said. “We have a very high level of support from the president, and he is just extraordinarily interested in this project and seeing that it moves forward.”
From the Navajo perspective, what is interesting are the “ancillary benefits” that could come from the water supply pipeline, Pirotte said. Once the reservoirs are filled and the pipeline’s full capacity is not needed, the extra space could be repurposed for tribal water supply uses.
“That’s why the feasibility studies are really important for the Nation, because they help us understand to what extent Navajo Nation resources would be used for the project,” Pirotte said.
None of this is immediately around the corner, Conroy cautions. The DOE grant extends for more than two years. The FERC permitting process could be another two to four years. With Congress and the Trump administration talking about faster permitting and better coordination, that timeline is a best guess.
And then there is the question of tribal authority in the permitting process, not just for the Carrizo project but for other such developments. Will FERC abide by its 2024 stance that preliminary permits for hydropower projects on tribal lands require tribal consent? The Trump administration would like to see that policy scrapped. If FERC approves a project must a tribe assent to all the associated infrastructure? Will the Navajo be allowed to conduct reviews and issue permits?
And then there is construction, the biggest component. That will take four to six years, Conroy said.
Even on an ambitious timeline, Carrizo is not operating until the mid-2030s.
“I’m 77,” Taylor said. “I probably won’t see it.”
This story was produced by Circle of Blue, in partnership with The Water Desk at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Center for Environmental Journalism.
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
Workers raise dam 109 feet in 2025. Next year’s goal: Reaching the top.
The Denver Water team working on Gross Dam in Boulder County is celebrating a successful year after the dam raise is 95% complete.
“In 2025, we raised the height of the dam by 109 feet above the original structure,” said Jeff Martin, Denver Water’s program manager for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project. “We have 22 feet left to go to reach the new height and we’re on track to reach that in 2026.”
The dam-raising aspect of the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project wrapped up for the season on Nov. 14, due to the drop in temperatures. The project is designed to nearly triple the water storage capacity of Gross Reservoir.
In 2025, workers raised the height of Gross Dam by 109 feet. The final 22 feet will be completed in 2026 to reach the dam’s new height of 471 feet. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“We have to stop placing roller-compacted concrete when the temperatures drop below freezing,” said Casey Dick, deputy program manager for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project.
“To prepare for winter, we put blankets on top of the new concrete to keep it from getting too cold. That’s because if the concrete freezes while it is still curing, it can lead to a weakened final product.”
Work associated with the dam raise will resume in spring 2026, when the weather warms up enough to complete the final 22 feet.
Protective “blankets” were placed on top of the dam to insulate the new concrete, so it does not fully cure over the cold, winter months. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Once that work is complete, the dam will be 471 feet tall, which is 131 feet higher than the original. The completed dam also will be longer across its crest, or top. The original crest was 1,050 feet long; the higher dam will have a crest that stretches 2,040 feet from one side of the canyon to the other.
This year marked the second year of dam raising construction work at Gross.
As of December 2025, workers had placed more than 730,000 cubic yards of concrete. To put that in perspective, Empower Stadium at Mile High, where the Denver Broncos play their home football games, required just 29,000 cubic yards of concrete to build, about 4% of the concrete placed so far on Gross Dam.
Protective “blankets” were placed on top of the dam to insulate the new concrete, so it does not fully cure over the cold, winter months. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Roller-compacted concrete is a special mix of concrete that allows crews to place it on the dam and then spread it out. The concrete is firm enough to be able to drive machinery on top of it. The process is a fast and efficient method of raising the dam. During the construction work, crews raised the height of the dam by about 1 foot per day.
Construction crews use GPS technology and survey equipment to keep track of how high they’ve raised the dam.
“The way we keep track of the elevation gain is that the bulldozers are equipped with GPS-grade control technology, which ensures that each layer of concrete is spread to the correct thickness,” Dick said.
“Once the concrete is rolled and vibrated into place, each layer ends up being 1 foot thick. It’s then checked by surveyors with their equipment to verify the exact elevation.”
The bulldozers are equipped with GPS-grade control technology to monitor the height of the concrete as it is spread across the top of the dam and keep track of the elevation. Photo credit: Denver Water.
Work won’t completely stop over the winter.
Mechanical and pipe work will be done inside the dam, and crews will build a stilling basin at the base of the dam. The basin’s function is to slow the speed of water coming down the dam’s spillway and safely redirect the water into South Boulder Creek.
Work on the stilling basin at the base of the dam will continue over the winter. The stilling basin is designed to slow the flow of water coming down the spillway and channel it into the creek. Photo credit: Denver Water.
“This season was a huge success, and our team met a ton of challenges in raising Gross Dam,” Martin said. “We had legal challenges and adverse weather challenges. We also had wildfire safety operation challenges that shut down our power supply up here. Despite all those setbacks, the dedicated team of 500 men and women rose to the challenge. I’d just like to thank everybody who committed themselves to this project and helped us make 2025 a success.”
Jeff Martin, Denver Water’s program manager for the Gross Reservoir Expansion Project, stands at the south side of the dam. Once completed, the dam will reach up to white line on the rock wall. Photo credit: Denver Water.
About 60% of Iowa’s power comes from wind. Farmers can earn extra cash by leasing small sections of farms for power production. Bill Clark/Getty Images
Drive through the plains of Iowa or Kansas and you’ll see more than rows of corn, wheat and soybeans. You’ll also see towering wind turbines spinning above fields and solar panels shining in the sun on barns and machine sheds.
For many farmers, these are lifelines. Renewable energy provides steady income and affordable power, helping farms stay viable when crop prices fall or drought strikes.
Wind energy is a significant economic driver in rural America. In Iowa, for example, over 60% of the state’s electricity came from wind energy in 2024, and the state is a hub for wind turbine manufacturing and maintenance jobs.
For landowners, wind turbines often mean stable lease payments. Those historically were around US$3,000 to $5,000 per turbine per year, with some modern agreements $5,000 to $10,000 annually, secured through 20- to 30-year contracts.
Nationwide, wind and solar projects contribute about $3.5 billion annually in combined lease payments and state and local taxes, more than a third of it going directly to rural landowners.
States throughout the Great Plains and Midwest, from Texas to Montana to Ohio, have the strongest onshore winds and onshore wind power potential. These are also in the heart of U.S. farm country. The map shows wind speeds at 100 meters (nearly 330 feet), about the height of a typical land-based wind turbine. NREL
These figures are backed by long-term contracts and multibillion‑dollar annual contributions, reinforcing the economic value that turbines bring to rural landowners and communities.
Wind farms also contribute to local tax revenues that help fund rural schools, roads and emergency services. In counties across Texas, wind energy has become one of the most significant contributors to local property tax bases, stabilizing community budgets and helping pay for public services as agricultural commodity revenues fluctuate.
In Oldham County in northwest Texas, for example, clean energy projects provided 22% of total county revenues in 2021. In several other rural counties, wind farms rank among the top 10 property taxpayers, contributing between 38% and 69% of tax revenue.
The construction and operation of these projects also bring local jobs in trucking, concrete work and electrical services, boosting small-town businesses.
A wind turbine technician stands on the nacelle, which houses the gear box and generator of a wind turbine, on the campus of Mesalands Community College in Tucumcari, N.M., in 2024. Colleges in other states, including Texas, also developed training programs for technicians in recent years as jobs in the industry boomed. Andrew Marszal/AFP via Getty Images
The U.S. wind industry supports over 300,000 U.S. jobs across construction, manufacturing, operations and other roles connected to the industry, according to the American Clean Power Association.
Solar energy is also boosting farm finances. Farmers use rooftop panels on barns and ground-mounted systems to power irrigation pumps, grain dryers and cold storage facilities, cutting their power costs.
Some farmers have adopted agrivoltaics – dual-use systems that grow crops beneath solar panels. The panels provide shade, helping conserve water, while creating a second income path. These projects often cultivate pollinator-friendly plants, vegetables such as lettuce and spinach, or even grasses for grazing sheep, making the land productive for both food and energy.
Federal grants and tax credits that were significantly expanded under the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped make the upfront costs of solar installations affordable.
However, the federal spending bill signed by President Donald Trump on July 4, 2025, rolled back many clean energy incentives. It phases down tax credits for distributed solar projects, particularly those under 1 megawatt, which include many farm‑scale installations, and sunsets them entirely by 2028. It also eliminates bonus credits that previously supported rural and low‑income areas.
Without these credits, the upfront cost of solar power could be out of reach for some farmers, leaving them paying higher energy costs. At a 2024 conference organized by the Institute of Sustainability, Energy and Environment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where I work as a research economist, farmers emphasized the importance of tax credits and other economic incentives to offset the upfront cost of solar power systems.
What’s being lost
The cuts to federal incentives include terminating the Production Tax Credit for new projects placed in service after Dec. 31, 2027, unless construction begins by July 4, 2026, and is completed within a tight time frame. The tax credit pays eligible wind and solar facilities approximately 2.75 cents per kilowatt-hour over 10 years, effectively lowering the cost of renewable energy generation. Ending that tax credit will likely increase the cost of production, potentially leading to higher electricity prices for consumers and fewer new projects coming online.
The changes also accelerate the phase‑out of wind power tax credits. Projects must now begin construction by July 4, 2026, or be in service before the end of 2027 to qualify for any credit.
Meanwhile, the Investment Tax Credit, which covers 30% of installed cost for solar and other renewables, faces similar limits: Projects must begin by July 4, 2026, and be completed by the end of 2027 to claim the credits. The bill also cuts bonuses for domestic components and installations in rural or low‑income locations. These adjustments could slow new renewable energy development, particularly smaller projects that directly benefit rural communities.
While many existing clean energy agreements will remain in place for now, the rollback of federal incentives threatens future projects and could limit new income streams. It also affects manufacturing and jobs in those industries, which some rural communities rely on.
Renewable energy also powers rural economies
Renewable energy benefits entire communities, not just individual farmers.
Wind and solar projects contribute millions of dollars in tax revenue. For example, in Howard County, Iowa, wind turbines generated $2.7 million in property tax revenue in 2024, accounting for 14.5% of the county’s total budget and helping fund rural schools, public safety and road improvements.
In some rural counties, clean energy is the largest new source of economic activity, helping stabilize local economies otherwise reliant on agriculture’s unpredictable income streams. These projects also support rural manufacturing – such as Iowa turbine blade factories like TPI Composites, which just reopened its plant in Newton, and Siemens Gamesa in Fort Madison, which supply blades for GE and Siemens turbines. The tax benefits in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act helped boost those industries – and the jobs and local tax revenue they bring in.
As rural America faces economic uncertainty and climate pressures, I believe homegrown renewable energy offers a practical path forward. Wind and solar aren’t just fueling the grid; they’re helping keep farms and rural towns alive.
The Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference met in Las Vegas [December 16-18, 2025]. Each year, over a thousand government officials, members of the press, municipal water district leaders, water engineers, ranchers, and tribal members meet to discuss the management of the mighty Colorado River. Hanging over the three-day conference was a stalemate between the upper and lower basin states over how to manage the Colorado River after current operational guidelines expire at the end of 2026.
Throughout the conference, the states’ inability to reach a consensus deal produced ripple effects. The stalemate held back progress on both near term shortage concerns (experts predict that Lake Powell will be only 28% full at the end of the ’25-’26 water year) and long-range planning, such as the development of the next “Minute” agreement between the United States and Mexico.
The closing act of CRWUA 2025 was an orderly (and familiar) report from each of the basin states’ principal negotiators that their state is stretched thin but remains committed to finding a consensus agreement. This final session had no discussion or Q&A. The basin states now have until February 14th to provide the Bureau of Reclamation with their consensus deal, which would presumably be added to an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) draft that is expected to be released in early January. With time running short, many worry that public participation in the EIS process – vital to informed decision-making – will be greatly reduced.
Still, as Rhett Larson of Arizona State University said on the first day of the conference, “Desert rivers bring people together.” Tribal governments continue to innovate in the areas of conservation and storage, even in spite of ongoing challenges to meaningful access of federally reserved tribal water rights. For instance, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, or CRIT, shared news of a Resolution and Water Code recently passed by their Tribal Council which work together to recognize the Colorado River’s personhood under Tribal law. This provides CRIT with a holistic framework for on-reservation use and requires the consideration of the living nature of the Colorado River in off-reservation water leasing decisions. John Bezdek, who represented CRIT at the conference, put it this way: “If laws are an expression of values, then this tribal council is expressing to the world the importance of protecting and preserving the lifeblood of the Colorado River.” Among others, Celene Hawkins of The Nature Conservancy and Kate Ryan of the Colorado Water Trust also shared about the unique, and often unlikely, partnerships formed to protect stream flows and the riparian environment across the Colorado River basin.
Notwithstanding the basin states’ current deadlock, one theme rang true at CRWUA 2025: Despite the dire hydrologic and administrative realities facing decision-makers today, the Colorado River continues to bring unlikely parties together.
Left to right: Becky Mitchell, Tom Buschatzke, Brandon Gebhart, John Entsminger, Keith Burron, Gene Shawcroft, JB Hamby, Estevan López. Photo credit: Yes To Tap via X (Twitter)
The single most important gathering of Colorado River Basin officials came and went — with no significant announcements regarding the often frustrating yet crucial seven-state negotiations for how to divvy up the river over the next 20 years…Here are three takeaways as the states wrestle with basinwide overuse of water, declining river flows due to a warming world and how to meet the federal government’s Valentine’s Day deadline for a consensus-based deal.
States far from deal — with less than 60 days left
Unlike last year’s conference, the seven states agreed to sit on a panel that was added to the agenda for the last day. The ballroom was still packed for the early morning session. That’s because the stakes are high for states to meet Burgum’s Feb. 14 deadline for a seven-state agreement. Should they not deliver one, Burgum could intervene and states are likely to sue. The Lower Basin states have agreed to shoulder the brunt of a massive deficit the system faces that totals 1.5 million acre-feet, or almost 489 billion gallons. However, the Upper Basin states of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico and Wyoming say they don’t have more water to give should cuts in their jurisdictions become necessary. Conflicts exist with state laws, too…
Temporary deal could be on the table to avoid courtroom
Nevada’s governor-appointed negotiator, John Entsminger, spoke last on the panel and called out the other six states for failing to cede any ground on further conservation in their remarks. Without some compromise from each state on these long-standing arguments, the negotiations are “going nowhere,” he said. While the states have been expected up until this point to deliver a 20-year deal, Entsminger suggested on the panel that a temporary, five-year deal could be on the table to comply with the Feb. 14 deadline.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Poor outlook sending shockwaves throughout basin
The underlying issues of the Colorado River are making this moment much more precarious. Several experts presented a dismal picture for the system at large. Carly Jerla, senior water resource program manager at the Bureau of Reclamation, said the agency’s most recent projections place flows into Lake Powell anywhere between 44 percent to 73 percent of average this upcoming year. And since 2006, that replenishment of the reservoir has declined about 15 percent because of poor snow years, evaporative losses and more…
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Jack Schmidt, who leads the Center for Colorado River Studies at Utah State University, has published several papers this year alongside a group of experts throughout the basin. By his estimation, should snowpack in the Rocky Mountains fail to impress again this winter, water managers may be blowing through a crucial buffer that ensures water can be released from Lake Powell into Lake Mead — and that hydropower generation can continue.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
A new report from Colorado Law’s Colorado River Research Group warns the Colorado River Basin is “out of time,” describing conditions so severe they threaten the region’s water supply, economy and governance. Called “Colorado River Insights 2025: Dancing with Deadpool,” the report details a dire assessment of the basin’s worsening crisis and offers options for reform. According to the report, reservoirs that once stored four years of river flows are now more than two-thirds empty. The authors note a single dry year or two could push Lake Powell and Lake Mead below critical thresholds, jeopardizing hydropower, water deliveries, and even physical conveyance downstream. The report concludes that current operating rules through 2026 are unlikely to prevent this scenario.
“This report underscores that the basin is out of time, the crisis is no longer theoretical,” said Douglas Kenney, director of the Western Water Policy Program of the Getches-Wilkinson Center at the University of Colorado Law School and chair of the Colorado River Research Group.
“Post-2026 negotiations must produce durable, equitable, climate-realistic solutions — and they must do so urgently. The message is stark: the Colorado River system is now dancing with Deadpool.”
Among the key challenges:
Severe shortage risk: The authors warn that if the next two winters are dry, combined usable storage in Powell and Mead could fall below 4 million acre-feet — far short of what’s needed for water supply and compact obligations.
Climate-driven decline: Rising temperatures, shrinking snowpack efficiency and ocean-atmosphere interactions are reducing runoff and precipitation.
Safety nets collapsing: Groundwater reserves are rapidly depleting, while federal capacity — funding, staffing and science programs — are eroding. Interstate cooperation is fraying, and litigation may be on the table.
Authors stress that many challenges are self-inflicted and, in their view, solvable with technical, legal and financial tools already available.
Colorado River Basin Plumbing. Credit: Lester Doré/Mary Moran via Dustin Mulvaney and Twitter
The year is ending with the Colorado River at a critical juncture.
Figure 4. Graph showing active storage in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and in Powell+Mead between January 1, 2023, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
The big reservoirs Mead and Powell remain perilously low and the seven states that share the basin have been unable to agree on cuts that would reduce their reliance on the shrinking river.
Reservoir operating rules expire at the end of 2026. If no agreement is reached the federal government could step in, or the states could take their chances in court. It’s a risky move that no one in principle seems to want. Yet brinkmanship and entrenched positions have stymied compromise.
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
The basin’s Indian tribes, which collectively have rights to more than a quarter of its recent average annual flow, are adamant that their interests – and more broadly, the river itself – be protected. “Any progress made in the negotiations to date is merely rationing a reduced supply, not actively managing and augmenting it as a shared resource with strategies and tools that can benefit the entire basin,” the leaders of the Gila River Indian Community wrote on November 12.
At Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada, “the National Park Service’s focus remains on sustaining boating access and visitor services across the park, including operations at Hemenway Harbor, Callville Bay Marina, Echo Bay, Temple Bar Marina, and South Cove to the extent feasible,” the National Parks Traveler was told.
“As part of that effort, construction began at Hemenway Harbor last summer to extend the launch ramp and help maintain access as conditions change. Lake levels are closely monitored, and NPS operations continue to be adjusted as needed to support safe recreation while protecting park resources,” the Park Service said.
Two years ago Lake Mead officials adopted a plan to “maintain recreational motorboat access in the event water declines to 950 feet.” As of Tuesday, the elevation was 1061.76 feet, according to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation. At Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, which straddles the Utah-Arizona border, the Park Service has spent more than $100 million in recent years to extend boat ramps and relocate a takeout for river runners coming down the Colorado River through Canyonlands National Park.
Colorado River negotiators are seen, from left to right: Becky Mitchell (Colorado), Tom Buschatzke (Arizona), Brandon Gebhart (Wyoming), and John Entsminger (Nevada). (Photo by Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
Western states that rely on the Colorado River have less than two months to agree on how to manage the troubled river – and pressure is mounting as the federal government pushes for a compromise and a troubling forecast for the river’s two biggest reservoirs looms.
Top water officials for the seven Colorado River Basin states — Arizona, California, Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming — gathered for the three-day Colorado River Water Users Association conference at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas last week.
Colorado River states have until Feb. 14 to reach a new water sharing agreement before current operating rules expire at the end of 2026 —or the federal government will step in with their own plan.
Despite the fast-approaching deadline, states reiterated many of the same issues they did during previous years at the conference, namely, which water users will need to sacrifice more water to keep the Colorado River stable as overallocation, climate change, and rising demand sucks the river dry.
Nevada’s chief river negotiator and general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority John Entsminger offered a succinct but sharp assessment of the negotiations during a panel discussion Thursday.
“If you distill down what my six partners just said, I believe there’s three common things: Here’s all the great things my state has done. Here’s how hard/impossible it is to do any more. And here are all the reasons why other people should have to do more,” Entsminger said.
“As long as we keep polishing those arguments and repeating them to each other, we are going nowhere,” he continued.
The seven states that share the river’s flows have been deadlocked for nearly two years over how to govern the waterway through the coming decades — even as water levels at Lake Mead and Lake Powell are forecasted to reach record lows after two straight years of disappointing snowpack across the West.
The Colorado River’s headwaters saw a weak snowpack last winter, contributing to one of the worst spring runoff seasons on record. Water flow into the river this year was only 56% of average, leading to significant reductions in Lake Powell, according to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Reclamation.
Federal officials also released a troubling forecast of expected flows for the river in 2026, which were significantly lower than previous predictions. Projections from the Bureau of Reclamation found the Colorado River’s inflow next year would likely be 27% lower than normal, with worst-case scenarios predicting even lower flows.
Without a strong winter snow season, it’s possible Lake Powell’s levels could drop low enough to cease hydropower production by next October — a scenario that would also limit the department’s ability to send water downstream to Arizona, California and Nevada.
The federal government has refrained from imposing its own plan for the river, preferring the seven basin states reach consensus themselves. But the Interior Department has ramped up pressure on states to reach a deal.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s Acting Commissioner Scott Cameron said he and other federal officials have intensified efforts to bring states to a consensus, flying out West every other week since early April to meet with the seven states’ river negotiators.
“The expiration of the current agreements is not a distant horizon. It’s less than a year away. The time to act is now,” said Cameron.
Within the next few weeks, the Bureau of Reclamation will release a range of proposals to replace the river’s current operating rules, but said they would not identify which set of operating guidelines the federal government would prefer
During the conference, negotiators for the seven states repeated that they are still committed to finding a consensus despite missing previous deadlines. California’s biggest water districts said they were willing to “set aside many of their legal positions” in order to reach a seven-state agreement.
However, a long-term multidecade strategy for managing low river flows is likely out of reach.
“I went into this process…advocating strenuously for a 20- to 30-year deal,” said Entsminger. “I no longer believe that’s possible with the time we have left and with the hydrology that we’re facing.”
Entsminger said the “best possible outcome at this juncture” is a short-term five-year deal that sets new rules around water releases and storage at Lakes Powell and Mead.
During a panel of state negotiators, states highlighted water conservation efforts they have undertaken to reduce water use and protect the river, but all explained why their state can’t take on more cuts.
Figure 4. Graph showing active storage in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and in Powell+Mead between January 1, 2023, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
“Our savings accounts are totally depleted,” said Utah’s’s river negotiator, Gene Shawcroft. “Reserviours were full when we started this process. They’re empty now.”
One of the biggest disagreements between the Upper and Lower Basin states is over which faction should have to cut back on their water use during dry years.
The Lower Basin – Nevada, Arizona, and California – have agreed to take the first 1.5 million acre-feet in water cuts needed to address deficits and evaporation that are reducing flows in the river, but say any additional cuts during dry years must be shared with upstream states. Under the current agreement, Lower Basin states must take mandetory cuts when water levels in Lakes Powell and Mead are low.
The Upper Basin, which is not subject to mandatory cuts under the current guidelines, say they already use much less water than downstream states and should not face additional cuts during shortages.
Any more cuts to water users in downstream states during dry years will be politically perilous, explained Arizona’s top negotiator, Tom Buschatzke. Arizona requires the state legislature to approve any changes to Colorado River management rules impacting the state.
Buschatzke called for the Upper Basin – Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, and Utah – to split any additional water cuts with the Lower Basin states 50-50.
“We need conservation in the Upper Basin that is verifiable and mandatory,” Buschatzke said, during the panel.
“I have to go to my legislature and get that approval,” he continued. “And I will say right now, I do not think there is anything on the table from the Upper Basin that would compel me to do that today.”
New Mexico’s river negotiator, Estevan López, responded, “I think we’ve been pretty clear. We are unwilling to require additional mandatory reductions on our water users.”
This story was originally produced by Nevada Current, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Stateline, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Click the link to read the report from “Dancing with Dead Poll” on the Getches-Wilkinson website (Jack Schmidt1, Anne Castle2, John Fleck3, Eric Kuhn4, Kathryn Sorensen5, Katherine Tara6) Here’s Chapter 1:
In Brief
The rains of mid-October caused significant flooding in the San Juan River basin and increased reservoir storage throughout that basin and in Lake Powell.7 However, basinwide reservoir storage remains low, and the October rainfall offerings were insufficient to alleviate the peril of declining overall water supply.
While the attention of the Basin’s water management community remains focused on the thus far unsuccessful effort to forge a seven-state agreement on future long-term operating rules, the Basin continues to face the risk of short-term crisis. If winter 2025-2026 is relatively dry and inflow to Lake Powell and other Upper Basin reservoirs is similar to that of 2024-2025, low reservoir levels in summer 2026 will challenge water supply management, hydropower production, and environmental river management. Under such a scenario, it is likely that less than 4 million acre feet in Lake Powell and Lake Mead would be realistically available for use during the nine months between late summer 2026 and the onset of snowmelt runoff in 2027. If winter 2026-2027 is also dry, water supply would be further constrained. The present reservoir operating rules that remain in place through 2026 are insufficient to avert this potential water supply crisis. Action to further reduce consumptive water use across the basin is needed now.
How did we get here?
The Basin’s reservoirs were nearly full in late summer 1999,8 acting as a buffer against dry years and serving their fundamental purpose. At that time, the 46 Colorado River Basin reservoirs tracked by the Bureau of Reclamation in its Hydro database held 59.5 million acre feet (maf) in active storage,9 more than four times the Basin’s average consumptive uses and losses in the 1990s (Fig. 1).10 Beginning in 2000, five years of below average runoff11 resulted in a 46% reduction in storage in the Basin’s reservoirs.12 During that time, the reduction in storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead accounted for 90% of the Basin’s total loss in storage, because most of the Basin’s water was stored in those two reservoirs.
Figure 1. Graph showing active storage in Colorado River basin reservoirs between January 1, 2021, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
During the next fourteen and a half years, the amount of storage in the Basin’s reservoirs changed little, despite four years of large runoff (2005, 2011, 2017, and 2019). The increase in storage during the few wet years was nearly completely consumed during the more frequent dry years, and active storage in Powell and Mead was only 5% greater in late July 2019 than it had been at the beginning of 2005.13 When dry years of low runoff returned between 2020 and 2022,14 the Basin’s water users had little of the buffer that they had at the beginning of the 21st century. Combined active storage of Powell and Mead was halved again between mid-July 2019 and mid-March 2023,15 reducing the combined contents of these two reservoirs to only 27% of what it had been in late summer 1999.16 If next winter’s runoff is as low as it was in 2025 17 and consumptive use is not significantly reduced, Powell and Mead will drop below the previous unprecedented low stand of mid-March 2023.
