Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Debra Utacia Krol). Here’s an excerpt:
August 20, 2025
Key Points
Hours after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals blocked a land swap for a copper mine at Oak Flat, President Donald Trump called the mine’s critics “Anti-American.”
Tribal leaders reacted quickly, reminding the president that they are the first Americans and are trying to protect their sacred lands.
Trump reportedly met with mining executives at the White House and, in his Truth Social post, argued that the United States needed to protect its copper reserves.
Arizona tribal leaders struck back after President Donald Trump called opponents of a planned copper mine at Oak Flat “anti-American,” suggesting they were allied with other copper-producing countries like China. Trump posted comments on Truth Social on Aug. 19, hours after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appealsย temporarily halted a land exchangeย that would allow Resolution Copper to build the mine on a site east of Phoenix held sacred by the Apache people and other Indigenous communities. “Those that fought (the mine) are Anti-American, and representing other Copper competitive Countries,” Trump wrote, while claiming that the 9th Circuit Court is “a Radical Left Court.” He did not include any evidence to support his claims…Currently,ย 10 of the judges on the 9th Circuit’s panel are Trump appointees;ย another three are Republican-appointed justices, while the remaining 16 judges in the circuit court are Democratic appointees, according to the legal news outlet Daily Journal. The president also said the U.S. needs copper now…
In aย Facebook postย on Aug. 20, San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler hit back: “As first Americans, the San Carlos Apache Tribe agrees on the importance of protecting Americaโs interests,” he said, but “the Presidentโs comments mirror misinformation that has been repeated by foreign mining interests that want to extract American copper.” Rambler also pointed out that a Chinese company, Chinalco, is the largest shareholder of Rio Tinto and BHP, the two British-Australian firms that jointly own Resolution Copper. “Of course their interest is in mining this copper and shipping it to China.” With just three smelters in the U.S., and one of those currently non-functional, mines have been shipping crushed ore to China for processing for years.
The San Carlos Apache Tribe and a coalition of environmental groups have fought for years against the Resolution Copper mine, which would become one of the countryโs largest at the cost of a site revered by the tribe.
Just hours before the deal was set to go through, a federal appeals court temporarily blocked a land transfer in Arizona on Monday that would ultimately lead to the destruction of a site sacred to Western Apache people.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appealsโ temporary restraining order is the latest in a long-running saga in which the U.S. Forest Service has planned to transfer the land to a mining company, Resolution Copper, while the San Carlos Apache Tribe and a coalition of environmental groups have fought to protect the sacred site of Oak Flat, or Chรญโchil Biลdagoteel in Apache.
The company has worked for two decades to gain access to the 2,200 acres of land in Tonto National Forest that contains both the sacred site and one of the worldโs largest untapped copper deposits. The restraining order halts the land transfer until the court can rule on two consolidated cases, which have argued in lower courts that approval of the land transfer and mine violates the National Environmental Policy Act and failed to adequately consult with the tribe.
โThe Apache people will never stop fighting for Chรญโchil Biลdagoteel,โ said San Carlos Apache Tribe Chairman Terry Rambler in a statement. โWe thank the court for stopping this horrific land exchange and allowing us to argue the merits of our pending lawsuit in court.โ
A spokesperson for Resolution Copper said in a written statement that the order is โmerely a temporary pause so that the court of appeals can consider plaintiffsโ eleventh hour motions,โ and that the company is โconfident the court will ultimately affirm the district courtโs well-reasoned orders explaining in detail why the congressionally directed land exchange satisfies all applicable legal requirements.โ
U.S. District Judge Dominic W. Lanza on Friday denied the tribe and environmental groupsโ challenges, which had cleared the way for the land transfer to go through. In his order, he acknowledged the mine would destroy the sacred area and use a massive amount of the regionโs scarce groundwater. But he noted that the transfer was signed into law in 2014 by President Barack Obamaโmandated by Congress in a rider attached to a defense billโand that the Supreme Court declined to hear another case challenging the mine.
A spokesperson from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, declined to comment on the latest court order, but said the bill authorizing the land transfer aligns with the Trump administrationโs efforts โto strengthen domestic mineral and energy production, advancing the nationโs economic and strategic goals.โ
In April, the Trump administration signaled it would approve the project. A years-long religious freedom case brought by Apache Stronghold, an Apache religious group, was denied by the Supreme Court in May. Then, the U.S. Forest Service postedthe final environmental impact statement and draft record of decision for the Resolution Copper project, setting the stage for Oak Flat to be transferred to the mining company by Aug. 19.
Since then, the proposed mine has become one of the most high-profile environmental battles in the U.S. The 9th Circuitโs order requires the tribe and environmental groups to file their opening brief by Sept. 9, with answering briefs from the Forest Service and Resolution Copper due by Sept. 29.
โWeโre thankful that the court has paused this ill-conceived land exchange that would destroy Oak Flat and all that makes it special, including the old Emory oak trees, endangered hedgehog cactus, and its significant cultural and recreational values,โ said Sandy Bahr, director of the Sierra Clubโs Grand Canyon Chapter, in a statement. The Sierra Club is one of the plaintiffs. โThere is still a lot to do to save this special place, but we remain committed to doing everything we can to ensure Oak Flat is here for future generations.โ
Colorado River water flows through La Paz County, Arizona on August 6, 2025. The Central Arizona Project is among the agencies facing cutbacks on water supply while the river is under shortage conditions. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
August 15, 2025
This story is part of ongoing coverage of water in the West, produced by KUNC in Colorado and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
The latest projections for the Colorado River are out, and they paint a picture of more dry conditions and dropping reservoirs.
The river supplies water to nearly 40 million people across the Southwest, and itโs stretched thin by climate change and steady demand. New data from the Bureau of Reclamation shows low inflows and dropping water levels at the nationโs two largest reservoirs โ Lake Powell and Lake Mead. This is just the latest bad news in the midst of a megadrought going back more than two decades.
Projected Lake Mead end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
Projected Lake Powell end-of-month physical elevations from the latest 24-Month Study inflow scenarios.
The river will enter 2026 in a โTier 1 Shortage,โ under which Arizona and Nevada will face mandatory cutbacks to their water supply. While they put some water users in an uncomfortable pinch, those cutbacks arenโt raising the same alarm bells they once did. Dry conditions and water reductions have become a sort of new normal. Shortage conditions for the lower Colorado River basin were first declared in 2021, and have been in place since.
On the ground, the agencies that have to deal with these cutbacks seem to be adapting. Major water users tout their conservation efforts. The towns and cities that are most likely to face permanent reductions to their water use are putting hundreds of millions of dollars into systems that will steel them against smaller water deliveries in the future.
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
Meanwhile, further upstream, dropping levels at Lake Powell are creating a near-term crisis. The new federal water data shows the reservoir ending this year only 27% full. If it drops much lower, the reservoir could fall below the pipes which allow water to flow through hydropower generators inside the dam โ jeopardizing electricity generation for about five million people across seven states. The new data shows that could happen as soon as November 2026.
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
Policymakers who can shape the regionโs long-term response to dry conditions have been facing mounting calls for action. They are under pressure to come up with new rules for managing the river in the long-term before the current guidelines expire in 2026.
Cynthia Campbell, who directs a water policy research center at Arizona State University, said instead of urgently working on a long-term plan, those policymakers seem to have spent the past few years โgamblingโ on the idea that water might come back and reverse the crisis at major reservoirs.
โIf they were betting on that,โ she said, โThen they’re losing, because it is continuing to march on. Mother Nature is continuing to march on, and we’re continuing to see declines in the system.โ
While some small glimmers of hope have emerged from negotiations, water managers from the seven states that use the Colorado River seem stuck at an impasse.
โWe have yet to see any courage in the sense of making choices that will bolster long-term system reliability,โ said Campbell, who formerly served as a top water lawyer for the city of Phoenix. โThere seems to be an unwillingness on the collected parties to do that, and that is not good news.โ
Climate scientists say the riverโs dry conditions are unlikely to turn around anytime soon. A warming, drying climate is sapping the region of its water at every turn, and significant reductions to demand are likely the only solution to that new reality.
When I was a kid, I collected pinback buttons, political and otherwise. Most of you probably know what that is, but for the youngs out there, itโs basically an analog meme you pin to your clothing to let folks know which political candidate or other cause you might support.
Iโm pretty sure I had a โJohn Anderson for Presidentโ button. My parents supported the Independent candidate in the 1980 election because he had been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Jimmy Carter, while championing environmental preservation, had supercharged the fossil fuel industries in the West, which ravaged landscapes and economies, losing their support. I had a couple of buttons from the early Snowdown celebrations in Durango, and one from Wolverton Mountain Days, a funky event held at the Durango nordic center whose motto was: โTrack, Telly, Twinkie,โ or something along those lines. Maybe the little collection included a โGilbert Slade for County Commissioner,โ that I would have picked up at one of Sladeโs Democratic Party goat roasts out on the Dryside.
But perhaps the most intriguing one was small, dark blue or black, with a bold white typeface declaring: โFight Blight / Burn a Billboard Tonight.โ I probably had to ask an adult what blight meant, though the second part I understood. It was, perhaps, my first encounter with the concept of monkey-wrenching, or sabotaging equipment or structures or billboards as a form of protest, usually with environmental motivations.
This would have been shortly after Edward Abbeyโs The Monkey Wrench Gang was published (50 years ago this month), in which Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug did some billboard burning of their own before joining up with Seldom Seen and George Hayduke and moving on to bigger acts of sabotage. But the buttonโs text preceded the novel. The slogan was a favorite of David Brower, according to John McPheeโs โEncounters of the Archdruid,โ which ran in the New Yorker in 1971.
Though I wouldnโt find out until much later, it turns out my father lived out the slogan during his younger days in Silverton, Colorado.
***
Up until the 1950s, Silverton was a full-on mining town, with a little bit of tourism on top. Following World War II, however, the last big mine, the Shenandoah-Dives, shut down. The local economy, sputtered and gasped, ushering in what Silvertonians would come to call the โBlack Decade.โ
Desperate, the townsfolk turned to tourism, capitalizing on a Hollywood-fueled, global fascination with the Wild West of American mythology. The Durango-to-Silverton stretch of railroad switched from hauling ore to carrying sightseers, and almost overnight Silverton morphed from mining town to a facsimile of a Hollywood version of a place that never existed. In order to lure motorists, some local businesses installed billboards along Highway 550 as it dropped into town from Molas Pass.
My parents arrived in Silverton in the 1960s. Mining had come back in force, with Standard Metalsโ American Tunnel facilitating the re-opening of the fabled Sunnyside Mine. Yet the tourism industry and its cheesy theatrics persisted, much to the disgust of my parents and their peers, who were members of a sort of rural Western intelligentsia, drawn there by the mountains, the wildness, the culture, the history, and perhaps most of all, the authenticity of the community. They saw the tchotchke-peddling economy as the antithesis of the richer, more real mining culture.
In July 1963, Terry Marshall summed up the sentiment in a Silverton Standard editorial on the surreal scene that unfolded every day at โtrain time.โ
Ultimately, the town would pass statutes and rules that reined in the carnival atmosphere. Yet the billboards on 550 remained and fell into disrepair, and efforts to have the highway department take them down apparently went nowhere. One day in the late 1960s โ the story goes 1ย โ my father was telling his cousin about his frustration with the situation, not just at how ugly the billboards were, but at the powerlessness to do anything about it. This relative (who will remain nameless), suggested in his sanguine way: โLetโs just burn it.โ
And so, on one dark night, thatโs exactly what they did, with my mother possibly driving the get-away car, nearly a decade before the fictional George Hayduke sabotaged the equipment building the road through Comb Ridge. My father and accomplices were never caught. Indeed, the billboard was so damned ugly that maybe nobody cared.
***
People who knew or knew of my father might find it incredible that he would go to this extreme. He was a diplomat and uniter, someone who could bring together disparate factions to benefit the community. He also had a strong moral compass and cared deeply about this land and its communities, and would do what he could to defend it โ within reason โ even if it may have skirted the law just a little bit.
I know this because when I was maybe 12 or 13, I went camping with my dad and his friend and the friendโs kid. It was way up near Raplee Ridge, in southeastern Utah, looking down into the San Juan River, on a dusty two-track. On the way to the campsite, we noticed some survey flags sticking up from the sparse and rocky earth.
This would have been the early 1980s, when the Carter-era quest for โenergy independenceโ was still in full-force, and miners and drillers were ripping apart the Western landscape for whatever uranium, coal, oil and gas, or oil shale they could find. My young heart ached at the realization that the stakes marked a future extraction site, that soon the bulldozers and the drill rigs would show up and tear the earth apart and suck out whatever minerals dwelled down there.
On the way back, the adults stopped the car near the site, told us kids to stay put, got out, walked over to the stakes, methodically pulled them out of the ground, and threw them over the edge of the cliff. Then they got back in and we drove away, without saying anything else about it. It was a soothing site to witness, even from the remove of the old car.
The site was never developed or drilled or mined, though Iโm guessing that had less to do with this little act of sabotage than with the fact that the energy booms all faded shortly thereafter. For them, however, it was a significant act of resistance, and perhaps of love for the Place. Maybe just as importantly, they were defying the powerlessness we feel in the face of the churning gears of progress and greed, apathy and cruelty.
***
The Monkey Wrench Gang is often considered monkey-wrenchingโs literary debut. Itโs not. Two years before Abbey published his book, there was Jim Harrisonโs A Good Day to Die, which followed a trio on a Florida-to-Idaho road trip in a quest to blow up a dam.
Harrisonโs protagonist is named Tim, a Hayduke-esque guy just back from a couple tours in Vietnam, scarred in more ways than one and with a hankering for booze and pills to ease the pain. The storyโs narrator, a bit of a cad with relationship issues, is on a fishing trip and escapist odyssey in Floridaโs Keys when he encounters Tim. During a drinking session, the narrator tells Tim offhandedly that thereโs a dam in the Grand Canyon, or at least they are planning one, pushing Tim into a melancholic slump. โJesus Christ,โ he says, โit will fill up with water.โ
Tim is immediately fixated by the idea, noting that he has never seen the Grand Canyon. The narrator โhad seen Glen Canyon years ago before it was literally drowned and liked it better but any comparison was absurd with such splendors.โ After a little more thought, he notes, casually: โWe probably ought to blow up the goddamn thing.โ
Tim takes the idea and runs with it, though it isnโt entirely clear what his motives are. Is he truly looking to defend the environment and free the Colorado River? Is he seeking to punish those who deigned dam up something as sacred as the Grand Canyon? Or is he merely lashing out at the general injustice of the world, hoping to be heard among all the cruel noise?
Whatever it is, the narrator gets caught up in it, too, maybe just to have a bit of purpose beyond baking in the sun and waiting for the fish to bite. When Tim suggests a trip West, the narrator hesitates and says only if they return quickly. But as the story progresses he becomes more invested in the act, even if it is only a means for pursuing the alluring Sylvia, Timโs on-again-off-again girlfriend.
When they discover there is no dam in the Grand Canyon, the narrator refuses to abandon the mission, and suggests they instead decommission an earthen dam on a tributary of the Clearwater in Idaho, โwhere a wealthy rancher ruined a good steelhead stream โฆ out of greed and contempt for the natural world.โ Once the new target is picked, the narrator feels โstrong and clean and very moral. Heroic, in fact.โ 2
***
A Good Day to Die may have preceded and even inspired the Monkey Wrench Gang, but the latter was far more widely read and influential. Abbeyโs classic was published 50 years ago this month, inspiring many acts of low- and high-level eco-sabotage in the decades that followed. And in 1985, Bill Haywood and Dave Foreman published a manual for Abbeyโs acolytes called Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.
Monkeywrenchers pulled up survey stakes by the dozen, spiked trees to halt logging projects, cut commercial fishing drift nets, dumped sand and corn syrup into bulldozersโ gas tanks and crankcases, vandalized ski-lift supports, cut power to uranium mines, and plotted to topple transmission towers carrying electricity from nuclear plants. Some were caught. Others were not.
In the late 1990s, factions of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front took it up a notch by torching a Bureau of Land Management wild horse captivity facility in Burns, Oregon. Then, in 1998, they burned down several structures at the Vail Ski Resort in an effort to block the ski area expansion and its deleterious effects on lynx habitat.
The ski area recovered and expanded, despite an estimated $24 million worth of damage. Direct environmental action, however, took a hit as federal law enforcement (and corporate interests) began throwing around the term โeco-terrorist,โ the connotations of which became far more grim after 9/11 3. The FBI then declared monkeywrenching to be one of theย nationโs leading domestic terror threats, surpassing even right-wing militia groups, despite the fact that the saboteurs only damage property and make a point of not harming humans or other living beings.
This put quite a damper on environmental direct action, since even pulling up a few survey stakes might get you labeled a terrorist and tossed in the clink โ or even Guantanamo Bay โ for years. Monkeywrenching, however, did not die. In 2016, for example, a crew of โValve Turnersโ managed to shut down several major oil pipelines in an attempt to slow fossil fuel burning and bring attention to the climate crisis (Michelle Nijhuis wrote a terrific piece on this in 2018). Otherwise there have been very few high-profile direct-action eco-sabotage cases, at least from what I can gather.
***
Monkeywrenching is on my mind not because itโs MWGโs half-century birthday or even because the White House, Congress, and the courts have been occupied by authoritarians, oligarchs, and their enablers, who value profit over everything else, especially the environment. Iโve actually been pondering it for several months, since long before Trump was elected.
A couple of things sparked this line of thought. First, it seems as if thereโs a bit of a literary revival of monkeywrenching. Itโs one of the methods employed by climate activists in Stephen Markeyโs excellent novel The Deluge. And it is the main theme of the film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is a fictional rendering of Andreas Malmโs non-fiction treatise of the same name.
I began to write that these books and films are Monkey Wrench Gangs for the global warming age. But I donโt think thatโs quite right. The tone of the newer book and film is far different โ more urgent and somber โ than MWG or a Good Day to Die. And the motives of the protagonists are also more serious and deep, if you will. Pipelineโs characters, for example, mostly were direct victims of the fossil fuel industry, making their sabotage a form of self-defense, while the Delugeโs eco-saboteurs see themselves as warriors fighting for the planetโs very survival.
Itโs not surprising that eco-sabotage is experiencing a revival, even if itโs only fictional. The urgency of a warming climate is becoming acute, and yet the powers that be are diddling their thumbs. More and more people are frustrated and fed up with the lugubrious process of fighting climate change and environmental destruction in legal and legitimate ways. Even when the Democrats control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, they rarely are able to take more than a half-step forward policy-wise, only to see their incremental progress obliterated by Trump, the MAGA-dominated Congress, and a runaway Supreme Court within weeks after taking power.
Now the Trump administration is even precluding public input for major mines, oil and gas drilling, and other developments on public lands, all in the name of a bogus โenergy emergency.โ They are literally blocking the publicโs legal avenues for making a difference, leaving concerned citizens with little choice but to take more direct action.
What is surprising to me is that a new wave of eco-sabotage has not made it from the screen and page to real life. 4ย Instead, climate activists areย throwing soup, paint, and other stuff at prominent artworks, hoping to bring attention to their cause. They are gluing themselves to the road and disrupting bicycle races, from theย World Championshipsย in Scotland to theย Tour de France, and Just Stop Oil even defaced Charles Darwinโs graves.
The activists and their supporters claim that these actions raise public awareness. That may be so, but awareness of what, exactly? How does disrupting a bike race, of all things, reduce fossil fuel combustion? How does defacing a painting โ even if only โsymbolicallyโ โ relate to environmental destruction? And whatโs with targeting Darwinโs grave? While I appreciate the zeal, I canโt help but wonder: If youโre going to vandalize something and risk jail time, why not do something that makes a direct and immediate difference โ even if only temporarily?
When the narrator in a Good Day to Die decides to get rid of the dam in Idaho, he is hit with a moment of moral clarity. I suspect it has to do with the directness of his planned action. He sees a problem, a fish-harming dam, and sets about to solve it in the most logical and direct way possible: blowing it up โ preferably without harming anybody. Heโs not looking to send a message, to make a symbolic gesture, or raise awareness. Heโs just trying to fix something thatโs wrong, not unlike burning an atrocious billboard or surreptitiously removing some survey stakes from a remote area or destroying a pipeline that defiles the land and carries planet-killing fossil fuels.
Donโt get me wrong. Iโm not suggesting that anyone go out and do anything illegal. Iโm just saying that when a personโs home โ whether thatโs a house, a community, a Place, or the entire planet โ comes under attack, it shouldnโt be surprising that they would go to extreme lengths to defend it.
Four Corners Power Plant. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
For the last several years, the coal industry in the Western U.S. has been suffering from what I call the Big Breakdown โ as opposed to the Big Buildup of the 1960s and 1970s, when coal power plants and mines popped up all over the Colorado Plateau and beyond. Now, it appears that the proliferation of energy-intensive data centers is stalling the Breakdown, maybe even reversing it. Last week, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico running โ and polluting โ for another seven years beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement.
The coal-burning extension is part of the stateโs largest utilityโs plan to shift its climate goal from becoming zero carbon by 2050 to carbon neutral. While that sounds like a mere semantic switch, its on-the-ground effects will be significant. Along with the coal plant news, APS and the stateโs other largest utilities are going in on a new natural gas pipeline from the Permian Basin so it can increase fossil fuel generation rather than pivoting entirely to solar, wind, battery energy storage, and other carbon-free sources.
APS officials say the shift is necessary to meet growing power demand. While population growth and increasingly hot temperatures play a role in the ever-larger load on the grid, the crop of new energy-intensive data centers sprouting in the Phoenix area is a principle driver. The utility is also likely reacting to the Trump administrationโs fondness for fossil fuels and disdain for renewables.
The Four Corners plant and its accompanying Navajo Mine were constructed about 15 miles west of Farmington in the early 1960s by a consortium of utilities led by APS and Utah Construction & Mining Co, a subsidiary of Kennecott, a global mining firm. It was the flagship of a much larger fleet that would include the San Juan, Navajo, Mojave, Cholla, Coronado, and Escalante plants. Mojave was shuttered in 2005, with the other big plants closing down more recently (Coronado will be converted to natural gas). That leaves just Four Corners, which was supposed to be shuttered in 2031, or even sooner, if Public Service Company of New Mexico were able to get out of its 13% stake before then.
But over the last few years, utilities have been second-guessing plans to decommission the aging behemoths as data centers have sprouted across the region, significantly increasing demand on the power grid. Over the last week, both Salt River Project and APS have set new peak power demand records as both residents and data centers crank up the coolers to offset extreme heat. Demand is projected to grow significantly over the next decade, mostly due to new data centers. Itโs the Big Buildup all over again, only this time itโs high-tech server farms sprouting all over the place, with power generating sources struggling to keep up.
1 *I didnโt hear this story until after my father died, so this is all second-hand and the details may be a bit off.
2 I wonโt tell you what happens. If you read the book, you should be warned that reviewers of the time sneered at it for being too macho, too crude, having too much drug and alcohol use, โadolescent,โ and so forth. Maybe thatโs all true, but I liked it the first time I read it decades ago, and I still liked it when I read it again recently.
3 * The term was apparently coined in the 1980s by Ron Arnold, the founder of the anti-environment Wise Use Movement.
4**ย Right-wing nationalist attacks on the power grid are not, in my mind, a form of monkeywrenching. Their goal is to disrupt and harm society, including humans, not to stop environmental damage or even make a political protest.
The 24-Month Study projects future Colorado River system conditions using single-trace hydrologic scenarios simulated with the Colorado River Mid-term Modeling System (CRMMS) in 24-Month Study Mode. The Most Probable and Probable Minimum 24-Month Studies are released monthly, typically by the 15th day of the month. The Probable Maximum 24-Month Study is released alongside other 24-Month Studies in January, April, August, and October.
Initial Conditions: The 24-Month Study is initialized with previous end-of-month reservoir elevations.ย
Hydrology: In the Upper Basin, the first year of the Most Probable inflow trace is based on the 50thย percentile of Colorado Basin River Forecast Center (CBRFC) forecasts and the second year is based on the 50thย percentile of historical flows. To represent dry and wet future conditions, the Minimum Probable and Maximum Probable traces use the 10thย and 90thforecast percentiles in the first year and the 25thย and 75thย percentiles of historical flows in the second year, respectively. The Lower Basin inflows are based only on historical intervening flows that align with the Upper Basin percentiles.ย
Water Demand: Upper Basin demands are estimated and incorporated in the unregulated inflow forecasts provided by the CBRFC; Lower Basin demands are developed in coordination with the Lower Basin States and Mexico.ย
Policy: 2007 Interim Guidelines, 2024 Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines, Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan, and Minute 323 are modeled reflecting Colorado Riverย policies. For modeling purposes, simulated years beyond 2026 assume a continuation of the 2007 Interim Guidelines including the 2024 Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines (no additional SEIS conservation is assumed to occur after 2026), the 2019 Colorado River Basin Drought Contingency Plans, and Minute 323 including the Binational Water Scarcity Contingency Plan. With the exception of certain provisions related to ICS recovery and Upper Basin demand management, operations under these agreements are in effect through 2026. Reclamation initiated the process to develop operations for post-2026 in June 2023, and the modeling assumptions described here are subject to change.