How much of active storage is realistically available?
One of the challenges of the current water supply crisis is uncertainty over how much water is actually available in the reservoirs for use. Although Reclamation regularly reports the amount of water in active storage, our analysis identifies realistically accessible storage as the more appropriate metric of the amount of water that is available for use without challenging the integrity of the dam structures, efficient production of hydroelectricity, or implementation of environmental river management protocols, especially in Grand Canyon.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Reservoir water that can be physically released from a dam is termed active storage. In virtually all reservoirs, there is a small amount of water below the elevation of the lowest outlets–the infamously named dead pool. Active storage is everything above dead pool–water that can be physically released through the reservoir’s lowest outlets.
We know, however, that not all the water above dead pool is readily usable. Engineering assessments have indicated that infrastructure constraints at Hoover and Glen Canyon Dams require that higher reservoir elevations be maintained, thereby constraining utilization of the lowest part of the active storage. We defined realistically accessible storage as the volume of water whose release does not impact previously identified engineering or hydropower-production constraints.
At Glen Canyon Dam, for example, the lowest release tubes, called the “river outlets,” are at elevation 3370 ft. Reservoir water below that elevation cannot be released and constitutes the dead pool. Above the river outlets, at elevation 3490 ft, are the intakes for the power generating turbines, known as the penstocks. The penstocks are the conduits that withdraw water from the reservoir into the powerplant to generate electricity, and thereafter discharge the water to the Colorado River downstream from the dam. When the reservoir falls below the elevation of the penstocks, the river outlets are the only means of discharging water through the dam (Fig. 2). The river outlets are not routinely used to release water; virtually all normal releases go through the penstocks.
Experience has shown that the river outlets were not designed for continuous release at the discharge rates required to meet downstream obligations. If the river outlets were to be used continuously, there is significant concern that structural damage to those outlets could occur.18
Accordingly, Reclamation has determined that it will take steps to avoid Lake Powell elevation declining below 3500 ft, considered a safe elevation for continuous withdrawal of water through the penstocks without risk of harm caused by cavitation to the turbines that produce electricity.19 Similarly at Lake Mead, Reclamation has indicated its intent to protect the reservoir from going below elevation 1000 ft.20
Figure 2. Diagram showing schematic of Glen Canyon Dam elevations at which Lake Powell’s waters can be released downstream, and the volumes of water defined by these elevations. Active storage between 3370 and 3500 ft is not realistically accessible for continuous downstream release without risk to engineering infrastructure at the dam and powerplant. Hydroelectricity cannot be produced below 3490 ft, and 3500 ft has been established as a minimum safe level for intake through the penstocks.
The total volume of active storage in Lake Powell above dead pool but below elevation 3500 ft is 4.2 maf. Release of this stored water is constrained, because it cannot be safely withdrawn through the penstocks, and continuous use of the river outlets is considered unwise. At Hoover Dam, there is 4.5 maf of active storage below elevation 1000 ft, also not realistically accessible. In these two largest reservoirs of the Colorado River Basin, there is a total of 8.7 maf of active storage below the elevations required for safe and efficient operation of the infrastructure (Fig. 3). Thus, of the 14.9 maf of active storage at Lake Powell and Lake Mead on November 15, 2025, only 42% of that active storage, 6.2 maf, was realistically accessible.
Figure 4. Graph showing active storage in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and in Powell+Mead between January 1, 2023, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Implementation of environmental river management protocols at Glen Canyon Dam are constrained when the elevation of Lake Powell is low. Since 1996, controlled floods, administratively termed High Flow Experiments (HFEs), have been conducted at Glen Canyon Dam to rebuild eddy sandbars along the river’s margin and conserve sediment. HFEs are now an essential component of the Long Term Experimental and Management Plan for Glen Canyon Dam.21 Reclamation did not, however, release an HFE in 2021 or 2022 when sediment conditions were sufficient to trigger implementation of the HFE Protocol because Lake Powell was low. In early October of those years, when decisions about implementing HFEs were made, active storage in Lake Powell was 7.3 maf (elevation 3545.3 ft) and 5.8 maf (elevation 3529.4) in 2021 and 2022, respectively. Reclamation cited low storage as the reason not to release those controlled floods.22 Although administrative decisions change with time, it is doubtful that any HFEs would be released if Lake Powell fell below elevation 3500 ft.
Low reservoir levels also impact Reclamation’s ability to control the invasion into Grand Canyon of smallmouth bass, and other warm water reservoir fish species, that dominate the recreational fish community of Lake Powell. These nonnatives are significant predators and competitors of endangered or threatened native fish species and live near the surface of Lake Powell. At moderate and low reservoir elevations, water withdrawn through the penstocks (termed fish entrainment) includes some fish that survive passage through the powerplant turbines and are delivered into the Colorado River downstream from the dam. These fish have the potential to successfully spawn downstream from the dam if river temperatures are relatively warm, such as occurs when Lake Powell is low and water is only released through the penstocks.
This infographic shows how as Lake Powell water levels decline, warm water containing smallmouth bass gets closer to intakes delivering water through the Glen Canyon Dam to the Grand Canyon downstream. Credit: U.S. Geological Survey
Reclamation has implemented a protocol to eliminate the potential of smallmouth bass population establishment in Grand Canyon by releasing some cooler water through the river outlets when the water released through the penstocks is warm. The objective of these Cool Mix releases is to disrupt smallmouth bass spawning downstream from the dam. Water released through the river outlets bypasses the powerplant and does not produce electricity, and Western Area Power Administration (WAPA) must purchase electricity on the open market to replace electricity that the agency contractually committed to provide. WAPA estimated that the cost of replacing contracted electricity was $18.9 million23 and $6.5 million24 during the Cool Mix releases of 2024 and 2025, respectively. The risk of fish entrainment from Lake Powell increases significantly as Lake Powell’s elevation drops, and the need to implement the Cool Mix protocol therefore increases. The risk is minimized if Lake Powell is higher than 3590 ft (10.8 maf active storage) and significantly increases when Lake
Powell is below 3530 ft (5.8 maf active storage).25 When water is no longer withdrawn through the penstocks, the risk of entrainment decreases, because all water passes through the lower elevation river outlets.
What would happen if the coming winter and spring snowmelt is similar to 2024-2025?
In an analysis released in September 2025, we reviewed what might happen in the coming year if runoff is the same as it was last year and Basin consumptive uses and losses are the average of the past four years. We used a simple mass balance approach and estimated the available water supply and consumptive uses and losses, and calculated the difference between the two. The available water supply is the sum of the natural flow of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry plus inflows that occur in the Lower Basin, primarily in Grand Canyon. Consumptive uses and losses are those associated with diversions that support irrigated agriculture, municipal and industrial use, water exported from the Basin by trans-basin diversions, and reservoir evaporation. The difference between supply and use is the net effect on reservoir storage. We then estimated the effect of the Basinwide imbalance between supply and use on the combined realistically accessible storage in Powell and Mead, i.e., above elevations 3500 and 1000 ft in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, respectively.
In the scenario that we considered, we assumed that natural flow at Lees Ferry in the coming year will be 8.5 maf, the same as in Water Year 2025,26 and inflow in the Grand Canyon is 0.8 maf. Thus, we assumed a total supply in the coming water year of 9.3 maf. We analyzed a scenario wherein consumptive uses and losses in the United States portion of the Colorado River would be the average of the most recent four years (2021-2024), namely 11.5 maf,27 and we assumed that 1.4 maf would be delivered to Mexico.
The gap between supply and use under this scenario is 3.6 maf, which would have to be met by additional withdrawals from reservoir storage. Assuming that 75% of this deficit would be withdrawn from Lake Powell and Lake Mead (2.7 maf), then the realistically accessible storage in these two reservoirs would be reduced to 3.5 maf, slightly less than the 21st century low that occurred in mid-March 2023 (Fig. 3). Our analysis of this one realistically low inflow scenario–the coming year’s supply is just like last year’s and consumptive uses and losses are the average of the past four years–is consistent with, but less dire than, Reclamation’s most recent 24-Month Study minimum probable forecast28 for the coming year. That study projects that total storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead will be drawn down by 3.8 maf during the next year, 2.9 maf from Lake Powell alone. Under Reclamation’s minimum probable projection, the elevation of Lake Powell would drop below 3500 ft in August 2026. All of the remaining realistically accessible storage, 2.5 maf in the scenario modeled by Reclamation, would be in Lake Mead. Under the assumption that the current operating rules remain in effect in 2027, Reclamation’s projection is that the elevation of Lake Powell would stay below elevation 3500 ft through at least July 2027.
Further complicating the situation is that the status and ownership of water in Lake Mead at very low storage levels is unclear. Lake Mead holds (a) water available for allocation in the Lower Division under the prior appropriation system, (b) at least some amount of the water due to Mexico under treaty obligations, and (c) assigned water. Assigned water, commonly known as Intentionally Created Surplus or ICS, is water that can be delivered independent of the Lower Basin’s prior appropriation water allocation system and that is held in Lake Mead by the Secretary of the Interior for the benefit of a specific entity. Assigned water also includes delayed water deliveries held for the benefit of the Republic of Mexico that can be delivered subsequently in amounts in excess of the U.S. treaty obligation to Mexico of 1.5 maf/year. Owners of assigned water have the right to withdraw that water when Lake Mead water levels are above 1025 ft, but entitlement holders in the priority system also have a right to water deliveries, as does Mexico via treaty.
Sketches by Floyd Dominy show the way he’d end the Glen Canyon Dam. From the article “Floyd Dominy built the Glen Canyon Dam, then he sketched its end on a napkin” on the Salt Lake Tribune website.
So long as there is water in Lake Mead adequate to fulfill all required and requested deliveries, no conflict arises. However, as the amount of water in Lake Mead decreases, the potential for a clash increases. International treaty obligations take precedence over deliveries pursuant to the priority system within the U.S., but it is unclear how competing priorities and entitlements will be resolved within the U.S. Holders of higher-priority entitlements would likely contest the Secretary’s authority to reduce their deliveries while withholding assigned water from the priority system. As of the end of 2024, there was approximately 3.5 maf of assigned water in Lake Mead, almost the same as the amount of realistically accessible water in storage above elevation 1000 ft. If Lake Powell ever became a “run of the river” facility, the potential for conflict over access to water in Lake Mead would also increase.
Implications
We are not weather forecasters and have no crystal ball that reveals the coming winter snowpack. We are not predicting that our assumptions about the gap between supply and use/losses and the resulting drawdown of Lake Powell and Lake Mead will inevitably occur. Our scenario is merely one of many possibilities, but our assumptions are sufficiently realistic to serve as a warning of how close the Basin is to a true water crisis. Our results should serve as a call to action. We need to adopt additional and immediate measures across the Basin to reduce water consumption even further during the next year, well before any new guidelines are in place.
Taking steps now to decrease consumptive uses across the Basin will reduce the need to implement draconian measures next summer or in the following years. Every acre foot saved now is an acre foot available for our future selves, slowing the rate of reservoir decline and creating more room for creative Colorado River management solutions. If, on the other hand, we delay reducing water usage and addressing reservoir drawdown, we may find ourselves in more significant distress at the beginning of the Post-2026 guidelines. As we wrote in October, continued reduction in Lake Powell releases also brings the Basin perilously close to the Colorado River Compact “tripwire,” the point at which the ten-year rolling total of water delivered from the Upper Basin to the Lower Basin might trigger litigation asking the U.S. Supreme Court to interpret long avoided ambiguities in rules written a century ago by the drafters of the Colorado River Compact.
We do not presume to make specific recommendations about the steps that should be taken immediately to reduce consumptive use in the Basin. There are many smart and experienced individuals in the Colorado River community whose sole focus is on the mechanics of operating the Colorado River water system and the impacts of operations on their particular constituencies.
We can, however, highlight the available mechanisms for reduction of consumptive use that should be explored for their immediate utility in diminishing the looming jeopardy to the overall system. Such mechanisms include:
Releases from federal reservoirs upstream of Lake Powell to stabilize storage in Lake Powell.
Such releases would be made pursuant to the Drought Response Operations Agreement or similar successor agreement or pursuant to the Secretary of the Interior’s inherent authority to operate federal water projects. Obviously, such releases do nothing to solve the imbalance between supply and demand and will create additional depletions in the system when these reservoirs are refilled. Such releases can, however, provide a temporary bulwark against exceptionally low levels in Lake Powell.
Additional reductions in deliveries from Lake Mead under the Secretary’s Section 5 delivery contracts in the Lower Basin, as authorized by Section II.B.3 of the decree in Arizona v. California, 376 U.S. 340 (1964).
By reducing deliveries from Lake Mead, releases from Lake Powell could also be reduced without the risk of causing exceptionally low storage in Lake Mead.
Extension of system conservation programs in the Lower Basin, and facilitation of an Upper Basin water conservation program, both funded through compensation from federal or state governments or other water users in the Basin, and requiring specific quantities of saved water.
Relying on compensated annual forbearance alone is unsustainable, however, because it is not feasible to pay water users in the long term to forgo the use of water that nature no longer supplies. Permanent reductions in consumptive use are both necessary and also the most productive use of limited funding. In addition, to be effective, changes to state law in some Upper Basin states may be necessary, including recognition of water conservation as a beneficial use for the purpose of avoiding litigation concerning the Colorado River Compact. Finally, authorization for shepherding of saved water to the intended place of storage is essential, including across state borders.
Reductions in deliveries to Mexico through negotiation of a new minute.
Reductions in consumptive use by federal water projects in the Upper Basin, if allowable pursuant to the Secretary’s authority.
It should be noted, however, that in order to benefit the Colorado River system, any such reductions must be recognized at the point of diversion and shepherded to the intended place of storage.
It is obvious that any long-term agreement for future Colorado River operations among the Basin States should be evaluated based on its immediate ability to reverse the storage declines experienced in recent years and anticipated in the future under similar hydrology. An agreement that does not reliably balance supply with uses and losses is not sustainable. Similarly, any operational alternative proffered by the Department of the Interior must achieve the same objectives. When our reservoir storage is as low as it is now, we have very little buffer to rely on–we simply cannot use more water than nature provides.
The focus within the Basin and among its principal water users and state negotiators has been on the formulation of the Post-2026 guidelines for operation of the river. But action is necessary now to avoid creating conditions that will doom the next set of operating principles by initiating their implementation when the Basin is in full crisis mode. No governmental administration, state or federal, wants to see the Colorado River system fail on its watch. Negotiators have worked tirelessly to reach agreement, yet have come up short. The hour is late. The Secretary must take decisive action.
Photo Credit: John Weishei via the Colorado River Research Group
Footnotes
1 Director, Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center.
2 Senior Fellow, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School, former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission, former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Dept. of the Interior.
3 Writer in Residence, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
4 Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District.
5 Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University, former Director, Phoenix Water Services.
6 Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
7 Between 9 October and 8 November, five reservoirs in the San Juan River basin gained 204,000 af in total storage, especially in Navajo and Vallecito Reservoirs. Between 9 October and 20 October, Lake Powell gained 105,000 af in active storage, and the total contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead increased by 108,000 af between September 25 and October 27.
8 Schmidt, J.C., Yackulic, C.B., and Kuhn, E. 2023. The Colorado River water crisis: its origin and the future. WIREs Water 2023;e1672.
9 Total active storage in the Basin’s 46 reservoirs was at its maximum on 24 August 1999.
10 Total Basin consumptive uses and losses, including deliveries to Mexico, averaged 14.2 maf/yr between 1990 and 1999.
11 Average natural flow of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry, estimated by Reclamation, was 9.5 (Water Year, WY) and 9.6 (Calendar Year, CY) maf/ yr between 2000 and 2004. Average natural flow for the preceding ten years (1990-1999) was 15.0 maf/yr (WY, CY). Average natural flow for the entire 21st century between 2000 and 2025 was 12.3 maf/yr (WY, CY).
12 Total active storage of the Basin’s reservoirs was 32.0 maf on 19 October 2004.
13 Total active storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead was 23.0 maf on 1 January 2005 and was 24.2 maf on 28 July 2019, a 5% increase.
14 Average natural flow at Lees Ferry averaged 9.0 (WY) and 9.2 (CY) maf/yr between 2020 and 2022.
15 Total active storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead was 12.7 maf on 14 March 2023, 48% less than it had been on 28 July 2019.
16 Total active storage in Lake Powell and Lake Mead was 47.7 maf on 19 September 1999.
17 Reclamation estimates that natural flow at Lees Ferry was 8.5 (WY, CY) maf in 2025.
18 Bureau of Reclamation, Establishment of Interim Operating Guidance for Glen Canyon Dam during Low Reservoir Levels at Lake Powell (2024).18
19 Bureau of Reclamation, Supplement to 2007 Colorado River Interim Guidelines for Lower Basin Shortages and the Coordinated Operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead, Record of Decision (2024) (SEIS ROD).
20 Id.
21 U.S. Department of the Interior, Record of Decision for the Glen Canyon Dam Long-Term Experimental and Management Plan, Final Environmental Impact Statement, December 2016.
22 Salter, G. and 7 co-authors, 2025, Reservoir operational strategies for sustainable sand management in the Colorado River. Water Resources Research 61, e2024WR038315.
23 Ploussard, Q., Pavičević, M., and Yu, A. 2025. Financial analysis of the smallmouth bass flows implemented at the Glen Canyon Dam during Water Year 2024. Argonne National Laboratory report ANL 25/44, 17 pp.
24 C. Ellsworth, Western Area Power Administration, pers. commun.
25 Eppenhimer, D. E., Yackulic, C. B., Bruckerhoff, L. A., Wang, J., Young, K. L., Bestgen, K. R., Mihalevich, B. A., and Schmidt, J. C. 2025. Declining reservoir elevations following a two-decade drought increase water temperatures and non-native fish passage facilitating a downstream invasion. Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 82:1-19.
26 During the 21st century, natural flow at Lees Ferry was lower than this amount in 2002, 2012, 2018, and 2021, meaning that this is not a worst case scenario.
27 In 2024, consumptive uses and losses in the Upper and Lower Basins totaled 11.4 maf.
28 October 2025 24-Month Study Minimum Probable Forecast. For a discussion of why the Minimum Probable forecast has become a more reliable indicator of the future than the Most Probable 24-Month Study, see Awaiting the Colorado River 24-Month Study, Aug. 14, 2025.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The winter solstice teaches us that we must descend into the darkness before we can return to the light. This solstice season we find ourselves in especially dark times —figuratively speaking.
We can be fairly certain that the earth’s northern hemisphere will begin tilting back towards the light next week. Yet we can only hope that America will find similar relief from the metaphorical shroud of darkness under which it has fallen.
As I monitor the news each day, I find myself spiraling past frustration, disdain, and outrage and sinking into a mire of disbelief and despair. That our government is rife with corruption, short-sightedness, greed, and incompetence is outrageous, but neither new nor surprising. What is new is that those traits are now combined with blatant cruelty, wretchedness, moral vacuity, outright bigotry and racism, and a pathological dearth of empathy and compassion. It’s a toxic stew that emanates from the president, is lapped up by his sycophantic and unqualified cabinet — not to mention the tech broligarchs who debase themselves in hopes of holding onto a few more million of their billions of dollars at tax time, or ease the regulatory burden on their hyperscale AI-powering data centers.
Perhaps most distressing is that the safeguards that once protected the nation from the lunatics or incompetents in power — i.e. the courts, the rule of law, Congress — have themselves been broken down or infected with the same malady of wretchedness.
If you think I’m exaggerating, just consider the current situation: The U.S. military is blowing up Venezuelan boats — and then striking the wreckage again to kill any survivors — and is threatening to go to war with the country and send American soldiers into harm’s way, simply to distract the nation from Trump’s disastrous policies and his close association with known pedophile, sex-trafficker, and scam artist Jeffrey Epstein. And when Democratic members of Congress — and decorated veterans — tell soldiers they will support them if they refuse to break the law, Trump threatens to court-martial them.
That’s outrageous and despicable. That Congress and the courts and the American people aren’t rising up en masse in revolt is depressing. And that’s just one example of so, so many like it. Which explains the extra despair during this dark season.
I’m saying a little pagan prayer that the light will return next year.
But for now, I’m afraid I have some more darkness to report from the Land Desk beat:
Back in 2024, former Mesa County clerk and right-wing conspiracy theorist Tina Peters was convicted by a jury of breaching the security of her office’s own election system in 2021 in a futile attempt to prove election fraud. Trump pardoned her, but it didn’t count because it is a state, not federal, crime, and Gov. Jared Polis wasn’t going to play Trump’s game. That made Trump mad, so, in his usual fashion, he governed by spite and is now planning to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder.
This will not only hurt Colorado, but also science and all the people who are affected by climate and weather and the like, which is to say: everybody, this harms us all. Here’s a couple Blue Sky takes from prominent scientists:
The U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to pass Rep. Lauren Boebert-sponsored legislation that would remove Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves in the lower 48 states. The bill now goes to the Senate. Congress delisted wolves in the Northern Rockies in 2011, turning management over the states; hunting wolves is no allowed in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. This bill could potentially do the same for wolves in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Nevada, and most of Utah.
The Bureau of Land Management is going on a bit of a tear when it comes to auctioning off public land leases to oil and gas companies. Just a couple of examples of future sales (June 2026) you can weigh in on:
In Utah, the administration is planning on offering 39 parcels covering about 54,000 acres. A bulk of the parcels are located south of the town of Green River, east of the river itself, and adjacent to Tenmile Canyon.
And it’s looking to sell 174 oil and gas leases covering more than 160,000 acres in Colorado. They don’t have the maps up for these ones yet, but judging by the descriptions it seems they are scattered across much of the state (but not in southwestern Colorado).
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️
Weather is wacky and probably always has been. But this month has got to be one of the weirdest, weather-wise, the West has seen in a while. It’s like the new abnormal on steroids, and it’s hard to deny that much of it has the oily fingerprints of human caused climate change smeared all over it.
This week, alone, the West has experienced:
A succession of atmospheric rivers pounded the Northwest, dropping more than 10 inches of rain in places over a few days and bringing several rivers up to record-high flows and causing widespread flooding. The Skagit River near Mt. Vernon, Washington, jumped from about 13,500 cubic feet per-second on Dec. 4 to 133,000 cfs a week and a day later. The Snohomish River saw even more dramatic increases in flow. The flooding and landslides severely damaged U.S. Hwy 2 through the Cascade Mountains, and it could be closed for months. And anywhere between 200,000 and 500,000 homes and businesses were left without power after the floods, rains, and severe winds toppled utility lines, reminding us once again that extreme weather is a far greater danger to the power grid than shuttering coal plants. Atmospheric rivers and big storms aren’t abnormal. But because warm air can hold more moisture, these ones may have been intensified by global heating.
The storms came on the heels of the warmest meteorological autumn on record in the Northwest (based on 130 years of record-keeping). The result: Huge dumps, even in the mountains, falls mostly as rain, not snow, meaning the snowpack remains relatively sparse across much of the region.
The soggy soil of the Northwest coincided with smoky skies in eastern Colorado.I had thought that I could close out my Watch Duty wildfire-monitoring tab for the season, but I had to bring it back up on Wednesday night as wicked winds combined with dry conditions and warm temperatures to whip up a trio of grass fires in Yuma County, Colorado, with another one flaring up along the Colorado-Wyoming line. All fires were contained, but they brought back memories of the 2021 Marshall Fire, which broke out in similar conditions at the end of December.
The fires followed a nine-day warm streak on the Front Range, when the mercury in Denver topped out at 60° F or above, including reaching a daily record high of 71° on Dec. 17. The rest of the state was also abnormally warm (after a seasonably chilly beginning to the month).
Expect the same to continue into the New Year. While Utah and western Colorado may get some precipitation, it’s likely to be either rain or sloppy snow — i.e. Schneeregen — due to unseasonably high predicted temperatures.
Most ski areas in the Interior West are open now, but that doesn’t mean the conditions are good. To the contrary, they’re generally lousy almost everywhere, with snowpack levels hovering around 50% of “normal” everywhere from Utah’s Wasatch Range to Vail to Wolf Creek in southwestern Colorado. In most of those places the story of the season is the same: It started off with heavy rainfall, followed by a succession of decent snow storms that offered false hope, only to be dashed by a run of warm snow-melting temperatures. So far the story’s even more extreme in the Sierra Nevada, where the mountains are utterly devoid of snow, despite massive, flood-inducing rains this fall. The following graphics from the Wolf Creek Pass SNOTEL station tell the story of most of the region:
The water year started with a deluge and flooding on the San Juan River through Pagosa. While precipitation leveled off after that, accumulations remain above normal and significantly higher than on this date last year.
The problem: All of that water fell as, well, water, not snow, thanks mostly to high temperatures. Note how average daily temperatures have been above the median, sometimes way above it, all water year so far.
The result: way below “normal” snowpack levels. They are also significantly lower than at this time last year, and last year sucked, to put it bluntly. While all of the rain eased drought conditions and restored some moisture to the soil, the lack of snow does not bode well for spring runoff — or the reservoirs and water users that depend on it.
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
The backlash to the Big Data Center Buildup is gaining steam, and the resistance to the energy- and water-guzzling server farms is scoring a few victories and suffering defeats.
Earlier this month, Chandler, Arizona’s city council voted to reject Active Infrastructure’s proposed rezoning request that would have cleared the way for the developer to raze an existing building and replace it with an AI data center complex. The denial followed widespread opposition from residents, and in spite of lobbying by former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in favor of the facility and the developer’s pledge to use closed-loop cooling, which consumes less water (but more energy) than conventional cooling systems.
Opposition to a proposed data center in Page, Arizona, was dealt a blow when a referendum to block a land sale for the facility was rejected because the petition didn’t meet legal requirements. Beth Henshaw has more on the Page proposal over at the Corner Post, a cool nonprofit covering the Colorado Plateau.
Pima County, Arizona’s supervisors approved an agreement with Beale Infrastructure advancing its proposed Project Blue data center. The developer is pledging to match 100% of its energy consumption with renewable sources and to use a less water-intensive closed-loop cooling system. Opposition to the facility has been fierce.
🌞 Good News! 😎
These days we hear a lot about how utility-scale wind and solar developments harm the flora and fauna of the desert. But one solar installation near Phoenix is providing sanctuary for wildlife, as reported by Carrie Klein in Audubon recently. Wild at Heart, a raptor rehabilitation center, rescued a bunch of burrowing owls from a housing development construction site. But instead of returning them to the wild (which is becoming more and more scarce in Arizona), they set them up in plastic tunnels they built amid a 10,000-acre solar installation. The owls are not only surviving, but are thriving and successfully reproducing. Finally, a bit of light!
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Moon and tree, Bryce Canyon National Park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Anne Castle, Jeff Kightlinger, Jim Lochhead at the 2025 CRWUA Conference. Photo credit: Water Mark (@OtayMark)
Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Daily News website (Austin Corona). Here’s an excerpt:
December 17, 2025
Federal officials have released a “sobering” forecast of 2026 water levels in the Colorado River, with expected flows plummeting from previous predictions. Precipitation later in the winter could turn those dire forecasts around, officials say, but the current outlook is grim for a river already flirting with crisis. Officials published the new forecast on Monday, only a day before negotiators and stakeholders from the river’s basin states gathered in Las Vegas for a three-day conference. The federal government has given states until February to agree on a longer-term strategy for managing low river flows. The Colorado River’s flow in 2026 (specifically, the unregulated inflow to Lake Powell) could be 27% lower than normal, according to the most probable scenario in the December forecast, with worst-case scenarios predicting even lower flows. The projection has worsened estimates released in November (16% lower than normal in most probable scenarios).
“We all know Mother Nature is a trickster and can often confound our expectations. We certainly hope she intends to do that this year,” said Wayne Pullan, the Bureau of Reclamation’s regional director for the Upper Colorado River Basin, on Tuesday. “But December’s outlook is troubling.”
The bureau, which manages federal dams, will delay water releases at Lake Powell to conserve supplies in the reservoir during the dry winter months in 2026, Pullan said. Even with those efforts, however, the lake’s water levels could fall to critical levels in 2027 as another disappointing year hits the basin. A bad water year in 2026 would compound already poor conditions from 2025, when river flows have been less than half of normal. The new forecast increases the possibility that water levels in Lake Powell could drop below the intakes for hydropower turbines and that releases from the lake could fall below the annual average required to meet the requirements of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, which governs water allocation between the seven states that use the river. Without above-average flows in future years to bring averages back up, or an interstate deal on how to manage drought, those low releases could set the stage for a legal battle on the river.
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
Colorado River states have been given less than two months to agree on how to share water cuts from the shrinking river.
Homeland Security waives environmental laws to speed the construction of a border wall in parts of New Mexico.
A federal judge proclaims federal authority over the contentious Line 5 oil pipeline that crosses the Great Lakes.
U.S., Mexican governments sign Tijuana River sewage cleanup agreement.
The House passes a bill to change environmental reviews for infrastructure permitting.
USGS study finds lower water levels in Colorado’s Blue Mesa reservoir the cause of increased toxic algal blooms.
And lastly, a draft EIS for post-2026 Colorado River reservoir operations, when current rules expire, will be published in the coming weeks.
“Let me be clear, cooperation is better than litigation. Litigation consumes time, resources, and relationships. It also increases uncertainty and delays progress. The only certainty around litigation in the Colorado River basin is a bunch of water lawyers are going to be able to put their children and grandchildren through graduate school. There are much better ways to spend several hundred million dollars.” – Scott Cameron, acting commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, speaking at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference on December 17, 2025. Cameron encouraged the states to reach an agreement on water cuts and reservoir operating rules instead of suing each other.
By the Numbers
February 14: New Interior Department deadline for the seven Colorado River states to reach an agreement on water cuts and reservoir operations. If the states fail at that, Interior could assert its own authority. There could also be lawsuits. A short-term agreement might be necessary.
The deadline, according to Interior’s Andrea Travnicek, is for several reasons. It gives states time to pass legislation, if necessary. It provides time for consultation with Mexico and the basin’s tribes. And it allows for reservoir operating decisions in 2027 to be set this fall.
“Time is of the essence, and it is time to be able to adjust those stakes, to arrange so compromises can be made,” Travnicek said.
News Briefs
Line 5 Oil Pipeline Court Case A U.S. district judge ruled that the federal government, not the state of Michigan, has authority over the contentious Line 5 oil pipeline that crosses the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac.
Michigan’s top officials have attempted to shut down Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 since 2020 when Gov. Gretchen Witmer revoked the company’s easement.
In his ruling, Judge Robert Jonker determined that the federal Pipeline Safety Act gives the U.S. government the sole authority over Line 5’s continued operation, the Associated Press reports.
Tijuana River Sewage Pollution Cleanup U.S. and Mexican representatives signed an agreement that will facilitate the cleanup of chronic sewage pollution in the Tijuana River, a shared waterway.
Line 5 Oil Pipeline Court Case A U.S. district judge ruled that the federal government, not the state of Michigan, has authority over the contentious Line 5 oil pipeline that crosses the Great Lakes at the Straits of Mackinac.
Michigan’s top officials have attempted to shut down Enbridge Energy’s Line 5 since 2020 when Gov. Gretchen Witmer revoked the company’s easement.
In his ruling, Judge Robert Jonker determined that the federal Pipeline Safety Act gives the U.S. government the sole authority over Line 5’s continued operation, the Associated Press reports.
Tijuana River Sewage Pollution Cleanup U.S. and Mexican representatives signed an agreement that will facilitate the cleanup of chronic sewage pollution in the Tijuana River, a shared waterway.
Called Minute 333, the agreement outlines actions and sets timelines. A joint work group will assess project engineering and feasibility studies. Mexico will build a wastewater treatment plant by December 2028 and a sediment control basin by winter 2026-27. The agreement also addresses monitoring, planning, and data sharing.
Permitting and Land Use Bills House Republicans used the week before the holiday break to pass a bill that changes infrastructure permitting processes.
The SPEED Act, which passed with support from 11 Democrats, changes the National Environmental Policy Act and the environmental reviews it requires for major federal projects. It restricts reviews to immediate project impacts, sets timelines, and limits lawsuits.
“On net, these reforms are likely to make it easier to build energy infrastructure in the United States,” asserts the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Border Wall Kristi Noem, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is waiving environmental laws in order to speed the construction of a border wall in parts of New Mexico near El Paso, Texas.
The affected laws include the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and others.
Studies and Reports
Mississippi River Recap The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a December state of the Mississippi River report, noting how drought conditions this year have influenced operations on the country’s largest river system.
The Corps authorized construction of an underwater dam that was completed in October in order to impede the upstream movement of salty water from the Gulf of Mexico.
Harmful Algal Blooms in Colorado Reservoir Blue Mesa is the largest reservoir in Colorado and is part of the Colorado River basin water storage system.
The U.S. Geological Survey investigated why Blue Mesa has been experiencing toxic algal blooms in recent years. Its report concluded that warmer water temperatures enabled by lower water levels are the likely cause.
The affected laws include the Clean Water Act, National Environmental Policy Act, Safe Drinking Water Act, Migratory Bird Conservation Act, and others.
Studies and Reports
Mississippi River Recap The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers published a December state of the Mississippi River report, noting how drought conditions this year have influenced operations on the country’s largest river system.
The Corps authorized construction of an underwater dam that was completed in October in order to impede the upstream movement of salty water from the Gulf of Mexico.
Harmful Algal Blooms in Colorado Reservoir Blue Mesa is the largest reservoir in Colorado and is part of the Colorado River basin water storage system.
The U.S. Geological Survey investigated why Blue Mesa has been experiencing toxic algal blooms in recent years. Its report concluded that warmer water temperatures enabled by lower water levels are the likely cause.
Reducing nutrient inflows is unlikely to help, the researchers said. There are naturally occurring phosphorus inputs and the algae can fix nitrogen from the air.
The best solution might be keeping the reservoir high enough, the report says. That will not be easy in a drying and warming region with competing water demands.
On the Radar
Colorado River Draft EIS Coming Soon In the coming weeks – in early January if not by the end of the year – the Bureau of Reclamation will publish a draft environmental impact statement for changes to how the big Colorado River reservoirs will be managed.
Reclamation began its environmental review about two and a half years ago. The agency had hoped to slot a seven-state consensus agreement into the document. But since there is no agreement, the document will instead describe a “broad range” of options, said Carly Jerla of Reclamation, who spoke at the Colorado River Water Users Association conference.
The draft will not select a preferred option, Jerla said. Instead that will come in the final version.
“We’ve set up a draft EIS that reflects a range of carefully crafted alternatives to enable the further innovation and the ability of the basin to come to a consensus agreement to be able to adopt in time for the 2027 operations,” Jerla said.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
The seven states that rely on the Colorado River to supply farms and cities across the U.S. West appear no closer to reaching a consensus on a long-term plan for sharing the dwindling resource. The river’s future was the center of discussions this week at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas, where water leaders from California, Nevada, Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming gathered alongside federal and tribal officials. It comes after the states blew past a November deadline for a new plan to deal with drought and water shortages after 2026, when current guidelines expire. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation has set a new deadline of Feb. 14. Nevada’s lead negotiator said it is unlikely the states will reach agreement that quickly.
“As we sit here mid-December with a looming February deadline, I don’t see any clear path to a long-term deal, but I do see a path to the possibility of a shorter-term deal to keep us out of court,” John Entsminger of the Southern Nevada Water Authority told The Associated Press.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
The federal government continues to refrain from coming up with its own solution — preferring the seven basin states reach consensus themselves. If they don’t, a federally imposed plan could leave parties unhappy and result in costly, lengthy litigation. Not only is this water fight between the upper and lower basins, individual municipalities, tribal nations and water agencies have their own stakes in this battle. California, which has the largest share of Colorado River water, has over 200 water agencies alone, each with their own customers.
“It’s a rabbit hole you can dive down in, and it is incredibly complex,” said Noah Garrison, a water researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Lower Basin states pitched a reduction of 1.5 million acre-feet per year to cover a structural deficit that occurs when water evaporates or is absorbed into the ground as it flows downstream. An acre-foot is enough water to supply two to three households a year. But they want to see a similar contribution from the Upper Basin. The Upper Basin states, however, don’t think they should have to make additional cuts because they already don’t use their full share of the water and are legally obligated to send a certain amount of water downstream.
“Our water users feel that pain,” said Estevan López, New Mexico’s representative for the Upper Colorado River Commission.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Lake Powell is seen from the air in October 2022. The December 24-month study from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects Powell could drop below the threshold needed to make hydropower in 2026. CREDIT: ALEXANDER HEILNER/THE WATER DESK
Federal water officials addressed the increasingly grim river conditions and laid out their options for dealing with plummeting reservoir levels over the first two days of the largest annual gathering of water managers in the Colorado River Basin.
On Monday, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation released its monthly report, which projects a two-year hydrology outlook for the operation of the nation’s two largest reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead. The report provided a sobering backdrop to the Colorado River Water Users Association conference at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map December 18, 2025. via the NRCS.
With the slow start to winter in the Upper Basin (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming), the report showed a drop in Lake Powell’s projected 2026 inflow of 1 million acre-feet since the November forecast. Under the “minimum” possible inflow, Lake Powell would fall below the surface-elevation level of 3,490 feet needed to generate hydropower by October 2026 and stay there until spring runoff briefly bumps up reservoir levels in summer 2027; but the water level would again dip below 3,490 in the fall of 2027.
Under the “most probable” forecast, the reservoir’s level stays above minimum power pool, but falls below the target elevation of 3,525 until the 2027 runoff. (Reservoir levels below the target elevation trigger more drastic emergency actions.) The reservoir is currently about 28% full, down from 37% at this time last year.
Wayne Pullan, regional director for the bureau’s Upper Basin, called the December projections troubling.
“That outlook is sobering for all of us,” Pullan said at Tuesday’s meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
Snowpack, which is lagging across the Upper Basin, hovered at around 61% of median Wednesday. Snowpack in the headwaters of the Colorado River was 53% of median.
The Colorado River basin has been locked in the grip of a megadrought since the turn of the century. Climate change and relentless demand have fueled shortages, pushed reservoirs to all-time lows and sent water managers scrambling.
Pullan laid out four tools that the Bureau of Reclamation can use to respond to the projected low water levels to prevent the surface of Lake Powell at the Glen Canyon Dam from falling below 3,500 feet in elevation.
This 2023 diagram shows the tubes through which Lake Powell’s fish can pass through to the section of the Colorado River that flows through the Grand Canyon. Credit: USGS and Reclamation 2023
The first tool is shifting some winter releases to the summer months when runoff into the reservoir will compensate for those releases. The second is releasing water from upstream reservoirs to boost Lake Powell. The third is reducing releases when water levels hit a certain trigger elevation.
Representatives from the Upper Basin and Lower Basin (Arizona, California and Nevada), which share the river, have been in talks for two years — with long periods of being deadlocked in disagreement — about how to manage the river after the current guidelines expire at the end of 2026. The 2007 guidelines set annual Lake Powell and Lake Mead releases based on reservoir levels and did not go far enough to prevent them from being drawn down during consecutive dry years.
“We have learned that if we failed at all in these last 25 years, it might have been that our vision wasn’t sufficiently pessimistic,” Pullan said.
States’ representatives have said they are still committed to finding a consensus after they blew past a Nov. 11 deadline to come up with an outline of a plan. Federal officials have set a second deadline of Feb. 14 for the states to submit a detailed plan.
While water managers across the basin wait for an agreement from the states, federal officials are moving ahead with the National Environmental Protection Act review process and crafting an environmental impact statement for future reservoir operations. Reclamation officials said that they plan to release a draft EIS around the end of the year and that the alternatives analyzed in the EIS will be broad enough that they would capture any seven-state agreement. The draft EIS will not choose a preferred alternative.
“Probably all of you have heard us say, ad nauseum, this emphasis on creating a broad range of alternatives,” Carly Jerla, a senior water resource program manager at the Bureau of Reclamation, said Wednesday. “We really went about this by taking input over the last almost two years from you all … to craft a broad range that really reflects the ideas on how to operate the system.”
Wayne Pullan, Reclamation’s Upper Colorado Basin Regional Director, speaks at the meeting of the Upper Colorado River Commission at the Colorado River Water Users Association Conference on Tuesday in Las Vegas. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM
Not a routine water source
This isn’t the first time the basin has experienced dire straits. In 2021, as Lake Powell flirted with falling below minimum power pool, the Bureau of Reclamation made 181,000 acre-feet in emergency releases from three Upper Basin reservoirs — Flaming Gorge, Navajo and Blue Mesa — to protect critical Lake Powell elevations.
These reservoirs are part of the Colorado River Storage Project, and their primary purpose is to control the flows of the Colorado River. But the unilateral action by the feds rubbed Upper Basin water managers the wrong way. The 36,000 acre-feet released from Blue Mesa cut short the boating season on Colorado’s largest reservoir, which is on the Gunnison River.
On Tuesday, Colorado’s representative, Becky Mitchell, said Upper Basin reservoirs are not a routine water source for the Lower Basin.
“I appreciate as we’re in critical and dire situations how we use our resources to protect our infrastructure, but we have to shift,” Mitchell said. “Our biggest resource is post-2026 and figuring out how do we do this in a way that doesn’t create those to be routine water sources.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
So far, the basin has avoided the worst outcomes by getting last-minute reprieves in the form of wet years in 2019 and 2023. But overall, Jerla said, the Colorado River can expect to see persistent dry years and challenging conditions in the future, and water managers will need more adaptive, flexible solutions.
“(This is) really our last year together operating under the existing agreements, kind of stretching the flexibilities and the bounds and stability which those agreements provide,” she said.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
The Colorado River fills Glen Canyon, forming Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir. The reservoir could drop to a new record low in 2026 if conditions remain dry in the Southwestern watershed. (Alexander Heilner/The Water Desk with aerial support from LightHawk)
Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Wyatt Myskow, Blanca Begert, Jake Bolster):
December 19, 2025
At the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference in Las Vegas, Colorado River Basin states remain at an impasse over how to cut their water use as Lake Mead and Lake Powell verge on record lows.
The Colorado River Basin is, quite literally, 50 feet away from collapse, and an agreement to save it is nowhere in sight.
Water titans clashed at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas this week, where negotiators from each of the seven Colorado River Basin states outlined what they have done to protect the river—and pointed fingers at each other, demanding more.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Talks over how to manage the river after 2026, when current drought mitigation guidelines expire, began two years ago. Federal deadlines have come and gone, and the stakes are higher than ever as climate change and overuse continue to push the river that 40 million people rely on to the edge. Still, the states are refusing to budge.
“It’s now 2025, we’re here in a different hotel a couple years later and the same problems are on the table. In the last two years, we’ve been spinning our wheels,” said JB Hamby, California’s lead negotiator, at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference.“Time has been wasted, and like water, that’s a very precious resource.”
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
The Colorado River flows from Wyoming to Mexico, supplying water to seven U.S. states, two Mexican states and 30 tribes. But the bedrock law guiding its management, the 1922 Colorado River Compact, overestimated how much water the river could provide, leading to state allocations that promised more than was ultimately available. The nation’s two largest reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, which for decades have met the excess demand driven by overly optimistic allocations, are at the brink. Lake Mead is 33 percent full; Powell is just 28 percent full. If the latter’s water levels drop by an additional 50 feet, the water behind Glen Canyon Dam would be trapped, limiting deliveries to California, Arizona and Nevada, and preventing the dam from generating hydropower.
The federal government’s data indicate that Lake Powell could drop to that level, known as “deadpool,” by the summer of 2027 if significant cuts aren’t made.
Yet, the states remain stuck on the same points that, for years, have prevented any of them from agreeing to reduce their long-term use enough to prevent the collapse of the Colorado River system.
The structural deficit refers to the consumption by Lower Basin states of more water than enters Lake Mead each year. The deficit, which includes losses from evaporation, is estimated at 1.2 million acre-feet a year. (Image: Central Arizona Project circa 2019)
In a proposal to the federal government from March 2024, Arizona, California and Nevada, the three states that make up the Lower Basin, which uses the greatest amount of the river’s water and has historically over-consumed its allotments, put annual cuts of 1.5 million acre feet of water on the table for a post-2026 agreement. [ed. This includes 1.2 MAF for the “Structural Deficit”. The Lower Basin has never been charged for shrink in Lake Mead and in the Colorado River mainstream. USBR said earlier in the Post-2026 guideline negotiations that the LB would have to be charged for shrink going forward.] They want to see any necessary reductions after that, which experts estimate could range from another 2 to 4 million acre-feet per year, divided among all seven states. One acre-foot of water is enough to supply somewhere between two and four households for a year.
The Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming have proposed taking voluntary reductions. They argue they should not face mandatory cuts because the Upper Basin has never used the full amount of water it was allocated under the 1922 compact, which apportions 7.5 million acre-feet to each basin. Due to climate change and a lack of storage infrastructure, they say they’re already living with cuts while delivering the required water to the Lower Basin.
— Colorado River Water Users Association (@CRWUA_water) December 18, 2025
In closing comments on Thursday, which provided a rare opportunity for the public to hear what have otherwise been behind-closed-doors conversations, negotiators expressed frustration, rehashing the same talking points they have used for years.
“As long as we keep polishing those arguments and repeating them to each other, we are going nowhere,” said John Entsminger, Southern Nevada Water Authority’s general manager, and that state’s negotiator. He added that at this point, the best he could envision was an interim five-year operating plan agreement, not the multi-decadal deal that would be necessary to bring certainty to the region. Even a short-term deal still requires resolving debates about what each state can commit to.
The impasse heightens the risk that the federal government will have to step in to implement a plan to protect its infrastructure. Many fear that a failure to reach state consensus could lead to exorbitantly expensive litigation, delay needed action for years and cause uncertainty throughout the region.
The federal Bureau of Reclamation has told the basins to develop a plan by Feb. 14, 2026, after the states blew past a previous Nov. 11 deadline, so it can include their agreement in the federal government’s environmental analysis of a post-2026 plan to operate Lakes Mead and Powell and oversee their dam releases.
Lorelei Cloud, Vice-chair of the Southern Ute Tribal Council, and Southwest Colorado’s representative of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, which addresses most water issues in Colorado. Photo via Sibley’s Rivers
Lorelei Cloud, chair of the Colorado Water Conservation Board and co-founder of the Indigenous Women’s Leadership Network, cautioned against federal intervention. The federal government has fallen short of its trust responsibility to the tribes by failing to provide water, she said.
”All the people on the ground really need to step up and provide a solution,” she said.
Bill Hasencamp, manager of Colorado River Resources for the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, said that federal intervention would mean reverting to pre-2007 operating guidelines under which water allocations are determined annually. That would make it harder for Metropolitan, which serves 19 million people across Southern California, to plan for the future.
“We might invest in sources that we don’t need, but also we may have to restrict water deliveries from time to time, as we’ve done in the past,” said Hasencamp. “For us, that’s a fail.”
But Tom Buschatzke, the director of the Arizona Department of Water Resources and the state’s lead negotiator, told Inside Climate News that federal leadership could break the deadlock between the states, a move that Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has called for recently.
Buschatzke feels that nothing the Upper Basin has proposed would withstand scrutiny from Arizona legislators, who would have to approve it. Visibly upset, he said the Upper Basin’s claim that they can’t take more cuts is “absurd” and is based on them not getting their “paper” water—a term used to refer to water that exists legally but has never been put to use or proven to currently be available.
“They need mandatory conservation that results in more water being in Lake Powell that can be moved to Lake Mead,” he said.
From left, J.B. Hamby, chair of the Colorado River Board of California, Tom Buschatzke, Arizona Department of Water Resources; Becky Mitchell, Colorado representative to the Upper Colorado River Commission at #CRWUA2023. Hamby and Buschatzke acknowledged during this panel at the Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference that the lower basin must own the structural deficit, something the upper basin has been pushing for for years. CREDIT: TOM YULSMAN/WATER DESK, UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO, BOULDER
Upper Basin negotiators counter that it is not their responsibility to cut their use to accommodate Lower Basin users who have long overdrawn the system. “We cannot subsidize overuse,” said Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s negotiator.
Lower Basin water use since 1964. 2025 data provisional, based on USBR projections Oct. 29, 2015.
At one point, the Lower Basin used several million acre-feet more water per year than it was allocated, but it has since reduced its consumption and now uses less than it is legally entitled to. California, the river’s biggest user, touted drastic conservation measures that have reduced water use to its lowest levels since the 1940s, despite booming growth in the state. Lower Basin leaders argue, too, that the region’s biggest cities, farms and economic outputs from the river are within the three states.
Upper Basin officials argue they have the right to grow as the Lower Basin has, and it’s unfair for those four states to sacrifice their future.
— Colorado River Water Users Association (@CRWUA_water) December 17, 2025
Earlier this week, leaders in both basins saw a preview of the federal government’s draft environmental review, which included a range of options for managing Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Some in the Lower Basin expressed concern that the options relied too heavily on them making future cuts. Hamby, California’s negotiator, emphasized that if the basin states eventually reach an agreement, it will determine how the federal government manages the river.
“Ultimately, none of it should matter if we get to a seven-state consensus,” said Hamby, who is also a board member of Southern California’s Imperial Irrigation District, the river’s single-largest water user. “But as part of the [environmental review] process, what we look forward to seeing from California is an equally balanced risk across the basin that motivates people to develop a seven-state consensus.”
Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s state engineer and Colorado River negotiator, called the analysis “broad enough to accommodate any seven-state consensus agreement” in an email.
Andrea Travnicek, assistant secretary for water and science at the Interior Department, said the government expects to publish the environmental impact statement in the last week of December or first week of January.
Despite the urgency, conference attendees weren’t surprised that negotiations remain stalled and no deal appeared imminent.
Cynthia Campbell, the director of policy innovation for the Arizona Water Innovation Institute at Arizona State University, said she expects one of two outcomes in the next 18 months, and perhaps both: the system will collapse or there will be litigation.
The public, she said, will then ask what happened, and leaders will have no good answers.
“I came with very low expectations, and they were met,” she said.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Bureau of Reclamation’s Acting Commissioner Scott Cameron speaks at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association’s conference. (Photo: Jeniffer Solis/Nevada Current)
In the next few weeks, the public will get their first look at a critical document two and a half years in the making that will define how the Colorado River is managed for the next decade.
The Bureau of Reclamation – which manages water in the West under the Interior Department – is on track to release a draft environmental review by early January with a range of options to replace the river’s operating rules, which are set to expire at the end of 2026.
Several elements of the draft were shared during the annual Colorado River Water Users Association’s conference in Las Vegas at Caesars Palace Wednesday.
Negotiations between federal officials and the seven western states that rely on the Colorado River have largely remained behind closed doors since 2023, but any new operating rules will be required to go through a public environmental review process before a final decision can be made.
Interior Department Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, Andrea Travnicek, said the agency is committed to meeting the self-imposed January deadline in order to finalize new rules before the current ones expire.
“The Department of the Interior recognizes a shrinking timeline is in front of us in order to operate under a new potential agreement,” Travnicek said.
In an unusual move, federal water officials said the draft will not identify which set of operating guidelines the federal government would prefer, which is typically included in environmental reviews.
“We will not be identifying a preferred alternative, but we anticipate the identification of that between the draft and the final,” said Bureau of Reclamation’s senior water resource program manager, Carly Jerla.
Instead, the draft environmental review will list a broad range of possible alternatives designed to enable states to continue working towards a seven-state consensus agreement on how to share the river’s shrinking water supply.
“We want to continue to facilitate, but not dictate these operations. The goal here is to inform decision makers and encourage parties to adopt agreements that put consultation and negotiation first,” Jerla continued.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Lower Basin states — California, Arizona, and Nevada — and Upper Basin states — Colorado, Wyoming, Utah and New Mexico — have been at an impasse for months over how to manage the Colorado River’s shrinking water supplies.
Last month, the states missed a federally-imposed deadline to submit a preliminary seven-state consensus plan that could replace the river’s operating guidelines after days of intense closed-door negotiations.
States’ last chance to share a final consensus-based plan will be mid-February 2026 in order to reach a final agreement in the summer with implementation of the new guidelines beginning in October 2026.
The Bureau of Reclamation’s Acting Commissioner Scott Cameron said he and other federal officials have intensified efforts to bring states to a consensus, flying out West every other week since early April to meet with the seven states’ river negotiators.