Reclamation will continue to carefully monitor hydrologic and operational conditions and assess the need for additional responsive actions and/or changes to operations. Reclamation will continue to consult with the Basin States, Basin Tribes, the Republic of Mexico and other partners on Colorado River operations to consider and determine whether additional measures should be taken to further enhance the preservation of these benefits, as well as recovery protocols, including those of future protective measures for both Lakes Powell and Mead.
For more detailed information about the approach to the 24-Month Study modeling, see the CRMMS 24-Month Study Modepage. All modeling assumptions and projections are subject to varying degrees of uncertainty. Please refer to this discussion of uncertainty for more information.
Projections
The latest 24-Month Study reports for each study can be found at the links below:
WASHINGTONโฏโ The Bureau of Reclamation released the August 2025 24-Month Study, reaffirming impacts of unprecedented drought in the Colorado River Basin and pressing the need for robust and forward-thinking guidelines for the future. The study provides an outlook on hydrologic conditions and projected operations for Colorado River reservoirs over the next two years and sets the 2026 operating conditions for Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
โThis underscores the importance of immediate action to secure the future of the Colorado River,โ said Reclamationโs Acting Commissioner David Palumbo. โWe must develop new, sustainable operating guidelines that are robust enough to withstand ongoing drought and poor runoff conditions to ensure water security for more than 40 million people who rely on this vital resource.โ
Lake Powellโs elevation on Jan. 1, 2026, is projected to be 3,538.47 feetโapproximately 162 feet below full pool and 48 feet above minimum power pool. This places the reservoir in the Mid-Elevation Release Tier, with a planned release of 7.48 million acre-feet of water for water year 2026, October 1, 2025, through September 30, 2026. If hydrologic conditions worsen, the water year release volume may be reduced in accordance with the 2024 Record of Decision for the Supplement to the 2007 Interim Guidelines.
Lake Mead is projected to stay in a Level 1 Shortage Condition, with an expected elevation of 1,055.88 feetโ20 feet below the Lower Basin shortage determination trigger. This condition necessitates significant water reductions as indicated by the 2007 Interim Guidelines and the Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan in the United States and Minute 323 and the Binational Water Scarcity Contingency Plan in Mexico. This calls for Arizona to contribute 512,000 acre-feet, about 18% of its annual apportionment, Nevada to contribute 21,000 acre-feet or 7%of its annual apportionment, and Mexico to contribute 80,000 acre-feet or 5% of its annual allotment.
Current guidelinesโincluding the 2007 Interim Guidelines, 2019 Drought Contingency Plans, and international agreements Minutes 323 and 330โare all set to expire at the end of 2026, leaving a critical void that must be filled with comprehensive strategies that address current and future challenges.
โAs the basin prepares for the transition to post-2026 operating guidelines, the urgency for the seven Colorado River Basin states to reach a consensus agreement has never been clearer. We cannot afford to delay,โ said Department of the Interiorโs Acting Assistant Secretary for Water and Science Scott Cameron. โThe health of the Colorado River system and the livelihoods that depend on it are relying on our ability to collaborate effectively and craft forward-thinking solutions that prioritize conservation, efficiency, and resilience.โ
In June, Cameron called on the seven Colorado River Basin states to submit the details of a preliminary operations agreement by mid-November and share a final seven state agreement on that proposal by mid-February 2026, with the goal of reaching a final decision next summer to begin implementation in the 2027 operating year.
In the meantime, near-term operating guidelines approved last year provide additional strategies to reduce the risk of reaching critical elevations at Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These short-term tools, available through 2026, include conserving 3 million acre-feet or more of water in the Lower Basin and the potential to reduce release from Lake Powell. Under the Drought Contingency Plan, Upper Basin drought response operations could also include sending additional water to Lake Powell from upstream reservoirs.
โThese short-term tools will only help us for so long,โ Cameron emphasized. โThe next set of guidelines need to be in place. We remain committed to this effort and will continue to invest in infrastructure improvements and system water reuse and conservation efforts as we move forward toward viable solutions.โ
The Department and Reclamation continue meeting regularly with the basin states and Tribal Nations to collaborate on the Post-2026 Operating Guidelines as part of their continued commitment to ensuring water security and promoting long-term sustainability in the Colorado River Basin. For more information on the August 2025 24-Month Study, visit https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/riverops/24ms-projections.html.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
From email from Western Resource Advocates (John Berggren):
August 15, 2025
Western Resource Advocates released the following statement in response to the August 24-Month Study by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which determines reservoir operations and Lower Basin shortages for the coming Water Year, and projects future conditions in the Colorado River system for the next two years.
“This study confirms what weโve known for decades: the Colorado River is overallocated with demands outpacing supplies. We face continued shortages, emergency measures, and the limits of our current agreements, all which are set to expire in the next 12 months. It further sounds the alarm that the Colorado River is drying out and Western states need to act now to protect this vital waterway and its tributaries.”
– John Berggren, Ph.D.
The Colorado River provides drinking water for one in ten Americans and after years of persistent drought, declining snowpack, and rising temperatures, the river continues to face a historic and growing imbalance where demand overwhelms available supply. It is operating under extreme stress and at the edge of a critical management transition.
โThis is not just a crisis. Itโs also a call to action to use remaining time wisely to replace our current reactive, emergency-based management framework with new, long-term solutions. We canโt litigate our way out โ we must collaborate forward. A negotiated agreement among all the Colorado River sovereigns and stakeholders will be more comprehensive, more adaptable, and more responsive to our communities throughout the Basin.โ
Change is the only constant on the Colorado River. Its water carved the Grand Canyon, its flows fluctuate seasonally, its path is altered by a network of dams and pipelines, and its water is dwindling as climate change dries out the West. The River is a dynamic and living system with real limits, yet early agreements treated it like a simple water delivery pipeline.
“Going forward, itโs essential for all water stakeholders and decision makers to take an honest look at the Basinโs hydrology and accelerate coming together around a set of proactive solutions to keep the river healthy.ย Decisions made in the coming months will determine whether we can meet the needs of our communities and protect the river for future generations and for the fish, wildlife, and recreationists that depend on it. The time to lead is now.”
Thank you for fighting climate change in the West with us.
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (John Fleck, Anne Castle, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Kathryn Sorensen, and Katherine Tara):
As we await Fridayโs (Aug. 15, 2025) release of the Bureau of Reclamationโs Colorado River 24-Month Study, we need to remember a painful lesson of the last five years of crisis management: whatever you see in Reclamationโs report of the โMost Probableโ reservoir levels for the next two years, we must prepare for things to be much worse.
A year ago, Reclamationโs โMost Probableโ forecast told us to expect Lake Powell to hold 10.36 million acre feet of water at the end of July 2025, with a surface elevation 3,593 feet above sea level. Actual storage in Powell at the end of July was 7.46 maf, 2.9 million acre feet less, and the reservoir is 38 feet lower, than the โMost Probableโ forecast.
Four years ago, one of us (Eric Kuhn) wrote this, which is helpful in understanding what is happening:
“The problem: the assumptions underlying the study do not fully capture the climate-change driven aridification of the Colorado River Basin.”
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
In 2022, a Utah State Center for Colorado River Studies team led by Jian Wang (including one of us, Schmidt) took this on in more technical detail โ Evaluating the Accuracy of Reclamationโs 24-Month Study of Lake Powell Projections. The finding provided technical support for an intuition water managers already had: the 24-Month Study has an optimistic bias.
Produced monthly, Reclamationโs 24-Month Study includes three scenarios: Most Probable, Minimum Probable, and Maximum Probable. The Study includes 18 pages of data and forecasts for twelve Colorado River system reservoirs, from Fontenelle and Flaming Gorge in the north to Mohave and Havasu in the south, projecting things like elevation, storage, inflows, releases, evaporation, and hydropower production each month for the next two years.
“Projections for reservoir elevations during the next few months are based on predictions of reservoir inflow using a widely accepted watershed hydrologic model run by the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center. The input data for that model are observed snowpack in the watershed, soil moisture, and anticipated precipitation and temperature. Projections for reservoir elevations beyond the immediately proximate winter, a year or more in the future (โsecond year projectionsโ), are based on statistical probabilities calculated using analyses of past inflows during a 30-year reference period.”
The resulting model runs represent a wide range of uncertainties, which are captured in three resulting scenarios:
Most Probable: the middle of the range
Maximum Probable: the 90th percentile scenario, meaning that 10% of the model runs predict even wetter hydrology and 90% predict drier.
Minimum Probable: the 10th percentile scenario, meaning that 10% of the model runs predict even drier hydrology and 90% predict wetter.
The problem, implicit in the argument Milly et al. made nearly two decades ago, is that a 30-year reference period is no longer a reliable indicator of what we should expect in the future. It represents a river we no longer have. This is not to suggest any bias or partiality on the part of Reclamation, but merely that the algorithms and modeling used to produce the 24-Month Study have proven in recent years to be skewed more toward the the past than the true-to-life. Our response needs to reflect that reality.
Because of the changing conditions in the Colorado River Basin, the Minimum Probable scenario has become the most valuable in providing a reliable indicator of the future. Actual flows and reservoir levels have been tracking the minimum probable forecast since March of this year. As we enter the fall of 2025, with the weak summer monsoon for most of the Upper Basin coupled with weak La Niรฑa conditions persisting through the fall and early winter, and NOAAโs seasonal outlook pointing to a warmer and drier than average fall, itโs a good bet that this trend will continue at least through mid-winter. The Basin should be prepared for minimum probable conditions, with a clear possibility that actual conditions could be worse than the 10th percentile scenario. The basin community needs to be ready to respond with the necessary water use reductions now to protect the Colorado River system on which we all depend.
After weeks of hot, dry and windy weather across western Colorado, Gunnison County Commissioners received a water-issues update on Tuesday that was filled with โsoberingโ news. In addition to details about Gunnison Countyโs worsening drought conditions, commissioners heard from representatives of the Colorado Water Conservation Board (CWCB) that the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation is once again considering emergency releases from Blue Mesa Reservoir to bolster falling water levels in Lake Powell [in 2026, h/t Sue Serling].
West Drought Monitor map August 12, 2025.
According to drought.gov, approximately 50% of Gunnison County is in โextremeโ drought, compared to just 5% one month ago. Conditions in most of the remainder of the county are rated as โsevere.โ Precipitation for most of the county has been between 25% and 50% of normal for the past 30 days, with little immediate relief in sight.
CWCB representative Amy Ostdiek told commissioners she believes emergency releases will come from elsewhere in the Upper Basin this year, but couldnโt rule out the possibility that Blue Mesa would be included…If current conditions persist, Lake Powell is projected to fall below the critical elevation of 3,525 feet above sea level in the spring of 2026. This would be the second time that has occurred since the reservoir filled in 1980. The other time happened in 2021, precipitating emergency releases from Blue Mesa Reservoir and Flaming Gorge and Navajo reservoirs totaling 180,000 acre-feet. An acre-foot is the volume of water that would cover one acre a foot deep.
As of Aug. 10, Blue Mesa was 61% full and is projected to end the year at 51% of its storage capacity โ without any additional releases. Taylor Reservoir is forecasted to be at 65% of average capacity at the end of 2025. The threshold of 3,525 feet at Lake Powell was agreed to in the Upper Basin Drought Response Operations Agreement as the trigger point for possible releases. The purpose is to prevent Lake Powell from dropping below 3,490 feet, known as โdead poolโ โ the point at which the Glen Canyon Dam can no longer generate electricity. Up to 5 million people across six western states depend on hydroelectric power from the dam. Emergency releases in 2021 were controversial. Critics argued that federal authorities did not properly consult with Upper Basin water users prior to the decision and failed to account for impacts to local economies and communities. Further, many objected on the grounds that water managers had no way of measuring whether the extra water in fact reached Lake Powell.
Jeff Hurd, the U.S. representative from western Colorado, met this week with first responders and residents from a region where multiple wildfires are raging. The Lee Fire had become the fifth-largest wildfire in state history and was threatening the town of Rifle, where officials had to evacuate a state prison in the fireโs potential path.
In a social media post about the visits, Hurd thanked local authorities and community members for their response to the fires tearing across his district, and he vowed to โbe here for the long haul to help recover.โ
But nowhere did he offer the most appropriate gesture: an apology.
Hurd, along with the other three Republican members of Coloradoโs U.S. House delegation, has promoted drill-baby-drill policies as part of a Trumpist โenergy dominanceโ agenda, even though those policies crank up the greenhouse gas emissions that guarantee more megafires in Colorado. The only posture truly available to Hurd when he meets constituents is contrition. The only plausible message is, โI was wrong.โ
Rising global temperatures are increasing the risk and frequency of extreme weather across the globe. The Southwest is being transformed by aridification amid the worst drought in 1,200 years. There is no scientific doubt that the primary cause of climate change is the combustion of fossil fuels.
In Colorado, this means bigger, fiercer wildfires and a fire season that no longer respects warm-month limits. The most destructive wildfire in state history, the Marshall Fire in 2021 in Boulder County, occurred five days after Christmas. The stateโs 20 biggest fires have all occurred since the turn of the century. The three biggest came in 2020, when one of them, East Troublesome, grew so ferocious it leapt over the Continental Divide. A 2021 study found that hotter, drier conditions in the American West are causing fires, such as East Troublesome, to reach high elevations that were previously too wet to burn.
โAnd they are burning at rates unprecedented in recent fire history,โ the authors wrote. โWhile historical fire suppression and other forest management practices play a role in the Westโs worsening fire problem, the high-elevation forests we studied have had little human intervention. The results provide a clear indication that climate change is enabling these normally wet forests to burn.โ
Colorado is especially exposed. A huge part of the state is the site of one of the largest areas of the highest temperature spikes in the lower 48 states. It covers Hurdโs hometown of Grand Junction and much of his district. Either Hurd is oblivious to the science or heโs cynically chosen to side with oil and gas industry interests.
During the freshman Hurdโs campaign last year, he sometimesย seemed to alignย with an โall of the aboveโ energy policy, which at least purports to include renewables, but he also signaled aย strong preferenceย for fossil fuel extraction over wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. He evenย championsย coal, the most damaging of fossil fuels, a position heโsย reinforcedย as recently as April.
Hurd found himself in an awkward spot once he was in the House as MAGA extremism sought to demolish the all-of-the-above plank and demonize renewables. He and U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton were among 21 Republicans who urged colleagues not to eliminate energy tax credits, which support wind and solar jobs and development in Colorado. (The other two House members from Colorado, Lauren Boebert and Jeff Crank, left their names off the letter.) But they both voted to pass the recent Trump megabill, which eliminated the credits.
Hurd insists he believes climate change is real. But this just makes his approach all the more hypocritical. For example, he repeats the pro-carbon talking point that since fossil fuel in other countries is dirtier than Americaโs the U.S. should maximize production.
โIf you genuinely care about reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, then you ought to support getting as much energy out of Colorado as possible. That includes not only the clean coal that we have, but also natural gas,โ he told CPR in September.
But thatโs like saying that since people are going to abuse fentanyl even though itโs deadly, America should manufacture a superior product to preempt Chinaโs more dangerous supply. An immoral practice should be avoided because itโs immoral, not pursued with improvements.
If he has any doubt that prioritizing carbon-based energy is immoral, Hurd should take a closer look at the environmental catastrophe unfolding in his own district. He often cites the jobs at risk in the transition to renewable energy, but this short-sighted perspective ignores substantial state greening efforts to responsibly transition local economies, and it misses the larger risk that whole regions of a cooked Earth will be uninhabitable.
The megafires in Hurdโs district are exposing โenergy dominanceโ as disastrously self-defeating.
From email from the Bureau of Reclamation (Conor Felletter):
On Monday, August 11 at 8pm MT, Reclamation will increase releases from Crystal Dam to 1,700 cfs from the current release of 1,650 cfs. Gunnison Tunnel diversions remain at 1025 cfs. Gunnison River flows in the Black Canyon/Gunnison Gorge, currently ~590 cfs, are anticipated to increase to ~640 cfs.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Aspinall Unit, and to maintain target base flows through the endangered fish habitat along the Gunnison River between Delta and Grand Junction.
Reclamation conducts Public Operations Meetings three times per year to gather input for determining upcoming operations for the Aspinall Unit & Gunnison River. Input from individuals, organizations, and agencies along with other factors such as weather, water rights, endangered species requirements, flood control, hydro power, recreation, fish and wildlife management, and reservoir levels, will be considered in the development of these reservoir operation plans. In addition, the meetings are used to coordinate activities and exchange information among agencies, water users, and other interested parties concerning the Aspinall Unit & Gunnison River. The next Operations Group meeting will be held on August 21, 2025 at 1:00 p.m in Montrose, CO at the Holiday Inn Express (1391 S. Townsend Ave). This meeting is open to the public with a virtual option using Microsoft Teams. Register for the webinar at this link.
Contact Conor Felletter (cfelletter@usbr.gov or 970-637-1985) for more information regarding Aspinall operations or the Operation Group meeting.
The main topic of the most recent Rio Blanco Water Conservancy meeting was news that despite the recent $2.5 Million repair, the Hydro power unit is not in operation yet. Originally, the hydraulics seized due to solids in the oil, all the oil has been flushed and replaced and the hydraulics are in working order. Currently they are working on the part known as the face seal. It is being refurbished in California and will be delivered and installed asap. Once the face seal is installed then RBWCD will finalize wet testing to verify that it is properly functioning before going fully online with it.
The issue was discovered while the hydro power unit was running during the initial wet testing. They ran the hydro for approximately 12 hours over a couple of days. At this time is when the stuck face seal was discovered. It appears that this part may have been faulty for several years and it is the belief of the contractor, engineer and RBWCD Staff that this fix will help remedy these persistent issues the hydro has been having.
CPW and RBWCD is working on education and prevention for the zebra mussels at Kenney Reservoir. The lake has seen an increase of use due to closures of other lakes in the area due to mussels, capacity restrictions and construction.
The District continues to solicit responses to their Irrigation Study and Recreation Study and intend on using the results to support in NEPA (National Environmental Protection Act) for the Wolf Creek mega reservoir project. According to Executive Director Alden Vanden Brink, they are having better than expected participation. The next survey will be a Rangely Water Needs assessment.
These days, thereโs a lot that divides the Colorado delegation along party lines. But one thing theyโre all in agreement on is the need for the federal government to release about $140 million itโs holding onto for 15 water projects across the state.
โWe ask you to move forward with obligating the remaining $140 million worth of Bucket 2 projects in Colorado โ not just for the benefit of our state, but for the resilience of the entire Colorado River Basin,โ urges the delegation letter [from Sen. John Hickenlooper, Hurd, Sen. Michael Bennet, and Reps. Jeff Crank, Joe Neguse, Gabe Evans, Brittany Pettersen, Lauren Boebert, Diana DeGette and Jeff Crow].
Among the awards was $40 million to purchase the Shoshone water rights from Xcel Energy and transfer them to the Colorado River District. The other projects deal with watershed restoration, restoring or improving habitats, improving wetlands and improving water health. As the letter points out, Congress allocated $4 billion in Bidenโs signature climate, tax and health care law to deal with theย ongoing drought in the Colorado River Basin.ย The Bucket 2 funding was awarded on January 17, but that was just the first step for money to be distributed to the projects. Typically, contracts or agreements have to be signed before the money is actually obligated and distributed. Still, even if that had been completed before the change of administrations, one of Trumpโs first executive ordersย paused all funding appropriated through the IRA.
During both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry often accused the administration of waging a โwar on energy.โ It was a demonstrably false allegation. The most either of the Democrats did to attack the energy industry was to incrementally increase common sense regulations and environmental protections, which apparently did little to hamper energy development. The so-called shale revolution, when โfrackingโ opened up huge new reserves of tight oil and gas, began under Obama, and truly came to fruition under Biden, when domestic oil and gas production reached new record highs. Meanwhile, Bidenโs Interior Department approved dozens of utility-scale solar and wind and long-delayed transmission projects on public lands.
But now the Trump administration is, in fact, waging a very real war on energy โ renewable energy, that is, namely wind and solar power. Theyโve frozen and even clawed back funds for projects, killed federal clean energy tax credits, subjected wind and solar projects on public lands to heightened reviews, and eliminated wind energy leasing areas off Oregonโs coast. And theyโve done it all as America is supposedly gripped by an โenergy emergency.โ
Now, the Interior Department has gone even further with a new order that threatens to kill all new renewable power development on federal lands. I know there are some readers out there who might applaud this, since so many of our public lands are not suited for sprawling utility-scale solar or wind developments. But this order โ deceptively and cynically titled, โManaging Federal Energy Resources and Protecting the Environmentโ โ would potentially replace proposed wind and solar projects with coal or uranium mines and/or power plants, oil and gas fields, or other non-renewable energy projects.
The order requires land management agencies, when reviewing proposed solar or wind energy projects, to consider โa reasonable range of alternatives that includes projects with capacity densities meeting or exceeding that of the proposed project.โ
Capacity density is basically the amount of energy a project can generate per acre. According to the Interior Departmentโs calculations (weโll get to the flaws there in a moment), the capacity density (megawatts/acre) for various power sources are:
Advanced nuclear reactor: 33.17 MW/acre
Combined cycle gas plant: 5.4 to 24.42 MW/acre (depending on configuration)
In other words, wind and solar are the big losers, taking up far more space to generate the same amount of electricity as, say, a nuclear plant. According to the new order, this raises the question of โwhether the use of federal lands for any wind and solar projects is consistent with the law.โ
This isnโt a new argument: The specter of โrenewable energy sprawlโ has long been wielded to push back against solar and wind development. And certainly the amount of space a project takes up should be one of many considerations in whether to permit it. But should it really have more weight than the amount of damage the project would inflict? How about pollutants emitted per megawatt, or amount of harm to people, the climate, and the environment per megawatt? Is there consideration for the fact that there is a lot of space between the turbines within a wind facility that is minimally affected? And why doesnโt their chart include hydroelectric, which has the lowest capacity density of all?
Also, the Interior Departmentโs calculations are a bit fishy, or at least incomplete. They say they are based on a 2023 Sargent & Lundy report commissioned by the Energy Information Administration. The report is not on capacity density, but rather the costs of building and operating various power generating technologies. When determining the acreage of the nuclear and fossil fuel plants, they do not take into account the land required for fuel production, which can be extensive.
The supercritical coal plant referenced in the report, for example, would require a mere 600 acres. Yet, the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico โ along with its associated Navajo Mine (current mining areas as well as reclaimed areas), Morgan Lake, and coal combustion waste disposal facilities โ covers (and wrecks) some 15,000 acres. That acreage will continue to grow for as long as the plant operates, since the mine and waste dumps will continue to expand. Compare that to the 2,400 acres covered by the nearby San Juan solar plant.
Iโd also argue that if the goal is to get the most energy out of every acre of public land (which is a silly goal, but whatever), then they should figure in the amount of energy the proposed project consumes. Coal mining and oil and gas drilling require large amounts of electricity and petroleum (along with human labor, which is also a form of energy), as does transporting coal and gas by train and pipeline. Uranium enrichment, which is necessary to produce reactor fuel, is extremely power-intensive.
None of this really matters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, however. Thatโs because he knows weโre not really in an โenergy emergency,โ and that it is merely a fabricated excuse to give more handouts and regulatory relief to his fossil fuel-industry buddies and to get revenge on Trumpโs political opponents by punishing cleaner energy sources.
Proposed utility-scale solar and wind facilities on public lands should by all means be scrutinized and subjected to the same reviews as any other projects, contrary to what the Abundance faction might believe. The projects should be denied if their impacts outweigh the benefits, with bonus benefit-points for solar or wind projects that displace or replace coal or natural gas generation.
But judging the projects based on a virtually meaningless metric is not only spiteful, unfair, and stupid, but it also will needlessly hamper the fight against health-harming pollution and climate change. And thatโs simply irresponsible, at best. [ed. emphasis mine]
โ๏ธ Mining Monitor โ๏ธ
Speaking of fake energy emergencies โฆ In May, the Bureau of Land Management completed its environmental review and approval of the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in Utahโs Lisbon Valley in just 11 days. The rush, sans public input, ostensibly was necessary to get the mine online quickly to address the supposed uranium shortage.
The mineโs proponent, Anfield Resources, apparently doesnโt share the Trump administrationโs sense of urgency. At the end of April, the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining asked Anfield for more information on its application to commence large mining operations, which was deemed technically incomplete. Anfield has yet to respond. The company is also not rushing forward to get state approval for its water treatment plant permit or to reopen its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, where the Velvet-Woodโs uranium would be processed.
In other words, the fast-tracked permitting was merely a ruse, intended to bypass environmental regulations and public input, not to expedite the project, itself.
***
Photo-illustration of the Animas River a few days after the spill from the air. Jonathan P. Thompson photo and illustration.
Itโs the tenth anniversary of the Gold King Mine blowout that affected the Animas and San Juan rivers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. A few folks have asked if Iโm going to write anything about it โ since I did write a book about it โ but I donโt think thereโs much more to say, really.
The Gold King Mine continues to drain acidic, heavy metal-laden water โ though it is being treated before itโs released into the watershed โ and neighboring mines continue to do the same (though they arenโt being treated). Superfund designation hasnโt been the boon to water quality that some hoped for, nor did it stigmatize Silverton as many feared it would (property values continue to soar into the unreachable zone).
While the event did bring more attention to the problem of abandoned mine sites (even though the Gold King wasnโt technically abandoned when it blew out), and injected โacid mine drainageโ into the publicโs vocabulary, it hasnโt led to mining law reform or any widespread effort to address the issue. That said, Congress finally did pass a Good Samaritan bill, that might clear the way for volunteer groups to do some additional cleanup without being sued for it. Still, they need funding, and thatโs in short supply these days.