“There are a number of issues from decades past that some people are having some difficulty getting past,” Cameron said, adding that states must “be willing to set aside previous perceived inequities and unfairness.”
One of the biggest disagreements between the Upper and Lower Basin states is over which faction should have to cut back on their water use, and by how much.
Lower Basin states want all seven Colorado River states to share mandatory water cuts during dry years under the new guidelines. The Upper Basin, which is not subject to mandatory cuts under current guidelines, say they already use much less water than downstream states and should not face additional cuts. [ed. Also, the UB states face cuts every year from Mother Nature with the variability, but generally lower, snowpack each season.]
Despite states missing past deadlines, Cameron said he was “cautiously optimistic” states will reach a consensus deal by the February deadline.
“It’s not unusual in the negotiating process that tougher decisions get made the closer you get to the deadline. And frankly, there are tough decisions that have to be made,” Cameron said.
On Tuesday, California’s biggest water districts said they were willing to “set aside many of their legal positions” in order to reach a seven-state agreement.
The Bureau of Reclamation provided a broad overview of the components that will be included in draft’s range of options, including guidelines to reduce water deliveries from Lake Mead during shortages, coordinated reservoir operations for Lake Mead and Lake Powell, and storage and delivery mechanisms for conserved water.
Jerla, Reclamation’s senior water resource program manager, said the draft alternatives will include some components previously proposed by states.
She said the agency has adopted a number of temporary operational agreements since 2008 to address changing conditions on the river. Those agreements have served as test runs for a long term agreement and emphasized the need for more flexibility when managing the river from year-to-year.
“We want to preserve ourselves the flexibility to come back to the table, to do reviews, to make consensus adjustments if needed,” Jerla said.
That flexibility to operations will likely be needed again this year due to a less-than-average upcoming snow season, that combined with a dry spring or early summer in 2026, could create conditions for another low runoff year.
“We’re monitoring the forecast, and we’re seeing not a great start to water year 2026. It’s still early in the year, but the way things are setting up it isn’t looking good,” Jerla said.
Figure 1. Graph showing active storage in Colorado River basin reservoirs between January 1, 2021, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
The two biggest reservoirs in the country, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, are currently at a fraction of their full capacity. Lake Mead is at 32% capacity, while Lake Powell is at 28%.
Additionally, water inflow into the reservoirs in 2026 are projected to most likely be 75% of the average, according to the federal agency. The minimum probable inflow forecast for 2026 is 44% of average, indicating a potentially very dry year.
As the 80th annual Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) conference wraps up, SNWA General Manager John Entsminger reflects on the shared responsibility of everyone on the river, emphasizing collaboration while continuing to protect Southern Nevada’s water future. pic.twitter.com/JjuvUrHwuR
I apologize, I missed the first Session Friday, “Near-term analysis of Colorado River Basin Storage” with Eric Kuhn, Sarah Porter, and Jack Schmidt. Here’s the link to “Colorado River Insights 2025: Dancing with Deadpool“. Their contribution is in Chapter 1, “Colorado River Reservoir Storage – Where We Stand”.
LAS VEGAS — About [1,700] people from every corner of the Colorado River Basin flocked to the palm tree-lined Caesars Palace casino in Las Vegas this week thirsty for insights into the stalled negotiations over the future management of the river.
New insights, however, were sparse as of Tuesday morning.
The highly anticipated Colorado River Water Users Association conference is the largest river gathering of the year. It’s a meet up where federal and state officials like to make big announcements about the water supply for 40 million people, and when farmers, tribal nations, city water managers, industrial representatives and environmental groups can swap strategies in hallway chats.
The meetings started Tuesday morning before the conference officially kicked off. Officials from basin states, including Colorado, set the tone by digging into their oft-repeated rhetoric about the worrisome conditions in the basin, impacts in their own states and conservation efforts. Conference-goers pushed state leaders for more transparency and progress in the discussions over the river’s future.
The basin’s main reservoirs, lakes Mead and Powell, have fallen to historic lows despite pouring state and federal dollars into broad conservation efforts, said Commissioner Becky Mitchell, Colorado’s governor-appointed negotiator on Colorado River issues.
“We’re in a precarious time because none of that is enough,” Mitchell told hundreds of audience members during an Upper Colorado River Commission meeting Tuesday. “It has not been enough.”
Natural flows — which is a calculation of how much water would pass Lees Ferry without upstream human intervention — has trended downward since the mid-1980s. Even before that, however, the river rarely carried as much water as the drafters of the 1922 Colorado River Compact presumed it did. They based the Compact on a median flow of 20 million acre-feet. The 1906-2025 median flow has actually been just 14.3 MAF, while the most recent six-year average has been just over 10 MAF. Data source: Bureau of Reclamation via The Land Desk.
As the river’s water supply is strained by a 26-year drought and human demands, officials are trying to replace an expiring agreement from 2007, which manages how Mead and Powell capture water from upstream states and release it downstream for water users in Arizona, California, Nevada and Mexico.
The Department of the Interior is managing the effort, dubbed the post-2026 process, but deciding new rules is simpler said than done: Basin officials will have to address a changing climate and decide on painful water cuts going forward.
The Interior Department has given the seven basin states until Feb. 14 to reach a consensus. If they can agree, the feds will use the states’ proposal to manage the basin’s reservoirs. If not, the federal officials will decide what to do.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Officials from the Upper Basin states — Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — did not share examples of progress in the post-2026 negotiations. They said the basin’s water cycle, not its legal issues, are the main problem.
“It’s not political positions. It’s not legal interpretations,” Brandon Gebhart, Wyoming’s top negotiator, said. “It’s the hydrology of the entire basin.”
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
Others, including some of the 30 tribes in the basin, saw it differently. Some tribal representatives called for more transparency. Others said they couldn’t support a plan that is geared toward sending water to downstream states.
“Despite those that think hydrology is the problem, it’s not, and it can’t always be the scapegoat,” said Kirin Vicenti, water commissioner for the Jicarilla Apache Nation, located within New Mexico just south of the Colorado state line. “Our planning and policies must allow flexibility, and innovative and dynamic solutions.”
Portion of a Roman aqueduct Barcelona, Spain, May 2025.
A basin divided by a Rome-inspired wall
Relationships between upstream states and Lower Basin states — Arizona, California and Nevada — have been strained since the post-2026 effort kicked into gear in 2022 and 2023.
On the other side of the casino wall from the Upper Basin meeting, the Colorado River Board of California met Tuesday morning. Each audience could hear muffled clapping from the other room as the officials spoke to their constituents.
“We know one thing for sure, which is that we have a smaller river and that requires less use,” JB Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River board and California’s top negotiator, told the gathering.
He lauded California’s “massive” and expensive efforts to address the river’s shrinking supply while still growing the state’s economy and agriculture industry.
Lower Basin water use since 1964. 2025 data provisional, based on USBR projections Oct. 29, 2015.
California has cut its water use to 3.76 million acre-feet, the lowest it has been since 1949, state officials said. It has a proposed plan to conserve 440,000 acre-feet of river water per year.
One acre-foot roughly equals the annual water use of two to three households.
“We hear lots of applause lines from our friends next door, and we encourage them to take some examples from what California has been able to put together,” Hamby said. “We must all live with the resources we have, not the ones that we wish for.”
Crossing basin lines
While the states might be divided in water politics, conference attendees like Ken Curtis of Colorado moved between the rooms to hear each group’s discussion.
“We appear to be talking past each other,” said Curtis, the general manager of the Dolores Water Conservancy District in southwestern Colorado.
Some water managers from central Utah said they were already looking beyond the current negotiations to the next few decades. The basin’s challenges don’t end next fall — this is just a speed bump in a long future ahead, they said.
Others were waiting for updates from federal officials, scheduled for Wednesday. The Department of the Interior is set to release a highly anticipated look at different options for how to manage the basin around the end of the year.
Curtis said he is at the conference mainly to learn how other states were grappling with the tough water conditions and to get more insight into the negotiations beyond what’s in the media, he said.
“Squeezing it (water) out of the Upper Basin isn’t going to make enough water for the Lower Basin demands,” Curtis said. “And that may be a biased view, obviously, so I’m trying to get a little bit beyond my own biases.”
September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Palm trees in the Imperial Valley 2017. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Brian McNeece):
December 15, 2025
Where Colorado and other Upper-Basin states need to retreat from trying to develop full compact allocation. But Lower Basin states need to acknowledge Mother Nature.
This was published on Dec. 13, 2025, in the Calexico Chronicle, a publication in California’s Imperial Valley. It is reposted here with permission, and we asked for that permission because we thought it was an interesting explanation from a close observer who was reared in an area that uses by far the most amount of water in the Colorado River Basin.
This week is the annual gathering of “water buffaloes” in Las Vegas. It’s the Colorado River Water Users Association convention. About 1,700 people will attend, but probably around 100 of them are the key people — the government regulators, tribal leaders, and the directors and managers of the contracting agencies that receive Colorado River water.
Anyone who is paying attention knows that we are in critical times on the river. Temporary agreements on how to distribute water during times of shortage are expiring. Negotiators have been talking for several years but haven’t been able to agree on anything concrete.
I’m just an observer, but I’ve been observing fairly closely. Within the limits on how much information I can get as an outsider, I’d like to propose some principles or guidelines that I think are important for the negotiation process.
A. When Hoover Dam was proposed, the main debate was over whether the federal government or private concerns would operate it. Because the federal option prevailed, water is delivered free to contractors. Colorado River water contractors do not pay the actual cost of water being delivered to them. It is subsidized by the U.S. government. As a public resource, Colorado River water should not be seen as a commodity.
B. The Lower Basin states of Arizona, California, and Nevada should accept that the Upper Basin states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming are at the mercy of Mother Nature for much of their annual water supply. While the 1922 Colorado River Compact allocates them 7.5 million acre-feet annually, in wet years, they have been able to use a maximum of 4.7 maf. During the long, ongoing drought, their annual use has been 3.5 maf. They shouldn’t have to make more cuts.
C. However, neither should the Upper Basin states be able to develop their full allocation. It should be capped at a feasible number, perhaps 4.2 maf. As compensation, Upper Basin agencies and farmers can invest available federal funds in projects to use water more efficiently and to reuse it so that they can develop more water.
D. Despite the drought, we know there will be some wet years. To compensate the Lower Basin states for taking all the cuts in dry years, the Upper Basin should release more water beyond the Compact commitments during wet years. This means that Lake Mead and Lower Basin reservoirs would benefit from wet years and Lake Powell would not. In short, the Lower Basin takes cuts in dry years; the Upper Basin takes cuts in wet years.
E. Evaporation losses (water for the angels) can be better managed by keeping more of the Lower Basin’s water in Upper Basin reservoirs instead of in Lake Mead, where the warmer weather means higher evaporation losses. New agreements should include provisions to move that water in the Lower Basin account down to Lake Mead quickly. Timing is of the essence.
H. In the Lower Basin states, shortages should be shared along the same lines as specified in the 2007 Interim Guidelines, with California being last to take cuts as Lake Mead water level drops.
I. On the home front, Imperial Irrigation District policy makers should make a long-term plan to re-set water rates in accord with original water district policy. Because the district is a public, non-profit utility, water rates were set so that farmers paid only the cost to deliver water. Farmers currently pay $20 per acre foot, but the actual cost of delivering water is $60 per acre foot. That subsidy of $60 million comes from the water transfer revenues.
J. The San Diego County Water Authority transfer revenues now pay farmers $430 per acre-foot of conserved water, mostly for drip or sprinkler systems. Akin to a grant program, this very successful program generated almost 200,000 acre-feet of conserved water last year. Like any grant program, it should be regularly audited for effectiveness.
K. Some of those transfer revenues should be invested in innovative cropping patterns, advanced technologies, and marketing to help the farming community adapt to a changing world. The Imperial Irrigation District should use its resources to help all farmers be more successful, not just a select group.
L. Currently, federal subsidies pay farmers not to use water via the Deficit Irrigation Program. We can lobby for those subsidies to continue, but we should plan for when they dry up. Any arrangement that rewards farmers but penalizes farm services such as seed, fertilizer, pesticide, land leveling, equipment, and other work should be avoided.
M. Though the Imperial Irrigation District has considerable funding from the district’s QSA water transfers, it may need to consider issuing general obligation bonds as it did in its foundational days for larger water efficiency projects such as more local storage or a water treatment plant to re-use ag drain water.
Much progress has been made in using water more efficiently, especially in the Lower Basin states, but there’s a lot more water to be saved, and I believe collectively that we can do it.
The Colorado River Basin spans seven U.S. states and part of Mexico. Lake Powell, upstream from the Grand Canyon, and Lake Mead, near Las Vegas, are the two principal reservoirs in the Colorado River water-supply system. (Bureau of Reclamation)
Native America in the Colorado River Basin. Credit: USBR
State leaders seek durable post-2026 plan and make significant contributions
December 16, 2025
Las Vegas – California’s water, tribal, and agricultural leaders today presented a comprehensive framework for a durable, basin-wide operating agreement for the Colorado River and highlighted the state’s proposal for conserving 440,000 acre-feet of river water per year.
At the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference, California underscored the state’s leadership in conservation, collaboration, and long-term stewardship of shared water resources that inform its approach to post-2026 negotiations.
California takes a balanced approach, relying on contributions from the upper and lower basins to maintain a shared resource. California supports hydrology-based flexibility for river users, with all states contributing real water savings. Any viable framework would need to include transparent and verifiable accounting for conserved water, along with several other elements outlined in the California framework.
State leaders also noted that they are willing to set aside many of their legal positions to reach a deal, including releases from Lake Powell under the Colorado River Compact, distribution of Lower Basin shortages, and other provisions of the Law of the River, provided that there are equitable and sufficient water contributions from every state in the Basin and the country of Mexico.
Constructive California
“California is leading with constructive action,” said JB Hamby, chairman of the Colorado River Board of California. “We have reduced our water use to the lowest levels since the 1940s, invested billions to modernize our water systems and develop new supplies, partnered with tribes and agricultural communities, and committed to real water-use reductions that will stabilize the river. We are doing our part – and we invite every state to join us in this shared responsibility.”
Despite being home to 20 million Colorado River-reliant residents and a farming region that produces the majority of America’s winter vegetables, California’s use of Colorado River water is projected at 3.76 million acre-feet in 2025 – the lowest since 1949.
That achievement comes on top of historic reductions in water use over the past 20 years, led by collaborative conservation efforts. Urban Southern California cut imported water demand in half while adding almost 4 million residents. And farms reduced water use by more than 20% while sustaining more than $3 billion in annual output. Tribes also have made critical contributions, including nearly 40,000 acre-feet of conserved water by the Quechan Indian Tribe to directly support river system stability.
Going forward, California is prepared to reduce water use by 440,000 acre-feet per year – in addition to existing long-standing conservation efforts – as part of the Lower Basin’s proposal to conserve up to 1.5 million acre-feet per year, which would include participation by Mexico. When conditions warrant, California is also committed to making additional reductions to address future shortages as part of a comprehensive basin-state plan.
The state’s history of conservation illustrates what can be accomplished through collaboration, and all Colorado River water users in California are preparing to contribute to these reductions – agricultural agencies, urban agencies, and tribes.
Framework for a Post-2026 Agreement
In addition to conservation contributions, California provided a framework of principles for the post-2026 river operating guidelines to advance a shared solution for the seven Basin States, the tribes and Mexico. More specifically, California outlined the following key components for a new framework:
Lake Powell releases – California supports a policy of hydrology-based, flexible water releases that protects both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. Flexibility must be paired with appropriate risk-sharing across basins, avoiding disproportionate impacts to any one region.
Upper Initial Units (Colorado River Storage Project Act) – Releases should be made when needed to reduce water supply and power risks to both basins.
Shared contributions – The Lower Basin’s proposed 1.5 million acre-feet per year contribution to address the structural deficit, including an equitable share from Mexico (subject to binational negotiations), is the first enforceable offer on the table. When hydrology demands more, participation by all seven Basin States is essential.
Interstate exchanges – Interstate exchanges need to be part of any long-term solution to encourage interstate investments in new water supply projects that may not be economically viable for just one state or agency.
Operational flexibility – Continued ability to store water in Lake Mead is vital to maintain operational flexibility. California supports continuation and expansion of water storage in Lake Mead as a long-term feature of river management and to encourage conservation. We also support Upper Basin pools for conservation, allowing similar benefits.
Phasing of a long-term agreement – California supports a long-term operating agreement with adaptive phases. Tools like water storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell need to extend beyond any initial period due to significant investments required to store conserved water in the reservoirs.
Protections and federal support: Any agreement should be supported with federal funding and any necessary federal authorities, allow agriculture and urban areas to continue to thrive, protect tribal rights, and address the environment, including the environmentally sensitive Salton Sea.
“There are no easy choices left, but California has always done what is required to protect the river,” said Jessica Neuwerth, executive director of the Colorado River Board of California. “We have proven that conservation and growth can coexist. We have shown that reductions can be real, measurable, and durable. And we have demonstrated how states, tribes, cities, and farms can work together to build a sustainable future for the Colorado River.”
What California agencies are saying:
“The future of the Colorado River is vital to California – and our nation. As the fourth largest economy in the world, we rely on the Colorado River to support the water needs of millions of Californians and our agricultural community which feeds the rest of the nation. California is doing more with less, maintaining our economic growth while using less water in our urban and agricultural communities. We have cut our water use to its lowest levels in decades and are investing in diverse water supply infrastructure throughout California, doing our part to protect the Colorado River for generations to come. We look forward to continued discussions with our partners across the West to find the best path forward to keep the Colorado River healthy for all those who rely on it.” – Wade Crowfoot, Secretary, California Natural Resources
“Metropolitan’s story is one of collaboration, of finding common ground. We have forged partnerships across California and the Basin – with agriculture, urban agencies and tribes. And through that experience, we know that we can build a comprehensive Colorado River Agreement that includes all seven states and the country of Mexico. We must reach a consensus. That is the only option.” – Adán Ortega, Jr., Chair, Metropolitan Water District Board of Directors
“California’s leadership is grounded in results, and the Imperial Valley is proud to contribute to that record. Our growers have created one of the most efficient agricultural regions in the Basin—cutting use by over 20% while supporting a $3 billion farm economy that feeds America. Since 2003, IID has conserved more than nine million acre-feet, and with the Colorado River as our sole water supply, we remain firmly committed to constructive, collaborative solutions that protect America’s hardest-working river.” – Gina Dockstader, Chairwoman, Imperial Irrigation District
“The path to resiliency requires innovation, cooperation, and every Basin state’s commitment to conservation. The San Diego County Water Authority supports an approach that provides flexibility to adapt to changing climate conditions. That means developing a new framework that allows for interstate water transfers to move water where it’s most needed and incentivizes the development of new supplies for augmentation.” – CRB Vice Chair Jim Madaffer, San Diego County Water Authority
“Palo Verde Irrigation District is committed to maintaining a healthy, viable river system into the future. We at PVID have always gone above and beyond in supporting the river in times of need. Since 2023 our 95,000-acre valley, in collaboration with Metropolitan and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation have committed over 351,000 acre-feet of verifiable wet water to support the river system and Lake Mead. It is important to our stakeholders in the Palo Verde Valley and all of California that Colorado River water continues to meet the needs of both rural and urban areas. We must find workable solutions that keep food on people’s plates and water running thru the faucets of homes.” – Brad Robinson, Board President, Palo Verde Irrigation District
“California continues to lead in conservation and collaboration, setting the standard for innovation and sustainability. Together, we strive to ensure reliability for millions of people, tribes, and acres of farmland. For decades, CVWD has invested in conservation efficiency, alongside investments from growers. Additionally, we have saved more than 118,000 acre-feet of Colorado River water since 2022 — underscoring our shared commitment to long-term sustainability. CVWD remains dedicated to finding collaborative solutions to protect the river’s health and stability.” – Peter Nelson, Board Director, Coachella Valley Water District
“As stewards of the Colorado River since time immemorial, our Tribe is committed to protecting the river for the benefit of our people and all of the communities and ecosystems that rely on it. We believe partnerships and collaboration, such as our agreement with Metropolitan Water District and the Bureau of Reclamation to conserve over 50,000 acre-feet of our water in Lake Mead between 2023 and 2026, are essential to ensure that we have a truly living river.” – President Jonathan Koteen, Fort Yuma Quechan Indian Tribe
“Bard Water District remains committed to continued system conservation and responsible water management. While small in size, the District continues to make meaningful contributions to regional sustainability efforts on the Colorado River.” – Ray Face, Board President, Bard Water District
“LADWP is dedicated to delivering and managing a water supply that prioritizes resilience, high quality, and cost-effectiveness. These investments illustrate that achieving urban water resiliency is indeed feasible.” – Dave Pettijohn, Water Resources Director, Los Angeles Department of Water & Power
Water shooting out of Glen Canyon Dam’s river outlets — as opposed to the penstocks and hydroelectric turbines — in autumn 2025. The releases were part of the Cool Flow project that is intended to lower the temperature of the river downstream of the dam to protect native fish by disrupting non-native smallmouth bass spawning. The releases diminished hydroelectric output, forcing the Western Area Power Administration to spend over $25 million over two years to purchase replacement electricity on the open market. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
A new report from the Colorado River Research Group, aptly named “Dancing with Deadpool,” paints a grim picture of the critical artery of the Southwest. Reservoir and groundwater levels are perilously low, the 25-year megadrought is likely to persist — perhaps for decades, and the collective users of the river have yet to develop a workable plan for cutting consumption and balancing demand with the river’s dwindling supply.
Amid all the darkness however, the report also delivers a few glimmers of hope, noting that mechanisms do exist to avert a full-blown crisis, and that humans do have the power to slow or halt human-cased global heating, which is one of the main drivers of reduced flows in the river.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
Those reduced flows seem like a good place to start, since the Colorado River Basin is experiencing the very phenomenon that Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall write about in the second chapter, “Think Natural Flows Will Rebound in the Colorado River Basin? Think Again.”
Natural flows — which is a calculation of how much water would pass Lees Ferry without upstream human intervention — has trended downward since the mid-1980s. Even before that, however, the river rarely carried as much water as the drafters of the 1922 Colorado River Compact presumed it did. They based the Compact on a median flow of 20 million acre-feet. The 1906-2025 median flow has actually been just 14.3 MAF, while the most recent six-year average has been just over 10 MAF. Data source: Bureau of Reclamation.
The authors call the Southwest “megadrought country,” since tree rings and other sources show that severe, multi-decadal dry spells — like the one gripping the region currently — have occurred somewhat regularly over the last 2,000 years. The current drought, then, is likely a part of this natural climate variability.
But there’s a catch: The previous megadroughts most likely resulted from, primarily, a lack of precipitation. The current dry-spell is also due to lack of precipitation, but it is intensified by warming temperatures, which are the clear and direct result of climate change. They also find evidence that climate change may also be exacerbating the current climate deficit.
The takeaway is that even when we move through the current dry part of the cycle, the increasingly higher temperatures will offset some of the added precipitation and continue to diminish Colorado River flows. And, when the natural cycle comes back around to the drought side, it’s going to be even worse thanks to climate change.
Westwide SNOTEL basin-filled map December 16, 2025.
Water year 2026 is so far looking like an example of the former, with normal to above-normal precipitation accumulating, but as rain, not as snow, leaving much of the West with far below normal snowpack levels.
If the trend continues, it will not bode well for the Colorado River, according to the chapter written by Jack Schmidt, Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara. In an updated version of a paper they put out in September, they find that if water year 2026 (which we’re about 2.5 months into) is anything like water year 2025, Lake Powell is in trouble, and “low reservoir levels in summer 2026 will challenge water supply management, hydropower production, and environmental river management.”
The top water users on the Lower Colorado River Basin. Imperial Irrigation District in southern California once again tops the list. But it’s notable how much consumption they’ve cut since 2003; the IID is expected to use even less water in 2025. Nevada is broken out as a state here because of the way the accounting works. Nearly all of Nevada’s Colorado River allocation goes to Southern Nevada and the Las Vegas metro area. Data source: Bureau of Reclamation.
In order to avoid a full-blown crisis in the near-term, Colorado River users must significantly and quickly cut water consumption — independent of whatever agreement the states come up with for dividing the river’s dwindling waters after 2026.
While there is a long-running debate over whether the Upper Basin or the Lower Basin will have to bear the brunt of those cuts, the math makes it indisputable that the agricultural sector in both basins will have to pare down its collective consumption. That’s because irrigated agriculture accounts for about 74% of all direct human consumptive use on the River, or about three times more than municipal, commercial, and industrial uses.
Chart showing how water from the Colorado River is used. Source: “New accounting reveals why the Colorado River no longer reaches the sea,” by Brian Richter et al.
That’s why, in recent years, the feds and states have paid farmers to stop irrigating some crops and fallow their fields. While this method has achieved meaningful cuts in overall water use in those areas, it is in most cases not sustainable because the deals are temporary, and because they rely on iffy federal funding. So, in another of the report’s chapters, Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter offer a different proposal: The federal government should simply purchase land from willing sellers and stop irrigating it (or at least compensate landowners for agreeing to stop or curtail irrigation permanently).
They emphasize that this is not a “buy-and-dry” proposition, where a city buys out the water rights of farms to serve more development. That doesn’t actually save any water, since the city is still using it, and it wrecks farms and communities. Instead, this proposal would actually convert the farmland into public land, and put the water back into the river. This proposed program would target high-water-use, low economic-water-productivity land in situations where the water savings would benefit the environment and the land transfer would help local communities.
Even then, this would be disruptive, in that it would take land out of agriculture and potentially remove farms — and the farmers — from the community. There would also be the question of how to manage the freshly fallowed fields so that they don’t become weed-infested wastelands or sources of airborne, snow-melting dust.
In the following chapter, a quartet of authors suggests a slightly softer approach, in which farmers adapt to dwindling water amounts by shifting crops or to reduce cattle herd sizes or approaches.
The report concludes with a call for a basin-wide approach to managing the Colorado River, and the creation of an entity that would address Colorado River issues in a more comprehensive, transparent, and inclusive way. The current approach, which arbitrarily cuts the watershed in half along an imaginary line, pitting one set of states against another while excluding sovereign tribal nations, and trying to operate within an outdated framework known as the Law of the River, is an opaque mess that has thus far resulted only in gridlock.