If youโd like to read more on it, check out this piece by Peter Butler. And you can check out past stories in the Land Desk for more information (links below, but they are behind the paywall). Better yet, go down to your local bookstore and buy River of Lost Souls.
This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agencyโs-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]
An image of the Sharp Fire near Cahone, Colorado, from the Benchmark fire lookout. Source: Watch Duty.
๐ฅต Aridification Watch ๐ซ
Fire season is really heating up, along with the summer temperatures. The relatively dry spring was followed by higher than normal temperatures in July and zero to minimal precipitation in many places, turning low- and mid-elevation forests to kindling. Officials working the Leroux Fire west of Paonia said the relative humidity was just 2%, contributing to rapid fire growth.
The Leroux blaze was just one of many new starts on Coloradoโs Western Slope over the last several days. The Sharp Canyon Fire north of Cahone, Colorado, grew rapidly to 400 acres on Monday, forcing evacuations, but it seems to have quieted down overnight. The Lee and Elk fires in Rio Blanco County blew up to 13,000 and 7,700 acres, respectively, over a couple of days. The Middle Mesa Fire east of Navajo Reservoir and just south of the Colorado-New Mexico line grew to 2,500 acres as of Monday night.
Meanwhile, the Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyonโs North Rim has lived up to its name, reaching 126,445 acres as of Tuesday morning with only 13% containment a month after it ignited.
The situation is probably going to get worse before it gets better. The National Weather Service has issued red flag warnings for parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, with extreme heat warnings in parts of Arizona and southern California. The mercury in Moab is expected to reach 100ยฐ F or more every day this week, and thereโs no significant rainfall in sight.
The state could eventually host the nationโs largest uranium production facility to use two different mining methods. Environmentalists worry that expedited permitting in the nuclear sector could threaten โsafety, environmental quality and public trust.โ
Uranium Energy Corp.โs Sweetwater uranium project has become the first mining proposal in Wyoming to be fast-tracked under President Donald Trumpโs March executive order to increase U.S. mineral production.
The company announced Aug. 5 that it planned to expand its uranium mining operations in Wyomingโs Red Desert as a result of the expedited permitting process. The federal government expects to post a permitting timetable for the project by Aug. 15.
Through other executiveorders, the dismantling of environmental regulations and the spending bill congressional Republicans passed in July, the second Trump administration has made it easier for extractive industries to receive permits for mining on public lands. Trump has classified uranium as a โcritical mineralโ for the U.S., which imported 99 percent of its fuel for nuclear energy in 2023, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
John Burrows, energy and climate policy director at the Wyoming Outdoor Council, saw the fast-tracking news as evidence of a pattern in the stateโs nascent nuclear industry.
โAcross the nuclear supply chain weโre seeing permits getting expedited and weโre having concerns around safety, environmental quality and public trust,โ he said.
Last month, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission accelerated its review of an advanced nuclear reactor being built in Kemmerer, Wyoming, with an end-of-year completion goal. TerraPower, the company behind the new technology, was co-founded by billionaire Bill Gates.
Uranium Energyโs Sweetwater permits were fast-tracked by the Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council. Trumpโs March executive order required the executive director of the council to publish such projects on a special dashboard.
โI am excited to welcome the Sweetwater Complex to the FAST-41 transparency dashboard in support of President Trumpโs goal of unlocking Americaโs mineral resources,โ said Emily Domenech, the councilโs executive director, in a statement accompanying Uranium Energyโs announcement. โThe uranium that this project can produce would be game-changing for our nation as we work to reduce our reliance on Russia and China, strengthen our national and economic security, and reestablish a robust domestic supply chain of nuclear fuel.โ
The Federal Permitting Improvement Steering Council was established in 2015 under President Barack Obama and made permanent by President Joe Bidenโs Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act in 2021.
Pictorial representation of the In situ uranium mining process. Graphic credit: (source: Heathgate Resources)
If approved, Uranium Energy expects to begin โin-situโ uranium mining within its permit boundaries. The process involves leaching uranium from underground rock and does less surface disturbance than conventional strip-mining methods. The company already operates conventional uranium mines in Wyoming but wants to expand its claim to include nearby areas it says are suitable for in-situ retrieval methods.
โThis will provide the Company unrivaled flexibility to scale production across the Great Divide Basin,โ Amir Adnani, Uranium Energyโs president and CEO, said in an email.
If Uranium Energy receives its permits, which could still take years, the company said its Sweetwater facility will become the largest in the United States capable of processing both conventionally and in-situ-mined uranium. Its current licensed production capacity at the Sweetwater facility is 4.1 million pounds of uranium annually, the company said.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 5, 2025
Colorado governors of the past and possibly the future gathered in Lamar to pay their respects. His last wishes were that the wheat harvest go on.
When it became clear that John Stulp had little time left to live, he specified that the memorial service would come later, after the wheat had been harvested but before the next planting.
That service was held on Saturday, August 2, at the First Baptist Church in Lamar, in southeastern Colorado, not quite a month after his death. Several hundred people attended, many of us from out of town.
Fittingly, the family had positioned a few large vases fill with bundles of wheat next to the photos of Stulp. One photo was Yuma High School, and another was from a meeting with then-President Jimmy Carter. He got around in his life, but in his heart, he remained a farmer.
Tributes to his life were lavished at the church in Lamar, and from my experiences with him during the last 13 years or so, they were deserved. Responding to my first impressions on Facebook, one individual said this: โA great man.โ Said another: โThese sorts of people make civilization work.โ
Former Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter was at the remembrance in Lamar, as was an individual who may possibly become Coloradoโs next governor, Phil Weiser. Neither spoke, and as for Weiser, I saw no evidence he was campaigning. It appeared to me he was simply there to pay his respects after likely arising early in [Denver] to get to Lamar by mid-morning.
This was in addition to former U.S. senator, Ken Salazar, who was in the audience along with Kate Greenberg, the current Colorado commissioner of agriculture, and two of her predecessors, Don Brown and John Salazar. I also recognized various people from the Colorado Water Conservation Board, including at least two former directors of the Colorado Water Conservation Board, Becky Mitchell and James Eklund.
John Hickenlooper, still another former Colorado governor, was not there but had delivered a eulogy from the floor of the Senate shortly after Johnโs death on July 7. โJohn was a good man, a great man by any measure,โ Hickenlooper had said.
What came out again and again was his love of place, his devotion to family and community, his generous heart. And while he was also a notably good listener, it was also said that John was a very good storyteller.
I knew Stulp a bit. In about 2012, I went to Beaver Creek for a water forum, and he was a speaker. I struck up a conversation with him, and he invited me to visit him on his farm south of Lamar the following weekend. Then I didnโt fully realize the irony of his position as the stateโs โwater czarโ for Hickenlooper: his farm south of Lamar was entirely dryland.
When I visited him at that farm, we talked at length before he showed me around his home country. We stayed in touch after that, usually it being a matter of me seeking his perspective about water, energy, and other matters.
John leaned into the future. He saw the tiny details and the big pictures. Several times I consulted him to understand the role of eastern Colorado in our stateโs energy transition. He had been a Prowers County commissioner from 1992 to 2003, and during the latter time he voted for approval of Colorado Green. The wind farm south of Lamar was, when it began operations in 2004, the largest in the country.
John Stulp purchased an electric pickup truck in 2022 and was happy to show it to visitors. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Of late, I was particularly interested in his experience as an early adopter. In his electric pickup he made the rounds between Lamar, a home in Lakewood that I believe he and his wife, Jane, had acquired during his 12 years in his position in Colorado state government, and Yuma, where he had begun life during an intense snowstorm in 1948 and where he still had farming property. Trips often also included Fort Collins, where two of his children lived.
Earlier this year, I was curious whether the growing network of fast-charging stations in eastern Colorado was meeting his traveling needs. By then, he was on oxygen, eight liters a minute, and when in the pickup he needed to draw on the battery. That gave him less margin for error, he said, and no, Coloradoโs fast-charging infrastructure on the eastern plains fell short. He had been forced to return to an internal-combustion engine for trips to the Front Range.
As recently as late June, I had written to him after noticing a letter from him filed in a Colorado Public Utilities docket. It was, I wrote to him truthfully, the most compelling of all the comments I had seen filed in that case.
The main reflection I had after hearing the remarks in Lamar was a reinforcement of my previous opinion. For whatever reason, John put it together early in life. Many of us struggle to figure out our paths. He did not. He must have been a bright boy. By age 4, he was accompanying his aunt to a one-room schoolhouse. He grew up farming, growing corn, and raising cattle and hogs. He went to Colorado State University and became a veterinarian.
After stints as a veterinarian in Windsor and then Las Cruces, N.M., he and his wife, Jane, moved to the Lamar area, where she had grown up on a farm. They had five children, and he assumed new roles in agriculture organizations, his community, and state and national organizations. He was on the board of directors for the State Land Board, for the Colorado Wildlife Commission, and the board of governors of Colorado State University.
In the 1990s, then Colorado Gov. Roy Romer twice asked him to be the state ag commissioner, but he declined, citing the need to be with his family. Bill Ritter made the same request when he was elected in 2006, and this time he excitedly said yes. He served a four-year term.
Governor Hickenlooper, John Salazar and John Stulp at the 2012 Drought Conference
When John Hickenlooper was elected governor in 2010, he asked Stulp to be part of his team but in a different capacity. In his eulogy on the floor of the Senate, Hickenlooper explained what he was up to. Colorado had experienced particularly severe drought in 2011 and even more in 2012.
โI was convinced that we needed a blueprint, a plan of some sort, to address the projected growth and its future water supply, to make sure that we had the supply that could match our needs. I recruited John to serve as my top water policy advisor. We made it a cabinet-level position. He came to all our cabinet meetings. He was our water czar.โ
Wheat harvest was a time of hard work but also joy at the Stulp farm south of Lamar. Photo credit: Allen Best/Bigg Pivots
Stulpโs background in agriculture โ which uses 85% to 90% of water in Colorado โ was key to his choice.
โJohn understood the agriculture community in Colorado better than almost anyone,โ explained Hickenlooper. โMaybe thatโs why, when I first approached him with the idea of a statewide water plan, he wasnโt immediately convinced. Actually, he was far from it. He was, I would say, more than skeptical.โ
Hickenlooper explained that he understood how difficult it would be to get buy-in. โHe didnโt think it was a smart idea for me politically as a new governor to take on an issue that had the potential to be so divisive,โ explained Hickenlooper. โBut he understood that we couldnโt let our rivers and farms be at risk of running dry. We needed him. Colorado needed him. And he set aside his reservations, rolled up his sleeves and went to work.โ
Stulpโs work in achieving consensus was part of the state water plan completed in 2015 (and since updated twice). What has been the result of that plan? Has it actually been a success? Thatโs a much longer story.
In his eulogy, Hickenlooper also added a personal touch.
โIโm not sure there are gradations of โgoodness,โ but I have traveled long distances with John Stulp, and Iโve stayed at his home in Prowers County where he and his remarkable wife, Jane, would cook up a barbecue and get me together with some of their neighbors.โ โHe even loaned my son, Teddy, a .410 shotgun so he could learn how to shoot,โ said Hickenlooper.
โIf I did believe in gradations of โgoodness,โ John and Jane Stulp would be at the very top.โ
Delivering a testament later, once again in response to my Facebook post, was Jackie Brown, who spent 39 yeas in public health, including 22 years in Prowers County. Stulp had recruited her to the position from nearby Baca County.
โJohn was the best example of a good man and a great leader,โ she wrote. โHe was honest, smart, caring, fair and had integrity. His family, community and his employees were his priority. Plus, he had a great sense of humor.โ
The service was held in a church, and it turns out that Stulp was deeply religious. During covid, after his work in Colorado state government, he was confined to his home. He had, he told me, been admonished by one of his sons for venturing out to Walmart. Later, he lost a brother in Yuma to covid.
In this time of isolation, John agreed to take over the Baptist ministerโs daily phone tree that sought to connect people during times of isolation. The pastor, Darren Stroh, said that Stulp had sent more than 200 messages. One of them contained these thoughts:
โIf you were judged โ choose understanding.
If you were rejected โ choose acceptance.
If you were shamed โ choose compassion.
Be the person you needed when you were hurting, not the person who hurt you.
Vow to be better than what broke you -โ to heal instead of becoming bitter.
Act from your heart โ not your pain.โ
At the church on Saturday, his son Jensen told us about the father he knew, the father who relished wheat harvest, where he loved to offer rides in a combine to his grandchildren and others. Harvest on July 4th always produces extra energy amid questions of will it rain and will there be time to watch fireworks.
On this yearโs July 4th, days before he died, the Stulp family gathered around John. With his strength ebbing, he delivered โone of the most meaningful and powerful speeches weโve ever heard,โ said John Stulp III. โIt was a charge to the grandkids. First thing he said, finish harvest. Keep cutting the wheat. That was said multiple times.โ
Then he continued about how he wanted them to comport themselves. Be flexible. The world is better when you are generous. We produce food, and the world is hungry. Care for others. Make sure they know you love them. Jesus wasnโt petty; neither should you be. Live in this moment and live it to the fullest, but plan for the future.
And with those words to his grandchildren remembered we were invited to the fellowship hall and a long table of tasty home-cooked food and an equally long table of desserts. In the middle of each table was a centerpiece consisting of a mementoes of Johnโs life and a small bundle of wheat.
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Cranes and construction equipment line the shore at Gross Reservoir on June 19, 2025 in Boulder County, Colorado. The construction is part of an expansion project that will supply water to Denverโs residents. (Cassie Sherwood/The Water Desk)
Pieter Strauss used to love hosting stargazing parties at his house in the Lakeshore Park neighborhood up Flagstaff Road southwest of Boulder. The hobbyist astronomer would fire up the barbecue and spend hours showing his neighbors the night sky through his observatory and telescopes.
Straussโs house sits looking directly over Gross Reservoir, which provides water to Denver residents.
But when a project to significantly raise the reservoirโs dam began construction in 2022, those moments of neighborhood tranquility were lost for some residents. For Strauss the biggest impact was the bright construction lights used to keep work moving overnight.
โIt became impossible to sit on the deck before sunrise and after sundown, astrophotography was impossible. They lit up the skies,โ with powerful floodlights, Strauss said.
For over 20 years, residents and various environmental groups have protested the project, which suffered a series of legal blows this year. Construction on the massive dam ground to a halt in April amidst the courtroom wrangling, and subsequent decisions have cast a new level of uncertainty over large-scale water projects that propose to draw on the beleaguered Colorado River.
However, by the end of May, federal courts ruled that construction could continue due to concerns surrounding uncompleted construction and potential flooding possibilities, but that the reservoir could not be filled.
The Gross Reservoir Expansion Project involves raising the height of the existing dam by 131 feet. The dam will be built out and will have โstepsโ made of roller-compacted concrete to reach the new height. Image credit: Denver Water
Raising the dam
Gross Reservoirโs dam is owned and operated by Denver Water. The utility built it in the 1950s, with two other building phases planned to accommodate future water needs. The current dam expansion will raise the height of the dam 131 feet, tripling the current capacity of the reservoir, and providing more water for Denver Water customers.
The construction was spurred by โa combination of demands in our system, as well as concerns about climate and concerns about the needs for greater resilience in our system,โ said Jessica Brody, general counsel for Denver Water.
The need for the expansion is similar to a bank savings account, Brody said. Tripling the capacity of the reservoir is a savings account that can be drawn on in circumstances of an emergency.
โIf we have an extreme drought event, we want to have more water banks that we can help smooth the impacts to our customers,โ Brody said.
When the utility initially announced plans to begin moving forward with a dam expansion, residents of the area were concerned. Environmental threats and the disruptions from the massive construction project topped the list of worries. They attended meetings at town halls with county commissioners. They organized with other residents in and around Coal Creek canyon.
While some residents fought the expansion, others anticipated it. When the dam was initially constructed, the utility planned to expand further down the line.
Since construction began in 2022, residents have experienced noise and light pollution. Five neighbors have moved from the Lakeshore Park neighborhood. Pieter Strauss, at whose house they once held stargazing gatherings, was among them.
Beverly Kurtz, member of TEG, on Pieter Straussโs former porch overlooking Gross Reservoir on June 19, 2025. Once construction began, Strauss was no longer able to host neighborhood stargazing parties due to light pollution. (Cassie Sherwood/The Water Desk)
โThe most valuable thing to all the people who have moved up here is that they had a quiet nature sanctuary. But then when you take that away, is it worth it?โ said Anna McDermott, another resident of the area.
โWe sleep with our windows open. Not one house has air conditioning, so you sleep with your windows open in the summer months,โ she said. โYou hear these giant backup beepers crashing, grinding all night long. Even with earplugs, I canโt sleep.โ
The Environmental Group (TEG) is an organization of residents in the Lakeshore Park neighborhood and surrounding residents, focused on engaging the community in action when environmental issues arise. Along with Save the Colorado, The Sierra Club, and other environmental organizations, TEG has fought the expansion. Beverly Kurtz, former president of TEG, has worked to hold Denver Water and the companies working on the dam, Kiewit Corp. and Barnard Construction Company Inc., accountable during construction.
Heavy duty trucks are required to use a different road to access the dam rather than the paved road up Flagstaff Mountain due to fire concerns. Large semi-trucks have slid off the road due to the steep grade, which can cause traffic jams and road closures.
โAt one point they had one of the two roads down this mountain closed for five months,โ Kurtz said. โIt wasnโt until we called the sheriff out here and he realized the safety concern that they opened the road back up.โ
Legal snares slow construction
In October 2024, two years after construction began, Save the Colorado, along with other environmental groups, won a lawsuit against Denver Water. U.S. District Court judge Christine Arguello found the utilityโs dam construction permit violated the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act. At the time, construction was able to continue and Arguello ordered the groups to work out an agreement regarding damages.
In April 2025, the judge ordered a temporary halt on construction. The initial lawsuit argued that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who provided the project permitting, did not fully consider climate change impacts when it approved the damโs expansion.
A month later, Arguello ruled that Denver Water could finish construction on raising the dam, but that the reservoir could not be filled until the Army Corps reissued the permits.
โIf you stop the construction of a dam when it is partially built, the dam doesnโt function as it was ultimately designed to function,โ said Denver Waterโs Brody. โThat was a big concern of ours and the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.โ
The utility has also been ordered to not remove any additional trees surrounding the dam until the proper permits are obtained. The project proposes the removal of over 200,000 trees.
Arguelloโs opinion also called into question the underlying water rights Denver Water would rely on to fill the newly enlarged reservoir when construction finished. Gross Reservoir is filled with water from the headwaters of the Colorado River, which has experienced steep declines in water supply amid a long-term warming and drying trend in the Rocky Mountains.
โThe Environmental Impact Statement didnโt even look at the fact that the flows of the Colorado River are in decline. Most of the science suggests they will continue to decline further,โ said Doug Kenney, Western Water Policy Program director at the University of Colorado Boulderโs Natural Resources Law Center. Acquiring new permits will require Denver Water to redefine the projectโs purpose and evaluate the environmental damage, he said.
The case is more than a local water project. Diverting more water across the western slope of Colorado has created concerns for ecosystems throughout the overappropriated watershed and for communities downstream in California, Nevada and Arizona.
โIt makes it more difficult to ensure that thereโs sufficient flow downstream as a result,โ Kenney said. โWe have got to stop this practice of taking more and more water out of the upper reaches of the Colorado River because it just increases the stress on a river that is already under a tremendous amount of stress.โ
By calling into question the projectโs potential to have downstream impacts, the decision could add a new legal hurdle future water development infrastructure will have to clear.
โHistorically, agencies in recent decades have not done enough to consider climate change in decisions,โ Kenney said. Cases like this one need to happen in natural resource law more generally, he said, as they help establish precedents for future projects that could potentially put the environment at risk.
Denver Water is appealing the court decisions that bar the expansion. That could result in a reissue of the permits with a redefined purpose or a dismissal of the court rulings made earlier this year.
โWe think that the district court made some misjudgements or misinterpretations when it found the Army Corps committed these errors,โ Brody said.
Learning to live alongside it
Amid the stops and starts of Gross Reservoir construction, nearby residents are not ready to let go of what they used to have.
Kurtz and McDermott recall their old activities along the reservoirโs north shore. A handful of neighbors would walk their dogs everyday along the hiking trail that connected the reservoir to their neighborhood. The trail has since been widened significantly, to allow for excavating equipment. They would host Memorial Day parties along the waterโs edge.ย
Beverly Kurtz and Anna McDermott, longtime residents of the Lakeshore Park neighborhood pose in front of Gross Reservoir on June 19, 2025. They are members of TEG, an environmental group involved in a lawsuit against Denver Water. (Cassie Sherwood/The Water Desk)
Now they minimize their excursions to the shore as much as they can. At this point theyโre more than ready for construction to be completed, exhausted from the daily disruptions, explosions and drilling.
โNow clearly, when the work is done, the things which negatively impacted my life would go away. But I couldnโt last them out,โ Strauss said. He recently relocated to the Boulder area. โIt was just my bad luck that my golden years coincided with the worst effects of the project.โ
Some residents found that the expansion project has renewed their sense of community in Lakeshore Park.
โIn a weird way a lot of us have gotten even closer because we were in the battle together,โ Kurtz said. โWe feel like at this point we won the battle, but weโve lost the war.โ
โThey will get the permits to eventually fill this reservoir following the expansion,โ she said.
However, federal courts requiring the proper permits to continue construction is a win in her and TEGโs book, as it sets a precedent for any large construction processes that occur in the future. It will ensure that the proper environmental permits are obtained before construction can begin on a project.
โIf nothing else, we hope that precedent still stands. Because it will help somebody else,โ she said.
This story was produced by The Water Desk, an independent journalism initiative at the University of Colorado Boulderโs Center for Environmental Journalism.
…in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change. These moves, which are sure to be challenged in court, extend far beyond Trumpโs well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the worldโs largest oil producer. His Environmental Protection Agencyย announced plans this weekย to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate. But thatโs just one data point. There are many others:
Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution thatโs been tied to climate change.
Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trumpโs first term before they were expanded during Joe Bidenโs presidency. Now, Republicans areย abruptly ending themย next month.
The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.
Republicans in Congress and Trumpย enacted legislationย to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Bidenโs EPA and is alsoย to challengeย Californiaโs long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.
The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, theย National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.
Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role โ or any role at all โ the US will not attend.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk (Jonathan P. Thompson):
August 1, 2025
๐ฅต Aridification Watch ๐ซ
The monsoon is on its way, apparently, but seems to be delivering more lightning than rain to many areas that are grappling with wildfires. Meanwhile, the drought is intensifying and spreading in almost all parts of the West, especially in the deep Southwest.
Streamflows are dropping, too. The Animas River in Durango has fallen to about 200 cubic feet per second, and itโs only at about half that by the time it gets to Farmington, New Mexicoโs, new surfing wave. The Rio Grande already dried up in Albuquerque a couple of weeks ago (but got a good boost from a thunderstorm early this morning). WyoFile reports that the Snake, Wind, and Bear Rivers are all at record low flows for this date, even though the snowpack was about average this winter.
And, of course, the wildfires continue to burn. The Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyonโs North Rim has burned through 112,000 acres so far, with only 9% containment. The Monroe Canyon Fire in southwestern Utah is at 55,642 acres with 7% containment, and is causing power outages in surrounding communities. The Turner Gulch Fire northeast of Gateway is still growing โdue to continuous hot and dry conditions and erratic winds.โ And the Elkhorn Fire north of Durango has settled down a bit at 317 acres, but officials worry forecasted hot and dry conditions could reawaken it.
Below are some satellite moisture index maps, with blue being moist and red indicating dryness. The top image shows Dove Creek and areas south of there. This was dryland farming country for many years (Pinto Bean Capital of the World), but irrigation from McPhee Reservoir on the Dolores River was later extended out to Dove Creek. Problem is, their water rights are junior to the farmers in the Montezuma Valley near Cortez, so when reservoir levels are low, they tend to get less irrigation water. Here you can see the difference between 2023 (on the left), when snow, river, and reservoir levels were high, and this year (right), when they are not. What stands out to me is that some fields are still being irrigated this year, despite the drought, as is indicated by the circles of bright blue. But there are more fallow fields now, and the areas around the fields are especially dry.
Here are two more images showing the Ute Mountain Ute Tribeโs farms south of Ute Mountain in 2023 compared to 2025. Again, some irrigation is still reaching the fields, but apparently far less, given the number of fields that are apparently fallow.
๐ Data Center Watch ๐
The Land Desk is adding another beat to its roster, the Data Center Watch, which is just to say that Iโll be covering data centers and their economic and environmental ramifications a bit more frequently from here on out. Why? Because they currently are proliferating throughout the West: There are 93 data centers in the Phoenix area, 54 in the greater Denver area, and eight in Albuquerque, with many more on their way. And every one of them uses outsized quantities of electricity and water, straining power grids, and throwing utilitiesโ resource planning into disarray.
Cheyenne, Wyoming, is already home to six data centers. That doesnโt count Metaโs $800 million center that is under construction there, or energy firm Tallgrassโs proposed facility that would pull 1,800 megawatts of electricity from new, dedicated natural gas plants and renewable power installations (presumably solar and wind). Down in Tucson, city officials are considering Amazon Web Servicesโ proposed Project Blue, a massive complex that is poised to consume up to 2,000 acre-feet of water per year and become Tucson Electric Powerโs largest single customer.