The authors propose, instead:
And, finally, a little smidgeon of hope from the report’s second chapter, although it’s hard to be hopeful about reversing climate change in times like these and with a presidential administration intent on burning more and more fossil fuels …
Remote camera image of a wolf pup taken during the summer of 2025. Source: Colorado Parks & Wildlife.
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
The News:Colorado Parks and Wildlife last week thanked New Mexico wildlife officials for successfully capturing gray wolf 2403, a member of Colorado’s Copper Creek pack that had roamed over the state line. The wolf was re-released in Grand County, Colorado, where officials hope it will find a mate.
The Context: WTF!? Are these folks trying to bring an extirpated species back to a state similar to the one that existed before it was systematically slaughtered — i.e. the “natural” state — or are they running a zoo?
The CPW said that the wolf’s capture was in compliance with an agreement with bordering states that is purportedly intended to “protect the genetic integrity of the Mexican wolf recovery program, while also establishing a gray wolf population in Colorado.”
I’m no wildlife biologist, but it sure does seem to me that if a gray wolf from Colorado heads to New Mexico in search of a mate, as is their instinctual tendency, then that’s a good thing. And trying to confine the wolves to artificial and arbitrary political boundaries is counterproductive.
“Historically, gray wolf populations in western North America were contiguously distributed from northern arctic regions well into Mesoamerica as far south as present day Mexico City” explained David Parsons, former Mexican Wolf Recovery Coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in a written statement. “The exchange of genes kept gray wolf populations both genetically and physically healthy, enhancing their ability to adapt and evolve to environmental changes.” He added that 2403’s walkabout, along with that of “Taylor,” the Mexican gray wolf that has defied attempts to constrain him to southern New Mexico by traveling into the Mt. Taylor region, were “simply retracing ancient pathways of wolf movements. Rather than being viewed as a problem, these movements should be encouraged and celebrated as successful milestones toward west-wide gray wolf recovery efforts.”
Amen to that.
It’s clearly very tough to run a predator reintroduction program in the rural West, fraught as it is with political and cultural complications. And I respect and admire the folks that are running the project, and understand they are working within serious constraints. Still, there has to be a better way to let nature run its course.
Screenshot from Kestrel Kunz’s presentation at the CRWUA 2023 Annual Conference.
I’m in Las Vegas for the 2025 Colorado River Water Users Association annual conference! Follow along on the CRWUA Twitter (X) feed: https://x.com/CRWUA_water. Take a look back at our LinkedIn, blog, and Instagram posts from this year.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
December 15, 2025
The effort to permanently protect the historic Shoshone water rights gained additional momentum as two more west slope communities committed funding in their 2026 budgets toward the Colorado River District’s $99 million purchase agreement with Xcel Energy. The Town of Breckenridge has pledged $100,000, and the Town of Gypsum has committed $15,000, underscoring the importance of reliable Colorado River flows for communities from the headwaters to the state line and beyond.
By committing financial support for the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project, Breckenridge and Gypsum join a large and growing coalition of Western Slope partners working to safeguard flows that support local economies, healthy rivers, and long-term water security for Colorado.
Breckenridge circa 1913 via Breckenridge Resort
“The Shoshone water rights are a cornerstone of the Colorado River system and a critical part of protecting our quality of life in the high country,” said Breckenridge Mayor Kelly Owens. “Breckenridge is proud to stand with partners across the West Slope and headwaters region to keep water in the river, support our outdoor recreation economy, and protect this vital resource for generations to come.”
Town of Gypsum via Vail.net
“Look, in Gypsum we see it every single day, our local ranches, our jobs, our families all depend on the Eagle and the Colorado running strong and flowing,” said Gypsum Mayor Steve Carver. “Backing Shoshone just makes sense. It gives us some certainty when water gets tight. We’re happy to jump in with everybody else and keep that water right here on the Western Slope.”
The Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Coalition, led by the Colorado River District, now includes 35 local governments, water entities, and regional partners across the Western Slope, as well as support from across the state. Together, these partners have committed over $37.3 million toward the $99 million purchase price, in addition to state and federal investments to protect a critical piece of Colorado’s water security.
“Communities across the West Slope continue to step up together in a powerful way,” said Andy Mueller, general manager of the Colorado River District. “Support from Breckenridge and Gypsum reflects a shared understanding that Shoshone is about more than one community or region. It’s about working together to keep the Colorado River and its tributaries flowing for the environment, agriculture, recreation and local communities across Colorado that rely on this water.”
Shoshone Hydroelectric Plant back in the days before I-70 via Aspen Journalism
The Shoshone hydroelectric plant, located in Glenwood Canyon, holds nonconsumptive senior water rights that date back to 1902. These rights are essential for supporting flows in the Colorado River, benefiting agriculture, recreation, rural economies, and water users across the West Slope and beyond.
In December 2023, the Colorado River District entered a purchase and sale agreement with Xcel Energy to acquire and permanently protect the water rights, with plans to negotiate an instream flow agreement with the Colorado Water Conservation Board. This agreement would safeguard future flows, regardless of the Shoshone plant’s operational status.
In January 2025, the Bureau of Reclamation awarded $40 million in federal funding through a program authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act. The River District continues to work with the Bureau and remains optimistic that the project’s broad support and clear public benefit will secure the necessary federal funds to complete this once-in-a-generation investment.
Learn more about the Shoshone Water Rights Preservation Project & Coalition at KeepShoshoneFlowing.org.
The Colorado River Water Conservation District spans 15 Western Slope counties. Colorado River District/Courtesy image
Aldo Leopold, Colorado River delta, Baja California, Mexico Credit: Courtesy Aldo Leopold Foundation and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
December 15, 2025
Key Points
Seven states and 30 tribes that depend on the Colorado River are looking for ways to share a shrinking resource, but environmental groups fear little will be left for the river itself.
A wetlands at the end of the river and a fishery at its midpoint show what can happen when water is managed to preserve nature’s needs.
Growing demand on the river and competing interests, including electric power providers, could force negotiators for the states to confront difficult decisions.
CIÉNEGA DE SANTA CLARA, Mexico — The rusty observation tower at the edge of this wastewater-fed marsh offers an osprey-eye view of two possible futures for the parched and overworked Colorado River. To one side, the marsh spreads across more than 20 square miles of pools and islands choked with cattails and phragmites, convoys of pelicans descending and splashing down for a rest on their journey south from the Great Salt Lake or other western waters. Dragonflies hover below, while a fish hawk circles above, scanning the open water between the reeds. This is a vision of a future in which partners across the Western United States and Mexico save enough water that they can spare some for nature, even if it means irrigating it with the salty dregs. On the tower’s other side, boundless flats of sand and cracked mud spread to the horizon across what was, prior to the river’s damming a century ago, one of Earth’s great green estuaries.
Colorado River Dry Delta, terminus of the Colorado River in the Sonoran Desert of Baja California and Sonora, Mexico, ending about 5 miles north of the Sea of Cortez (Gulf of California). Date: 12 January 2009. Source http://gallery.usgs.gov/photos/10_15_2010_rvm8Pdc55J_10_15_2010_0#.Ur0mcvfTnrd. Photographer: Pete McBride, U.S. Geological Survey
Jennifer Pitt leaned against a rail atop the tower and scanned that dusty horizon. A century ago, she said, the river had meandered so widely and soaked so much verdant ground there that the naturalist Aldo Leopold had written in “A Sand County Almanac” that “the river was nowhere and everywhere,” unable to “decide which of a hundred green lagoons offered the most pleasant and least speedy path to the Gulf (of California).”
Now the Grand River’s delta supports just a handful of green lagoons, all fed either by wastewater or by targeted environmental irrigation. Pitt leads the Audubon Society’s Colorado River program. She has toiled for decades alongside American and Mexican conservationists to rebuild slivers of living delta from what’s left of the water after dams, farm ditches and growing cities divert most of the great river along its 1,450-mile route from the Rocky Mountains toward its dry mouth on the Sea of Cortez near here. A century ago, the river would have wandered a soaked delta teeming with birds, jaguars and legendary biodiversity. Now, a wastewater marsh must do the ecological heavy lifting.
Jennifer Pitt and Brad Udall at the Getches-Wilkinson Center/Water and Tribes Initiative conference June 5, 2025. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
“If we can’t prioritize taking care of a place like this, I fear for our ability to take care of ourselves,” Pitt said.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
The next few months will be a turning point in efforts to preserve a measure of nature here and across the river’s length, as the seven U.S. states that split the bulk of the water struggle to reach a new deal among themselves that could also determine how much water is available to nurse a remnant of the river’s own environment. Federal officials have said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is prepared to impose his own cuts if the states can’t reach their own deal, and have said they need a negotiated plan by late winter to avoid that outcome. More than two decades of “megadrought,” unprecedented in U.S. history, have left little wiggle room for year-to-year operations. Reservoirs that were near their 58.48 million-acre-foot capacity in 2000 began the 2026 water year on Oct. 1, with just 21.8 million acre-feet behind the dams. Each acre-foot contains about 326,000 gallons and is roughly enough to support three households for a year, though the bulk of the water flows to the region’s farms.
Jennifer Pitt, the National Audubon Society’s Colorado River program director, paddles a kayak through a restoration site. (Source: Jesus Salazar, Raise the River)
The rhetoric of the so-called sagebrush rebels, members of the Wise-Use movement, the anti-federal land management crowd, public lands ranchers, and the like gives a certain impression: They are salt-of-the-earth folks who are just trying to eke out a meagre living and feed the nation from the hostile land of the Western U.S., and they are doing battle with the coastal elites and moneyed environmentalists who have the federal bureaucrats in their pockets.
There are certainly instances in which this holds true, when a rancher can’t afford pasture of their own, so they rely on the public lands, the public forage, and the taxpayer-subsidized fees to stay afloat. But just as often, these “cowboys” are actually millionaires — sometimes even billionaires — who are accumulating even more cash with the help of the American taxpayers. (And sometimes the public land ranchers and the moneyed environmentalists are one and the same).
Two recent pieces from the folks over at Public Domain — which is run by long-time public lands reporters Jimmy Tobias and Chris D’Angelo — shed more light on this phenomenon. Tobias and ProPublica’s Mark Olalde looked into how ultra-wealthy ranch-owners were benefitting from absurdly low federal grazing fees for High Country News. When you get a chance, check it out.
And it turns out one of those millionaires is high-ranking Interior Department official Karen Budd-Falen. Public Domain managed to pry her financial disclosure from the Trump administration and they posted it online. The Land Desk dove into it and followed a few segues to find not only that Budd-Falen and her husband Frank have done quite well for themselves, amassing large amounts of acreage in the process, but that their ranches have also benefitted from federal subsidies — even as they battled the federal government.
As Land Desk readers are likely aware, Wyoming attorney Budd-Falen built a career fighting federal and state land management agencies on behalf of sagebrush rebels and members of the Wise-Use movement. She and her husband, Frank Falen, once argued that a public lands grazing permit actually conveyed a “private property right” protected by the Constitution. She described land-management agencies as part of “a dictatorship” and in the 1990s helped draft a New Mexico county’s resolution declaring that federal and state land-management officials “threaten the life, liberty, and happiness of the people of Catron County … and present danger to the land and livelihood of every man, woman, and child.”
But Budd-Falen has also been a part of the federal land-management bureaucracy. She worked in Ronald Reagan’s Interior Department under James Watt, and then signed on as deputy Interior solicitor for wildlife and parks under the first Trump administration. Now she is the department’s associate deputy secretary, which gives her plenty of power and influence without the need to be confirmed by the Senate. Notably, she headed up a closed-door meeting early this month aimed at giving Utah more sway over national park management.
The financial disclosure, which is missing the usual signature from an Interior ethics official to verify it is in compliance with the law, shows that Budd-Falen’s firm — which is now owned entirely by her husband — continues to represent clients that her department may regulate. She holds stock in oil and gas companies that operate on public land. And she and her husband own millions of dollars worth of land in Nevada and Wyoming.
Here’s a rundown of their land-holdings, per the disclosure:
A ranch in Big Piney, Wyoming, valued between $1 million and $5 million, leased out to a 3rd party for between $50,000 and $100,000 annually. Karen Budd-Falen owns this several-thousand-acre spread with her siblings and says they reinvest the proceeds back into the property
Home Ranch LLC in Orovada and UC Cattle Company LLC in McDermitt, Nevada, each valued at over $1 million, and each with a livestock operation that brings in over $1 million in income annually. Together, Home Ranch and UC Cattle Company cover about 11,740 acres in northwestern Nevada.
The ranches were previously owned by Frank’s parents, John and Sharon Falen. The late John Falen, who once leased nearly 300,000 acres of public land for grazing, was featured in a 1991 Newsweek story titled “The War for the West” due to his conflict with the BLM for requiring him to fence off streams that provided habitat for imperiled Lahontan cutthroat trout. “I never figured I’d be fighting my own government to defend my way of life,” he told the reporter.
But they also relied pretty heavily on the feds for their livelihood. Not only did they pay well below-market rates for grazing on public land, but the elder Falens’ livestock operation received over $1.3 million in USDA subsidies between 1995 and 2015, according to the EWG Farm Subsidy Database.
Home Ranch LLC in Nevada received an additional $580,000 in federal farm subsidies between 2016 and 2024, while Home Ranch LLC and UC Cattle Company — both registered by Frank Falen at the Budd-Falen law office’s address in Cheyenne — received yet another $871,000 from 2022-2024.
Both Home Ranch and UC Cattle are listed as grazing permittees under the BLM’s Humboldt River Field Office. And in 2020, Home Ranch applied for a grazing permit renewal on the 106,000-acre Jordan Meadows allotment, but after a rangeland health analysis found that several categories did not meet standards, the process was canceled. Currently the allotment is listed as active and permitted for 11,720 animal unit-months, with 8,939 suspended AUMS.
L-F Enterprises LLC, a cattle operation and rentals, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, valued at $1 million to $5 million that brings in between $100,000 and $1 million annually. A note on the disclosure says Budd-Falen is a “passive” owner of this entity.
Divide Ranch, a cattle operation covering about 2,800 acres in Wheatland, Wyoming, valued at $1 million to $5 million. There is a lot of loopy stuff in this disclosure: This one has a footnote that says L-F Enterprises grazes cattle on land owned by Divide Ranch, meaning the Budd-Falens are leasing land from themselves.
Five residential properties in Cheyenne and Laramie, Wyoming, each valued between $250,000 and $500,000 that together bring in a rental income of between $50,000 and $165,000 annually.
Two commercial properties in Cheyenne, each valued between $500,000 and $1 million, that together bring in between $115,000 and $1.1 million annually.
And then there are the stocks:
Budd-Falen has held between $15,000 and $50,000 worth of shares in Enterprise Products Partners L.P. That’s the midstream oil and gas company that owns and operates the pipeline that spilled about 97,000 gallons of gasoline near Durango, Colorado, last December. The spill contaminated groundwater, forced people to move out of their homes, and is still being cleaned up — recently the EPA joined the effort.
And she held between $15,000 and $50,000 shares in Exxon Mobil Corp., the oil and gas giant that drills on the same public lands Budd-Falen oversees.
I know it’s cliche, but I can’t help but think that this is yet another example of the foxes guarding the henhouse, something that the Trump administration seems to specialize in.
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
The Big Data Center Buildup continues, with larger and larger projects put on the table every day, many in places that one wouldn’t expect. This has sparked a backlash of growing intensity, both among those worried about the centers’ electricity and water consumption, and those who see AI — which is driving much of the growth — as a threat.
This week, a group of more than 200 environmental, social justice, and consumer organizations sent a letter to Congress calling for a nationwide ban on new data centers. It says, in part:
Given the Trump administration’s fondness for AI, and donations from Big Tech, I don’t see the GOP-dominated Congress acting on this.
More news tidbits:
As if to verify the opposition groups’ concerns, the developers of the massive proposed Project Jupiter data center complex near Santa Teresa, New Mexico, recentlyy asked state regulators for permission to generate more power than the state’s largest utility and emit more greenhouse gases than both Albuquerque and Las Cruces combined, according to a Source NMreport. The latter figure was so high that many observers assumed it was a typo. But then, given its purported size — developers say the complex will cost $165 billion — and ginormous energy consumption, fueled by methane, it surely will emit a lot of carbon, typo or not.
Then there’s Beale Infrastructure’s Project Blue, the hyperscale data center planned for 290 acres outside of Tucson that was originally slated to be occupied and operated by Amazon Web Services. From the outset, it has run into stiff local opposition, nixing plans to annex it into Tucson so it could use recycled wastewater for cooling. The developers shifted gears, saying they would use air-cooling instead to save water in the very water-constrained area. But that was a no-go for Amazon, which pulled out of the deal last week. Beale says other tenants have lined up in the tech giant’s stead. Meanwhile, the Arizona Corporation Commission approved the data center’s power purchase deal with Tucson Electric Power.
And in the places-you-wouldn’t-expect-a-data-center beat: An obscure UK-based developer has proposed building a $10-billion, 1-gigawatt data center on 500 acres of land it plans to purchase from the city of Page, Arizona.
The purple dot in the green grid marks the approximate location of the proposed data center in Page, Arizona. Local opposition is growing, based on power use, water use, noise, and proximity to Horseshoe Bend.
Details remain sketchy: It’s not clear who, exactly, the developer is; a land-purchase agreement indicates the data center might generate its own power, but no fuel source is listed — and 1 GW is the capacity of a big coal or natural gas plant; they plan to “acquire, develop, construct, and use water in a sufficient quantity and quality to continuously serve the Data Center and Energy Project,” yet don’t say where they would get this water; and the developer said the project would create 500 permanent jobs, which is a rather large staff to oversee a bunch of computer processing units. A majority of the city council has supported the $7 million land sale, which is contingent on a successful feasibility study, and the attendant tax revenues and jobs. That is not a surprise given the economic blow dealt by Navajo Generating Station’s 2019 closure and lower visitor numbers at Lake Powell and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area. But local opposition is growing and may derail the plans — if the lack of water doesn’t.
A shuttered uranium mine and its waste dump just below the burn scar left by the July 2025 Deer Creek Fire near old La Sal, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Another uranium project is coming to the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah, though this one is a bit unconventional. Last month, Mandrake Resources signed onwith Disa technologies to use its “high-pressure slurry ablation,” or HPSA, technology to “recover saleable uranium and other critical minerals” from old mining waste piles on Mandrake’s 94,000 project area south of La Sal.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s environmental review of the Disa’s proposal to remediate abandoned mine dumps with HPSA describes the technology as involving …
Because the process is separating uranium and thorium fines from ore, it is considered a form of milling, not mining. And that’s an important distinction, because when you mill uranium ore, you leave behind mill tailings, which must be disposed of according to NRC and Environmental Protection Agency standards. Instead, the “coarse material,” as the waste is described, would be reintegrated into the mine site — even though it may contain radioactive and other harmful materials.
Nevertheless, the NRC granted Disa a license to use HPSA to remediate waste rock at abandoned uranium mines. “The NRC failed to define and regulate the wastes that would be produced by the HPSA process at former uranium mine sites in accordance with the Atomic Energy Act and NRC and EPA regulations applicable to the wastes from the processing of any ore for its uranium content,” said Sarah Fields, of Uranium Watch.
Also of concern is water use: Disa says it would obtain water from offsite, trucking it in at volumes between 10,000 and 40,000 gallons daily. Most likely this would come from a nearby municipal water supply, but it’s not clear which municipality that would be for the Mandrake/Lisbon Valley project.
Mandrake originally acquired and staked hundreds of mining claims on federal and state lands in the Lisbon Valley to extract lithium. But when its drilling samples showed high levels of uranium — and when lithium prices crashed — the Australian company switched gears, or perhaps just broadened their scope. The firm’s website still refers to the land-holdings as its “Utah Lithium Project.”
🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭
This is a pretty cool tool released by the U.S. Census Bureau a little while back. It shows how many housing units were added (or lost), along with the percent change, from each state, county, town, and even census tract between 2020 and 2025. Assuming it’s accurate, it could really help inform discussions about housing supply and demand, about the drivers of the housing affordability crisis, and whether land-use regulations and NIMBYism are really shutting down housing construction.
Check it out here and play around with it a little. Here are some screenshots of more detailed views of Phoenix and Durango.
Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News
Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Naveena Sadasivam):
December 12, 2025
While the U.S. sits in self-imposed isolation, the rest of the world, led by China, raced ahead to invest in renewables and commit to climate action
As the year comes to a close, 2025 looks like a turning point in the world’s fight against climate change. Most conspicuously, it was the year the U.S. abandoned the effort. The Trump administration pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement, which unites virtually all the world’s countries in a voluntary commitment to halt climate change. And for the first time in the 30-year history of the U.N.’s international climate talks, the U.S. did not send a delegation to the annual conference, COP30, which took place in Belém, Brazil.
The Trump administration’s assault on climate action has been far from symbolic. Over the summer, the president pressed his Republican majority in Congress to gut a Biden-era law that was projected to cut U.S. emissions by roughly a third compared to their peak, putting the country within reach of its Paris Agreement commitments. In the fall, Trump officials used hardball negotiating tactics to stall, if not outright derail, a relatively uncontroversial international plan to decarbonize the heavily polluting global shipping industry. And even though no other country has played a larger role in causing climate change, the U.S. under Trump has cut the vast majority of global climate aid funding, which is intended to help countries that are in the crosshairs of climate change despite doing virtually nothing to cause it.
It may come as no surprise, then, that other world leaders took barely veiled swipes at Trump at the COP30 climate talks last month. Christiana Figueres, a key architect of the 2015 Paris Agreement and a longtime Costa Rican diplomat, summed up a common sentiment.
“Ciao, bambino! You want to leave, leave,” she said before a crowd of reporters, using an Italian phrase that translates “bye-bye, little boy.”
These stark shifts in the U.S. position on climate change, which President Donald Trump has called a “hoax” and “con job,” are only the latest and most visible signs of a deeper shift underway. Historically, the U.S. and other wealthy, high-emitting nations have been cast as the primary drivers of climate action, both because of their outsize responsibility for the crisis and because of the greater resources at their disposal. Over the past decade, however, the hopes that developed countries will prioritize financing both the global energy transition and adaptation measures to protect the world’s most vulnerable countries have been dashed — in part by rightward lurches in domestic politics, external crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and revolts by wealthy-country voters over cost-of-living concerns.
The resulting message to developing countries has been unmistakable: Help is not on the way.
In the vacuum left behind, a different engine of global climate action has emerged, one not political or diplomatic but industrial. A growing marketplace of green technologies — primarily solar, wind, and batteries — has made the adoption of renewable energy far faster and more cost-effective than almost anyone predicted. The world has dramatically exceeded expectations for solar power generation in particular, producing roughly 8 times more last yearthan in 2015, when the Paris Agreement was signed.
China is largely responsible for the breakneck pace of clean energy growth. It now produces about 60 percent of the world’s wind turbines and 80 percent of solar panels. In the first half of 2025, the country added more than twice as much new solar capacity as the rest of the world combined. As a result of these Chinese-led global energy market changes and other countries’ Paris Agreement pledges, the world is now on a path to see 2.3 to 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.1 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming by 2100, compared to preindustrial temperatures, far lower than the roughly 5 degrees C (9 degrees F) projections expected just 10 years ago.
These policies can be viewed as a symbol of global cooperation on climate change, but for Chinese leadership, the motivation is primarily economic. That, experts say, may be why they’re working. China’s policies are driving much of the rest of the world’s renewable energy growth. As the cost of solar panels and wind turbines drops year over year, it is enabling other countries, especially in the Global South, to choose cleaner sources of electricity over fossil fuels — and also to purchase some of the world’s cheapest mass-produced electric vehicles. Pakistan, Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, and Malaysia are all expected to see massive increases in solar deployment in the next few years, thanks to their partnerships with Chinese firms.
“China is going to, over time, create a new narrative and be a much more important driver for global climate action,” said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute. Shuo said that the politics-and-rhetoric-driven approach to solving climate change favored by wealthy countries has proved unreliable and largely failed. In its place, a Chinese-style approach that aligns countries’ economic agendas with decarbonizationwill prove to be more successful, he predicted.
Meanwhile, many countries have begun reorganizing their diplomatic and economic relationships in ways that no longer assume American leadership. That shift accelerated this year in part due to Trump’s decisions to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, to impose tariffs on U.S. allies, and more broadly, to slink away into self-imposed isolation. European countries facing punishing tariffs have looked to deepen trade relationships with China, Japan, and otherAsian countries. The EU’s new carbon border tax, which applies levies to imports from outside the bloc, will take effect in January. The move was once expected to trigger conflict between the EU and U.S., but is now proceeding without outright support — or strong opposition — from the Trump administration.
African countries, too, are asserting leadership. The continent hosted its own climate summit earlier this year, pledging to raise $50 billion to promote at least 1,000 locally led solutions in energy, agriculture, water, transport, and resilience by 2030. “The continent has moved the conversation from crisis to opportunity, from aid to investment, and from external prescription to African-led,” said Mahamoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission. “We have embraced the powerful truth [that] Africa is not a passive recipient of climate solutions, but the actor and architect of these solutions.”
The U.S. void has also allowed China to throw more weight around in international climate negotiations. Although Chinese leadership remained cautious and reserved in the negotiation halls in Belém, the country pushed its agenda on one issue in particular: trade. Since China has invested heavily in renewable energy technology, tariffs on its products could hinder not only its own economic growth but also the world’s energy transition. As a result the final agreement at COP30, which like all other United Nations climate agreements is ultimately non-binding, included language stipulating that unilateral trade measures like tariffs “should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade.”
Calling out tariffs on the first page of the final decision at COP30 would not have been possible if negotiators for the United States had been present, according to Shuo. “China was able to force this issue on the agenda,” he said.
But Shuo added that other countries are still feeling the gravitational pull of U.S. policies, even as the Trump administration sat out climate talks this year. In Belém last month, the United States’ opposition to the International Maritime Organization’s carbon framework influenced conversations about structuring rules for decarbonizing the shipping industry. And knowing that the U.S. wouldn’t contribute to aid funds shaped climate finance agreements.
In the years to come, though, those pressures may very well fade. As the world pivots in response to a U.S. absence, it may find it has more to gain than expected.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 12, 2025
New ‘book’ explores the evolving thoughts about an increasingly dire situation
To put that into perspective, the Colorado River Compact assumed an average 16.5 million acre-feet at that site, Lees Ferry. The river this century has produced far less. Since 2020, the river flows have declined even more, to an average of 10.8.