In Alaska, a company is looking to build a large data center and a dedicated natural gas plant that would run off of oilfield methane. Numerous data centers can be found along the banks of the Columbia River, drawn there in part by the relatively cheap and abundant hydropower. In Montana, a proposed data center would use all of the powergenerated by NorthWestern Energyโs existing resources. And Pacific Gas & Electric expects new data centers in Silicon Valley to drive a 10 GW increase in electricity demand over the next decade, which is about one-third of todayโs forecast peak demand for Californiaโs grid.
The biggest concern with these sprawling warehouses packed with processors is their power consumption. Each one can draw as much electricity as a small city โ the proposed Cheyenne server farm would use more power than all of the stateโs households. As recently as half a decade ago, most utilities werenโt expecting the speed and magnitude of the big data center buildout. Now itโs hitting hard, and coinciding with increased demand from a growing number of electric vehicles and electrified homes, and utilities are scrambling to bring new power sources online to meet the projected demand growth. This includes geothermal, wind, and solar power โ each with impacts of their own โ but also new natural gas plants and even small nuclear reactors. Some utilities are cancelling plans to retire coal plants to keep enough generating capacity online.
In other words, the data center boom is likely to radically reshape the energy landscape of the West, and will spur more debates over the costs of this sort of economic development and the impacts our cyber-world has on the environment and humanity.
๐ Data Dump ๐
In some ways, I guess you could say that as alfalfa is to the Colorado River, data centers are to the Western power grid: they both suck up a lot of the resources. That doesnโt make them bad. Alfalfa mostly goes to dairy cows, which make cheese and ice cream and other really good things. Data centers power annoying AI art, sure, but they also make everything internet possible, including me sending this newsletter to you.
Anyway, itโs worth tracking both โ alfalfa and data centers, I mean. So hereโs a quick update on hay exports from the U.S. (which includes alfalfa and other hay), as well as a look at acreage planted in alfalfa (excl. other hay) over time. Exports seem to have peaked in 2022 and are now in decline. Nevertheless, sending alfalfa and other hay overseas is big business.
๐คฏ Annals of Inanity ๐คก
You might think that our federal agencies under Trump would be content to wreck the environment and trample civil liberties in a quiet, not-so-noticeable way. But no, of course not: Theyโre so proud of their racism and fetishization of fossil fuels that they plaster social media with their proclamations thereof โ they are trolling us, in other words.
Above are just two recent examples. In the first one, the Department of Energy fawns over a sparkling chunk of coal. In the other, the Department of Homeland Security posts an 1872 painting by John Gast titled โAmerican Progress.โ
Both are gross in their own way.
What the hell kind of sexualization of coal โ i.e. โShe is the momentโ โ are they going for in that first one? Frigginโ perverts, if you ask me.
As for the second, it glorifies the crimes the American military and white colonial settlers perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples in order to get more Lebensraum, one might say (it makes sense to use Hitlerโs term given that he was inspired by the U.S.โs policies toward Native Americans). Not only is the use of the word โHeritageโ in this way a dog whistle to white supremacists, but itโs also kind of weird to be talking about defending the โHomelandโ against immigrants when, in the image, the immigrant invaders are the white settlers, and the folks trying to defend themselves and their homeland are the Indigenous people (and wildlife) fleeing from the settlers.
๐ธ Parting Shot ๐๏ธ
I donโt want to leave yโall with that awful taste in your mouth, so here are a couple of nicer images of one of my favorite flowers out there.
Colorado River May 2023 swelled from low elevation snow runoff.
Click the link to read the article on the KJCT website. Here’s an excerpt:
July 28, 2025
On Monday, the Colorado Basin Roundtable had a meeting to discuss the state of the Colorado River. The Roundtable discussed the potential Shoshone stream flow acquisition. The area of interest is the 2.4 miles in Glenwood Canyon. It is important for Western Colorado because of its stream flow rate that mimics the current water rates used for hydropower. Wildlife organizations did habitat studies on it, and they show it improves the natural environment.
Another topic of discussion was the basin hydrology. With a limited snowpack this year, there is less water. The biggest concerns people had in the meeting related to that was the stress of many systems struggling from prolonged drought and aging infrastructure. Lindsay DeFrates, Deputy Director of Communications for the Colorado River District, said, โThe Colorado Basin Roundtable is a great example of a room where a bunch of different stakeholders from agriculture, recreation, environment, municipal, industrial, water users all come together to talk about those solutions. Itโs never an easy conversation. And we canโt forget about zebra mussels. Zebra mussel veligers were found at the Silt Boat Ramp and near New Castle.
We left the Colorado River a couple months ago to explore the Trumpstersโ effort to use the public lands in the river basin to โunleash American energyโ and return us to the glorious age of cheap petroleum โ and why itโs not happening. At that time, the seven states in the riverโs basin were in a stalemate over a management plan to replace the cobbled together โinterimโ management guidelines that expire next year. The Trumpstersโ have not interceded noticeably in this situation, since it appears to require complex and sustained thought.
Unfortunately, the stalemate is still the basic situation. As a couple water mavens put it, weโre all still waiting for the black smoke coming out of the chimney to turn white. The Basinโs state representatives are meeting together regularly though, with input from the First People, and reports from the meetings suggest that the participants have all agreed to โwork with the river we have, not the river we wish we (still) hadโ (if we ever actually did have it) โ the Colorado River Compactโs river. So a little review here today, to remind us where this puts usโฆ.
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 Colorado River Compact was created in 1922 for a river that had been, for a couple decades, running flows guesstimated to average 18 million acre-feet (maf) annually. The compact commissioners thought they were being conservative in only dividing 15 maf among themselves, and assumed that โthose men who may come after us, possessed of a far greater fund of informationโ would be dividing up even more water after resolving a share for Mexico and resolution of the Indian rights.
The river then played desert trickster and stopped running those big flows, shortly after Congress passed the Boulder Canyon Act to reconstruct the Colorado River through the subtropical deserts below the canyons. By the end of the 1930s drought that followed, the statesโ water leaders knew the numbers in the Compact division might have been for a river that no longer existed, if it ever really had. But they persisted with the Compact, in the spirit of the unnamed quasi-mythical G.W. Bush administration official: โWe are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.โ The next half century was invested in creating our own imperial reality for the Colorado River โ until we began to run into more โnaturalโ realities than weโd anticipatedโฆ.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The unimperial reality today is a river whose annual flow since the turn of the century has dropped to an average around 12.5 million acre-feet (maf), two-thirds the size of the Compactโs river. That is โthe river we haveโ โ and we are aware of the extent to which our superimposed imperial reality on the Colorado River region (and on the whole planet) has caused a lot of this unanticipated loss of water.
Exactly what it means when the basin-wide negotiators say they are working with that โriver we haveโ has not been revealed. One bad sign, however, viewing it from โoutside the box,โ is their persistence in thinking of the river as divided into a four-state Upper Basin and a three-state Lower Basin, a construct destined by a competitive appropriation culture to devolve into chronic conflict โ which it has.
Much of the conflict has revolved around the foggily written Article III(d) of the Compact, stating that the Upper Basin โwill not cause the flow of the river at Lee Ferry to be depleted below an aggregate of 75,000,000 acre-feet for any period of ten consecutive years.โ This could be most rationally interpreted as a warning to the Upper Basin to just be careful to not develop to the point of using more than their 7.5 maf/year (which the four states have not even come close to doing) and cutting into the Lower Basinโs 7.5 maf in dry periods. Or it could be irrationally interpreted as a delivery obligation that the Upper Basin had to deliver regardless of the natural state of the river, even if an extended drought forced the upper states to short themselves in order to deliver the required 7.5 maf.
Looking upstream at the Boulder Dam (now called Hoover Dam) under construction. “Boulder Dam, looking upstream August 31, 1933 2345” is written at the bottom of the photo. Via UNLV
Given a history of tension among the states based on how fast California was growing, the obvious choice between those interpretations was to believe the worst. Their intent in convening the compact commission had been to prevent a โseven-state horse raceโ to appropriate water for their futures; they wanted a seven-state division of the use of the riverโs water that wouldย override interstate appropriative competition. But they didnโt know enough about either the river or their own fantasy-infused futures to do that desired division. The two-basin division has come to be regarded as a stroke of genius, good for all time, when in fact it was just an expedient measure โ one wouldnโt be wrong to call it a โdesperate measureโ โ to cobble together something that would persuade Congress that the states were enough on the same page so Congress could put up the money for a big control structure (Hoover Dam).
But in their haste in pasting together the two-basin compact, they appeared, through Article III(d), to make one basin โjuniorโ to the other, subject to a โcompact callโ in an extended droughtย ย โ or at least that is how everyone chose to interpret it. The 2007 โInterim Guidelinesโ began to address that (perceived) inequity by imposing cuts on the Lower Basin states when Mead and Powell Reservoirs dropped to dangerous levels, but on not the Upper Basin (leaving their shortages up to the erratic river). But interstate โseniorityโ played a big role in the size of cuts for each Lower Basin state, belying the notion that the Compact would protect states from interstate appropriative competition.
So what could todayโs negotiators be doing instead? There is actually a constructive and useful way to divide a desert river into two โbasins,โ based on the nature of the desert river. All rivers are surface water that is leaving โ maybe reluctantly โ the land it flows through; it is leaving the land because the land and its life were not able to put the water to use in support of life or to hold it as groundwater in an aquifer. Even much of the groundwater that doesnโt get used by the plants does not escape leaving the land with the river; isotopic analysis indicates that over the course of a year more than half of all the water in surface streams is groundwater trickling back in.
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
This is not to say that a river is nothing but a drainage ditch โ an earlier Army Corps of Engineers perspective that messed up a lot of rivers, trying to make the drainage more efficient by straightening channels. All rivers have a much more complex relationship with the land they are flowing through than just โdrainage.โ Most rivers have their origins in highlands โ mountains or other significant uplands โ where steep slopes or fast snowmelts produce too much water to sink into whatever soil there might be; this generates surface flows that become small streams confluing to form larger streams and rivers. Throughย hyporheic exchange,ย surface streams either gain groundwater from the land they flow through when that land has a higher water table than the stream level (aย gaining stream), or they lose water to the riparian areas along the river when the water table there is lower than the stream level (aย losing streamย โ although, since the water it loses nurtures life in the riparian area, I think hydrologists should consider calling it a โgivingย streamโ).
For rivers in humid regions, there is adequate precipitation throughout the riverโs basin so the rivers will usually gain more from the land they pass through than they will lose (or โgiveโ); they are gaining streams that grow from both surface and ground water until they discharge it all into the seas. But a desert river like the Colorado, on the other hand, is a dependable gaining stream only in its highland headwaters, where the Colorado River accumulates 85-90 percent of its entire water supply from the Southern Rockies, Wind River and Wasatch Mountains above ~8,000 feet elevation. This water-producing region is less than 15 percent of the whole basin. (That โdivision contourโ is more accurately an โecotone,โ a blurry edge zone, in the 7,500-8,500 feet range.)
Below the ~8,000 foot elevation, the riverโs tributaries flow first into the high orographic โcold desertsโ (steppes) of western Colorado, southwestern Wyoming and eastern Utah. Most of its tributaries have been โstepping downโ through the mountain region in a series of canyons alternating with floodplains, all of it the waterโs work โ and all of it the beautiful erosion and deposition that draws and holds us here. As they drop into the high desert, they get into a serious canyon-cutting project through the Colorado Plateau, up to a mile deep โ a mystery story in itself thatย Iโve written about before. After more than five hundred miles of canyons winding through the Plateau, the river flows out into the subtropical Mojave and Sonora โhot deserts,โ and thence โ only occasionally now โ emptying whatโs left into the Gulf of California.
Super Bloom along UT-128 during the last road trip with Mrs. Gulch May 2023.
But once they drop out of its headwaters highlands, desert streams and rivers like the Colorado and its tributaries become losing (giving) streams; they get little new precipitation below the ~8,000 foot contour. The occasional exception is the desert cloudburst that manages to penetrate the desertโs heat shield, dumping a huge rain that mostly runs off the desert land in a quick, destructive flood, filling dry arroyos and stream beds for a few dangerous hours. Or a rare winter snowfall that melts and sinks in, activating flora and small fauna that have lain inactive for long periods, instigating pilgrimages from hundreds of miles away just to see the desert in bloom.
The โnaturalโ Colorado River (the river before the 20thย century CE) became a โbig riverโ for two or three months a year, in the May-July period when its mountain snowpack released the majority of the riverโs water into its tributaries and ground storage. But once the snowpack was gone, the natural river became an increasingly modest flow, fed largely by groundwater, and as it wandered through the desert regions, it gave what water it had to riparian life (a process that intensified as humans began โbroadeningโ its riparian areas through irrigation systems), or into desert aquifers โ and a lot of it just evaporated or transpired back into the atmosphere (losses that increased as humans spread more of it out in reservoirs and fields).
There were probably years (like our current water year) in which the last of the natural riverโs water never made it through its lush delta to the sea in the autumn. It is not unusual for a desert stream to completely disappear in its desert; some 40 surface streams and rivers flow into the Great Basin, and most of them just disappear after spreading their limited beneficence en route.
The natural and logical โtwo-basinโ division for a desert river like the Colorado, then, would be into a โwater production regionโ and a โwater consumption region.โ With the exception of mountain mining or resort towns, and the mountain flora and fauna, nearly all the users of Colorado River water live below that ~8,000 foot division. They are all in the same boat, trying to figure out how best to share a โlosing riverโ when its flows drop into the desert regions where they live.
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
The Colorado River Compact ignores this natural division of the river. The clumsy division into the four-state Upper Basin and three-state Lower Basin is done according to state boundaries, which have no geographic or hydrographic relevance to the Colorado River Basin.ย ย The state boundaries also include a lot of heavily developed landย outsideย the natural river basin that can lay claim to Colorado River water as part of the state โ and they have population and wealth concentrations that enable them to move that water out of the basin through tunnels. โWe are an empire, and when we actโย et cetera et cetera.
The Compact division is especially problematic for the Upper Basin. A quarter to a third of the Upper Basin area is the riverโs major waterย productionย area, scattered among the mountains of the four states above the ~8,000-foot contour, and the rest of the Compactโs Upper Basin is part of the riverโs waterย consumptionย region. The Compact makes no such distinction, and all the water above the Upper-Lower division point near Leeโs Ferry is presumed to be the Upper Basinโs โ minus the annual โdelivery obligationsโ of 7.5 maf for the Lower Basin and half of the 1.5 maf for Mexico. Given that the riverโs annual flows vary between 5 and 20 maf, this makes the Upper Basinโs Compact allotment of 7.5 maf annually a fantasy.
Acknowledging the desert nature of the Colorado River suggests a rather radical, but common sense two-basin management strategy for the Colorado River, addressing two main challenges: first, to work out an equitable division among all users for the use of the water that flows into the โwater consumption regionโ; and second, for all water consumption region users to collaborate on optimizing (not โmaximizingโ) the flow out of the โwater production regionโ and into the deserts.
And a third challenge (which should be first) would be to transcend (abandon) the Compactโs two-basin division, the artificiality of which just gets in the way of desert-river reality at best, and at worst fosters a competitive rather than collaborative attitude between the two basins.
And thatโs enough for today. We will look more closely at those challenges next time โ unless the negotiators have come up with a brilliant breakthrough to parse out. Donโt hold your breathโฆ.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
A satellite view of Mesa, Arizona, showing a handful of the 91 energy- and water-intensive data centers in the greater Phoenix metro area. Source: Google Earth.
When I first read a recent headline in Matthew Yglesiasโs Slow Boringnewsletter, I assumed it was a sort of joke to rope me into reading. โThereโs plenty of water for data centers,โ it said, reassuringly. โProbably the last worry you should have about either water or AI.โ
Unfortunately, he wasnโt joking. But he opened his piece with a line that should have warned his readers to take everything else he said with a grain of salt:
Before I continue with my rant, Iโd just like to encourage Yglesias to do a little more thinking about water scarcity before writing about it. Oh, and also, maybe consider spending a little bit of time in the water-starved West before committing punditry about it. (This is the same guy who tweeted that Sen. Mike Leeโs proposal to sell off public land was โpretty reasonableโ and an โokay idea on the meritsโ).
Yglesias acknowledges that data centers use water, and that more data centers will lead to more water consumption. But itโs okay, he says, because โWeโre not living on Arrakis, and rich countries are not, in general, abstemious in their water usage.โ
No, we are not on Arrakis, but have you seen the lower reaches of the Colorado River or even the mid-reaches of the Rio Grande lately? Itโs looking pretty Dune-like if you ask me.
Well, sure, Yglesias argues, but even in those places, people are doing frivolous things with water, like filling up their Super Soakers or using it to make ice cubes for their cocktails. Yes, he used those actual examples. Never mind that the potable water used each day by a single Microsoft data center in Goodyear, Arizona, could yield more than 35 million ice cubes or fill about 223,000 Super Soakers. That would be one big, drunken water fight.
Yglesias also notes that agriculture, especially growing alfalfa and other feed crops for cattle, is an even larger water consumer than Big Tech. True, for now. And he writes:
His logic appears to be: People are currently using a lot of water for all sorts of things โ frivolous or otherwise. So, it should be fine to use a lot more water for data centers in perpetuity, since water is โsufficiently plentiful.โ This is the sort of thinking that got the Colorado River Basin into its current mess, in which there actually may not be enough water to drink very soon if its collective users donโt change their ways. Adding a fleet of water-guzzling hyperscale data centers to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, andย Tucson, where water is anything but โsufficiently plentiful,โ will only exacerbate the crisis.
Researchers have tried various methods to determineย how much water a single ChatGPT query or AI-assisted Google search usesย as compared to, say, streaming a Netflix video or writing a standard e-mail.ย So far the estimates diverge wildly. An early calculation came up with a whopping 500 ml for each AI query, but the estimates have since gone down. The difficulty is due in part to the fact that water use data isnโt always publicly available, and also because data centersโ water use can vary depending on location, as do theirย carbon footprints.
What is clear is this: Data centers use large quantities of both energy and water, no matter where they are. The massive server banks churning away in warehouse-like buildings on the fringes of Phoenix and Las Vegas, and even in rural Washington and Wyoming, each gobble as much electricity as a small city to process AI queries, cryptocurrency extraction, and other aspects of our increasingly cloud-based society. The harder they work, the hotter they get, and the more power and water they need to cool off to the optimum operating temperature of between 70ยฐ to 80ยฐ F.
Evaporative or adiabatic cooling, where air is cooled by blowing it through moistened pads (i.e. high-tech swamp coolers), works well in arid areas like Phoenix, Tucson, or Las Vegas. They use less energy than refrigerated cooling, but also use far more water.
Data centers can also indirectly consume water through their energy use, depending on the power source. Thermal coal, nuclear, or natural gas plants need water for cooling and steam-production (some of this water may be returned to the source after use, except with zero-discharge facilities); natural gas extraction uses water for hydraulic fracturing; and solar installations can require large amounts of water for dust-suppression and cleaning. This explains how Googleโs data centers withdrew 8.65 billion gallons of water globally in 2023 1.
A 2023 study found that a single Chat GPT-3 request processed at an Arizona data center uses about 30 milliliters of water, compared to 12 ml per request in Wyoming. That doesnโt seem like much (itโs less than a shot-glass) until you consider that there are at least 1 billion ChatGPT queries worldwide per day and growing, using a total of some 8 million gallons of water daily, worldwide. And, training the AI at an Arizona data center would use about 9.6 million liters โ or 2.5 million gallons โ of additional water.
Another estimate finds the average data center uses between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water per day, onsite, which would be far more than the aforementioned Goodyear center (56 million gallons/year), but in line with a planned Google data center in Mesa, Arizona. When Google was first planning the facility back in 2019, the city of Mesa guaranteed delivery of nearly 1 million gallons of water per day. If they reach certain milestones they can use up to 4 million gallons daily, or about 4,480 acre-feet per year.
Now multiply those numbers by the more than 90 data centers of various sizes and water and energy intensity in the Phoenix area, alone, which would amount to somewhere between 14 million to 450 million gallons per day. No matter how you add it up, they collectively are sucking up a huge amount of water and power, and enough to strain even Yglesiasโs purported โsufficiently plentifulโ supplies (which do not exist in Arizona, by the way).
The average Phoenix-area household uses about 338 gallons of water per day, or almost 123,000 gallons per year. One of these big data centers, then, could guzzle as much water as some 10,000 homes. And yet housing developments in groundwater-dependent areas on Phoenixโs fringe must obtain 100-year assured water supply certification before they can begin building. The same is not the case for data centers.
According to Open ET maps, a 75-acre alfalfa field in Buckeye (western Phoenix metro area), uses about 156 acre-feet โ or 50.8 million gallons โ per year. Thatโs far less than the 28-acre Apple Data Center in Mesa consumes. Of course, there are the equivalent of about 3,470 alfalfa fields of that same size in Arizona (260,000 acres), meaning the total water consumption of hay and alfalfa is still greater than that of data centers. But it shows that while replacing an alfalfa field with houses would result in a net decrease in water consumption, replacing those same fields with data centers would substantially increase consumption.
And donโt forget that the 75-acre alfalfa field produces about 690 tons of alfalfa per year, which could feed quite a few dairy cows, which in turn would produce a bunch of milk for making cheese and ice cream. Just saying. Maybe itโs time to update the old saying: โIโd rather see a cow than a data center.โ
Data centers arenโt going away. After all, they are the hearts and brains of the Internet Age. Many of us may wish that AI (not to mention cryptocurrency), which are more water- and energy-intensive than other applications, would just up and vanish. But thatโs probably too much to ask for. Besides, AI, at least, does have real value.
So what can be done to keep the data center boom from devouring the Westโs water and driving its power grid to the snapping point? Hereโs where Yglesias had a good point: Policymakers and utilities should adjust water and power pricing for large industrial users, i.e. data centers, to discourage waste, incentivize efficiency and recycling, and push tech firms to develop their own clean energy sources to power their facilities.
Itโs imperative that utilities force data centers to pay their fair share for infrastructure upgrades made necessary by added water or power demand, rather than shifting those costs to other ratepayers, as is usually the case. Arizona should make data centers prove out their water supply, just like they do with housing developments. Plus, states should stop trying to lure data centers with big tax breaks, which ultimately are paid for by the other taxpayers. And local governments and planners should subject proposed data centers to the highest level of scrutiny, and not give in to promises of jobs and economic development if it means sacrificing the communityโs water supply or the reliability of the power grid.
Proper policy isnโt a cure all, by any means. But it could mitigate the impacts of the imminent data center boom. Meanwhile, Mr. Yglesias, I will reiterate that the West, at least, does not have plenty of water for data centers, and I will continue to worry about them guzzling up what little water remains.
๐ Reading Room ๐ง
The Land Desk is reading all of yโallโs great responses to last weekโs open thread about forms of resistance. Check it out and weigh in if you havenโt already.
Len Necefer has had some really strong pieces on hisย All At Once by Dr. Lennewsletter recently, includingย this oneย musing about the opportunities for the Navajo Nation to build a recreation economy on the San Juan River (great idea!). He writes about how strange it is that he, a Navajo Nation citizen, must get a permit from the BLM to raft the river, when it borders his homeland (and is at the heart of Dinรฉ Bikeyah). I also like that he sees boating/recreational opportunities along the entirety of the river, not just from Sand Island to Clay Hills Crossing. Iโve always thought it would be super cool to boat the reaches between Farmington and Bluff (actually, Iโve always wanted to boat from Durango to Farmington to Bluff).ย
Another Substack thatโs been getting my attention isย Time Zero, a podcast and Substack on โthe nuclearized world.โ Theย Wastelandingย series is about the legacy of uranium mining and milling on the Colorado Plateau, the Navajo Nation, and on Pueblo lands. Very powerful stuff.ย
Theย Colorado Sunโs Shannon Mullane has aย good storyย about the Southern Ute Tribe finally getting some of its Animas-La Plata water, which was the whole reason the last big Western water project, as itโs known, was finally built.
1 This is not the same as consumption, which is the amount of water withdrawn minus the amount returned to the source.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
DENVER – Today, by repealing the 16-year-old “Endangerment Finding,โ which determined that greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution poses a threat to public health and welfare, the Trump administrationโs U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paved the way for more extreme weather and natural disasters, hurting Colorado communities.
โThis decision flies in the face of decades of data about the negative public health impact of greenhouse gasses including heat exposure and fire risk. Colorado is all too familiar with the impacts of climate change, seeing the three largest fires in our state’s history and the most destructive in the last five years. Despite the EPAโs denial of our reality, Colorado will continue to achieve our ambitious clean energy goals to save people more on energy bills, reduce emissions and improve our air-quality and health,โ said Governor Jared Polis.
About 60% of Iowaโs 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 youโll see more than rows of corn, wheat and soybeans. Youโll 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 stateโs 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 multibillionโdollar 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 โ 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 farmโscale installations, and sunsets them entirely by 2028. It also eliminates bonus credits that previously supported rural and lowโincome 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.
Whatโs 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 phaseโout 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 lowโincome 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 countyโs 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 agricultureโs unpredictable income streams. These projects also support rural manufacturing โ 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 โ 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 arenโt just fueling the grid; theyโre helping keep farms and rural towns alive.