September 21, 1923, 9:00 a.m. — Colorado River at Lees Ferry. From right bank on line with Klohr’s house and gage house. Old “Dugway” or inclined gage shows to left of gage house. Gage height 11.05′, discharge 27,000 cfs. Lens 16, time =1/25, camera supported. Photo by G.C. Stevens of the USGS. Source: 1921-1937 Surface Water Records File, Colorado R. @ Lees Ferry, Laguna Niguel Federal Records Center, Accession No. 57-78-0006, Box 2 of 2 , Location No. MB053635.
Might it get worse?
“Dancing With Deadpool,” a new product from the Colorado River Research Group, delivers the short answer.
“Another year or two of low inflows and we will completely blow through the cushions provided by reservoir storage,” says the document’s executive summary. The word “crisis” litters the 64-page production. It has eight chapters written by 22 authors from Colorado and three other Colorado River Basin states.
The Colorado River has fascinated journalists since at least the 1980s. Then, the river was still delivering water to Mexico’s Sea of Cortez but troubles were evident on the horizon. The river now, except for specially engineered releases from upstream dams, disappears entirely after crossing into Mexico.
Since 2022, the Colorado River had become a national story. Empty seats at the annual Colorado River Water Users Association conference in Las Vegas have disappeared, press credentials harder to secure.
The tension even in the last year has grown. The river runoff this year was only 55% of long-term average. The seven basin states remain at an impasse about solutions proportionate to the problem.
“We have now entered a new era: Dancing with Deadpool,” says the report.
Deadpool is the point at which reservoirs can release no water. In 2022, that moment seemed imminent as sandstone walls of Glen Canyon were exposed directly to sunlight after being submerged since shortly after Lake Powell began filling. Then a miracle winter arrived, water levels in the two big reservoirs, Powell and Mead, rose once again, the emergency receded.
Now the crisis is back — and looming larger.
You can scare yourself to death with what-ifs, but we may need something akin to a miracle to avoid full-blown crisis. We cannot have another winter and then runoff like 2002-2003. Or, as several authors point out, runoff like we had in 2025.
As it is, we need another miracle winter, something akin to what diehard Denver Broncos fans remember as “the drive” in a 1987 playoff game. John Elway led his football team 98 yards down the field in Cleveland to tie the game with 37 seconds left. They won in OT.
Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck warn against too much optimism. Mother Nature can be stingy. She has been in the past, with one drought period as long as 80 years during the last 2,000 years. Now, the evidence grows that our monkeying with Mother Nature has produced this drought.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2025. Note the tiny points on the annual data so that you can flyspeck the individual years. Credit: Brad Udall
In 2017, Udall and Overpeck issued the results of their study that showed that warming alone was responsible for roughly half of the reduced natural flows of the Colorado River, at that point 17%. They delivered a new phrase: “hot drought” as distinguished from “dry drought.” The warmer temperatures were robbing the Colorado River Basin of water.
Precipitation in the basin has also declined 7% in the 21st century, as compared to the 20th century. In their chapter, Udall from Colorado State and Overpeck now at the University of Michigan (but with a summer cabin in San Miguel County), cite two new studies that together provide evidence “suggesting” complicity of humans. Greenhouse gases explain the declined precipitation, too.
As science is never 100%, Udall and Overpeck use cautious language. The studies, they say, “strongly suggest we are in for extended dry periods in the Colorado headwaters in the decades ahead.”
If there is less water, then isn’t the solution simple? Use less!
Easy to say. And for the last 20 years, efforts have been made to nibble away at uses. Cities have been working to make less water-intensive urban landscapes popular. But the far larger story lies in agriculture.
In Colorado and the three upper basin states, for example, about 70% of all the Colorado River water (after trans-basin diversions for irrigation are accounted for) goes to agriculture. How can ag use less water?
Two of the chapters work on this. A trio of academics from Wyoming and one from Colorado take aim specifically at the upper basin states. “The relevant questions are not whether or when cuts will happen, but how deep will they go, how will they be distributed, and how well can the consequences be mitigated?” they ask.
The four upper-basin researchers argue that evidence already exists for success. With creativity and collaboration, they say, farmers and ranchers can sustain crop and livestock production even as water becomes scarce. They get into the details, talking about adjustments of cow-calf operation, for example, to reduce water-dependent needs. They call for more research into limited irrigation, crop switching and other practices.
Two other academics, both from Arizona State, take a somewhat broader view, acknowledging the challenge.
“In a landscape of poor choices, in a failing river system in which all solutions are deeply unpopular to some or other powerful constituency, potentially harmful to one community or another or inordinately expensive and founded on unreliable funding, it is at least worth considering another option,” write Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter.
They see cuts of up to 4 million acre-feet in the basin annually being necessary. Again, that’s about 25% of what those who created the Colorado River Compact expected would be annual flows for the seven basin states.
How to get there? They introduce a new concept, “economic water productivity,” a measure of the value of water. Instead of buy and dry programs, they see need for a federally financed effort to pivot uses through incentives to reduce water use on those agricultural lands.
Similar buy-down of high-volume irrigated agriculture is underway in two groundwater depletion areas in Colorado, the San Luis Valley and the Republican River Basin. Some federal money is providing help in the latter basin. They contend federal money will be needed, and lots of it, to pay for this big pivot in the Colorado River Basin. That, they say, would be fitting, because it was federal money that financed the infrastructure for this hydraulic empire.
GRACE TWS trend map. (a) The time series of nonseasonal GRACE/FO TWS (km3/year) over UCRB and LCRB for the period (4/2002–10/2024). (b) Spatial variation in TWS trends for the Colorado River Basin for the investigated period (mm/year) (c) Time series comparison of the change in storage ΔS/Δt derived from the water balance equation (Equation 1) and GRACE/FO. ΔS/Δt calculated from GRACE/FO TWS anomalies in km3. The light shading represents uncertainties.
As for groundwater, that part of the Colorado River story has been generally overlooked. A study released several months ago found that nearly two-thirds of storage — both surface and groundwater — lost from 2002 to 2024 in the Colorado River actually came from groundwater depletion, mostly in Arizona.
Whoa!
“Simply shifting unsustainable surface water uses to unsustainable groundwater uses does nothing to address the core mismatch of supplies and demands,” observes Doug Kenney, who directs the Western Water Policy Program at University of Colorado Law School.
Other contributors dissect the complexities of what would seem to be simple, common sense solutions. For example, Eric Kuhn, the former general manager of the Colorado River District, works through the concept of water sharing among the states based on a percentage basis. The Colorado River Compact divides water between the upper and lower basins, a mistake in retrospect although even in 1922, when it was adopted, there had been an argument for using a percentage.
Later, when the upper-basin sates adopted a compact among themselves, they did use a percentage basis.
Kuhn goes deep into the history, as he has done with book-writing (“Science be Dammed,” 2019, with John Fleck) to sort through the thinking of this idea over the last century. It came up again earlier this year as the seven basin states tried to figure out how to share the river given the changed realities. The states, however, could not agree on what percentages should be used for sharing. It may have been just too much of a transformational change for some states to accept, he says.
However, the idea may come back if the stalemate between the upper and lower basins of the Colorado River ends up in the federal courts. Or failing that, what exactly would federal intervention look like? That’s an impolite question, but one of those what-ifs that must be wondered about. (For the record, the water people I know seem to have high regard for people in the Department of Interior in charge of looking after the Colorado River).
The large story here is that the states, with enormous aid from the federal treasury, created the infrastructure and expectations of water that no longer exists and, as per the studies of scientists, will almost certainly not return within the lifetimes of any of us. What, then, should be the federal role in defining the future balance? Once again, might the dismantling of Glen Canyon Dam be such a wild idea after all?
Thoughts in this book will likely be part of the conversations next week in Las Vegas when representatives of the seven basin states gather, as they always do, at the Colorado River Water Uses Association conference. Might a hallway conversation lead to a breakthrough?
Like huge snowstorms in the Rockies and then cool temperatures during runoff, there might be miracles, but I wouldn’t count on it. This deadpool dance might end sooner than anybody actually likes.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Graphic credit: Colorado River Research Group from the report “Dancing with Deadpool”
Click the link to access the report Dancing with Deadpool on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Doug Kenney1):
The rapid loss of storage in Lakes Mead and Powell is certainly deserving of the attention and angst it has generated and continues to generate, but it is the tip of larger trends altering the landscape of risk in the basin. The dismantling of many other “safety nets,” defined broadly, is happening at a pace far surpassing the already unprecedented declines in reservoir storage. Presumably that’s not an immediate problem if new post-2026 rules are able to recover and protect storage in Mead and Powell (and some of the other upstream facilities), but does anyone have that much faith in the power of new reservoir operating rules to combat the forces that have brought us to this point? What about when we have a 10 million acre-feet/year river?
GRACE TWS trend map. (a) The time series of nonseasonal GRACE/FO TWS (km3/year) over UCRB and LCRB for the period (4/2002–10/2024). (b) Spatial variation in TWS trends for the Colorado River Basin for the investigated period (mm/year) (c) Time series comparison of the change in storage ΔS/Δt derived from the water balance equation (Equation 1) and GRACE/FO. ΔS/Δt calculated from GRACE/FO TWS anomalies in km3. The light shading represents uncertainties.
From Groundwater to Governance
Perhaps the most obvious of those other diminishing safety nets is groundwater. Data on groundwater reserves throughout the basin is spotty at best. One approximation of a truly regional assessment comes from a creative use of satellite-based tools—namely NASA’s GRACE (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) system that can detect tiny changes in gravitational forces associated with the fluctuating mass of aquifers losing (or gaining) storage. Those findings paint a truly disturbing picture. Despite the familiar (and troubling) images of bathtub rings emerging at Mead and Powell, researchers using GRACE data now estimate that, from 2002 to 2024, nearly two-thirds of storage—both surface and groundwater—lost in the Colorado River Basin actually came from groundwater depletions.2 Significant groundwater losses have occurred throughout the basin, but the problem is particularly acute in Arizona and is likely to accelerate as shortages in Central Arizona Project (CAP) deliveries are likely offset by groundwater pumping—an ironic outcome given that CAP was originally proposed as the solution to groundwater mining in the region. Simply shifting unsustainable surface water uses to unsustainable groundwater uses does nothing to address the core mismatch of supplies and demands.
A very different and multi-faceted trend undercutting the regional safety nets is happening within the federal government, where federal agencies, programs and science programs are being systematically dismantled under the guise of “efficiency.” It’s hard to understate the significance of these actions, as it is the federal government that, presumably, has the scope, mandate and resources to oversee the entirety of the River and the full diversity of its roles and values. Interior Department agencies in 2025, like much of the overall federal bureaucracy, have been tasked to achieve significant staffing reductions, and to eliminate (or significantly scale back) spending on key water conservation programs—including programs under the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and WaterSMART.3
Additionally, agencies across the federal landscape have mobilized to coerce and shut down climate-related science and scientists, despite the nearly universal acknowledgment among water managers of the central role of climate change in the unfolding crisis.4 Collectively these efforts constitute a systematic effort to discredit and hide the primary cause of the broken water budget, while sabotaging the most effective coping mechanisms available. As members of the research community, the Colorado River Research Group (CRRG)unfortunately has a front-row seat to this culling of the people and programs essential to long-term data collection and analysis. It defies logic, and is dangerous.
Unfortunately, hostility toward the people and programs essential to responding to the Colorado River crisis is not the full extent of federal obstruction. One largely unappreciated threat to the water budget resulting from federal policy shifts comes from efforts to “re-carbonize” (and accelerate) water-intensive energy generation, in part to meet the demands of AI, a particularly troubling trend given that the previous emphasis on renewable energy generation and enhanced energy conservation was one of the few positive trends working to repair the regional water budget.5 Attempts to weaken or dismantle bedrock environmental laws, such as NEPA and the Endangered Species Act, are an additional wildcard likely to inflict irreparable harm on already strained species and ecosystems.6
Given the turmoil at the federal level, it’s tempting to absolve the States for stubbornly clinging to a policy making system reliant on 7-state dealmaking, but that would ignore the reality that the governance of the river has been a problem for decades. A seemingly never-ending series of crisis-inspired negotiations, held in largely secretive forums without direct tribal involvement or tools for meaningful public or scientific engagement, is an uninspired way to manage and protect the economic, cultural and environmental heart of the American Southwest. The river is too big and too important to govern in such an ad hoc and primitive manner. [ed. emphasis mine]
That this approach mostly ”worked” to keep deliveries flowing for so long—except, of course, for the tribes and the environment—rested, in part, on the accepted norm that decisions would emerge collaboratively from the States and would not spill over to the federal courts. But even that governance safety net is eroding, as the States seem to be increasingly resigned—and almost “comfortable”—with the notion that the resolution of existing conflicts may not emerge from a negotiated 7-state agreement. For those parties and viewpoints that have historically been left out of the state-dominated processes and the resulting agreements, then maybe this prospect is welcome. But all would concede that would be a stunning outcome with ramifications that are difficult to predict.
Ever since the Arizona v. California experience, the use of litigation to resolve interstate (and/or interbasin) conflicts in the basin has been a third rail issue, and for very good reasons. As shown by the basin’s earlier foray into Supreme Court action, the process would undoubtedly be lengthy, expensive, and likely to create as many issues and questions as it resolves. It certainly wouldn’t reduce risk, as the states, and the water management community more broadly, would lose control over the process of managing the shared resource. In fact, judicial intervention might be the impetus to trigger yet another traditionally feared decision pathway to be invoked—a Congressional rewrite of river allocation and management—either before or after the litigation concludes. In this setting, the extreme disparity in political influence—as measured by the number of Congressional representatives—between the Upper and Lower Basin is an obvious concern, as is the realization that congressional involvement means the future of the Colorado now becomes a national issue and, potentially, a bargaining chip to be used in the political logrolling necessary to enact legislation in dozens of otherwise unrelated areas.
Screenshot from Kestrel Kunz’s presentation at the CRWUA 2023 Annual Conference.
Rowing in the Wrong Direction
Managing water in the arid and semi-arid West is often more about risk than water. From the seniority concept in prior appropriation to the sizing of infrastructure based on low probability events, the goal of water management is often to clearly define and then minimize the risks of running out. Given that, you’d think that the communities dependent upon Colorado River water would be more committed to protecting (and enhancing) the safety nets that are increasingly critical as storage in Lakes Mead and Powell—the basin’s primary risk management tools—increasingly flirt with deadpool. But at the basin scale, that’s typically not what I see. Sure, individual water managers serving major cities or districts have their own risk management plans focusing on everything from new infrastructure to market solutions, but that’s far from a comprehensive or integrated approach, and safety nets designed by and for the “established players” only deepen the inequities that increasingly divide the Colorado River community.
There’s a lot of work left to do in this basin, both prior and after the 2026 deadline. Viewing the problems through the lens of risk management is not a bad place to start. But if doing so, it’s also not a bad idea to remember that poor risk management often comes at expense of diminished equity—an indispensable element of an equitable apportionment. Numerous examples around the world remind us that water scarcity can be the impetus for joint problem-solving in a spirit of camaraderie and mutual support, or it can sharpen and refine alliances that further distance the powerful from the weak. In this regard, I’m inclined to think we are rowing in the wrong direction. ●
Footnotes
1 Director, Western Water Policy Program, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School; and Chair, Colorado River Research Group.
2 Abdelmohsen, K., Famiglietti, J. S., Ao, Y. Z., Mohajer, B., & Chandanpurkar, H. A. (2025). Declining freshwater availability in the Colorado River basin threatens sustainability of its critical groundwater supplies. Geophysical Research Letters, 52, e2025GL115593. https://doi.org/10.1029/2025GL115593.
3 Finding accurate data on federal workforce reductions is challenging; see Competing numbers emerge on federal workforce reductions. Between “incentivized retirements,” RIF (reduction in force) layoffs, recently resumed terminations of employees losing court-ordered protections, remaining planned cuts, and the ongoing hiring freeze, the total workforce of the Department of Interior could drop by over a third in 2025. The Interior Department is taking steps to implement layoffs – Government Executive. Similarly, data on efforts to reduce agency budgets is difficult to compile, particularly given the complex back and forth between the administration, Congress, and, increasingly, the courts. The President’s 2026 budget request cuts Reclamation’s budget approximately by a third (Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf (see page 28 and Table 2); Briefly: Budget proposal defunds Western water conservation grants – Water Education Colorado). Overall, proposed cuts to the Department of Interior total over $5 billion, or 30.5% of the 2025 enacted budget (Table 2). To this point, that request has not been embraced by Congress.
4 For example, within NOAA, the administration’s 2026 budget request “terminates a variety of climate-dominated research, data, and grant programs,” and “cancels contracts for instruments designed for unnecessary climate measurements,” while also cutting National Science Foundation support of research “with dubious public value, like speculative impacts from extreme climate scenarios” (Fiscal-Year-2026-Discretionary-Budget-Request.pdf; see pages 24-25, and 38).
5 Data Center Energy and Water Use Trends Explained – Circle of Blue
6 Regulatory Tracker – Environmental and Energy Law Program
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
On the evening of November 19, a packed conference room in the Denver West Marriott erupted in cheers when the Colorado Water Conservation Board approved one of the largest ever dedications of water for the environment in Colorado’s history. This new deal, if completed, will ensure that water currently running through the aging Shoshone Hydropower Plant on the Colorado River, deep in the heart of Glenwood Canyon, will keep flowing through the canyon when the plant eventually goes off-line. It’s not a sure thing yet – water court wrangling over the details and financial hurdles remain. But the Board’s action was a crucial step forward.
Currently, when the plant is running full steam, 1,400 cubic feet/ second (think 1,400 basketballs full of water passing by every second) is diverted out of the river into a tunnel and then into massive pipes visible against the canyon walls, where the power of falling water spins turbines to generate electricity. The water is then returned back to the river. Under the new deal, when the plant stops operating (it is over 100 years old and vulnerable to rockfall), the water would instead stay in the river, vastly improving conditions for fish and the bugs they eat in the 2.4-mile reach between the diversion and the powerplant’s return flows. The dedication of the plant’s water rights to that stretch of river would bring benefits that ripple hundreds of miles up and downstream because of the crucial role these water rights play in controlling the river’s flow through Western Colorado.
Shoshone Power Plant, Colorado | Hannah Holm
In Colorado, as in most of the West, older water rights take priority over newer ones when there’s not enough water to satisfy everyone’s claims. On the Colorado River, the Shoshone Hydropower rights limit the amount of water that can be taken out of the river upstream by junior rights that divert water from the river’s headwaters through tunnels under the Continental Divide to cities and farms on the eastern side of the Rocky Mountains. The new deal to enable the Shoshone rights to be used for environmental flows would preserve those limitations on transmountain diversions in perpetuity.
Upstream from the power plant, near the ranching town of Kremmling, Colorado, the river carries less than half the water it would without the existing transmountain diversions. This stresses fish populations and the iconic cottonwood groves that line the river. The Shoshone rights downstream prevent these diversions from being even larger. Because the power plant returns all the water it uses to the river without consuming it, the water continues to provide benefits downstream from the plant to rafters, farms, cities and four species of endangered fish that exist only in the Colorado River Basin. Securing these flows for the future is particularly important as climate change continues to reduce the river’s flow, which has already declined by roughly 20% over the past two decades.
The people cheering in the hearing room represented cities, towns, counties and irrigation districts from up and down the Colorado River. Their entities had pledged ratepayer and taxpayer dollars to help secure the rights in the complex transaction spearheaded by the Colorado River Water Conservation District. Environmental organizations, including American Rivers, Audubon, Trout Unlimited and Western Resource Advocates, were also parties to the hearing and supportive of the deal, but were vastly outnumbered.
The Coloradans cheering in that room were there because their constituents’ livelihoods, clean drinking water and quality of life depend on a living Colorado River. American Rivers is proud to stand with them and will continue advocating for the completion of this historic water transaction.
He also directed federal agencies to “identify coal resources on Federal lands” and ease the process for leasing and mining coal on those lands. In addition, he issued orders to exclude coal-related projects from environmental reviews, promote coal exports and potentially subsidize the production of coal as a national security resource.
But there remain limits to the president’s power to slow the declining use of coal in the U.S. And while efforts continue to overcome these limits and prop up coal, mining coal remains an ongoing danger to workers: In 2025, there have been five coal-mining deaths in West Virginia and at least two others elsewhere in the U.S.
Until 2015, coal-fired power plants generated more electricity than any other type of fuel in the U.S. But with the rapid expansion of a new type of hydraulic fracturing, natural gas became a cheap and stable source for power generation. The prices of solar and wind power also dropped steadily. These alternatives ultimately overcame coal in the U.S. power supply.
Before this change, coal mining defined the economy and culture of many U.S. towns – and some states and regions, such as Wyoming and Appalachia – for decades. And in many small towns, coal-related businesses, including power plants, were key employers.
Coal has both benefits and drawbacks. It provides a reliable fuel source for electricity that can be piled up on-site at power plants without needing a tank or underground facility for storage.
But it’s dirty: Thousands of coal miners developed a disease called black lung. The federal government pays for medical care for some sick miners and makes monthly payments to family members of miners who die prematurely. Burning coal also emits multiple air pollutants, prematurely killing half a million people in the United States from 1999 through 2020.
Coal is dangerous for workers, too. Some coal-mining companies have had abysmal safety records, leading to miner deaths, such as the recent drowning of a miner in a sudden flood in a West Virginia mine. Safety reforms have been implemented since the Big Branch Mine explosion in 2010, and coal miner deaths in the U.S. have since declined. But coal mining remains a hazardous job.
In both of his terms, Trump has championed the revival of coal. In 2017, for example, Trump’s Department of Energy asked the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to pay coal and nuclear plants higher rates than the competitive market would pay, saying they were key to keeping the U.S. electricity grid running. The commission declined.
So many data centers, desperate for 24/7 electricity, are relying on old coal-fired power plants – buying electricity from plants that otherwise would be shutting down.
Despite the Trump adminstration’s efforts to rapidly expand data centers and coal to power them, coal is more expensive than most other fuels for power generation, with costs still rising.
The U.S. Department of the Interior’s recent effort to follow Trump’s orders and lease more coal on federal lands received only one bid – at a historically low price of less than a penny per ton. But in fact, even if the government gave its coal away for free, it would still make more economic sense for utilities to build power plants that use other fuels. This is due to the high cost of running old coal plants as compared to new natural gas and renewable infrastructure.
Natural gas is cheaper – and, in some places, so are renewable energy and battery storage. Government efforts to prevent the retirement of coal-fired power plants and boost the demand for coal may slow coal’s decline in the short term. In the long term, however, coal faces a very uncertain future as a part of the U.S. electricity mix.
In a collection of essays and research summaries, eleven members of the Colorado River Research Group (with eight guest contributors) touch on issues as diverse as plummeting reservoir storage, climate change trends, risk management, agricultural water conservation, equity, and governance, all against the backdrop of the need to fashion post-2026 reservoir operating rules.
Chapter 1. Colorado River Reservoir Storage – Where We Stand Jack Schmidt, Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara
Chapter 2. Think Natural Flows Will Rebound in the Colorado River Basin? Think Again. Jonathan Overpeck and Brad Udall
Chapter 3. The Erosion of the Colorado River “Safety Nets” is Alarming Doug Kenney
Chapter 4. Water Equity in the Colorado River Basin Bonnie Colby and Zoey Reed-Spitzer
Chapter 5. The Tale of Three Percentage-Based Apportionment Schemes Eric Kuhn
Chapter 6. A Humbly Proffered Proposal to Aid the Colorado River System: Conservation Easements & Land Purchases Kathryn Sorensen and Sarah Porter
Chapter 7. Facing the Future: Can Agriculture Thrive in the Upper Basin with Less Water? Kristiana Hansen, Daniel Mooney, Mahdi Asgari, and Christopher Bastian
Chapter 8. Towards a Basinwide Entity: Moving from Vision to Action Matthew McKinney, Jason Robison, John Berggren, and Doug Kenney
Contributors
Colorado River Research Group (CRRG) Members
Bonnie Colby, Professor, University of Arizona.
John Fleck, Writer in Residence, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
Kristiana Hansen, Professor, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wyoming.
Doug Kenney, Director, Western Water Policy Program, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School; and Chair, Colorado River Research Group.
Eric Kuhn, Retired General Manager, Colorado River Water Conservation District.
Matthew McKinney, Co-director, Water & Tribes Initiative; Senior Fellow, Center for Natural Resources & Environmental Policy, University of Montana; Fulbright Specialist 2025-2027.
Jonathan Overpeck, Dean, School for Environment and Sustainability, University of Michigan.
Jason Robison, Professor of Law and Co-Director, Gina Guy Center for Land & Water Law, University of Wyoming.
Jack Schmidt, Director, Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University, and former Chief, Grand Canyon Monitoring and Research Center.
Kathryn Sorensen, Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University; and former Director, Phoenix Water Services.
Brad Udall, Senior Water and Climate Research Scientist/Scholar, Colorado Water Center, Colorado State University.
Guest Contributors
Mahdi Asgari, Postdoctoral Scholar, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wyoming.
Christopher Bastian, Professor, Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, University of Wyoming.
John Berggren, Regional Policy Manager, Western Resource Advocates.
Anne Castle, Senior Fellow, Getches-Wilkinson Center, University of Colorado Law School; former US Commissioner, Upper Colorado River Commission; and former Assistant Secretary for Water and Science, US Department of the Interior.
Daniel Mooney, Associate Professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, Colorado State University.
Sarah Porter, Director, Kyl Center for Water Policy, Arizona State University.
Zoey Reed-Spitzer, Research Assistant, North Carolina State University (formerly University of Arizona).
Katherine Tara, Staff Attorney, Utton Transboundary Resources Center, University of New Mexico.