The Shoshone hydro plant in Glenwood Canyon. The Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon. The CWCB will hold a hearing on the water rights associated with the plant in September. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Front Range asked for Colorado Water Conservation Board neutrality on historic use of Shoshone water rights
In an effort to head off concerns about the stateโs role in a major Western Slope water deal, a Western Slope water district has offered up a compromise proposal to Front Range water providers.
In order to defuse what Colorado River Water Conservation District General Manager Andy Mueller called โan ugly contested hearing before the CWCB,โ the River District is proposing that the state water board take a neutral position on the exact amount of water tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant water rights and let a water court determine a final number.
โAlthough we believe this would be an unusual process, the River District believes it would address the primary concern (i.e., avoiding the state agencyโs formal endorsement of the River Districtโs preliminary historical use analysis) that we heard expressed by your representatives at the May 21, 2025 CWCB meeting regarding the Shoshone instream flow proposal,โ Mueller wrote in an email to officials from the Front Range Water Council.
The River District worked with CWCB staff to draft the proposal, but it may not go far enough to address Front Range concerns.
The River District, which represents 15 counties on the Western Slope, is planning to purchase some of the oldest and largest non-consumptive water rights on the Colorado River from Xcel Energy for nearly $100 million. The water rights, which are tied to the Shoshone hydropower plant in Glenwood Canyon, are essential for downstream ecosystems, cities, endangered fish, and agricultural and recreational water users. As part of the deal, the River District is seeking to add an instream flow water right to benefit the environment to the hydropower water rights.
The effort has seen broad support across the Western Slope. The River District has raised $57 million toward the purchase from at least 26 local and regional partners. The project was awarded a $40 million Inflation Reduction Act grant in the waning days of the Biden administration, but those funds have been frozen by the Trump administration.
โThese water rights are foundational to the Colorado River,โ said Amy Moyer, chief of strategy at the River District. โItโs the number one project for the Western Slope. Itโs the top priority to move forward.โ
Critically, because its water rights are senior to many other water users โ they date to 1902 โ Shoshone can force upstream water users to cut back. The Shoshone call has the ability to command the flows of the Colorado River and its tributaries upstream all the way to the headwaters.
The twin turbines of Xcel Energyโs Shoshone hydroelectric power plant in Glenwood Canyon can generate 15 megawatts. The River District is proposing that the CWCB remain neutral on the issue of the plantโs historic water use. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Putting a precise amount on how much water the plant has historically used is a main point of contention between the River District and the Front Range Water Council, a group that includes some of Coloradoโs biggest municipal water providers: Denver Water, Colorado Springs Utilities, Aurora Water and Northern Water. These entities take water that would normally flow west, and bring it to farms and cities on the east side of the Continental Divide through what are called transmountain diversions. About 500,000 acre-feet of water annually is taken from the headwaters of the Colorado River and its tributaries to the Front Range.
Estimates by the River District put the Shoshone hydro plantโs average annual use at 844,644 acre-feet using the period between 1975 and 2003 โ before natural hazards in the narrow canyon began knocking the plant offline regularly in recent years.
But Front Range Water Council members say this estimate is flawed and could be an expansion of the historical use of the water right. They have requested a hearing at the September CWCB meeting to hash out their concerns.
โThe preliminary analysis that has been presented appears to expand historic use and creates potential injury,โ Abby Ortega, general manager of infrastructure and resource planning at Colorado Springs Utilities told the CWCB at its May meeting.
Determining past use of the Shoshone water rights is important because it will help set a limit for future use. While changing the use of a water right is allowed by going through the water court process, enlarging it is not. The amount pulled from and returned to the river must stay the same as it historically has been.
As part of the River Districtโs deal to buy the water rights, the CWCB โ which is the only entity in the state allowed to hold an instream flow water right โ must officially accept the water right and then sign on as a co-applicant in the water court change case.
But Front Range water providers said that doing so would amount to an endorsement of the River Districtโs historical use estimate, which would mean taking a side in the Front Range versus Western Slope disagreement.
โIf you agree to accept the right and as I understand it, the instream flow agreement, youโre agreeing to be a co-applicant, which risks you accepting their analysis,โ said Alexandra Davis, an assistant general manager with Aurora Water, at the CWCBโs May meeting.
Some members of the Front Range Water Council have asked that the CWCB remain neutral during the water court change case. In May 9 and June 9 letters to the CWCB from Marshall Brown, general manager of Aurora Water, he said the CWCB shouldrefrain from endorsing any specific methodology or volume of water.
โโฆ [T]he CWCB should remain neutral in the water court proceedings and defer to the courtโs determination of the appropriate methodology and volumetric quantification,โ the May 9 letter reads.
The River Districtโs offer does just that: It proposes that the CWCB should not take a position regarding the determination of historical use of the Shoshone water rights.
โWe heard the issues that are most front and center from these entities,โ Moyer said. โAnd so we are trying to find a path forward that works for everyone.โ
But even if Front Range Water Council members are in favor of the proposal, it is unlikely to result in a cancellation of the hearing. CWCB Executive Director Lauren Ris said in an email that under the boardโs rules, they are required to hold a hearing. And Jeff Stahla, public information officer at Northern Water, said they will still be asking for the hearing to proceed.
Spokespeople from Colorado Springs Utilities, Aurora Water and Denver Water all declined to comment on the River Districtโs proposal because it was marked as confidential.
Some members of the Front Range Water Council have concerns beyond CWCB neutrality that could be addressed at the September hearing.
In a May 14 letter to the CWCB, Denver Waterโs CEO Alan Salazar said the water provider also wants to carry over some provisions from existing agreements like the Shoshone Outage Protocol. This agreement has an exception in cases of extreme drought that allows Denver Water to keep taking water if its reservoirs fall below certain levels and streamflows are low. Denver Water added that by omitting the last two decades of Shoshone water use, the River Districtโs study period is skewed, and that using an upstream stream gauge to measure historical use is improper.
The hearing is scheduled for the next CWCB board meeting Sept. 16-18. The board can approve or disapprove the acquisition of the water rights, or make changes to the proposal and adopt the amended proposal. The board is required to take action at the September hearing unless the River District approves an extension. Pre-hearing statements are due by Aug. 4.
CWCB board members Brad Wind, who is general manager of Northern Water, and Greg Johnson, manager of resource planning at Denver Water, recused themselves from the July 17 CWCB board meeting discussion of the Shoshone water rights and plan to recuse themselves from future Shoshone discussions and decisions.ย
Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0
Deadlocked for months in tense, closed-door meetings, Colorado River states may be one step closer to an agreement. Representatives from each of the seven Western states have agreed to discuss a new path forward โ one that could more firmly ground Colorado River policy in hydrological reality as snowpack fails to deliver, reservoirs decline and fears mount…The proposal, presented for the first time publicly at a meeting in Arizona on June 17, would base the release of water from Lake Powell on a three-year average of the โnatural flowsโ of the river. Water released from Lake Powell ends up in Lake Mead, the source of roughly 90 percent of Southern Nevadaโs supply…The natural-flow proposal, while details remain sparse, would be a stunning departure from guidelines minted in 2007, which some argue donโt take into account declining water availability.
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
Federal officials reported Tuesday that the water level in Lake Powell, one of the main water storage reservoirs for the Colorado River Basin, could fall low enough to stop hydropower generation at the reservoir by December 2026.
The reservoirโs water levels have fallen as the Colorado River Basin, the water supply for 40 million people, has been overstressed by rising temperatures, prolonged drought and relentless demand. Upper Basin officials sounded the alarm in June, saying this yearโs conditions echo the extreme conditions of 2021 and 2022, when Lake Powell and its sister reservoir, Lake Mead, dropped to historic lows.
The seven basin states, including Colorado, are in high-stakes negotiations over how to manage the basinโs water after 2026. One of the biggest impasses has been how to cut water use in the basinโs driest years.
โYou canโt reduce what doesnโt come down the stream. And thatโs the reality weโre faced with,โ Commissioner Gene Shawcroft of Utah said in the statement. โThe only way weโre going to achieve a successful outcome is if weโre willing to work together โ and not just protect our own interests.โ
Lake Powell is seen in a November 2019 aerial photo from the nonprofit EcoFlight. The Upper Basin states are proposing two pools of stored water in Lake Powell: A Lake Powell protection account and a Lake Powell conservation account. Credit: EcoFlight
Lake Powell, located on the Utah-Arizona border, collects water from Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming, part of Arizona and tribal reservations in the Colorado Riverโs Upper Basin. Glen Canyon Dam releases the reservoirโs water downstream to Lake Mead, Native American tribes, Mexico, and Lower Basin states, including Arizona, California and Nevada.
Lake Powell and Lake Mead make up about 92% of the reservoir storage capacity in the entire Colorado River Basin.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamationโs July report, called a 24-month study, shows the potential for Lake Powell to decline below two critical elevations: 3,525 feet and 3,490 feet.
It could drop below 3,525 feet in April 2026, which would prompt emergency drought response actions. Thatโs in the most probable scenario, but the federal agency also considers drier and wetter forecast scenarios. The dry forecast shows that the reservoirโs water levels would fall below this elevation as soon as January.
Lake Powell would have to fall below 3,490 feet in order to halt power generation.
Planning for emergency water releases
In 2021 and 2022, officials leapt into crisis management mode and released water from upstream reservoirs โ including Blue Mesa, Coloradoโs largest reservoir โ to stabilize Lake Powellโs water levels.
The July 24-month study triggered planning for potential emergency releases, called drought response operations, at Lake Powell, and Flaming Gorge, Blue Mesa and Navajo reservoirs, said Chuck Cullom, executive director of the Upper Colorado River Commission.
โThe Upper Division States and Reclamation have been monitoring the risks to Lake Powell since January 2025 due to the declining snowpack and runoff, and are prepared to take appropriate actions as conditions evolve through 2025 and spring of 2026,โ he said in an email to The Colorado Sun.
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
At-risk hydropower
Hydroelectric power generation takes a hit with lower water levels at Lake Powell and Lake Mead.
Reclamationโs dry conditions forecast says Lake Powell could fall below 3,490 feet by December 2026, and Lake Meadโs water level could fall below a key elevation, 1,035 feet, by May 2027. At that point, Hoover Dam would have to turn off several turbines and its power production would be significantly reduced, said Eric Kuhn, a Colorado water expert.
In more typical or unusually wet forecasts, neither reservoir would fall below these critical elevations in the next two years, according to the report.
Lake Powell and other federal reservoirs provide a cheap and consistent source of renewable energy. Without that, electricity providers would have to look to other, more expensive sources of energy or nonrenewable supplies. Some of those costs can get handed down to customers in their monthly utility bills.
Output capacity of the damโs turbines decreases in direct proportion to the reservoirโs surface elevation. As Lake Powell Shrinks, the dam generates less power. Source: Argonne National Laboratory.
Glen Canyonโs hydropower is normally pooled with other power sources to serve customers in Wyoming, Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas and Utah. Its power generation has already been impacted: Fourteen of the lowest generation years at the dam have occurred since 2000.
A strong monsoon season this summer could help elevate the water levels in the major reservoirs, as could a heavy winter snowpack in the mountains this coming winter.
โIf next year is below average, then weโre setting ourselves up for some very difficult decisions in the basin,โ said Kuhn, former general manager of the Colorado River District and author of โScience Be Dammed,โ a book about the perils of ignoring science in Western water management.
Arizona power house at Hoover Dam December 2019. Each of the 17 hydroelectric generators at Hoover Dam can produced electricity sufficient for 1,000 houses. Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News
An interstate legal mire
Kuhn has also been tracking the releases from Lake Powell with big, interstate legal questions in mind.
If the riverโs flow falls below a 10-year total of about 82.5 million acre-feet, it could trigger a legal mire. In that scenario, the Lower Basin could argue that the Upper Basin would be required to send more water downstream in compliance with the foundational agreement, the 1922 Colorado River Compact.
Some Upper Basin lawyers disagree about the terms of when states, like Colorado, would be required to send more water downstream. Thatโs a big concern for water users, including farmers and ranchers, who say they already donโt have enough water in dry years.
From 2017 to 2026, the 10-year cumulative flow is expected to be about 83 million acre-feet, Kuhn said.
โWeโre OK through 2026,โ Kuhn said. โBut under the most probable and minimum probable [forecasts], itโs almost a certainty that the flow will drop below 82.5.โ
Lake Powellโs ecosystems feel the strain
Bridget Deemer, a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, keeps her eye on how lower water levels impact ecosystems in Lake Powell.
In a recent study, she found that low dissolved oxygen zones grow larger as water levels fall and more sediment gets backed up in the reservoir over time. This sediment can spur more decomposition, which uses up oxygen in the water.
The zones can cut down on fish habitat. Fish donโt want to be in the warm surface waters of the lake, but as they search for their preferred temperature and food source, they can end up in an area with low oxygen, Deemer said.
The effect is greatest right below Glen Canyon Dam. In 2023, there were 116 days when the oxygen was below 5 milligrams per liter, which is the threshold for trout. At 2 to 3 milligrams per liter, the fish can die.
Deemer also studies how these zones are impacted by algae blooms.
Lake Powell researchers noted toxic algae blooms around the Fourth of July and last fall. They donโt know definitively what caused either bloom event, but research does show that warming water temperatures and increased nutrients are two leading causes of harmful algae blooms.
These blooms can impact fish, people, pets or anything that ingests the algae.
โIn general, Lake Powell is doing well,โ she said. โIts waters are really clear without a lot of nutrients and algal growth. These blooms are smaller scale and localized.โ
An idle drill rig with Raplee Ridge in the background near Mexican Hat, Utah, an oil and gas hotspot back in the early 1900s. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
Remember back in the pre-Trump II days, when every six months or so the environmental community would harp on Biden for issuing more oil and gas drilling permits than Trump did during his first term? If so, you probably also remember the Land Desk harping on the greens for making the comparison in the first place, saying it doesnโt really mean anything.
Well, it looks like it does mean something to Trump. And, wanting to demonstrate his fondness for those big fat drill rigs, his administration has been handing out drilling permits at a mind-bending rate. Between Jan. 21 and Jul. 21 of this year, the BLM has issued 2,660 permits, or about 524 per month. And since everyone likes comparisons: That eclipses Bidenโs biggest year of 2023, when he issued 317 per month.
But do you know who likes drill rigs more than Trump? George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, who issued a whopping 569 per month in 2007. Yet this is a good example of why these comparisons are not really meaningful.
Most of George W.โs APDs (approved permit to drill) were for coalbed methane wells (which is just natural gas extracted from coal seams) in places like New Mexicoโs and Coloradoโs San Juan Basin, Wyomingโs Sublette County, or Coloradoโs Piceance Basin. They are smaller and lower-producing than the horizontal โfrackingโ wells that sparked the โshale revolutionโ in about 2008, altering the industry and the geography of oil and gas extraction. Most new wells are aiming for oil rather than gas with drilling centered in the Permian Basin. The Farmington office of the BLM has issued just 48 APDs in the past six months, while the Carlsbad office has handed out 2,565.
Whether these permits are ever used is another question altogether. So far this year, the rig count is down from last year. There certainly are not enough rigs operating to burn through all of these new permits anytime soon, meaning the companies will just sit on them until oil prices increase again and then go on a frenzy.
Back in the San Juan Basin, where the natural gas industry pretty much collapsed in 2009 and has stayed that way since, rig activity is beginning to pick up just a bit, according to Hart Energy. But itโs all relative: There are only about six rigs operating in the basin currently, compared to more than 90 in the Permian.
Fresh off legislatively pillaging the public lands โ and so much else โ in the โOne Big Beautifulโ law, MAGA is looking to rub a little bit of acid in those wounds with the Houseโs 2026 fiscal year budget. Last week, they released their appropriations bill for Interior, environment, and related agencies, and it robs the public lands of cash and environmental protections, while handing concessions to the extractive and fossil fuel industries. It is, like so much that this administration and its lackeys do, straight out of Project 2025, the radical right wingโs roadmap for crushing democracy and turning America into a a corporate-run oligarchy.
Basically every public lands and environment related agency is getting its funding cut, not out of some sort of fiscal responsibility (Defense and Homeland Security are getting massive infusions of additional taxpayer funding), but because todayโs GOP is dead set on taking out their resentment on the planet and in offsetting a small portion of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. The only good news is that some of the cuts are less than what Trump asked for. Some examples:
The Bureau of Land Management would take aย $110.4 million cutย below fiscal year 2025โs level, or an 8% decrease.
The U.S. Geological Surveyโs budget will beย slashed by 5.6%, or $82 million.
The National Park Service will see itโs budgetย cut by about $176 million, a 6% decrease.
The Environmental Protection Agency will have its fundingย slashed by $2.12 billion, or a whopping 23%. That includes huge cuts to Science and Technology, Environmental Programs and Management, and State and Tribal Assistance Grants.
The U.S. Forest Serviceโs budget will beย reduced by $16.8 million.
The National Institute of Environmental Health Science will see aย budget cut of $27.9 million, or 35%.
Some good news: The Indian Health Service wouldย get a $182 million increaseunder the bill and the Bureau of Indian Affairs is getting about the same funding as last year, in defiance of Trumpโs request to slash its budget by more than 30%.
Also taking deep cuts under the Interior et al appropriations bill: Smithsonian, National Gallery of Art, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Presidio Trustโs funding will be totally eliminated, after receiving $90 million last year. This could open the way for the Presidio to be developed or become a โFreedom City.โ
But this is more than just about bean counting. Itโs also a way for lawmakers to exert their will over federal agencies by way of funding.
For example, since the Trump administration has yet to shrink or eliminate any national monuments, congressional Republicans are doing some de facto national monument shrinkage of their own. The appropriation bill would freeze funding for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monumentโs new management plan, forcing the relevant agencies to revert back to the February 2020 plan enacted under the previous Trump administration and applying only to the vastly reduced, Trump I-era monument boundaries. This effectively voids Bidenโs restoration of the monumentโs original boundaries and trashes the new management plan and all of the work that went into it.
The GOPโs bill also would suffocate the BLMโs 2024 Conservation and Landscape Health Rule, aka the Public Lands Rule, which aims to put conservation on a par with drilling, mining, and grazing on public lands.
The appropriation bill is also a sort ofย MAGA love letter to the fossil fuel industry, including provisions such as:
Cutting off funding for โ and thereby killing โ the Biden administrationโs Fluid Mineral Leasing rule, which increased oil and gas royalty rates from 12.5% to 16.67% to reflect modern times and give taxpayers a slightly better deal; increased minimum leasing bids to $10 per acre; established an โexpression of interestโ fee for leases; eliminated non-competitive leasing; increased minimum reclamation bonds for oil and gas wells from $10,000 to $150,000 and eliminated blanket nationwide operator bonds. It also directed leasing towards areas with high oil and gas potential and away from more sensitive cultural, wildlife, and recreation resources. In other words: All very common sense, some might say watered-down, provisions.
Cutting off funding for and killing the Biden administrationโs methane fee aimed at incentivizing oil producers to sell natural gas โ a byproduct of oil drilling โ on the market rather than simply venting or flaring the potent greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. The bill would also eliminate the greenhouse gas reporting system for the oil and gas industry.
Mandating quarterly oil and gas leases on public lands in nine states (WY, NM, CO, UT, MT, ND, OK, NV, AK) and expanding the definition of lands eligible for leasing.
Cutting off all funding for the Biden administrationโs environmental protections in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska.
Cuts off funding for a 2024 coal combustion waste disposal rule that had been in the works for decades as part of an effort to tackle one of the nationโs largest and nastiest solid waste streams.
The GOP isnโt too fond of wildlife. The bill takes aim at numerous endangered species โ from the lesser prairie chicken and grizzly, to the gray wolf, wolverine, and long-eared bat โ and blocks funding for bans or restrictions on lead ammunition, even though thatโs a leading killer of condors and some birds of prey.
Iโve been really curious about how the Trump administrationโs policy chaos might affect visitation at national parks. Would the threat to privatize public lands through various means (from selling it off to turning reservation systems over to private concessionaires) inspire folks to get to their parks while theyโre still around? Would the administrationโs hostility towards non-Americans (tariffs and trade wars, deportations) keep international tourists at bay? Or would the declining value of the U.S. dollar bring more foreign tourists to America?
Weโre six months in to this nightmare โฆ er โฆ administration, and there arenโt any obvious trends in the year-to-date visitation statistics. A lot of parks have actually seen an increase in visitation over the last couple of years so far. Drill down a bit, however, and something else becomes apparent: While visitation was unusually high in the winter and spring in Zion, Grand Canyon, Arches, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Chaco Canyon, and other parks, it dropped off relative to previous years in May and June.
This may be due to heat and drought, but it also may be tied to the drop in international tourism into the U.S. Federal data show that incoming international air travel during the first half of the year is down 3.6% from the same period last year. (Meanwhile, more U.S. citizens are flying overseas, despite the weak U.S. dollar. Perhaps they are fleeing something?).
Iโve always been interested in visitation patterns at Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, as well. It seems like it used to correlate with water levels: No one wants to visit Lake Powell when many of the boat ramps are high and dry, the shores are mudflats, and Rainbow Bridge isnโt accessible by boat. Or thatโs what I used to think. But more recently it seems that visitation rates are driven by other factors, perhaps because people are coming to the recreation area for different reasons, such as the spectacular landscape that surrounds the reservoir.
That said, visitation this year is down again along with the water levels.
Yes, the Department of Energyโs social media account did tweet this stupidity, Iโm sorry to say.
๐คฏ Annals of Inanity ๐คก
Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb โฆ One of the many, many stupid, ugly provisions in the Big Beautiful (I cringe every time I write it) law was a royalty reduction for coal production on federal lands. The rate has been at 12.5% for about a century. If you think of that as the wholesale price that Peabody, Arch, Oxbow, and other corporations have been paying to purchase Americansโ coal, then you could say they are marking the product up by about 800%.
It seems like a pretty good deal for the corporations โ and a crappy one for us taxpayers. But it wasnโt enough, apparently, so the Republicans lowered the royalty rate to a measly 7%. And just so you understand, this isnโt just for new coal leases, itโs for all existing and future coal leases on public lands and for the publicโs coal.
What that means is that all of those coal mines in the Powder River Basin, Colorado, and Utah are now paying the federal government only about 56% as much as they paid before the bill was signed into law. So that means if production levels remain flat and coal prices remain steady โ which is not a given โ then the federal government will bring in about $250 million from coal royalties this year, which is about $200 million less than last year. What about that is fiscally responsible, may I ask?
But hereโs the kicker: The states where the coal is mined get 50% of that royalty revenue back. This means Wyoming will receive something like $50 million less per year from coal royalties, according to aย report by Wyoming Public Radioโs Caitlin Tan. Thatโs My estimates say Wyoming could take an even bigger hit of more like $80 million annually, depending on the price of coal and production levels. Thatโs $50 million to $80 million less for the state to spend on schools, public services, roads, and so forth. Heck, it may even spur Wyoming to finally implement a corporate and individual income tax!
Federal coal royalty revenues from calendar year 2024. This is from a 12.5% royalty rate. Congressional Republicans just dropped it to 7%, meaning the taxpayers are going to be shorted about $200 million per year.
The pushers of this plan claim to be doing it to boost production, which would then offset some of the losses. But thatโs not how it works. Coal mines arenโt going to produce more just because itโs cheaper to do so; they produce more when demand goes up. Production will remain the same or, more likely, drop, since fewer and fewer utilities are interested in burning coal. The corporations will make more profit. Everyone else will get screwed.
The House budget, though not as severe as the White Houseโs, proposes a 25 percent cut to the main source of federal funding forย local water systems.
Senate approves Trumpโs $9.4 billion in cuts toย public broadcasting and foreign aid.
Otherย water bills in Congressย include tribal water infrastructure funding, sinkhole monitoring, microplastics, and Great Lakes fisheries.
Bureau of Reclamation announces $200 million forย water recycling projectsย in two western states.
EPA delays requirements to monitor groundwater atย coal ashย dumps.
Before taking summer break, Congress will holdย hearingsย this week on fossil fuel pipeline safety, rising electricity demand, FEMA improvement, and NEPA reviews.
And lastly, Congressโs watchdog finds NRCS could improve its dam safety approach.
โWhile requests greatly exceeded the funding available for projects, we did our best to provide some funding for all eligible projects given the impact these dollars will have in communities across the country.โ Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), speaking about water infrastructure earmarks in his committeeโs 2026 budget proposal.
By the Numbers
$200 Million: Bureau of Reclamation funding announced for two water reuse projects in the western states. Phoenix will receive $179 million for its North Gateway project, which will produce 8 million gallons of recycled water a day. Washington County Water Conservancy District, which encompasses high-growth St. George in southwest Utah, will see more than $20 million for its regional recycled water system. The final cost for that system is expected at more than $1 billion.
News Briefs
House Proposes Water Cuts In its draft fiscal year 2026 budget, a House Appropriations subcommittee proposes a 25 percent combined cut to the state revolving funds, the main source of federal funding for local water systems.
The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund would be funded at $895 million, down from $1.1 billion. The Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which is for sewer and stormwater projects, would be funded at $1.2 billion, compared to $1.6 billion in 2025.
Though not as deep as President Trumpโs proposal of a 90 percent cut, the budget proposal still drew criticism from water utility groups, who would prefer federal assistance be maintained or increased.