Here’s the preface:
Welcome to the Colorado River Research Group’s (CRRG) inaugural Colorado River Insights report. This publication marks a new (and still evolving) direction for the CRRG, transitioning away from the group-authored policy briefs of the past to more personal “Individual Submissions” that allow members to be more focused, direct and sometimes prescriptive than in the past efforts authored jointly and requiring unanimous consent. While each of the Individual Submissions (i.e., Chapters) that follows is unique in structure and tone and detail, each member was given the same charge: to speak directly about issues on the river where they have been directing much of their current focus, and where feasible, to identify a path forward on those issues. Given this approach, each Individual Submission is truly individual—or, in several cases, the product of small groups—and thus should not be attributed to the entire body, although in practice there is usually very little internal conflict on any of the major themes featured throughout these pages. One byproduct of this approach is that it shines a light on some of the CRRG’s most glaring holes in terms of disciplines and substantive expertise, helping to steer us to new potential members (and guest contributors) and, perhaps, new approaches. Unless or until that happens, we readily acknowledge that our collective snapshot of current and emerging basin issues is far from comprehensive. But how could it be? That’s an impossible standard for a river as vast in size, importance and complexity as the Colorado.
We are hopeful that this new approach can be helpful in better funneling the knowledge emerging from the research community into the hands of decision-makers, journalists, NGOs, water users, and other concerned parties in a more hands-on position to implement the changes needed to restore the economic and environmental sustainability of the River. Clearly, we are in an era screaming for new ideas and new approaches; the status quo isn’t working. — Doug Kenney, CRRG Chair
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Negotiations among the Magnificent Seven representing the seven states of the Colorado River region begin to resemble the ongoing negotiations between the military and diplomatic representatives for North and South Korea, where negotiations for something beyond an armistice have been going on for more than sixty years. Here, as there, the negotiations have reached a stalemate, and both sides are now engaged in an information war. Between the two Koreas, this war takes the form of everything from huge arrays of speakers blasting pop music across the demilitarized zone to smuggled USB drives with movies and TV shows. Here, it is mostly just propaganda bombs tossed over our ‘DMZ,’ the Grand Canyons, about each side’s virtue and the other side’s obstinacy, depending on their regional media’s love of conflict and tendency to support the home team. The missed November deadline has been seamlessly replaced – as we all suspected it would be – by a February deadline. But otherwise – nothing new on that front. We can just hope it doesn’t go on for another fortysome years.
So I’m going to take advantage of the stalemate to ask the reader to think about a bigger picture that may be more interesting. It stems from a comment from my partner Maryo, from whom I learn too much to dismiss anything she says. ‘Why are you “romancing the river”?’ she asked the other day. ‘Romance is such a cheapened concept today – bodice-ripping stories of ridiculous antagonistic love. You’re undermining the value of your work, calling it a “romance.”’
‘Well,’ I said – figuring that if she feels that way, maybe my readers raise the same question – ‘maybe one of the things a writer ought to try to do is restore the value of words and the concepts they once represented that have become devalued through misuse.’ Spoken like a true Don Quixote, another old man who took arms, sort of, against abuse of the concept of ‘romance.’
I do think that one of the things that ‘civilization’ does in civilizing us is to simplify things for us, including words whose complexity and depth embrace concepts, ideas and feelings that can be inconvenient to an orderly civilized society. A ‘romance,’ from the medieval era on into the early 20th century, was a story of an adventure in pursuit of something mysterious, exciting, challenging, something beyond everyday life. That could be the pursuit of a love relationship that was life-changing (and maybe life-endangering) for its participants – Tristan and Isolde, Launcelot and Guinevere, Romeo and Juliet, Bonnie and Clyde.
But on a much larger scale, the romantic adventure can be establishing a relationship with anything outside of ourselves that intrigues or challenges us. The relationship can emerge with a place, a house, a horse, a car, a continent, a river, an idea, as well as another person, anything that intrigues us, wakes up our imagination – arational or prerational relationships that make the civilizing forces nervous. The relationship can run the quick dynamic spectrum from arational love to its flip side arational hate, through all the intermediary love-hate variations. It can also have a mythically selective or even creative attitude toward the gray-zone relationship between ‘truth’ and fact. Which leads those trying to develop an orderly civilization to dismiss anything (ad)venturing into the mythic as a lie. It just seems simpler that way.
The Powell survey on its second trip down the Colorado River, 1871. Photo credit: USGS
The first comprehensive study of the Colorado River region was uncivilized enough to state upfront its romantic origins: Frederick Dellenbaugh’s Romance of the Colorado River. Dellenbaugh’s book (available online for a pittance) delved as deeply as was possible at that time into both the First People prehistory in the region and the early history of the Euro-American invasion, from the Spanish trying to work their way up the river from its contentious confluence with the Gulf of California (‘Sea of Cortez’ to them) to the trappers imposing the first major Euro-American change on the river, stripping its tributaries of their beavers which increased the size and violence of the river’s annual spring-summer runoff of snowmelt. But the heart of the book is John Wesley Powell’s explorations to link the upper river and the lower river through its canyons.
Dellenbaugh, as a seventeen-year-old, accompanied Powell on his second Colorado River expedition, a ‘baptism under water’ (often literally) that shaped his ‘romantic’ vision. In his ‘Introduction,’ after observing that most of the great rivers that humans encountered in exploration and settlement gradually became like foster parents to those who settled along them, carrying goods for them and generally watering and growing their settlements, he says of the Colorado:
Dellenbaugh’s Romance was published in 1903. That same year, another great southwestern writer, Mary Hunter Austin came out with her Land of Little Rain, a fascinating collection of her explorations in the deserts of the lower Colorado River region. In that book she offered what might be a cautionary note about ‘romancing the river,’ in an observation about a small Arizona tributary of the Colorado River, ‘the fabled Hassayampa… of whose waters, if any drink, they can no more see fact as naked fact, but all radiant with the color of romance.’
I will now indulge my tendency to take a ‘tectonic’ look at history – looking for large chunks colliding or grating together or subducting under each other. I see the history of our engagement with the Colorado River dividing into three ‘tectonic romances’: first, the Romance of Exploration, which is chronicled in a couple different ways by those two explorers, Dellenbaugh and Austin; their 1903 publications summarize that age and put a semi-colon at the end of the period, as it were.
Second, the Romance of Reclamation: 1903 also marks the year the U.S. Reclamation Service came into being, an organization created almost specifically for settling the Colorado River deserts. Civilized people on both sides of the question would deny that there was any ‘romance’ to reclamation, but one early Bureau engineer would publicly disagree, writing in 1918 about ‘the romance of reclamation’:
C.J. Blanchard of the U.S. Reclamation Service authored that steaming verdure. The Service at that time was under the U.S. Geological Survey, a scientific organization disciplined to the ‘look before you leap’ methods of science, discerning the reality of a situation and adapting to that; but the Reclamation Service, frustrated by the seasonal flood-to-trickle flows of the Colorado, thought that changing that reality (through storage and redistribution) was a more promising route than adapting to it, and so was on its way to becoming independent of the USGS when Blanchard wrote his ‘romance of irrigation’ for an educational journal called The Mentor(thanks, Dave Primus, for calling it to my attention).
Members of the Colorado River Commission, in Santa Fe in 1922, after signing the Colorado River Compact. From left, W. S. Norviel (Arizona), Delph E. Carpenter (Colorado), Herbert Hoover (Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of Commission), R. E. Caldwell (Utah), Clarence C. Stetson (Executive Secretary of Commission), Stephen B. Davis, Jr. (New Mexico), Frank C. Emerson (Wyoming), W. F. McClure (California), and James G. Scrugham (Nevada) CREDIT: COLORADO STATE UNIVERSITY WATER RESOURCES ARCHIVE via Aspen Journalism
The best-known document of the Romance of Reclamation was of course the Colorado River Compact – a document in which the romance of reclamation overrode any relationship to ‘naked fact’ about the river and its flows, a situation that is now biting our collective ass.Yet an Arizona water maven said recently that any Bureau of Reclamation solution to the seven-state impasse would have to cleave closely to the Compact…. The history of the Romance of Reclamation has been written in the gaggle of Congressional acts, court decisions, treaties, regulations and directives that make up the ‘Law of the River’ (recitations of which never seem to include the 1908 Winters Doctrine allocating assumed water to federal reservations, including to the First Peoples).
The end of the Romance of Reclamation would be in the 1960s, pick your date: publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, passage of the Wilderness Act in 1964, passage of the Environmental Policy Act in 1969 – a decade in which the general American perception of the West underwent a sea change, from seeing it as a workplace for producing the resources to feed the American people and industries, to seeing it as a great natural playground to which America’s predominantly urban population could go to recharge, with a resulting desire to protect it from the very industrial consumption that supported the American ‘lifestyle.’.
This was the dawn of the third romantic epoch in our relationship with the river (and the continent in general) – the Romance of Restoration and Revision, driven by a belief that we have sinned against capital-N Nature – with many naked facts as evidence – and can only expiate our sins by preserving what remains of the nonhuman environment, restoring what we can of the damage we’ve done, and revising our own systems for consuming nature (e.g., renewable energy).
Aesthetics are at the root of our romance with capital-N Nature, aesthetics best served by the (increasingly rare) opportunity to be alone with and ‘silent on a peak in Darien,’ as Keats put it. We have a large (and growing) number of excellent writer[s] who work to elaborate on that aesthetic – Ed Abbey first, Craig Childs, Heather Hansman, Kevin Fedarko, to name a few.
But the aesthetic yearning to ultimately ‘put it back the way it was’ does not extend to other equally naked facts, like the dependence of the outdoor recreation industries on the creation of big mountain-highway traffic jams pumping big quantities of carbon and nitrogen gases into the already overladen atmosphere, as we all load up our cars with expensive gear to go off to commune with Nature. Or the naked fact that maintaining civilization-as-we-know-it for 300 million people involves a lot of nonrewable extraction from Nature that it will be very difficult to move away from entirely – unless we figure out how to control our breeding.
Just as significant achievements were achieved under the Romance of Reclamation, so significant achievements have been achieved under the Romance of Restoration and Revision – the setting aside of millions of acres of still-sort-of-wild land, instream flow laws, increasingly responsible forest management, et cetera. But we are clearly still in the early transition – half a century later – to a more realistic romance with restoring and revising to a kinder gentler relationship with the nonhuman systems of nature. And right now, we are experiencing a major counter-attack from the societal forces whose aesthetics still imagine a ‘working landscape’ of derricks, mines and other industrial-scale harvests, all suffused with the ‘smell of money,’ societal forces that believe the best of times were before we woke up to the increasingly fragile finitude of our planet under the burden of us. Let’s all go back and make America great again!
The back of Glen Canyon Dam circa 1964, not long after the reservoir had begun filling up. Here the water level is above dead pool, meaning water can be released via the river outlets, but it is below minimum power pool, so water cannot yet enter the penstocks to generate electricity. Bureau of Reclamation photo. Annotations: Jonathan P. Thompson
I cannot now imagine when and how this third epoch of our romance with the river will end. I think this aesthetic romance might peak with the ‘breaching’ of Glen Canyon Dam, an action that has taken on a somewhat mythic quality for today’s river romantics. I don’t think we will tear it down – let it stand as a monument to…something. But I suspect that even the Bureau of Reclamation is exploring some way of tunneling around it at river level, as we continue to flirt with the disaster of dead pool behind the dam. It will not be easy, due to the silt already piled up at the dam – but really, nothing is going to be easy anymore; that blessed civilization is now in the rear-view mirror.
I’m going to take advantage of the lull in the short-term news about the river’s management for maybe the next decade, to take a look at each of these three epochs of ‘romancing the river’ and their relationship to the ‘naked facts’ of the river – mostly see if there might be something there we’ve overlooked that might help us move forward in our ever-emerging relationship of this ‘First River of the Anthropocene.’ Onward and outward.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Republicans are rallying around former New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce, Trump’s nominee to oversee the land management agency
Conservation groups in Montana and across the West are raising concerns about Steve Pearce, a former New Mexico representative who is President Donald Trump’s newest nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management.
In Montana and the two Dakotas, the BLM manages more than 8.3 million acres of federal land. Nationwide, the BLM oversees 245 million acres of federal land, along with 700 million acres of subsurface rights for extraction and energy development, putting the position directly in the crosshairs of energy developers and outdoor industry groups.
According to the Center for Western Priorities, Pearce amassed a “lengthy anti-public lands record,” sponsoring bills to shrink national monuments and increase extraction on national forest land.
Many conservation groups are specifically honing in on Pearce’s long record of advocating to sell off federal lands, including sponsoring legislation in Congress to authorize land sales or exchanges with local governments.
In a letter to then-House Speaker John Boehner in 2012, Pearce wrote that of the federal lands located in the West, “most of it we do not even need.”
“We cannot afford to hand the keys to 245 million acres of our public lands over to someone who has spent his career trying to auction them off to the highest bidder,” Aubrey Bertram, staff attorney and federal policy director at Wild Montana, said. “Steve Pearce’s record is crystal clear: he believes public lands should be privatized for billionaires’ benefit, not protected for the people’s.”
But Pearce’s nomination has been greeted with enthusiasm by mining and energy companies that operate on federal land, as well as by many Republican officials, including Montana Sen. Steve Daines.
“I knew Steve in the House days, and Steve is a great pick. And I particularly like the fact that it’s a Westerner,” Daines said in an interview. “I think it’s helpful when we have leaders in those important positions that come from the West, when they understand uniquely the challenges we face as it relates to federal land, state land, private land. And Steve Pearce has lived it and breathed it.”
Daines is a member of the newly formed Senate Stewardship Caucus, which is co-chaired by Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy.
The two Montanans also bucked their party earlier this year by joining Senate Democrats in a resolution that would have prevented the use of public land sales to reduce the deficit.
Representatives for Daines and Sheehy did not respond to questions about Pearce’s nomination.
Sheehy has not publicly stated whether he will support Pearce.
But Montana’s federal delegation has been supportive of increasing coal and energy extraction in the state.
In eastern Montana, Congress recently voted to overturn a Biden-era restriction on resource extraction on federal land, reopening nearly 1.7 million acres to future coal leasing.
All members of the state’s delegation supported the move calling it vital to the state’s economy and the nation’s energy security.
Pearce has roots in the oil and gas industry that stretch beyond his political work.
Starting in 2003, he represented New Mexico in Congress for seven terms.
He lost races for the U.S. Senate in 2008 and governor in 2018.
While conservation and public land advocates have pushed back against Pearce’s nomination, industry groups have applauded Trump’s pick.
The National Cattleman’s Beef Association said Pearce’s experience makes him “thoroughly qualified to lead the BLM and tackle the issues federal lands ranchers are facing.”
The Western Energy Alliance, comprising oil and gas companies across nine western states, also put out a statement of support for Pearce.
“As a westerner coming from a state that’s nearly 20 percent BLM land, he understands the bureau’s mission. As a former congressman and chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, his record shows he’s been a champion of multiple-uses of public lands. Steve has been a longtime friend who understands the value of energy development among other uses,” the Alliance said.
This story was originally produced by Daily Montanan, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Utah News Dispatch, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
December 2, 2025
Changing a name is simple enough, if somewhat expensive and time-consuming, at least in the case of businesses.
But what to make of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s new name? Is the change all bad for the laboratory and for its mission of the last 34 years?
It became National Laboratory of the Rockies as of Monday. It had been known as NREL since 1991 and before that had been the Solar Energy Research Institute since its founding in 1977 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.
The laboratory has become one of the nation’s — and perhaps the world’s — seminal institutions devoted to engineering an energy transition. As of October, it had 3,717 employees after a reduction of 114 during May.
“Clearly an effort is underway (by President Donald Trump)‚ to downplay renewable energy as a premier, viable energy source in the United States. So it is hard to separate the politics from this given the timing,” said David Renee, who worked at the laboratory from 1991 until his recent retirement.
Renee said that in part he was very disappointed to see the words “renewable energy” deleted from the name but does see the new name allowing the institution to broaden its mission to reflect needs of the ever-more-complex electrical grid.
“I can see some good, long-term benefits from this. It gives the laboratory flexibility to have a broader scope,” he said. “A lot of the work is not exclusively related to renewable energy but more related to grid reliability and expansion, of which renewables play an important part. So one could argue that the name change was overdue anyway in order to be consistent with other national laboratories, which are mostly named for their locations and not the technology.”
The United States has 17 national laboratories engaged in energy and other research, and most are named for their local geographies. New Mexico, for example, has the Sandia and Los Alamos labs, the former named for a mountain range and the latter a town. Renee arrived in Golden from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and retired after running the solar resource assessment program.
Ron Larson, one of the earliest employees of the solar institute who arrived in 1977, a time when solar was 100 times more expensive than it is now, also tends toward a charitable view of the name change.
A possible reason, and a valid one, he said, could be that other national labs wanted more to do on renewable energy topics and are qualified to do so. “Too, maybe some at NREL have wanted to expand into other sectors, including fossil fuels and nuclear.”
Peter Lilienthal, an NREL employee from 1990 to 2007, when he formed an energy-related business, was less charitable. He was incensed by a statement from Audrey Robertson, the assistant secretary of energy, in Monday’s announcement.
“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Robertson said. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”
Lilienthal called that statement gaslighting. “That is just not true,” he said of Robertson’s assertion about no longer picking energy sources. He points to the promises of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail and elsewhere to restore fossil fuels and discourage renewable energy. This, he said, will slow the energy transition away from fossil fuels, he believes.
Jud Virden, the director of the renamed laboratory since October, said the new name “embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all.”
That statement clearly fits in with the narrative of Chris Wright, the Colorado-born director of the Department of Energy. A graduate of Cherry Creek High School, in south Denver, Wright was a rock climber and skier before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering, first mechanical and then electrical. He also later studied at the University of California at Berkeley.
In April, Wright returned to Colorado to tour NREL. Afterward, he met with reporters, where he said that he had worked on solar energy during graduate school and then geothermal. Only later, needing a paycheck, did he begin work in the oil and gas industry. In Denver, he founded Liberty, an oil and gas field services company, in 2011.
In his remarks, Wright did not dismiss renewable energy, but he did — as he had done before — dismiss “climate alarmism.” He said the science does not support the perception of risk that has, in part, driven the work to make renewable energy affordable and integrated into the electrical grid.
Wright sees the need for more energy being paramount and climate change worries a hindrance to archiving that plentitude that will result in higher standards of living.
“The biggest barrier to energy development the last few decades is people, for political reasons, calling climate change a crisis,” he claimed.
He went on to cite 3 million people dying every year because they don’t have clean cooking fuels or the 4 or 5 million people dying because they don’t have sufficient food as well as the disconnect notices to American consumers for non-payment.
“If you call climate change a crisis and you don’t look at any data, you can pass laws to do anything.
Chris Wright has argued that energy scarcity poses a greater threat to quality of life than climate change. Here, he speaks to reporters in April 2025 while Martin Keller, then the director of NREL, looks on. Photo/Allen Best. Top image/National Laboratory of the Rockies.
In an essay published in The Economist in July, Wright said much the same thing.
Wright also talked about the need to deliver plentiful energy and lowering energy prices. He talked about the drive to integrate artificial intelligence data centers into the U.S. economy.
“Artificial Intelligence is critical. This is a phenomenal new technology. People are seeing the great consumer services it provides, the business efficiencies it provides, and we are very early on.”
And again, he talked about the need to expand electrical production as necessary to support artificial intelligence. Even without strong demand for data centers, he said, electricity prices have been rising.
“We’ve seen 20 to 25% rise in the price of electricity over the last four years. Americans are mad and angry and upset about that, which is why they’re all worried about AI — ‘No, we don’t want new demand on our grid that’s just going to make our prices more expensive.’ — We need to show them we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve got to grow our electricity production capacity without raising the prices to consumers, and we’ve got to keep our grid stable, not just the complicated system stable, but the increasing cyber threats of people that want to do us harm on our grid.”
Chuck Kutscher took a broad view of the change. A mechanical engineer by training, he began working at NREL in the 1980s before retiring in 2018.
“NREL is widely viewed as the leading renewable energy laboratory in the world. In the U.S. and throughout the world, solar and wind dominate the new electricity generation being deployed because they are now the lowest in cost and are also the fastest to deploy, in addition to avoiding air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. China is clearly the world leader in renewable energy development and deployment, but NREL has played a critical role in keeping the U.S. competitive,” he said in a statement.
“As a Department of Energy lab, NREL takes direction from DOE. The current administration made it clear in the last election that it would support fossil fuels. DOE does have a lab that focuses primarily on fossil fuels, the National Energy Technology Lab, so continuing to have a lab that performs R&D on renewables makes perfect sense, especially given the transition to renewable energy happening around the world. I’m sure the new lab director is working hard to preserve NREL’s tremendous expertise and important work in renewable energy while at the same time being responsive to DOE directives to strengthen the lab’s portfolio in areas such as AI and data centers.”
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
In Brief Unusually wet conditions in the Basin in October and November 2025, combined with reduced releases from some reservoirs, led to a basin-wide increase in storage for the two-month period. The combined contents of Lake Powell and Lake Mead increased during the two months for only the second time since 2010, and storage in the San Juan River basin increased by 19%, especially in Vallecito and Navajo Reservoirs. These changes were a welcome respite from the relentless depletion of storage that has dominated the last few years. Nevertheless, the upcoming winter snow season is predicted to be below average, and total active storage in the Basin is less than a 2 year supply when compared with recent Basin-wide consumptive uses and losses.
Total precipitation (inches) from 9-15 October 2025 with gridded data from the PRISM Climate Group and observations from the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow (CoCoRaHS) network. Credit: Russ Schumacher/Colorado Climate Center
The Details
The rains of October and November 2025 slowed depletion of the Colorado River’s reservoirs due to increases in stream flow and reduced reservoir releases in some places. Water levels rose in a few reservoirs, and autumn’s rains provided a small bit of flexibility for water managers at the beginning of what is likely to be a below-average winter snow season.
As of November 30, the Basin’s 46 reservoirs held 24.63 million af (acre feet) of active storage[1], of which 90% was in 12 federal reservoirs,[2] including 15.00 million af in Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead) and 4.88 million af in 8 federal reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell (Fig.1). This amount of storage is similar to conditions in early 2022, a situation that was described at that time as a crisis. If we divide the total active storage in the Basin’s 46 reservoirs by the basin-wide total annual rate of consumptive use and loss that was 12.7 million af in 2024, the basin-wide reservoir water supply would sustain Basin-wide use for less than 2 years. We continue to live at the doorstep of crisis.
Figure 1. Graph showing active storage in Colorado River basin reservoirs between January 1, 2021, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Basin-wide reservoir storage stabilized in October and November, because Powell+Mead storage stabilized and storage in the San Juan River basin increased. Total Inflow to Lake Powell exceeded releases for more than one week between October 11 and October 18, when Lake Powell increased by 105,000 af[3] which is a 1.6% gain (Fig. 2). Approximately 40% of the total inflow came from the San Juan River, and the monthly October inflows were the largest since 2015. The gain in storage in Lake Powell during this weeklong period exceeded depletions during the rest of the month, and Lake Powell gained approximately 52,000 af during the month. Lake Powell lost 147,000 af in November.
Figure 2. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Powell and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow at Lees Ferry, representing the total releases from Lake Powell, were 490,000 af in October and 501,000 af in November. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
In contrast, the autumn rains did not significantly increase inflow to Lake Mead, because most of the inflows come from scheduled releases from Lake Powell. These reservoir releases were supplemented by 101,000 af of inflows downstream from Lees Ferry[4] and 8000 af from the Virgin River.[5] The most significant changes in Lake Mead occurred at the end of November when releases from Hoover Dam were significantly reduced (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Graph showing inflow and outflow from Lake Mead and active storage between October 1 and November 30, 2025. Total monthly flow inflow of the Colorado River, representing the total releases from Lake Powell and inflows within Grand Canyon, were 574,000 af in October and 550,000 af in November. Reservoir releases from Hoover Dam were 485,000 af in October and 415,000 af in November. Withdrawals and return flows of the Southern Nevada Water Authority were not included in these data. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Together, total active storage in Powell+Mead increased by 63,000 af during October,[6] and decreased by only 38,000 af in November (Fig. 4).[7] More significant than the gains, however, was that the the pace of reservoir depletion was significantly slowed. Storage in Powell+Mead increased by approximately 25,000 af in October and November, only the second time since 2010 that total storage in these two reservoirs increased during these two months.[8]
Figure 4. Graph showing active storage in Lake Powell, Lake Mead, and in Powell+Mead between January 1, 2023, and November 30, 2025. Credit: Jack Schmidt/Center for Colorado River Studies
Reservoir storage in the San Juan River basin increased more than in any other part of the Colorado River Basin. Five San Juan basin reservoirs increased by 197,000 af in October and November, mostly in Navajo and Vallecito Reservoirs.[9] Not much happened elsewhere, however. The 21 reservoirs of the upper Colorado River watershed lost 57,000 af during October and November, and 16 reservoirs in the Green River watershed lost 10,000 af during the same period.
[2] Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Vallecito, Navajo, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu.
[3] Inflow to Lake Powell was computed as the sum of mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Gypsum Canyon near Hite (gage 09328960), Dirty Devil River above Poison Springs near Hanksville (09333500), Escalante River near Escalante (09337500), and San Juan River near Bluff (09379500), as reported by the U.S. Geological Survey. Outflow from Lake Powell was computed as the mean daily discharge of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), because stream flow is measured 15 miles downstream from the dam and includes ground-water seepage around the dam. Lake Powell storage increased between October 10 and October 20, as reported by Reclamation.
[4] Inflows within Grand Canyon were calculated as the difference between measurements of the Colorado River at Lees Ferry (09380000), Colorado River above Diamond Creek near Peach Springs (09420000), and Diamond Creek nr Peach Springs (09404208).
[5] Virgin River below confluence Muddy River near Overton (09419530)
[6] Between October 1 and November 1, 2025, active storage in Lake Powell increased 52,000 af and 11,000 af in Lake Mead.
[7] Between November 1 and November 30, active storage in Lake Powell decreased by 147,000 af and increased by 109,000 af in Lake Mead.
[8] During the previous 15 years between 2010 and 2024, total storage in Powell+Mead increased by 36,000 af in 2011. During the other 14 years of that period, the median depletion of Powell+Mead was 436,000 af.
[9] Storage in Navajo Reservoir increased 126,000 af between October 9 and November 8 and increased by 114,000 af in October and November. Active storage in Vallecito Reservoir gained 68,000 af in October and November. At the end of November, Navajo Reservoir was 60% of its 1.65 million af capacity. Vallecito Reservoir was 77% of its 125,400 af capacity.