Combined, half of the appropriated funds would be redirected as earmarks to specific projects. This action pulls money out of circulation in the revolving funds, which grow as utilities repay interest. Water groups worry that if Congress continues down this path of carving out earmarks from the revolving funds the viability of the funds will be at risk.
Delaying Coal Ash Compliance The EPA granted states and utilities more time to meet federal rules for cleaning up waste pits at coal-fired power plants that pollute groundwater and rivers.
Groundwater monitoring requirements will not be mandatory until August 2029, according to the new timeline. It is a 15-month extension.
Senate Approves Foreign Aid, Public Broadcasting Cuts Joining the House, the Senate endorsed the presidentโs desire to cut $9.4 billion in already approved spending on public broadcasting and foreign aid.
Reuters details the on-the-ground fallout from U.S. foreign aid cuts, documenting 21 water projects that were abandoned before completion.
Other Water Bills in Congress Besides the budget, members introduced bills on microplastics, tribal water access, and sinkholes.
Representatives from Florida and Oregon introducedย a bipartisan billย in both chambers that would require a federal study on the damage to human health from microplastics in food and water.
The House Natural Resources Committee approvedย a billย to reauthorize a federal research program for Great Lakes fisheries.
The House passedย a billย to establish within the U.S. Geological Survey a sinkhole mapping and risk assessment program.
Democrats in the House and Senate introduced theย Tribal Access to Clean Water Act, a bill that would increase funding authorizations for a number of federal programs that invest in water infrastructure and technical assistance on tribal lands. The largest chunk would be directed to the Indian Health Service, authorized at $500 million annually through 2030 for sanitation facilities. Even if the bill were to pass, Congress would still need to appropriate the money.
Studies and Reports
Dam Safety The Government Accountability Office reviewed the Natural Resources Conservation Serviceโs approach to dam safety.
The report found that NRCS could improve in several areas. For one, the agency does not monitor completion of dam inspections with its local project sponsors.
Also, the agency is missing data on the condition of the dams, even those that are rated high-hazard and threaten lives and property downstream if they fail.
NRCS helped to plan, design, and construct nearly 12,000 dams.
On the Radar
Congressional Hearings A few hearings on tap this week before the representatives take summer break.
On July 22, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on NEPA reviews, which agencies are beginning to shorten.
That same day, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing on fossil fuel pipeline safety. This week marks the 15th anniversary of one of the nationโs largest inland oil spills. In July 2010, an Enbridge pipeline ruptured near Marshall, Michigan, spilling more than 843,000 gallons of oil into local waterways.
Also on July 22, the House Appropriations Committee will vote on the fiscal year 2026 budget bill for EPA and Interior.
Cybersecurity Webinar for Water Utilities The EPA and the federal governmentโs cybersecurity agency will hold a free webinar for water utilities on cybersecurity vulnerabilities.
The webinar is July 24 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Register here.
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.
Climate change is warming the North Pacific Ocean, leading weather patterns that drive drought in the U.S. Southwest to persist decades longer than they have in the recent past.
The drought in the Southwestern U.S. is likely to last for the rest of the 21st century and potentially beyond as global warming shifts the distribution of heat in the Pacific Ocean, according to a study published last week led by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.
Using sediment cores collected in the Rocky Mountains, paleoclimatology records and climate models, the researchers found warming driven by greenhouse gas emissions can alter patterns of atmospheric and marine heat in the North Pacific Ocean in a way resembling whatโs known as the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), fluctuations in sea surface temperatures that result in decreased winter precipitation in the American Southwest. But in this case, the phenomenon can last far longer than the usual 30-year cycle of the PDO.
โIf the sea surface temperature patterns in the North Pacific were just the result of processes related to stochastic [random] variability in the past decade or two, we would have just been extremely unlucky, like a really bad roll of the dice,โ said Victoria Todd, the lead author of the study and a Ph.D student in geosciences at UT Austin. โBut if, as we hypothesize, this is a forced change in the sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific, this will be sustained into the future, and we need to start looking at this as a shift, instead of just the result of bad luck.โ
Currently, the Southwestern U.S. is experiencing a megadrought resulting in the aridification of the landscape, a decades-long drying of the region brought on by climate change and the overconsumption of the regionโs water. Thatโs led to major rivers and their basins, such as the Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, seeing reduced flows and a decline of the water stored in underground aquifers, which is forcing states and communities to reckon with a sharply reduced water supply. Farmers have cut back on the amount of water they use. Cities are searching for new water supplies. And states, tribes and federal agencies are engaging in tense negotiations over how to manage declining resources like the Colorado River going forward.
โPlanners need to consider that this drought, these reductions in winter precipitation, are likely to continue, and plan for that,โ said Tim Shanahan, an associate professor at UT Austinโs Jackson School of Geosciences and co-author of the study.
The research began with decades-old sample cores taken from lakes in the Rocky Mountains. Using modern geochemical techniques, Todd was able analyze drought conditions during the mid-Holocene period 6,000 years ago, a period in Earthโs history when the Northern Pacific warmed and the Southwestern U.S. experienced hundreds of years of drought.
But the sample cores suggest the drought was much worse than previously thought by scientists. Through a series of climate models, the researchers found vegetation change in the tropics darkened the Earthโs surface so that it absorbed more of the sunโs heat. That led to a warming of the North Pacific that was similar to the PDO that drives drought in the Southwest, but in this case, the drying lasted for centuries. โAs soon as we saw that, you know, we started thinking about whatโs happening today,โ Todd said.
For the past 30 years, the PDO has been in its negative phase, which leads to drought in the Southwest by reducing winter precipitation and the runoff from mountain snowpack that fills many of the regionโs rivers and recharges groundwater aquifers.
Using an ensemble of historical and future climate models forecasting climate and precipitation patterns until 2100, they found the PDO-like negative phase continues through this century. But unlike the mid-Holocene periodโs warming, which was brought on by vegetation change, todayโs is driven by greenhouse gas emissions. Certain models revealed that the change in the ocean pattern was less about vegetation absorbing solar radiation, Todd said, and more about warming in general.
The study also revealed that current climate models are underestimating drought conditions, Todd and Shanahan said, and they hope to find better ways to approximate aridity going forward.
Drought that continued until the end of the century would have major implications for water resources in the Southwest and how they are managed. The region currently sustains some of the countryโs biggest cities and most productive agricultural areas.
Brian Richter, president of the water research and education group Sustainable Waters and a water researcher not involved in the study, said the research further proves the drought in the Southwest is more intense than previously thought and is not going away any time soon.
โDoesnโt it suck that every time the science improves, the outlook for the climate and water looks worse?โ he said.
In many ways, Richter said, what people are seeing on the ground is outpacing science. Five years ago, he said, farmers would say theyโve been through droughts before, and this one would soon pass. Now, he said, their tone has changed to โThis is a different kind of a drought.โ
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
In response to last weekโsย dispatchย on a potential new Colorado River sharing deal, Save The Worldโs Rivers! tweeted this compelling โ but, for some, potentially opaque โ tweet:
I say โopaqueโ because at first glance it might seem strange that a 50/50 split of the riverโs waters between the Upper Basin and the Lower Basin would lead to ecological disaster. But it could, if, during a period of extremely low flow years, the 50% sent downstream was so low that it reduced daily flows through the Grand Canyon to a level that could not support fish or the ecology.
Iโve written about the faulty math of the Colorado River Compact many times here. Yet the assumptions of the riverโs flow and the math are hardly the only, or largest, problems with the document. Most egregious was the exclusion of tribal nations from the original negotiations and the compact, itself, even though they collectively are entitled to a significant portion of the riverโs waters. Under the compact, the tribal nationsโ water rights must come out of the respective statesโ allotments โ that reduces tribes to subdivisions of the states, which they are not. They are sovereign nations and their water rights are negotiated with the federal government.
The other very big problem is that the compact never once considers the river, or the ecology that depends upon it. Instead, it apportions all of the water in the river and then some to โbeneficial use,โ which does not include environmental or even recreational uses. The compact also states that โthe use of its waters for purposes of navigation shall be subservient to the uses of such waters for domestic, agricultural, and power purposes.โ If we consider river-running and Lake Powell boating to be navigation, then the compact also deprioritizes those uses, i.e. recreation.
Because all of the Lower Basinโs water must flow through the Grand Canyon, the Lower Basinโs water rights serve as sort of de facto instream water rights through the canyon. In other words, the more water the Imperial Irrigation District and other Lower Basin users demand for irrigating alfalfa, the more water there is for fish and other critters in the Grand Canyon (including river runners). So, if the states were to strike a deal that might allow the Upper Basin to send only a trickle to the Lower Basin, it would also result in a mere trickle flowing through the Grand Canyon.
The thing is, the fish and even the river runners donโt really care much about the annual volume of water in the river, they care more about the daily streamflow. And that is currently regulated by a separate set of rules aside from the Colorado River Compact that were implemented in the 1990s.
But first, letโs go back in time to the years before there was a Glen Canyon Dam. Back then, the Colorado River through Glen Canyon, Marble Gorge, and the Grand Canyon was truly wild. Seasonal streamflow fluctuations were extreme, swinging from as low as 3,000 cubic feet per second in late summer, fall, and winter, to 80,000 cfs or more during spring runoff and late summer monsoonal floods. The water was often laden with orange-red sediment, and in the summer its temperature might reach 80ยฐ F or higher, giving it a viscous, dirty-bathwater feel. It may not have been great for swimming in, but the native fish reveled in it.
The completion of Glen Canyon Dam in 1963 changed all of that. Annual flows were evened out to build up storage in Lake Powell while also meeting Colorado River Compact obligations. Seasonal fluctuations were also no more, and the silt-free, murky green water emanating from the dam was a near-constant 46ยฐ F. Daily fluctuations of streamflow, however, could be erratic and downright manic, depending on the power gridโs need for more juice.
Before there was a Glen Canyon Dam, the Colorado River ran wild and free, often topping out at Lees Ferry at or above 100,000 cubic feet per second, which is ginormous. After the dam was completed, managers withheld flows to fill up the reservoir. Then, in 1983, they withheld too much water, and a massive spring runoff threatened the dam itself, forcing managers to release nearly 100,000 cfs once again and providing a wild ride for Grand Canyon river runners. After the 1996 operations plan was implemented, occasional high-flow releases occurred to help move sediment through the Grand Canyon in an effort to benefit the riparian ecology and build new beaches. But they still pale in comparison with pre-dam high flows. Data source: USGS.
During the first few decades after the dam was completed, the hydropower plant operators had ample leeway to โfollow the loadโ by modulating the flow of water through the turbines. This occasionally caused huge fluctuations in the flow of water through the Grand Canyon. On one July day in 1989, for example, about 3,471 cfs was running through the dam at 5 a.m., a meagre flow by the Coloradoโs standards. By 3 p.m., it had jumped to 29,000 cfsโthe maximum flow through the turbinesโto generate juice to the burgeoning number of air-conditioners on the Southwest power grid. This must have wreaked havoc on river runners in the Grand Canyon, who might have tied up their boats during high flow, only to find them beached out several hours later (or vice versa, depending on how far downriver they were). It probably wasnโt so good for the fish, either.
In the early โ80s, dam operators wanted to maximize the potential for following the load by also installing turbines in the river outlets so they could generate even more power by releasing more water, which likely would have exacerbated daily fluctuations. The proposal was shot down following intense opposition, and sparked an effort to develop a more river-friendly plan for managing the dam.
Congress passed the Grand Canyon Protection Act in 1992, and in 1996 Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt signed off on the Glen Canyon Dam Operations plan, selecting the โModified Low Fluctuating Flowโ alternative โ a compromise between environmental and power-generating interests โ and creating an adaptive management working group. The annual releases would remain the same (8.2 million acre-feet), but it imposed minimum and maximum release rates and maximum fluctuation rates, along with adding in occasional high-flow events meant to simulate pre-dam seasonal fluctuations. This limited Glen Canyon Damโs flexibility as a hydroelectric plant, but it was far better for the downstream river and its users.
A profile of the Colorado River with potential future dam and reservoir sites. From the 1916 USGS paper โColorado River and its utilization,โ by E.C. La Rue.
Yet in the ensuing three decades, power-generation has often taken precedent over downstream ecological health, and the Grand Canyonโs riparian environment remains imperiled. (As long as weโre talking about ironies: A portion of revenues from Glen Canyon Damโs power sales fund endangered fish recovery efforts.)
Whether a new deal to share the Colorado River becomes an ecological disaster would seem to depend less on the annual volume released from Glen Canyon Dam than it does on the daily and seasonal operations of the dam. And I would add this to the above tweet: It would be the second ecological disaster for the Grand Canyon; the first was the construction of Glen Canyon Dam, itself.
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.
As long as weโre talking streamflowsย โฆ hereโs a hydrograph of the Animas River in Durango for the last year (July 17, 2024-July 17, 2025) and for the same time period during the previous year. You can see that spring runoff this year was lower, and less drawn-out than in 2024, and that the current streamflow is about 25% lower than it was on this date last year. Hopefully the monsoon will arrive soon and boost flows, at least for a bit.
๐คฏ Trump Ticker ๐ฑ
While everyone is going bananas over the Trump/Jeff Epstein brouhaha, the Trump administration is putting its fossil fuel fetish on garish display. This includes:
Yesterday the Interior Departmentย saidย it would subject proposed solar and wind developments on public lands to elevated scrutiny in an effort to end โpreferential treatment for unreliable, subsidy-dependent wind and solar energy.โ Meanwhile these guys have been eliminating environmental reviews for and public input on oil and gas and mining projects. So whoโs getting preferential treatment now?ย
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency is trying to block the state of Colorado from pushing dirty coal plants to close as part of its effort to reduce air pollution and, well, comply with EPA air quality regulations.ย CPRโs Sam Brasch has theย story, and reports that Coloradoโs not about to take this one lying down.ย
And, the EPA continues to defy its name by extending the deadline for compliance with regulations forย managing coal combustion waste, or CCW. Coal combustion waste is the solid stuff left over from coal burning, like ash, clinkers, and scrubber sludge, and it contains copious quantities of nasty stuff like mercury, arsenic, boron, cobalt, radium, and selenium. This is an enormous waste stream, and is piled up outside coal plants and in coal mines all over the West. Check outย this map from Earthjusticeย to see where the coal waste depositories are near you!ย
And finally, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, in anย Economistย column, wrote that climate change is โnot an existential crisis,โ merely a pesky little โby-product of progress.โ He said he was willing to take the โmodest negative trade-offโ of climate changeโalong, presumably, with the heat waves, wildfires, and devastating floodsโ”for this legacy of human advancement.โ Itโs almost as if they like pollution! It would be funny if it werenโt so tragic.
๐ Good News Corner ๐
Colorado has new wolf pups! Yes, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has confirmed three new wolf families have joined the Copper Creek Pack with new pups, though they have not released the number of pups in each family. This is good news, indeed.
โLike so many Coloradans, Iโm thrilled to hear of new wolf families and puppy paws on the ground,โ said Alli Henderson, southern Rockies director at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement. โThe howl of wolves rising once more in this iconic landscape signals real progress toward restoring balance in Coloradoโs wild places.โ
For more background and history on wolves, check out my essay from a little while back on wolves, wildness, and hope. But youโll have to sign up as a paid subscriber to read it, since the archives are behind the paywall!
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots wesite (Allen Best):
July 16, 2025
Four electrical utilities that deliver electricity from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins have a common problem. All have rapidly expanding demand, and all, in turn, need to add new sources of generating capacity.
Can they save money by sharing electricity? Improved transmission would be crucial. The four power providers โ Colorado Springs Utilities, CORE Electric Cooperative, Platte River Power Authority, and United Power โ have agreed to explore potential synergies to achieve common purposes.
Together, the four utilities provide electricity to 1.5 million Coloradans, collectively putting them just behind the 1.6 million customers of Xcel Energy, the stateโs largest electrical utility.
The utilities began talking about this last November, and they are just beginning the work of figuring out how they might collaborate.
โThis is a positive first step in exploring alternative ways for our four utilities to support growth and resiliency across our service territories,โ stated Pam Feuerstein, chief executive of CORE. โAdditional transmission would enable CORE to continue providing affordable and reliable power to our members, now and into the future.โ
One option might be to use existing rights of-way to erect upgraded transmission capacity, similar to going from a two-lane highway to a four-lane highway. In this case, the utilities might decide to create a 345 kV electron highway. Thatโs as large as they get in Colorado right now, except for a new 500 kV line that nicks the stateโs corner northwest of Craig.
โThere could be some commonality where CORE, for example, has a 115kV transmission line, that those rights of way could be used to develop a larger project,โ said Feurstein. โItโs way too early to tell at this stage. This is really just the beginning of us exploring opportunities.
Also an option is to create expanded transmission bypassing metropolitan Denver, in more rural areas served by United Power and CORE.
The electrical utilities share common borders. The service territory of Colorado Springs Utilities, for example, comes close to that of CORE, which serves Castle Rock and Parker and other parts of rapidly growing Douglas and Arapahoe counties.
COREโs expansive service territory โ from 60 miles east of Denver to 65 miles west of Colorado Springs โhas close proximity to Brighton-based United Power, which serves one of Coloradoโs fastest growing areas along the I-76 and I-25 corridors north and east of Denver. Unitedโs service territory extends to Longmont, one of the four municipal members of Platte River.
These four utilities are also defined by what they are not. Unlike Xcel, which provides power for much of metropolitan Denver, they report only to customers, not to private investors.
By banding together, they might be able to avoid charges for sharing electricity over the transmission lines owned by Xcel Energy or possibly Tri-State.
Congestion along the north-south lines has become a growing challenge that limits flexibility as the utilities try to meet rising demand while supporting Coloradoโs ambitious carbon reduction goals.
The analogy again might be to Coloradoโs north-south highways. If time is of the essence, you might want to avoid I-25 by taking an alternative route, including E-470. And in this case, an alternative might provide a way to avoid paying Xcel to use its lines.
But growth in demand undergirds the effort to achieve synergies.
โWe expect our growth to continue, so addressing transmission congestion is critical,โ said Mark A. Gabriel, chief executive of United Power. โUnited Power serves an area that is growing quickly, attracting large residential developments and new businesses alike. A more reliable transmission route would help to stabilize costs and increase reliability for current and future members in the cooperativeโs service territory.โ
United serves 115,000 members across a 900-square mile service territory stretching from the oil-and-gas wells of the Wattenberg Field to the foothills west of Arvada. During the last four years demand in April, to cite just one month, has grown from 350 megawatts to 500 megawatts.
CORE has more members, 170,000, but less demand.
Colorado Springs has 269,000 metered-customers in the city and in surrounding areas and has been growing at a rate of 1% to 2% in demand per year. Travas Deal, the chief executive of the cityโs utilities, suggested that demand could grow much more rapidly from data centers and other businesses if the city had the electrical resources.
The city recently put out a request for proposals for 1,900 megawatts of new generating capacity. The door is open for wind, solar and natural gas and whatever else may come along. Some of that generating capacity might come from individual projects, but Deal says that the electrical generating capacity might be delivered at better prices with larger economies of scale. In other words, through shared demand.
โWe understand the need, we understand the opportunities,โ said Deal.
In a prepared statement, Jason Frisbie, chief executive of Platte River Power Authority, alluded to this shifted dynamic. โAll options are on the table to help improve reliability and reduce costs, including opportunities to enhance transmission capabilities as we move into an organized market,โ he said.
In a complementary move to help manage costs and maintain reliability, Colorado Springs Utilities, Platte River Power Authority and United Power will join the Southwest Power Pool (SPP) Regional Transmission Organization on April 1, 2026. CORE is also evaluating market participation, including the SPP.
La Plata Electric Association (LPEA) has signed a new 10-year power purchase agreement (PPA) with Ptarmigan Resources and Energy Inc. for locally generated hydropower from the Vallecito Dam, reinforcing the cooperativeโs commitment to clean, reliable, and community-focused energy.
Effective April 1, 2026, through March 31, 2036, the agreement will provide approximately 5.8 megawatts of renewable capacity onto LPEAโs system – enough to power around 2,500 homes per year. Itโs the first time LPEA has been able to purchase power directly from Vallecito, thanks to new flexibility under its evolving power supply strategy.
โThis is a win for our members and our mission,โ said LPEA CEO Chris Hansen. โFor the first time, weโre contracting directly with a local hydropower provider right in our backyard.โ
The hydropower facility at Vallecito Dam, located northeast of Bayfield, has long provided clean energy to the regional grid. However, LPEAโs previous long-term wholesale power contract limited its ability to work with independent producers like Ptarmigan.
โThis project is exactly what we envision for the future of energy for our members: affordable, responsibly generated power produced right here in our community,” said Nicole Pitcher, LPEA Board President. โItโs meaningful that the same water sustaining our ranches and farms and bringing joy to recreationists will also be generating clean energy for homes across our service territory.โ
โSelling power locally is a win-win,โ said Sam Perry, CEO of HydroWest (contracted by Ptarmigan to oversee plant operations). โWith this new partnership, Vallecito can provide consistent, renewable energy and grid stability to LPEA.โ
This PPA follows LPEAโs launch of a competitive Request for Proposals (RFP) earlier this year, seeking additional long-term energy resources to serve its load after 2028.
Iโm a little slow getting to this one, thanks mostly to being consumed by the whole public land sale brouhaha, but better late than never.
After years of bickering, wrangling, fighting, and digging in their heels, representatives of the seven Colorado River Basin states may have finally agreed on a โrevolutionaryโ way to split up the riverโs waters: Theyโre going to base it on how much water is actually in the river at any given time.
So, apparently, in this world, โrevolutionaryโ is a synonym for the most common sense, obvious, and, really, necessary way to do things.
More specifically, the Upper Basin would release a percentage of the rolling three-year average of theโnatural flowโ* at Lee Ferry from Glen Canyon Dam, making it available to the Lower Basin. Thatโs opposed to the current model, where the Upper Basin is required to release at least 75 million acre-feet every ten years (or 7.5 MAF per year on average)**
Letโs pause for a moment and use an analogy to reflect on how short-sighted and dumb that original approach was. [ed. emphasis mine] Say someone has a potato farm and they die, leaving the farm to their two children, Upper and Lower, who must determine how to divide the farm and its yield between them. They look back at their parentโs ledgers, and determine that the farm has produced at least 15 tons of potatoes annually during the previous few years.
So they agree to divide it in half, with 7.5 tons going to each of them each year. But Upper will actually live on the farm, and has the keys to the lock on the gate, so they add into their Potato Farm Compact a clause that requires Upper to not prevent Lower from taking 75 tons of potatoes from the farm during every 10 year period.
This works out fine as long as the farm produces 15 tons per year. But what happens if you signed the Compact during an abnormally productive period, and the long-term average yield was far lower than 15 tons? Or what happens as the soil becomes less fertile and the irrigation water becomes more scarce and production drops far below 15 tons per year? Under the agreement, Upper still has to allow Lower to take 7.5 tons annually, leaving Upper with far less, maybe even nothing during a string of bad years. Obviously, this is untenable. And, just as obviously, it would have made far more sense for Upper and Lower to simply divide each yearโs harvest in half and each take 50% of whatever the total might be. Just as obviously, that would have been the smartest way to divide up the Colorado River in the first place. Of course, a river is not a potato crop.
To determine how much potatoes you have, you just put them on a scale. Determining the โnatural flowโ of the Colorado River is far more difficult, and requires inputting:
data from 29 upstream streamflow gauges/gages;
historic outflow and pool elevations from 12 main-stem and 12 off-stream reservoirs;
upstream consumptive uses and losses.
While that doesnโt sound so complicated, gathering all of these inputs โ reservoir evaporation, for example, or the exact amount consumed by agriculture โ can require separate calculations and guesswork of their own.
Note that the would-be signatoryโs of this deal havenโt agreed on what the โfixed percentageโ would be, and that there still would be an unspecified โlower limitโ to the annual release from Lake Powell. Those could both be sticking points in finalizing this plan. Source: Arizona Reconsultation Committee June meeting.
But the states wouldnโt be coming up with this from scratch. The Bureau of Reclamation alreadyย calculates the riverโs natural flowย at Lees Ferry along with Lake Powellโs unregulated inflow. As you can see from the graph below, the river has not consistently delivered 15 million acre-feet per year, forcing the Upper Basin to deplete their savings account (Lake Powell) in order to meet its Colorado River Compact obligations.
This shows the estimated natural flow of the river โ or what it would deliver without any upstream dams, diversions, or human-related consumptive use โ at Lees Ferry, several miles downstream from Glen Canyon Dam. The natural flow is calculated using upstream streamflow gages, consumptive use, and calculated reservoir evaporation. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
If the supply driven concept is implemented, it will base Glen Canyon Dam releases on a fixed percentage of the previous three-year moving average. For example, the average of water years 2022, 2023, and 2024 was 13 million acre-feet. If the Upper Basin and Lower Basin were to each take 50%, then the Glen Canyon release this year would be 6.5 million acre-feet (plus something for Mexico, presumably, although this isnโt clear. I highly doubt the Lower Basin will settle for just 50%, given that it has far more people, more agriculture, and is just thirstier, overall, but letโs go with that figure since itโs whatโs in the Colorado River Compact, sort of.
The Lower Basin states use far less water now than they did a decade or so ago, thanks in part to forced cuts and in part to general conservation measures. The increase between 2023 and 2024 is probably due to the fact that 2023 was an unusually wet year in most of the Colorado River Basin, meaning farmers and other irrigators needed less water. Source: Colorado River Accounting and Water Usage Report, Lower Basin, Bureau of Reclamation.
That would actually work: The Lower Basin statesโ consumptive use last calendar year was about 5.8 million acre-feet, so theyโd have enough to use, and a little on top for evaporation from reservoirs (which is not included in the Lower Basinโs accounting). It would leave the Upper Basin enough for consumption and some extra for reservoir storage.
But if you go with the previous three years (โ20,โ21,โ22), you end up with an average of just 9 million acre-feet, 50% of which would be a measly 4.5 million acre-feet, forcing downstream users โ namely the Central Arizona Project, since their rights are junior to Californiaโs โ to take deep cuts. And it would leave the Upper Basin just enough to meet their needs, meaning theyโd have to draw down Lake Powell or other reservoirs to fulfill their obligations.
Another tricky scenario would be if three decent water years were followed by an extremely dry year. Releases from Lake Powell could significantly exceed inflows, which might deplete the reservoir enough to bring it down to minimum power pool, which is no bueno.
While this may be the closest the states have come to reaching some sort of consensus on how to run the River beyond 2026, it seems as if there is still many sticky details to work out. How are they going to agree on a fixed percentage? What will the minimum release be? And how will that fly with the Upper Basin during years such as 2002, when the natural flow at Lees Ferry was a mere 5.8 million acre-feet? Timeโs running out.
Now for some more data for your pondering pleasure:
The Upper Basin states use far less water than the Lower Basin, but the Lower Basin has generally been reducing overall use, while the Upper Basin has remained steady or even increased consumption, with Colorado overtaking Arizona in 2023. Note: The Arizona figure only includes the Lower Basin. Arizona also consumes about 13,000 acre-feet of Upper Basin water each year, down significantly from pre-2019, when up to 40,000 acre-feet was withdrawn from Lake Powell for steam generation and cooling at the now shuttered Navajo Generating Station. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
The Imperial Irrigation District in southern California remains the Riverโs largest single water user, and one of the most senior water rights holders, using most of the water for alfalfa and various food crops. However, it has cut its consumption considerably over the years, in part thanks to state and federal programs that pay farmers not to irrigate. Itโs not clear how long these programs and the payments can last, however. Nevada is included on this list because nearly all of the stateโs Colorado River allocation is drawn from Lake Mead and goes to the greater Las Vegas area. Also note that it is only number 8 on this list. Source: Bureau of Reclamation.
Agriculture has been and remains the biggest single user of Colorado River water, by far. Of that amount, alfalfa and other hay crops take up the lionโs share.
This passage, from David Starr Jordanโsย Fish Commission Bulletin 1889: Report of Explorations in Colorado and Utah During the Summer of 1889,ย remains relevant today:
Uggh. Fire season is getting ugly. The Dragon Bravo Fire blew up and burned the historic Grand Canyon Lodge on the North Rim. The Deer Creek Fire, burning near Old La Sal, Utah, just west of the Colorado state line, has grown to almost 12,000 acres and exhibited some erratic behavior (see video above). Just northeast of there, the Wright Draw and Turner Gulch fires have forced the closure of Hwy. 141 and numerous evacuations in the Unaweep Canyon area outside Gateway (the community of Gateway is not yet threatened). The South Rim Fire at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison is now at 4,000 acres. The Laguna Fire west of Abiquiu Reservoir in New Mexico has reached 15,200 acres. And the air in the West is basically full of smoke.
Hereโs hoping for rain and lots of it, sans lightning, please.
๐ธ Parting Shot ๐๏ธ
This oneโs from โA notice of the ancient ruins of southwestern Colorado, examined during the summer of 1875,โ by W.H. Holmes. The text is the beginning of the description of the sketch.
The latest Bureau of Reclamation 24-month studies show a clear risk of Lake Powell dropping below minimum power pool in late 2026, with Lake Mead dropping to elevation 1,025 by the summer of 2027. This should be hair on fire stuff.
The โclear riskโ here is based on Reclamationโs monthly โminimum probableโ model runs โ what happens if we have bad snowpacks next year, and the year after? These are probabilistic estimates, not predictions. But the whole point of Reclamation doing this is so that we can be prepared. We need a robust public discussion about what our plan is if we end up on this fork in the hydrologic road.
The warning signs are clearly there in Jackโs analyses. Frustrated by the delay in the traditional metrics we use for measuring and monitoring the Colorado River, Jackโs been doing routine updates on reservoir storage contents. The traditional metrics we use โ the Upper Basin Consumptive Uses and Losses Reports, the Lower Basin Decree Accounting Reports, the Natural Flow Database โ have significant lags. The reservoir data is there in real time, integrating how much the climate system provides and how much humans use. The data here are all public. Jackโs value add is to sum them up and slice and dice the resulting data structures.
The somewhat arcane but incredibly useful framework heโs been using his his recent analyses is the period of accumulation, when reservoirs rise as river flows exceed human uses above them and extractions below them, following by the period of decline, when weโre drawing down the reservoirs. This is a tool, or a way of thinking, that we could use in real time to adjust our behavior, noting bad reservoir conditions and reducing our use. This is not something our water allocation framework is well suited to do.
The Negotiations
For more than a year, those involved in the delicate interstate negotiations over future Colorado River water allocation rules have repeatedly asked that we give them space to have the hard conversations they need to have in private. The results, or lack thereof, have done nothing to earn our trust.
The potential path forward.
When Arizonaโs Tom Buschatzke moved the up-until-then super secret โsupply drivenโ allocation concept into public view a month ago, it seemed like a good sign along two dimensions. First, the idea of basing the amount of water delivered from Upper Basin to Lower Basin past Lee Ferry on actual hydrology, on a percentage of how much water the climate is actually providing, seemed like an eminently reasonable approach. Second, Buschatzke was talking about this in public.
Folks from the Upper Basin followed suit, and a round of positive press followed.
But as this shifts from the brief sunshine of public statements back to the closed door negotiations, any glimmer appears dim indeed.
The problems were already visible in that brief, glorious bit of sunshine of public discussion last month.
There are two critical questions that need to be settled to make this work. The obvious one is the number โ what percentage of the three year natural flow are we talking about shepherding down past Lee Ferry? The second is more subtle: What happens if the Lee Ferry flow falls short of that number?
Speaking to the Arizona Reconsultation Committee, Buschatzke was clear that whatever percentage number they settled on would be an Upper Basin โdelivery obligationโ at Lee Ferry. Becky Mitchell, speaking on behalf of Colorado, (but effectively as the de-facto Upper Basin voice, the role the other Upper Basin states seem to have for all practical purposes ceded to her) said (per Heather Sackettโs excellent reporting) it was in no way to be considered a delivery obligation.
When I suggested in a blog post that Upper Basin states might need to curtail water users in order to ensure the agreed-upon-percentage (whatever that is) is met, I got an angry call informing me that the Upper Basin was considering no such thing.
What this makes clear is that the same disagreement over the irreducibly ambiguous legal question in Article III of the Colorado River Compact โ does the Upper Basin have a Lee Ferry delivery obligation or not? โ is simply being shifted to a new modeling framework.
Never mind the equally intractable question of what the Lee Ferry donโt-call-it-a-delivery-obligation percentage might be. I donโt know anything more than gossip, but the gossip suggests the attempt to settle on a number, or even a range of numbers that Reclamation might model as part of its NEPA analysis, also is not going well.
If I was talking to Alex Hager today, I would no longer describe a glimmer of hope.
The Failure Mode
One of the most useful questions I learned to ask as a reporter covering water involved drilling down to the question of what happens when scarcity finally bites. What is the failure mode? Who actually doesnโt get water? How does that work? [ed. emphasis mine]
The combination of Jackโs analysis and Reclamationโs latest 24-month study suggests that we need to be asking that question in the near term. When Powell approaches minimum power pool, and Mead drops below 1030, whose water use will be curtailed to protect the system? If your answer involves a defense of why your own water supply should not be reduced, youโre doing this wrong. Everyone needs to be realistic about their risk of a legal outcome different from their agency lawyerโs position. But we also need to recognize moral obligations here, to find ways to share in this shrinking river. How are we going to come together, as a community, to respond?
The longer term argument also needs to begin to take this form.
Let us imagine going to the Supreme Court to settle the question of whether the Upper Basin does or does not have a legal delivery obligation under Article III of the Colorado River Compact to deliver 75 million or 82.5 million acre feet per year past Lee Ferry. If you lose that litigation, what is the failure mode? Who actually doesnโt get water? If your groupthink has convinced you that this is not a meaningful question, that youโre sure to win, and the other basin is the one that needs to be thinking about failure modes, you need a second opinion, to get out of your groupthink bubble.
Whatever โbring it onโ enthusiasm for litigation youโre hearing from your groupthinkers needs to be tempered by an honest discussion about what happens to your communitiesโ water supplies if you lose.
Iโll also make a modest pitch here for a need to recognize moral obligations, to find ways to share this shrinking river.
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 article on the InkStain website (Jack Schmidt Center for Colorado River Studies, Utah State University):
July 14, 2025
Water stored in the reservoirs of the Colorado River represents the account balance from which we draw water for use. The amount in the account is especially important during dry times when the demand by water users throughout the Basin exceeds income to the account, primarily snowmelt runoff, and is met by account withdrawals.
The annual cycle of reservoir hydrology includes two seasons โ a relatively short season when reservoir storage increases and a relatively long season when storage decreases. In wet years, the season when storage increases typically begins in March or early April and may last until late July. In dry years, this season might not begin until May and end in mid-June. During the rest of the year, the Basinโs reservoirs are progressively depleted.
Snowmelt in 2025 was low, similar to what it was in 2012 and 2013; in early June, the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center predicted that this yearโs unregulated snowmelt inflow to Lake Powell will end up being 54% of the recent 30-yr average. In the 21st century, only 2002, 2018, and 2021 had lower inflows to Powell. Not surprisingly, the amount of water that accumulated in the Basinโs reservoirs during the 2025 snowmelt season was also unusually low. There are a few ways to consider the Basinโs reservoirs. We can consider every reservoir for which data are readily available[1]; we can consider the major reservoirs actively managed by Reclamation[2]; or, we can consider just Lake Powell and Lake Mead (hereafter, Powell+Mead). Considering only Lake Powell or only Lake Mead doesnโt tell us much, because all of the Rocky Mountain snowmelt is first stored in Lake Powell and subsequently transferred to Lake Mead. In 2025, the 46 Basin reservoirs gained only 0.55 million af (acre feet) of water, of which only 0.28 million af accumulated in the 12 federal reservoirs and only 0.11 million af accumulated in Powell+Mead. That is a very small amount, especially compared to 2023 and 2024 (Fig. 1). That accumulation is being quickly consumed. By 1 July 2025, all of the 2025 accumulation in Powell+Mead had been released downstream or evaporated.
Figure 1. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 2023. Total storage in March 2023 was the lowest in the 21st century. Storage significantly increased due to 2023 snowmelt, but the accumulation from the 2024 snowmelt was entirely lost. This will also happen in the coming months. On 30 June 2025, active storage in 42 reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell was 8.58 million af, active storage in Lake Mead was 8.05 million af, and storage in Lake Powell was 7.88 million af.
In contrast to previous dry years, however, todayโs account balance is unusually low, about the same as in late July 2021 (Fig. 2). Depending on how you think about the reservoir system, todayโs contents are between 34 and 45% full in relation to their condition at the beginning of the 21stย century (Table 1).
Figure 2. Graph showing reservoir storage in different parts of the Colorado River Basin since 1 January 1999. On 30 June 2025, total basin storage was comparable to what it was in late July 2021
Table 1. Present storage contents of reservoirs in the Colorado River Basin in relation to past conditions.
Storage contents, in million acre feet
on 30 June 2025
Last time storage was as low
Present storage as a percentage of storage in late July 1999
entire Basin (n=46)
26.8
25-Jul-21
45%
federal reservoirs (n=12)
23.64
4-Sep-21
42%
Powell + Mead
15.93
20-Nov-21
34%
The implications for Lake Powell depend on whether Reclamation decides to emphasize water storage in Lake Powell or in Lake Mead, and whether water presently in Flaming Gorge reservoir will be released to supplement storage in Lake Powell. As of June 30, 32% of the reservoir storage in the Basin was in 42 reservoirs upstream from Powell, 30% was in Mead, and 29% was in Powell (Fig. 1). if past management practices prevail, storage upstream from Powell will be quickly reduced, and storage in Powell and Mead will be reduced more slowly. If Reclamation emphasizes storage in Lake Powell by reducing releases to Lake Mead through the Grand Canyon, hydropower production at Glen Canyon Dam will be maintained and the risk of entrainment of smallmouth bass through the turbines will be reduced. But this management approach will cause Lake Mead to fall more quickl, thereby reducing hydropower production at Hoover Dam and perhaps the quality of water withdrawn to southern Nevada. Water storage canโt be maximized in both reservoirs at the same time. Indeed, we are living in dry times!
[2] There are 12 included in Reclamationโs monthly 12-month study reports (Taylor Park, Blue Mesa, Morrow Point, Crystal, Fontenelle, Flaming Gorge, Navajo, Vallecito, Lake Powell, Lake Mead, Lake Mohave, and Lake Havasu).
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Caitlin Hayes):
July 10, 2025
In the late 2010s, when Flavio Lehner worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, water managers often asked him about the drought in the Southwest. Was the low precipitation simply an unlucky draw in the cycle of long-term weather variations? What role did climate change play? Most importantly, was the drought there to stay?
No one had answers, but Lehner began pursuing them.
Now a study by Lehner and his team, published July 9 in Nature Geoscience, shows that climate change and aerosols have indeed led to lower precipitation in the Southwest and made drought inevitable.
The research is the first to isolate the variables of human-caused climate change and air pollution to show how they directly affect the regionโs precipitation; the study predicts that drought conditions will likely continue as the planet warms.
โWhat we find is that precipitation is more directly influenced by climate change than we previously thought, and precipitation is pretty sensitive to these external influences that are caused by humans,โ said Lehner, the senior author. He is now an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.
A trend towards lower precipitation in the Southwest started around 1980, with the onset largely attributed to La Niรฑa-like conditions, a climate phenomenon that results in cooler surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The new research shows that even if El Niรฑo-like conditions had prevailed instead, the Southwest would not have experienced a corresponding increase in precipitation.
โIn our models, if we see a warming trend in the tropical Pacific, we would expect more precipitation in the Southwestern United States, but thatโs not the case here,โ said first-author and doctoral student Yan-Ning Kuo.
โOn top of the El Niรฑo and La Niรฑa sea surface temperature trends, thereโs a uniform warming trend because of historical climate change, as well as emissions from anthropogenic aerosols, that both create a certain circulation pattern over the North Pacific. Those two factors prevent the precipitation for the Southwestern U.S. from increasing, even under El Niรฑo-like trends.โ
Lehner said the results point to a bigger shift in the connection between the weather in the tropical Pacific and in the U.S., due to climate change and aerosols.
โWhat we call a teleconnection from that region to the Southwestern U.S. is changing systematically,โ he said, โand these external influences really modulate that relationship, so it doesnโt behave exactly how we expect it to behave.โ
There is some good news. Researchers expect that the concentration of aerosols โ which includes the emissions from vehicles and industry โ will drop as China and other countries in East Asia implement policies to improve air quality. But Lehner said warming temperatures may offset those improvements.
โMost experts expect the world as a whole to reduce air pollution, and globally, itโs already going down quite quickly. Thatโs good news on the precipitation side,โ Lehner said. โAt the same time, the warming is going to continue as far as we can tell, and that will gradually outweigh those benefits, as a warmer atmosphere tends to be thirstier, gradually drying out the Southwest.โ
The researchers were able to determine the role of climate change and aerosols by eschewing prevailing climate models that in recent years have not been able to accurately reflect the sea surface temperatures observed in real-time. The team designed their own simulations that allowed them to plug in data from satellites and statistical models to understand the impact of each contributing factor.
Lehner said the research offers new methods for approaching questions about climate changeโs impact on weather patterns, while also specifically helping water managers and other stakeholders in the Southwest plan for the future.
โIn the Southwest, people really depend on what little water there is โ every drop in the Colorado River, for example, is accounted for through water rights,โ he said. โI am excited to go back and show the results to people who need them.โ
Co-authors include Isla R. Simpson, Clara Deser and Adam Phillips from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Matthew Newman from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Sang-Ik Shin from NOAA and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences; and Julie M. Arblaster and Spencer Wong from Monash University.
The study was supported by NOAA, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.
It's been a bit since I've done a meteorological deep dive, but the devastating flash #flood in central Texas this July 4th/5th deserve a closer look. #TXwxYes remnants of #Barry were involved helping enhance moisture. A remnant MCV from Mexico on 3 July also played a role.Full evolution below โคต๏ธ
Click the link to read the article on the ProPublica website by Abrahm Lustgarten
July 9, 2025
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.
On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.
Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless โ and warranted โ analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?
Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change โ driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal โ is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.
President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country โ including 10 more presidents โ has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect peopleโs everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.
Climate change doesnโt chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that weโre now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream โ the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere โ is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last yearโs cataclysmic floods.
We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year โ and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it canโt hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.
The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Lรฉon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.
There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last weekโs extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain โthis very exceptional meteorological condition.โ
That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.
The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The worldโs leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. Itโs one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.
What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trumpโs administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger โ and thus the suffering of the people affected by it โ but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.
Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nationโs chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nationโs seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agencyโs core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has โ as of last week โ signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the countryโs industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is โin alignment with evolving prioritiesโ of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.
Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster โ like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast โ once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling โmega rainโ events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.
July 20, 2023 – National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) market research analysis researcher Brittany Staie gather samples of vegetables that are being grown at the at the Photovoltaic Central Array Testing Site (PV-CATS) and agrivoltaics/solar garden near NRELโs parking garage. Staie was part of a crew that was checking for differences between plants grown in full sunlight, compared to those vegetables that were grown between the solar panels. The solar garden is part of the Innovative Site Preparation and Impact Reductions (InSPIRE) agrivoltaics project, which is studying the effects that solar panels and crops have on each other. (Photo by Werner Slocum / NREL)
Agrivoltaic solar arrays can shade crops from sun while moisture from vegetation cools the panels to increase their productivity, researchers and farmers have found.
โWe were getting basil leaves the size of your palm,โ University of Arizona researcher Greg Barron-Gafford said, describing some of the benefits he and his team have seen farming under solar panels in the Tucson desert.
For 12 years, Barron-Gafford has been investigating agrivoltaics, the integration of solar arrays into working farmland. This practice involves growing crops or other vegetation, such as pollinator-friendly plants, under solar panels, and sometimes grazing livestock in this greenery. Though a relatively new concept, at least 604 agrivoltaic sites have popped up across the United States, according to OpenEI.
Researchers like Barron-Gafford think that, in addition to generating carbon-free electricity, agrivoltaics could offer a ray of hope for agriculture in an increasingly hotter and drier Southwest, as the shade created by these systems has been found to decrease irrigation needs and eliminate heat stress on crops. Plus, the cooling effects of growing plants under solar arrays can actually make the panels work better.
But challenges remain, including some farmersโ attitudes about the practice and funding difficulties.
Overcoming a Climate Conundrum
While renewable electricity from sources like solar panels is one of the most frequently touted energy solutions to help reduce the carbon pollution thatโs driving climate change, the warming climate itself is making it harder for solar arrays to do their job, Barron-Gafford said. An optimal functioning temperature for panels is around 75 degrees Fahrenheit, he explained. Beyond that, any temperature increase reduces the photovoltaic cellsโ efficiency.
โYou can quickly see how this solution for our changing climate of switching to more renewable energy is itself sensitive to the changing climate,โ he said.
This problem is especially pertinent in the Southwest, where historically hot temperatures are steadily increasing. Tucson, for instance, saw a record-breaking 112 days of triple-digit heat in 2024, according to National Weather Service Data, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agencyreports that every part of the Southwest experienced higher average temperatures between 2000 and 2023 compared to the long-term average from 1895 to 2023.
Evaporation and transpiration graphic via the USGS
However, planting vegetation under solar panelsโas opposed to the more traditional method of siting solar arrays on somewhat barren landโcan help cool them. In one set of experiments, Barron-Gaffordโs team found that planting cilantro, tomatoes and peppers under solar arrays reduced the panelsโ surface temperature by around 18 degrees Fahrenheit. Thatโs because plants release moisture into the air during their respiration process, in which they exchange oxygen for carbon dioxide.
โThis invisible power of water coming out of plants was actually cooling down the solar panels,โ Barron-Gafford said.
Throwing Shade
While Barron-Gafford said some laughed him off when he first proposed the idea of growing crops in the shade of solar panels, this added sun shield can actually help them grow better, especially in the Southwest, where many backyard gardeners already employ shade cloths to protect their gardens from the blazing heat.
โMany people donโt understand that in Colorado and much of the West, most plants get far too much sunlight,โ said Byron Kominek, owner/manager of Jackโs Solar Garden in Boulder County, Colorado, which began implementing agrivoltaics in 2020. โHaving some shade is a benefit to them.โ
Jackโs Solar Garden has integrated 3,276 solar panels over about four acres of farmland, growing crops like greens and tomatoes. Meg Caley with Sprout City Farms, a nonprofit that helps with farming duties at Jackโs Solar Garden, said theyโve been able to produce Swiss chard โthe size of your torso.โ
May 6, 2023 – Volunteers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratoryโs (NRELโs) ESCAPES (Education, Stewardship, and Community Action for Promoting Environmental Sustainability) program lend a hand to Jackโs Solar Garden in Longmont, Colo. Bethany Speer (left) goes back for more while Nancy Trejo distributes her wheelbarrow load to the agrivoltaic plots. (Photo by Bryan Bechtold / NREL)
โThe greens just get huge,โ she said. โYou have to chop them up to fit them in your refrigerator.โ
She added that the shade seems to improve the flavor of the vegetables and prevents them from bolting, when plants prematurely produce flowers and seeds, diverting energy away from leaf or root growth.
โPlants when theyโre stressed out can have more of a bitter flavor,โ she explained. โSo the arugula that we grow is not as bitter or spicy. Itโs sweeter. The spinach is sweeter too.โ
Barron-Gafford and his team are seeing the same thing in Arizona, where they grow a variety of produce like beans, artichokes, potatoes, kale and basil.
โWeโve grown 30-plus different types of things across different wet winters and dry winters and exceptionally hot summers, dry summers, average or close to average summers,โ he said of the solar-shaded crops. โAnd across everything weโve done, weโve seen equal or greater production down here in the Southwest, the dry land environments, where it really benefits to get some shade.โ
As in Colorado, some of those crops are growing to epic proportions.
โWeโve made bok choy the size of a toddler,โ Barron-Gafford said.
All that shade provides another important benefit in a drought-stricken Southwestโlower water requirements for crops. Because less direct sunlight is hitting the ground, it decreases the evaporation rate, which means water stays in the soil longer after irrigation. Barron-Gafford and his team have been running experiments for the last seven or so years to see how this plays out with different crops in an agrivoltaic setting.
โWhat is the evaporation rate under something thatโs big and bushy like a bean or potato plant versus something thinner above ground, like a carrot?โ is one of the questions Barron-Gafford said they have tried to answer. โFor the most part, I would say that we are able to cut back our irrigation by more than half.โ
They are partnering with Jackโs Solar Farm on water research in Colorado and have so far found similar results there.
This shade has another benefit in a warming worldโrespite for farmworkers. Heat-related illnesses are a growing concern for people who work outside, and one recent study predicted climate change will quadruple U.S. outdoor workersโ exposure to extreme heat conditions by 2065.
But with solar arrays in the fields, โif you really carefully plan out your day, you can work in the shade,โ a factor that can help increase worker safety on hot days, Caley said.
The AgriSolar Clearinghouse performed skin temperature readings under solar panels and full sun at a number of sites across the United States, finding a skin temperature decrease of 15.3 degrees in Boulder and 20.8 degrees in Phoenix.
โI Donโt Know What the Future Holdsโ
Despite the benefits of agrivoltaics, the up-front cost of purchasing a solar array remains a barrier to farmers.
โOnce people see the potential of agrivoltaics, you run into the next challenge, which is how do you fund someone getting into this on their site?โ Barron-Gafford said. โAnd depending on the amount of capital or access to capital that a farmer has, youโre going to get a wildly different answer.โ
While expenses are dependent on the size of the installation, a 25 kilowatt system would require an upfront cost of around $67,750, according toAgriSolar Clearinghouse. For comparison, the median size of a residential solar array in 2018 was around 6kW, the organization stated, which would cost around $16,260 to install.
Kominek said the total initial cost of implementing a 1.2 megawatt capacity agrivoltaics setup on his farm in Colorado wasaround $2 million, but that the investment has paid off. In addition to the revenue he earns from farming, all of the energy produced by the arrays is sold to clients in the community through a local utility company, earning the farm money.
The Rural Energy for America program has been one resource for farmers interested in agrivoltaics, offering loans and grants to help install solar. However, itโs unclear how this program will move forward amid current federal spending cuts.
Meanwhile, some of the federal grant programs that Barron-Gafford has relied on have suddenly come to a halt, he said, putting his research in danger. But, as federal support dries up, some states are charging on with their own funding opportunities to develop farm field solar projects. For instance, Coloradoโs Agrivoltaics Research and Demonstration Grant offers money for demonstrations of agrivoltaics, research projects and outreach campaigns.