Map of the San Juan River, a tributary of the Colorado River, in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah, USA. Made using USGS National Map data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47456307
A patch of cheatgrass, pictured here in January 2025, emerged from a mountainside along the east shore of Flaming Gorge Reservoir. Cheatgrass has steadily invaded the lower Green River Basin, about half of which “needs attention,” according to the Sweetwater County Weed and Pest District. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
An all-hands-on-deck effort, tens of millions in funding and a breakthrough herbicide are slowing but not halting a destructive force steadily enveloping the best sagebrush left on Earth.
POWDER RIVER BASIN—Brian Mealor scanned the prairie east of Buffalo, but his mind drifted west to a haunting scene in northern Nevada.
In the burn scar of the Roosters Comb Fire, a single unwelcomed species had taken over, choking out all competitors. Mealor saw few native grasses or shrubs, scarcely a wildflower.
Not even other weeds.
“Literally everything you see is cheatgrass,” Mealor recalled of his June tour of the scar. “I just stood there, depressed.”
A sea of cheatgrass photographed about 20 miles north of Battle Mountain, Nevada, off of Izzenhood Road. (Claire Visconti/University of Wyoming)
Mealor already knew plenty about the Eurasian species’ capacity to decimate North American ecosystems since he leads the University of Wyoming’s Institute for Managing Annual Grasses Invading Natural Ecosystems. But he was still shocked walking through the endless cheatgrass monoculture taking over the 220,000 once-charred acres northwest of Elko.
The same noxious species, he knew, is steadily spreading in Wyoming.
The ecological scourge made Silver State officials so desperate that they were planting another nonnative, forage kochia, because it competes with less nutritious cheatgrass and offers some nourishment for native wildlife, like mule deer.
“They’ll just die, because there’s nothing there,” Mealor said. “That’s why we have to do stuff. Because we could turn into that.”
Brian Mealor, center, looks off into the sagebrush along the outskirts of the House Draw Fire scar near Buffalo in November 2025. The 2024 blaze eliminated over 100,000 acres of core sage grouse habitat, including 18 active leks. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Scientists, rangeland managers and state and county officials are doing everything in their power to prevent Wyoming from becoming another landscape lost to cheatgrass. There’s a powerful new herbicide that’s helping. And funds enabling the spraying of hundreds of thousands of acres are being secured and raised. Yet, Wyoming is still losing its cheatgrass fight, and ultimately far more resources are needed to turn it around.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Bob Budd, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “The magnitude of the need is utterly staggering. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade. That’s daunting.”
Budd voiced that warning Tuesday while addressing a statewide group that focuses on bighorn sheep, which depend on seasonal ranges being invaded by cheatgrass. A recent study co-authored by Mealor underscores the need to act soon to protect Wyoming’s wildlife. UW researchers concluded that cheatgrass, which is only edible in spring, could cost northeast Wyoming’s already struggling mule deer half their current habitat in the next couple of decades.
Eighteen months ago, green sagebrush plants would have dominated this vista all the way to the horizon in the Powder River Basin. Today, because of the House Draw Fire, it’s a golden prairie — the lighter-hued portions are dominated by invasive cheatgrass and Japanese brome. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
On Nov. 6, the Sheridan-based professor joined fellow academics, biologists and volunteers on a field trip to a mixed-grass prairie. Like the Nevada burn scar, this was a Wyoming landscape on the mend from wildfire. In fact, it wasn’t a grassland until last year.
Before Aug. 21, 2024, the ground where they stood had been considered the best of what’s left of northeast Wyoming’s sagebrush biome.
Transformation
A lightning storm that sparked a conflagration abruptly ended that era. Over the course of two days, the House Draw Fire tore a 10-mile-wide, almost 60-mile-long gash into the landscape, inflicting over $25 million in damage. In a fiery blink, the native plant community mostly disappeared.
Once-prized sagebrush within roughly 100,000 acres of the burn area is basically gone, a worrisome loss of habitat for the region’s already struggling sage grouse. What grew back isn’t a monoculture, like in Nevada. Native species are easily found. But portions of the Powder River Basin’s rolling hills are now dominated by big densities of cheatgrass and Japanese brome, another invasive annual grass. Without mature sagebrush shrubs to compete with, there’s reason to believe the invaders, which flourish with fire, will expand their grip.
“It’s not like you have a fire and all of a sudden you’re just completely covered with cheatgrass,” Mealor said. “There’s a lag.”
Cheatgrass grows in thick amid sagebrush southeast of Buffalo, adjacent to the House Draw Fire scar. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
The Johnson County Natural Habitat Restoration Team is throwing everything it can at the fire scar to try to prevent invasive grasses from taking over. Armed with $12 million in state funds, crews will aerially spray some 120,000 acres with a cheatgrass-killing herbicide. Aerial sagebrush seeding is also underway on 3,000 acres of burned-up sage grouse nesting habitat. And there are even funded plans to build hundreds of simple erosion-controlling Zeedyk structures to protect the wet meadows within the fire scar.
Yet, on a broader scale, Mealor is a realist about the immense challenge of keeping cheatgrass and its noxious counterparts at bay in Wyoming, let alone enabling sagebrush to stage a comeback — a costly, complicated feat.
“If we were talking about a 25,000-acre fire here and there,” Mealor said, “it would be a little different.”
About a half-million acres of northeastern Wyoming burned in 2024, the state’s second-largest fire year in modern history. Wyoming lawmakers agreed to carve out $49 million for wildfire recovery grants statewide, less than half of Gov. Mark Gordon’s requested amount. Optimistically, Mealor said, the awarded sum might be enough to treat a million acres. That sounds significant — it’s half the acreage of Yellowstone. But cheatgrass is spreading just about everywhere in a state that spans 62 million acres.
Gov. Mark Gordon gives his State of the State address Feb. 12, 2024, at the Capitol in Cheyenne. (Ashton J. Hacke/WyoFile)`
“If you think about it from a statewide level, it’s not a lot,” Mealor said of the funding. “That’s not an attack. I’m not downplaying the importance of the money that was set aside by the Legislature for this. It’s a lot of money. But it’s also not enough.”
The governor, who’s a rancher by trade, has voiced the same concern. Pushing for $20 million in cheatgrass spraying funds during the Legislature’s 2024 budget-making process, Gordon acknowledged Wyoming is “losing the battle” against invasive annual grasses. Lawmakers ultimately agreed to $9 million, less than half the requested amount, according to the budget.
‘Best of the best’
The incursions that cheatgrass, Japanese brome and fellow invasives medusahead and ventenata are making into Wyoming rangelands are significant because of what’s at stake. The Equality State is the cornerstone of what remains of the sagebrush-steppe biome, a 13-state ecosystem vanishing at a rate of 1 million-plus acres per year.
“Half of the best of the best is in Wyoming,” said Corinna Riginos, who directs the Wyoming science program for The Nature Conservancy.
In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies completed a conservation plan to proactively restore the United States’ declining sagebrush habitat. This map from the plan illustrates Wyoming’s importance, being the stronghold of the biome. (USGS)
The Lander-based scientist is spearheading a Camp Monaco Prize-winning project that seeks to safeguard the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from cheatgrass. The flanks of the ecosystem, such as the Golden Triangle, southwest of the Wind River Range, contain some of the most expansive unbroken tracts of sagebrush remaining on Earth. Distribution maps show that almost all of those areas are in Wyoming. It’s no coincidence that the same places also host remarkable biological phenomena, like the world’s largest sage grouse lek and longest mule deer migration.
Riginos’ research is focused on defensive measures to catch and kill cheatgrass early on, when it exists at low levels. Keeping the invasion out of core tracts of sagebrush, she said, is a more efficient use of funds than trying to shift heavily contaminated landscapes back to what they used to be.
“Maybe we live with what they are, we cope with it, rather than trying to recover from it,” Riginos said of cheatgrass-dominated areas.
Cheatgrass grows where reddish stripes appear on the hillsides leading up to Washakie Reservoir in June 2024. The green stripes are where an herbicide, Indaziflam, was experimentally applied. Rangeland managers have since scaled up the effort, funding 16,000 acres of cheatgrass removal in the Washakie Park area. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Within Wyoming, invasive grass experts don’t have to go far from the world’s most unsullied sagebrush stands to find heavily infested landscapes. In June 2024, Riginos toured cheatgrass treatments in the Wind River Indian Reservation’s Washakie Park area. Although they stood about 40 straight-line miles from the Golden Triangle, scientists, wildlife managers and weed experts on the tour were surrounded by hillsides purple-hued from cheatgrass.
“You have to respect it, as an organism,” Riginos said. “The adaptability and just kind of sheer ability to get a toehold and take over is pretty remarkable.”
Cheatgrass gets its name from its ability to “cheat” surrounding vegetation out of moisture and nutrients. Its mechanism for success is essentially a head start. It germinates in the fall and starts growing in cold temperatures. Then it overwinters, matures, throws off prolific amounts of seeds and dies by midsummer when native grasses and forbs are much earlier in their life cycle.
A patch of cheatgrass colors a 7,500-foot-high northern Wyoming Range ridgeline in November 2025. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
On top of the advantageous life cycle, the West’s ever-increasing, climate-driven wildfires help cheatgrass flourish. When a cheatgrass-infested area burns and becomes more cheatgrass dominant, it’s more prone to burn again, creating a vicious feedback loop.
Giving cheatgrass yet another advantage, research has shown the plant in North America adapts well to different locales. That trait enables it to flourish in a wide range of temperatures and moisture conditions across the West, Riginos said.
“I don’t want to see the West become a wasteland of cheatgrass, I really don’t,” she said. “I feel that this is the most existential, sweeping threat to our western ecosystems. It really concerns me.”
Closing in
All those traits have enabled an impressive, though foreboding, expansion. Since its introduction from Europe in the 1800s, cheatgrass has spread to all 50 states and parts of Canada and Mexico. There are signs it’s not slowing down. Rangeland ecologists have detected an eightfold increase in cheatgrass across the Great Basin since the 1990s, according to the National Wildlife Federation.
Simultaneously, sagebrush-dominated landscapes have sustained a decline. A 2022 U.S. Geological Survey reportfound that an average of 1.3 million acres are being lost or degraded every year. That’s an area larger than Rhode Island.
Although the spread of Wyoming cheatgrass hasn’t been as overwhelming as in lower-elevation, drier western states, the invasion has, and continues to be, successful. A whitepaper distributed by the Wyoming Outdoor Council in the state Capitol during the 2024 funding fight reported that invasive annual grasses already affect 26% of the Equality State’s landmass, which pencils out to over 16 million acres.
Cheatgrass is widespread along the east side of South Pass, just a couple dozen miles away from the most expansive and intact reaches of the sagebrush biome remaining on Earth. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Historically, Wyoming land managers believed that much of the nation’s least-populated state was too high and too cold for cheatgrassto gain much ground. But the climate has tilted in its favor, according to Jeanne Chambers, an emeritus U.S. Forest Service research ecologist who has studied cheatgrass for decades.
“Cooler temperatures, especially those cold nighttime temperatures, used to keep cheatgrass at bay,” Chambers said. “But now that things are warming up and people and livestock and animals are all over the place, the propagules — the seeds — are getting everywhere.”
As a result, slightly lower-elevation reaches of Wyoming, like the Bighorn Basin, are seeing more and more cheatgrass, she said. The same goes for where the salt desert transitions into sagebrush in the state’s southwestern corner.
“Those areas are pretty vulnerable,” Chambers said.
Cheatgrass sprouts off a badland-like formation near Burlington in November 2025. The noxious grass is widespread in the Bighorn Basin, and wildfires that have flared up in recent years are exacerbating its spread. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Wyoming specialists in those communities corroborate the claims.
“Cheatgrass is moving into our county, primarily on the south end — but it’s not exclusive to the south end,” Sweetwater County Weed and Pest Supervisor Dan Madson said. “There are hot spots throughout the county invading mule deer, antelope and elk habitats, as well as sage grouse core areas.”
Some of the encroachments are well north into the Green River Basin and Red Desert, noted sagebrush strongholds. North of Rock Springs, north of Superior and in the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge are all places being actively invaded, Madson said.
Sweetwater County is scaling up its response, Madson said. The county is spending about $750,000 to spray nearly 12,000 acres of cheatgrass this year and plans to treat more like 15,000 acres in 2026.
But money is a limiting factor. Wyoming landscapes have been the recipient of many millions of federal dollars, including from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which have complemented the state’s contributions.
Wyoming contains half of the core sagebrush-steppe habitat, in dark blue, that remains in the United States. Light blue signifies areas habitat managers have identified as having potential for restoration and tan areas are classified as “other rangeland.” (U.S. Geological Survey)
Still, the pace of infestation statewide and in Sweetwater County far exceeds the total resources available.
“We could easily, easily triple that [15,000 acres] in a year,” Madson said, “and still have enough to do for the rest of my career.”
“That money got lost,” said Budd, at the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “It actually hurt some parts of the state that were doing a very good proactive job, managing to keep cheatgrass down.”
‘Defending the core’
The upper Green River Basin is one example of a landscape where cheatgrass advances have been reversed. Its remoteness, harsh climate and high elevation helped, but those factors alone didn’t prevent a slow incursion of the virulent vegetation early in the century. By 2014, for example, hues of red and purple — hallmarks of cheatgrass — were painting the ridges rising over Boulder Lake.
The Sublette County Weed and Pest District fought the invasion with repeated treatments. In 2018 alone, some 30,000 acres of the western front of the Winds were aerially sprayed. It worked.
By the summer 2020, no cheatgrass was being detected at Boulder Lake, once a hotspot, District Supervisor Julie Kraft said. Nowadays, she said, no major problem areas remain in Sublette County.
In August 2019, a recreational shooter hit an exploding target and sparked the Tannerite Fire, which ripped across the pictured ridge on the north end of Boulder Lake. Afterwards, cheatgrass that was already in the area grew in thick where the sagebrush once stood, but the mountainside was subsequently treated and today the invasive grass occurs only in trace levels. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
Kraft even felt “good” about the future of her cheatgrass fight, expressing uncommon optimism for those grappling with an organism overtaking so many places.
“A couple of years ago, I might not have said the same thing,” Kraft said. “But with this new tool, and particularly because of the influx of money that came [during] the [Biden] administration, it allowed us to do so much more.”
That new tool is an herbicide, Indaziflam. It’s a product, also known by its trade name, Rejuvra, that provides far more enduring protection against cheatgrass than any previous chemical treatment. It works by attacking the seedbank and shallow root structure of cheatgrass, while not infiltrating the soil deep enough to kill perennial native grasses and plants like sagebrush.
“It depletes it down until there won’t be a seedbank of cheatgrass anymore,” Kraft said. “We’ve seen that on our sites. Year one, you can go out and grab handfuls of cheatgrass seed off the top of the soil. Year two, you can’t find those handfuls anymore. By year three, you can’t dig [cheatgrass seeds] out of the bottoms of sagebrush.”
Sublette County, a stronghold of the sagebrush biome, has fared better than other parts of Wyoming at keeping cheatgrass at bay. Still, patches can be found here or there, like this pocket overlooking Half Moon Lake in March 2025. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)
The June 2024 outing that drew Riginos, the Nature Conservancy scientist, to Washakie Park along the east slope of the Winds included a stop at an experimental Indaziflam treatment plot.
Although a mix of the herbicide had been misted over strips of cheatgrass nearly four years earlier, its effect remained obvious and unmistakable. Curing, purple drooping brome blanketed untreated strips, and native green grasses filled the niches between.
“It’s holding still,” said Aaron Foster, Fremont County’s weed and pest supervisor, who led the cheatgrass treatment tour on the reservation. “It’s been holding now for four growing seasons. Pretty impressive.”
The News:The Trump administration last week weighed in on the 53-year battle over what waterways are covered by the 1972 Clean Water Act — with a draft rule that would narrow the definition of “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS. The rule would effectively remove federal CWA protections from hundreds of arroyos, rivers, and ephemeral streams in the Southwest, giving developers industries more latitude to alter or pollute those waterways. The public has until Jan. 5 to submit comments.
The Context: For years, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers—the agencies charged with enforcing the CWA—considered WOTUS to include everything from arroyos to prairie potholes to sloughs to mudflats, so long as the destruction or degradation thereof might ultimately affect traditionally navigable waters or interstate commerce (which could include recreation, sightseeing, or wildlife watching). It was a broad definition that gave the agencies latitude to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,” as Congress mandated when creating the law in 1972.
Developers and property rights ideologues pushed back on this definition, saying it was too broad and therefore gave the feds too much power to curb pollution or restrict development. The issue ended up in the courts and, ultimately, to the U.S. Supreme Court.
The waters were muddied, so to speak, by the 2006 Supreme Court split decision on the Rapanos case. The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote what would become the right-wing’s preferred definition of waters of the U.S. He argued that they should include only “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water … described in ordinary parlance as streams[,] … oceans, rivers, [and] lakes.” Scalia’s definition emphatically excluded “ephemeral streams” and “dry arroyos in the middle of the desert.” Justice Anthony Kennedy disputed Scalia, saying instead the CWA should extend to any stream or body of water with a “significant nexus” to navigable waters, determined by a wetland’s or waterway’s status as an “integral part of the aquatic environment.”
Then, in 2023, in its ruling on the Sackett case, the SCOTUS majority deferred to Scalia’s Rapanos definition, writing: “… we conclude that the Rapanos plurality was correct: the CWA’s use of ‘waters’ encompasses ‘only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water forming geographical features that are described in ordinary parlance as streams oceans, rivers and lakes.’”
It’s up to the relevant agencies to translate these rulings into actual rules, often adding their own ideological twists. The W. Bush, Obama, and Trump I administrations issued their own post-Rapanos definitions of WOTUS, Biden weighed in post-Sackett, now Trump II is submitting its own set of industry-friendly, deregulatory definitions.
The EPA’s proposed definition of ‘‘waters of the United States’’ would include:
“Relatively permanent,” under the new rule, would mean
And then there’s this weird and vague, yet critical, term, “wet season,” which the rule defines as:
Sometimes you have to wonder whether the bureaucrats who come up with these things have ever even been to the Western U.S., particularly the arid Southwest.
The “relatively permanent” requirement clearly excludes thousands of arroyos, ephemeral streams, washes, gullies, and even rios and rivers — from the Santa Cruz to the Rillito to the Santa Fe to the Puerco and the Dirty Devil — from CWA jurisdiction. Indeed, it leaves huge swaths of the Southwest without Clean Water Act protections, and at the mercy of respective states or counties. A 2008 EPA study estimates that ephemeral and intermittent streams make up 59% of all of the waterways in the U.S. (excluding Alaska) and over 81% in the arid and semi-arid Southwest (AZ, NM, UT, CO, CA).
Source: U.S. EPA.
The ecological benefits of ephemeral streams are obvious to any Western wanderer who happens to venture down a seemingly dry and barren arroyo bed, where they may find cool air, the smell of water even on the hottest day, tiny tracks of animals seeking sanctuary from the sun, the lascivous bloom of a datura, and cottonwoods and even willows miles and miles away from any “relatively permanent” water source. And if that’s not enough, then consider that peer-reviewed research has found that these same ephemeral streams are major contributors to the water quantity and quality of the entire river drainage network of which they are a part.
Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org
A 2024 study by Craig Brinkerhoff et al concludes: “This ephemeral influence directly implicates downstream water quality standards: Excluding ephemeral streams from coverage under the CWA would substantially narrow the extent of federal authority to regulate water quality in the United States.”
While the administration was looking to provide “clarity,” the “wet season” provision does exactly the opposite, especially when one tries to apply it to the desert Southwest. If southern Arizona has a wet season, wouldn’t it be the days and weeks of the late summer monsoon? Many arroyos do run continuously during a good monsoon season, even if it is only for two or three weeks. So would that put them back under CWA jurisdiction?
How these proposed changes would play out on the ground is a bit of a puzzle — especially given the “wet season” ambiguity. But what is clear is that developers of big housing projects in the desert outside Phoenix or Las Vegas or Tucson, for example, would be allowed to fill in or build roads through arroyos and washes without obtaining a federal CWA permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. That would leave it to the state and county to implement their own, similar, permitting systems if they chose to do so.
As one might expect, the energy industry, developers, ranchers, and farmers generally support the changes, since it will eliminate some of the red tape that tangles up and delays projects.
“For U.S. oil and natural gas operators, this is a game-changer,” wrote the head of a Texas petroleum industry group in the Odessa American. “Picture the Permian Basin or Bakken Formation: vast swaths dotted with intermittent draws and playas that previous rules treated like sacred rivers, triggering Section 404 permits under the U.S. Army Corps that could drag on for years and cost millions in mitigation. Now, with ephemeral features sidelined and groundwater off-limits, operators can overcome those hurdles for well pads, access roads, and seismic surveys.”
If you live in the West, you probably live near at least one of the ephemeral streams that would lose federal protections under these new definitions. You might want to go walk up it sometime soon before it goes away.
In the meantime, you have until Jan. 5 to send your comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA–HQ– OW–2025–0322, by any of the following methods:
Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov/ (our preferred method). Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
Email: OW-Docket@epa.gov. Include Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OW– 2025–0322 in the subject line of the message.
Mail: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Water Docket, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460.
Read more about the Clean Water Act, WOTUS, and the value of ephemeral waterways here (but remember, you gotta become a paid subscriber to bust through the paywall!)
Scene from a huge coal mine in the Powder River Basin. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🌵 Public Lands 🌲
Congressional Republicans have apparently decided that the best way to turn over public lands to the extractive industries is to do away with the plans guiding management of those lands. Earlier this year, Congress revoked three Bureau of Land Management resource management plans in Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. Now, they’ve done the same for the RMP for the BLM’s Buffalo Field Office in Wyoming, which covers a good portion of the coal-rich Powder River Basin.
These mark the first times ever that the Congressional Review Act, which is intended to give Congress the power to review and possibly revoke recently implemented administrative rules, has been used in this manner. That’s in part because RMPs have not been considered “rules” in the past, meaning they are not subject to congressional review.
Resource Management Plans provide a framework for managing large swaths of land and authorize the BLM to permit mining, drilling, grazing, and other activities. They endeavor to balance the agency’s multiple-use mandate with environmental protections, guiding resource extraction and development away from sensitive areas and toward more appropriate ones, for example. They can take years to develop, and incorporate science, legal considerations, court orders, tribal consultation, and input from local officials and the general public.
And then, with just a few hours of debate and no opportunity for public input, Congress can toss the whole thing into the can.
In this case, the main target was a provision of the Biden-era RMP that halted new coal leasing on that swath of public land. While the moratorium was celebrated by environmentalists and panned by fossil fuel lovers when it was implemented late last year, it was largely symbolic, since existing leases contain enough coal to meet demand at least until 2040. So revoking the ban similarly won’t lead to any new mining anytime soon, nor are resulting lease sales likely to fetch much industry interest or acceptable bids.
But in their haste to scrap the ban, Congress also may have taken away the BLM’s power to issue new leases altogether — not just for coal, but for oil and gas drilling, grazing, or any other use. And not just for the Buffalo Field Office, either. This is a bit wonky, but basically it goes like this:
By applying the CRA to RMPs, Congress is saying that RMPs are “rules.”
According to the CRA, rules must be submitted to Congress before they can take effect.
No RMP that has been implemented since 1996 has been submitted to Congress.
Therefore, no post-1996 RMP has legally taken effect, making it invalid.
The Federal Land Policy Management Act says the BLM can only issue permits, leases, rights of way, and other authorizations “in accordance with” a valid land use plan, or RMP.
Therefore all permits, leases, ROWs, and other authorizations issued under post-1996 RMPs — including over 5,000 oil and gas leases, and hundreds more coming up for auction in the near future — are invalid.
This summer, 31 law professors and public land experts called on Congress to refrain from using the CRA to revoke RMPs. “The resulting uncertainty could trigger an endless cycle of litigation,” they wrote, “effectively freezing the ability of the BLM and other agencies to manage public lands for years, if not decades to come.”
Just last week, a group of conservation organization legal analysts expanded on the potential for chaos, and called on the BLM to pause new leasing and address the “potential legal deficiencies” of oil and gas leases covering some 4 million acres that were issued under now potentially invalid RMPs. The agency should not issue drilling permits for those leases, the analysts wrote, and it should consider canceling the leases.
Somehow, I don’t think the BLM under the current administration is going to follow that suggestion. Given its track record, it seems more likely that the agency will see the sudden lack of valid RMPs as an open gate through which it can ferry its pro-extractive agenda. This one is almost sure to end up in court.
🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅
The Trump administration is proposing new regulations that would dial back Endangered Species Act protections and weaken the landmark law to “strengthen American energy independence,” according to an Interior Department news release.
The new rules would:
Make it more difficult for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat in areas that are not currently occupied by an endangered species — likely because they were extirpated from the area — but that are essential for the conservation of that species. This would make recovering an endangered species that much more difficult.
Remove a rule that extends ESA protections to species that are listed as “threatened,” which is one step away from “endangered.” This would potentially remove protections for species such as the marbled murrelet, vernal pool fairy shrimp, western snowy plover, Gunnison sage grouse, northern sea otter, and many others.
Direct agencies to give economic impacts greater weight when deciding whether to extend ESA protections to a species. This could have potentially pushed the feds to, say, back off on listing the Tiehm’s buckwheat under the ESA, because doing so would potentially restrict or nix a proposed lithium mine in its only known habitat.
Make it more difficult for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat in areas that are not currently occupied by an endangered species — likely because they were extirpated from the area — but that are essential for the conservation of that species. This would make recovering an endangered species that much more difficult.
Remove a rule that extends ESA protections to species that are listed as “threatened,” which is one step away from “endangered.” This would potentially remove protections for species such as the marbled murrelet, vernal pool fairy shrimp, western snowy plover, Gunnison sage grouse, northern sea otter, and many others.
Direct agencies to give economic impacts greater weight when deciding whether to extend ESA protections to a species. This could have potentially pushed the feds to, say, back off on listing the Tiehm’s buckwheat under the ESA, because doing so would potentially restrict or nix a proposed lithium mine in its only known habitat.
“This plan hacks apart the Endangered Species Act and creates a blueprint for the extinction for some of America’s most beloved wildlife,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Raven and the red, white, and blue. Digital Painting by Jonathan P. Thompson.
And, finally, the Land Desk readers have spoken, and they have chosen El Burro Blanco as the name for the new Land Desk dispatch-mobile, with Hank coming in a distant second.