There are other challenges as well. Caley, for instance, said farming around solar panels is akin to working in an โobstacle course.โ She and her team, who mostly work manually, have found ways to work around them by being aware of their surroundings so that they donโt accidentally collide with the panels or strike them with their tools. This job is also made easier since Kominek invested between $80,000 and $100,000 to elevate his farmโs panels, which better allows animals, taller crops and farming equipment to operate beneath.
Still, a 2025 University of Arizona study that interviewed farmers and government officials in Pinal County, Arizona, found that a number of them questioned agrivoltaicsโ compatibility with large-scale agriculture.
โI think itโs a great idea, but the only thing โฆ it wouldnโt be cost-efficient โฆ everything now with labor and cost of everything, fuel, tractors, it almost has to be super big โฆ to do as much with as least amount of people as possible,โ one farmer stated.
Many farmers are also leery of solar, worrying that agrivoltaics could take working farmland out of use, affect their current operations or deteriorate soils.
Those fears have been amplified by larger utility-scale initiatives, like Ohioโs planned Oak Run Solar Project, an 800 megawatt project that will include 300 megawatts of battery storage, 4,000 acres of crops and 1,000 grazing sheep in what will be the countryโs largest agrivoltaics endeavor to date. Opponents of the project worry about its visual impacts and the potential loss of farmland.
Millions of dollars in federal funding has been released to continue restoring lands and streams in the fire-scarred Upper Colorado River Basin watershed in and around Grand Lake and Rocky Mountain National Park.
The roughly $4 million was frozen in February and released in April, according to Northern Water, a major Colorado water provider and one of the agencies that coordinates with the federal government and agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service to conduct the work.
Esther Vincent, Northern Waterโs director of environmental services, said the federal government gave no reason for the freeze and release of funds.
The amounts and timing of the freeze and release are being reported here for the first time.
U.S. Congressman Joe Neguse, who represents Grand County, did not respond to a request for comment regarding the funds.
The news comes as tens of millions of dollars in federal grants and budget allocations are being cut in Colorado and across the country as part of the Trump administrationโs reorganization of federal agencies and associated budget cuts.
In June, Gov. Jared Polisโ office released an accounting of federal money that has flowed to state agencies. That analysis showed the agencies were able to retain $282 million in funding, but that $76 million had been lost, and another $56 million is at risk.
Itโs unclear how much funding that flows through federal agencies to other Colorado entities and nonprofits such as those in the Upper Colorado River Basin, has been lost.
The U.S. Forest Service did not respond to a request for comment. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declined to comment on the funding actions.
In Grand County, $761,000 has been released from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to help move forward on a broad-based effort by the Kawuneeche Valley Restoration Collaborative, according to Northern Water. The valley has been damaged by drought, failing irrigation systems and overgrazing by wildlife and is a critical piece of the Colorado Riverโs upper watershed. The collaborative, established in 2020, is a major partnership of seven entities, including Northern Water, Grand County, the Nature Conservancy and Rocky Mountain National Park.
East Troublesome Fire. Photo credit: Northern Water
The $3.3 million in East Troublesome fire funding that has been released through the U.S. Forest Service will help restore the watershed around Grand Lake and land in Rocky Mountain National Park. The fire began in October 2020 and burned nearly 200,000 acres, making it the second largest fire in Colorado history.
The fire burned land that constitutes a sprawling water collection area for Northern Water, a major water provider that pipes Colorado River water from Grand County, under the Continental Divide and east to the Front Range, where it serves roughly 1 million residents of northern Colorado and hundreds of farms.
Steve Kudron, former mayor of Grand Lake who now serves as its town manager, said restoration work in both projects is critical to the economy and health of the historic tourist town, which lies at the western edge of Rocky Mountain National Park.
โThe biggest concerns that we had were closing parts of the forest because there hasnโt been sufficient cleanup. Some mountainsides are unstable,โ he said. โItโs the funding that makes it safe for the public to go into those areas. Thatโs why it was important to get the funding back.โ
A houseboat docks on the mudflats near Wahweap Marina during the summer of 2021, when reservoir levels dropped perilously low. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
If Lake Powell is like a big thermometer gauging the hydrologic health of the Upper Colorado River Basin, then itโs running a high fever.
In one case, the fever analogy is a bit too literal: The National Park Service has detected high concentrations of cyanotoxins in the reservoir around the mouth of Antelope Canyon, and is warning folks to limit their exposure to the water. Warm water is one of the drivers of cyanotoxin growth.
The surface level peaked out on June 19 at 3,562 feet above sea level, with about 7.8 million acre-feet of storage (or about one-third of its capacity). That means the big, white โbathtubโ ring on the sandstone cliffs has grown by about 27 feet in the past year, re-revealing some landforms and rendering some boat ramps unusable. Levels will continue to drop throughout the summer.
This is because more water is leaving the reservoir via downstream releases and evaporation than is flowing into it. Reservoir inflows during June were a mere 883,000 acre feet, or about 41% of the median inflows. Thatโs far lower than the last two years and is only marginally higher than in 2002, 2018, and 2021, some of the worst years on record. And with the water year three-fourths of the way done, only 4.2 million acre-feet has flowed from the Colorado River and its upstream tributaries into the reservoir, setting the stage for a water year total of just about 5.5 million acre-feet โ or 2 million acre-feet less than the minimum release from Glen Canyon Dam.
The only good news is that temperatures at the reservoir mostly have been in the 80s or 90s for the past several weeks, which is about normal for this time of year. Oh, and another sorta-kinda silver lining: As the reservoir levels drop, the surface area decreases, reducing the rate of evaporation. Yay?
Inflow volumes at Lake Powell have been pretty skimpy this water year, with June of 2025 delivering just 41% of the median flows for that month. 1983 was the biggest water year on record since Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963, and 2002 was the lowest inflows.
Meanwhile, many of the Colorado Riverโs users continue under the illusion that the Colorado River Compact and the Law of the River will trump nature and the reality of diminishing flows.
Take the Imperial Valley in southern California. The Imperial Irrigation District is the single largest water user on the river, consuming some 2.3 million acre-feet during the 2024 calendar year to grow various food crops and a lot of alfalfa. Thatโs about seven times more Colorado River water than all of southern Nevadaโs casinos, hotels, golf courses, and homes consume.
Bales of alfalfa in the Imperial Irrigation District of southern Calfornia, grown with Colorado River water. Photo by Brian Richter
But itโs also about 200,000 acre-feet less than the irrigation district consumed in 2013. Thatโs in part because some farmers are being paid to not irrigate or to irrigate less, often meaning they must fallow their fields, at least temporarily. And some of those farmers have chosen to lease their land โ about 13,000 acres โ to solar companies for utility-scale energy installations, allowing them to continue to make money off the land without further depleting the Colorado River.
Thanks to Dustin Mulvaney for tipping us off to this resolution on Bluesky.
That irks the Imperial Irrigation Districtโs board, which recently passed a resolutionโopposing the continued expansion of utility-scale solar projects on active or historically farmed agricultural landโ in the district. โOur identity and economy in the Imperial Valley are rooted in agriculture,โ said IID Board Chairwoman Gina Dockstader, in a written statement. โSolar energy has a role in our regionโs future, but it cannot come at the cost of our farmland, food supply, or the families who depend on agriculture. This resolution is about protecting our way of life.โ
The resolution doesnโt carry any legal weight, but the IID has a lot of influence, and could easily push the county to ban or heavily restrict solar installations on farmland as dozens of other counties across the nation have done.
Granted, taking land out of agriculture and irrigation has consequences. It can become a weed-choked, dust-spawning expanse. In the Imperial Valley, irrigation runoff feeds the Salton Sea. And, of course, you lose food production and farmworker jobs.
Nevertheless, the resolution seems somewhat short-sighted. It is based on the assumption that the IID will be able to flex its senior water rights in perpetuity, and never have to give up significant amounts of irrigation. It robs farmers of their private property rights, their ability to diversify their income sources, and an opportunity to conserve increasingly scarce water.
And, if the solar installations arenโt built there, they are likely to end up on public land in desert tortoise and other wildlife habitat that could require the removal of hundreds or even thousands of Joshua trees. Worse, it might result in new natural gas or even coal plants to meet the burgeoning demand for power driven by the proliferation of energy- and water-intensive data centers.
And on that note, thereโs Kanab, in south central Utah. Iโve driven through Kanab many a time, but usually I just roll on through, finding more of interest in Ordervilleor Fredonia or even Colorado City and Hildale. I mean, Orderville does have โHo-Made Pies,โ or so the sign declares, and was founded as a bastion of the United Order, the tenets of which were communalism, cooperation, and equal distribution of wealth.
Kanab, meanwhile, was notable to me only as the home of former Utah state representative Mike Noel, who was a Wise Use/Sagebrush Rebel leader of the early 2000s, and I wasnโt going to stop in for a cup of coffee โ er, a soda โ with the guy. So I failed to notice that the little community was not only growing, but sprawling into the surrounding red-rock desert in the form of upscale resorts and housing communities and even a brand new town. A friend sent me this video, which enthusiastically offers details:
There is, for example,ย Catori Canyonย โa premium housing development & luxury gated communityโ that โredefines modern indoor-outdoor living.โ Prices start at $450,000 โ for a bare lot. It also predictably has a pickleball court, which is what I think they mean when they say it โisnโt just home โ itโs a lifestyle.โ I call that real estate propaganda.
Andย Ventana Resort, which is on state trust lands and is described by the Utah Trust Lands Administration as an โambitious project that includes townhomes, affordable housing, nightly rentals, single-family homes, and even a hotel.โ The Kane County Water Conservancy District, headed by the aforementioned Mike Noel, had hoped to build a golf course on the land, but pickleball โ yes, the development has courts โ and four swimming pools won out, apparently. The townhomes are expected to begin at $650,000, according to theย Southern Utah News.
The new town? It was originally just a huge subdivision called Willow Preserve Estates, which received county approval (after the county had denied its proposed public infrastructure district). But apparently the developers werenโt content with the limits of the subdivision approval, so they petitioned the state toย incorporate their own municipalityย called Willow, which would allow them to approve their own PID with higher housing density. Kane County commissioners areย miffed. If the state approves the municipality, it will include 1,200 to 1,400 home sites along with commercial areas on a big parcel of land east of Kanab and just south of Hwy 89.
Thatโs a lot of homes; Kanab has about 2,000 households, and that doesnโt count Catori Canyon or Ventana Resorts, let alone Willow. And, if youโre like me, youโre wondering where these folks โ along with the other developments with their swimming pools and lawns โ are going to get their water.
It appears the answer is: wells. Kanab currently supplies its 5,000 residents with several groundwater wells and springs. Willow will likely get its water from Kane County Water Conservancy Districtโs Johnson Canyon system, which is also fed primarily by groundwater. Which is to say, they arenโt taking it directly out of the Colorado River system, but they are taking it indirectly from the system, since groundwater and surface water is all connected. Plus, aquifers all over the Colorado River Basin are being depleted by over-pumping. Pulling more out of them is not sustainable.
But thatโs not all. Kanab is also about to be home to two new ultra-exclusive resorts in a similar vein as Amangiri, the posh place frequented by the Kardashians and located just outside the (past and possibly present) polygamist community of Big Water, Arizona.
Canyon Country, my friends, is rapidly being gentrified.
Kaia, by Outdoor Citizen, bills itself as a โnew ultra-luxury RURAL EB-5 investment opportunity.โ That is, if youโd like to migrate to America, just fork out a million or so bucks for one of the 40 planned residences in Johnson Canyon outside Kanab and, voila!, you have permanent U.S. residency. In Europe they call that a โgolden passport.โ The projectโs developer is FirstPathway Partners, whose sole purpose is to facilitate these EB-5 visas.
Kaia, by Outdoor Citizen, bills itself as a โnew ultra-luxury RURAL EB-5 investment opportunity.โ That is, if youโd like to migrate to America, just fork out a million or so bucks for one of the 40 planned residences in Johnson Canyon outside Kanab and, voila!, you have permanent U.S. residency. In Europe they call that a โgolden passport.โ The projectโs developer is FirstPathway Partners, whose sole purpose is to facilitate these EB-5 visas.
Kaiaโs website says the development โฆ
Yeah, the BLM land might be protected for now. But a warning to the rich folks that might want to invest: Utah politicians are leading the charge to turn that lovely โGreenbeltโ of public land over to housing developers. So instead of those fetching red rocks, you might one day have a view of a subdivision out your giant front window. And if Sen. Mike Lee and his ilk canโt sell the public land straight out, the Trump administration might just fast-track a uranium or coal mine, AI-crunching data center, or oil and gas development in that greenbelt just a few hundred meters from your luxury home.
Late light on Glen Canyon rock formations. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Sensitive satellite-based instruments enable scientists to measure relative variations of Earthโs gravitational field. Data gathered by NASAโs Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is used in a new study to show that many continental regions are experiencing long-term aridification. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Texas Center for Space Research
The Rundown
President Trumpโsย budget billย targets a few water projects while eliminating some climate and environment programs.
Agencies move to constrainย environmental reviewsย under NEPA.
EPA says it will loosenย wastewater pollution rulesย for thermal power plants later this summer.
GAO reviewsย NASAโs major projects, including the third generation of a water-tracking satellite.
EPA intends to take public comments on its idea to narrowย state and tribal reviewsย under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.
White House orders higher fees for foreign tourists visitingย national parks.
And lastly, EPAโs internal watchdog notes the risks of rising seas to federally owned Superfund sites.
โIf contaminants from federal facility Superfund sites are released into the surrounding communities, the health, jobs, and environment of millions of U.S. residents may be threatened. Further, the federal funds expended to implement those remedies would have been wasted.โ โ Report from the EPA Office of Inspector General that identifies 49 federally owned Superfund sites at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.
By the Numbers
$658 Million: Expected baseline cost of the third generation of NASAโs satellite mission that measures changes in the planetโs water storage. The GRACE-C mission is scheduled for July 2029, according to a Government Accountability Office review of NASAโs major projects. Operating for more than two decades, the GRACE satellites have been instrumental in tracking global groundwater depletion.
News Briefs
NEPA Overhaul Cabinet and other agencies โ including the Interior Department, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Army Corps of Engineers โ announced they will revise their rules for environmental reviews of major projects and prioritize shorter and quicker assessments of potential harms.
The agencies are shortening the administrative timeline for implementing a new rule, arguing that the standard notice-and-comment process would be an unnecessary delay and โcontrary to the public interest.โ
The Council on Environmental Quality, the White House arm that traditionally oversees NEPA, revoked its regulations in April in response to an executive order promoting domestic energy production. The agencies, now seeking faster, more efficient reviews, are establishing their own rules.
Besides the arrival of the new administration, recent legal rulings have also rearranged the playing field for environmental reviews.
In justifying its action, each agency cited the U.S. Supreme Courtโs ruling in May in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado. That ruling, in a case which centered on a railroad line in Utah for crude oil, allowed for narrowly focused environmental reviews that assess only a specific project and not the actions โ like upstream oil drilling and downstream oil refining โ it would enable.
Among the few call outs: The bill delivers $1 billion for surface water storage and water conveyance in the western United States. The money is for projects that increase or restore capacity of Bureau of Reclamation water conveyance systems or increase their use. Increasing reservoir storage capacity โ such as raising Shasta Dam, a Republican-driven idea thatโs been on the table for years โ is also acceptable. The money is available through September 30, 2034.
More broadly, climate and environment programs were chopped. Unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds โ those not yet committed to a recipient โ were yanked back for programs on climate data, environmental justice block grants, reducing air pollution at schools, and more.
National Parks Fees President Trump ordered the Interior Department to increase national park entry fees for foreign visitors. The additional revenue would be channeled to infrastructure improvements at the parks or to increase park access.
Still Storm Watching, For Now NOAA said it would delay by one month the termination of certain storm-tracking satellite data, the Associated Press reports.
Studies and Reports
Superfund Sites at Risk from Rising Seas The federal government owns 157 Superfund sites. Forty-nine of those sites are at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.
The assessment comes from the EPAโs internal watchdog, which published the report to draw attention to federal liabilities related to climate change and the nationโs most toxic sites.
The at-risk Superfund sites are clustered at military sites around Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and San Francisco Bay.
Arizona Groundwater Assessment The U.S. Geological Survey published a report on water quality in the Coconino aquifer in northern Arizona, where it could be a water source for the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation.
On the Radar
Water Quality Permitting The EPA is considering a rulemaking that would narrow the scope of Clean Water Act reviews undertaken by states and tribes.
These Section 401 reviews have been a target of the Trump administration. Energy companies complain that states have used their review authority to block fossil fuel infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines.
Before the rulemaking, the EPA is asking for public input. The agency opened a docket for written submissions, and it will hold two online events at a time to be announced.
File written comments at www.regulations.gov using docket number EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0272. The deadline is August 6.
Another Slogan Commission Through an executive order, President Trump established the Presidentโs Make America Beautiful Again Commission.
The commissionโs objectives โ โpromote responsible stewardship of natural resources while driving economic growth; expand access to public lands and waters for recreation, hunting, and fishing; encourage responsible, voluntary conservation efforts; cut bureaucratic delays; and recover Americaโs fish and wildlife populations through proactive, voluntary, on-the-ground collaborative conservation effortsโ โ in some ways conflict with the administrationโs desire to cut budgets and greenlight fossil fuel projects.
One of the commissionโs charges is to recommend to the president โsolutions to expand access to clean drinking water and restore aquatic ecosystems to improve water quality and availability.โ Stay tuned.
Power Plant Wastewater Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator, said his agency later this summer will relax wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants that burn fossil fuel and nuclear fuel.
The Biden administration placed stricter limits on these wastewater discharges last year. In a press release, Zeldin said compliance deadlines would be extended. The agency will also reconsider technological requirements for preventing polluted discharges.
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.
Mapping the Grand Canyon. In this photo we have Claude Birdseye (right) – expedition leader and Chief Topographic Engineer of the USGS, and Roland Burchard (left) – expedition topographer. Photo credit: USGS
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
June 30, 2025
Becky Mitchell and Doug Kenney had much to say at Crested Butte. Just as important may have been what they did not say.
The apple cart of the Colorado River has been upset for 25 years, and Doug Kenney and Becky Michell were on stage June 24 at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum to talk about the bruised apples.
Thereโs broad understanding that what worked in the past wonโt work in the future. As to what will work โ ah, well, that has yet to be resolved. โSo far, we havenโt really been able to pull the demands down as quickly as supplies have been going down,โ said Mitchell.
Adding tension to the conversation is another so-so or worse spring runoff in the river. Despite a decent snow year in northern Colorado, yet another early, warm and mostly drier-than-usual spring has produced an anemic projected runoff of a little over 9 million acre-feet. Average runoff into Lake Powell has been 12 million in recent years. The compact governing the river between the three lower-basin states and the four upper basin states assumed at least 20.
Douglas Kenney. Photo credit: University of Colorado Boulder
Kenney directs the Western Water Policy Program at the University of Colorado Boulderโs Getches-Wilkinson Center. The program puts on a conference each June that is considered one of several must-attend events for those drawn to the unceasing drama about Coloradoโs namesake river.
The river and its tributaries provide water for farms almost to Kansas and Nebraska and, on the west side, to 23 million people crowded along the Pacific Ocean in southern California.
In Crested Butte, Kenney said that unlike other people in Colorado River discussions, whether they represent environmental or agriculture organizations, he enjoys a rare freedom. โI tell people sometimes, I donโt have a dog in the fight, and by that, I just mean I donโt have to represent an interest.โ
Then he added: โThatโs not entirely true.โ He went on to confess that when he sees the Colorado River โsometimes it gives me goosebumps. And Iโm not a goosebumps sort of guy.โ
Coloradoโs Becky Mitchell had a hearty laugh at the 2024 Getches-Wilkinson Centerโs Colorado River conference. Photo/Getches-Wilkinson Center
Mitchell shared that she was a โsolid B studentโ who had grown up in Hawaii before arriving in Colorado to pick up two degrees at the Colorado School of Mines. She worked primarily as a consulting engineer before becoming the director of the Colorado Water Conservation Board. In 2024, Gov. Jared Polis named her to a new position in Colorado government: the stateโs negotiator on Colorado River issues. Unlike others in such roles, sheโs not a lawyer.
โOften I think of everything as a math problem,โ she said. โAnd a lot of what you see with the Colorado River is a math problem. Itโs kind of simple math, almost like just addition and subtraction, not even algebra or multiplication.โ
The two provided a high-level, yet sometimes detailed overview of the Colorado River during their hour on stage. However, students of the Colorado River, especially about the dramas, might have wanted another hour and the opportunity to ask additional questions.
For example, what do they make of the so-called โnatural flow proposalโ that was first formally discussed at a public meeting earlier that day in Arizona. As reported by the Las Vegas Review-Journal, this would base the release of water from Lake Powell on a three-year average of the โnatural flowsโ of the river.
In their comments at Crested Butte, Mitchell and Kenney both broadly identified the need for the river to be shared in ways aligned with what Mother Nature is delivering, not a century-old compact.
Later, at a different meeting, Mitchell had this to say: โWhat we know today is that for any approach to work, it must be supply driven, perform well under both dry and varying hydrologies, and adapt to uncertain future conditions fundamental to this โdivorce,โ or how we call it in Colorado, the conscious uncoupling.โโ
Others might have asked Mitchell about the tensions behind the closed-door sessions โ and the things that Kenney mentioned she could not really talk about in a public forum.
Or about the amount of water used to grow hay, including alfalfa, and other fodder crops for livestock. A 2020 study published in Nature Sustainability found that 55% of the water in the Colorado River Basin altogether goes to crops to feed primarily cattle. In the upper basin, itโs much higher.
Mitchell and Kenney did talk about Mead and Powell, the two big reservoirs in the basin, as all Colorado River conversations must.
โThose are the two biggest reservoirs in the United States, and they happen to fall on a river thatโs not even one of the top 20 biggest rivers in the U.S. in terms of volume,โ observed Kenney. The reservoirs were close to full 25 years ago. Now, theyโre two thirds empty. โOptimists would say one-third full,โ he said.
If you have more water going out than you have coming in, he explained, you have a mass balance problem. โThatโs happening 8 out of 10 years. More water leaves than is coming into the reservoirs under guidelines adopted in 2007. Those interim guidelines govern operations, including how much water is released from the reservoirs and when.
โWhen we talk about Big River issues right now, the Big River issue is getting the system into balance and bringing back the sustainability of the system,โ Kenney explained.
Management of the reservoirs was premised on meeting demand. To be more precise, demands of the lower-basin states. Until relatively recently, the lower-basin states were taking an average 10 million acre-feet even if the river delivered only 5 to 10 million acre-feet for the entire basin. Having two big reservoirs upstream allowed them to ignore the winters of scant snow in the headwaters and the rising spring temperatures that spiked evaporation and transpiration.
The first big shock was in 2002, when the river delivered only 3.8 million acre-feet. That was bad, very bad. But the reservoirs still had a lot of water. And there had been bad snow years before. In 1934, for example, the river delivered only 3.9 million acre-feet. And in 1977, a cold but uncommonly snowless winter, it had delivered 4.8 million acre-feet.
By May 2022, Lake Powell had dropped to the lowest levels since the 1960s, when it began filling after construction of Glen Canyon Dam.ย Photo/Allen Best
A big snow year did not soon follow 2002, so the states, guided by the Bureau of Reclamation, came up with a sort-of short-term set of solutions called the 2007 Interim Guidelines. Those guidelines remain in effect but are to be replaced with new guidelines. Thatโs a way of saying how the river is to be managed and, more precisely, who gets what and when. Theyโre called the post-2026 guidelines.
As were the 2007 guidelines, these will be interim, because the hydrology of the Colorado River Basin is not static. It is changing, with some concern that the river, already slimmed down from its 20th century average, will continue to shrink. The Colorado River Compact that was devised in 1922 to apportion the riverโs waters assumed somewhere around 20 million acre-feet. This century the average has been 12.5 million acre-feet.
โThe math problem is becoming worse,โ said Kenney.
It will likely worsen. Some scientists have projected a further decline in decades ahead, conceivably to an average 10 million acre-feet or less.
How to shrink demands to correspond with the shrinking river?
Mitchell offered some thin optimism. Demands have ceased to rise. They have actually declined. The lower-basin states have reduced their take from the river to 7.5 million acre-feet.
Thatโs what the compact apportioned. But again, the compact from 1922 was flawed. It assumed more water than the river has delivered. Because of the two big reservoirs in the deserts of Utah and Arizona, the lower-basin states have been able to get their 7.5 million acre-feet (and more, until relatively recently). Arizona and California take way more than half of the riverโs harvest. And because the upper-basin states were not taking their full allocation, they could get away with it without causing harm.
The 21st century combined with the aridification caused by rising temperatures have forced the issue. Even so, the reckoning has come slowly. The lower basin states did not reduce demand to stay within the compact until forced to by a declared shortage in August 2021.
While the decision was not a surprise to veteran Colorado River watchers, it vaulted the Colorado River troubles high into the national consciousness. The story ran on the front page of the New York Times: โIn a First, U.S. Declares Shortage on the Colorado River, Forcing Water Cuts.โ Arizona farms took the brunt of this declaration, but as the Times noted, wider reductions loomed as climate change continues to affect flows into the river.
The upper-basin states have been averaging 4.4 to 4.5 million acre-feet, far less than the 7.5 million acre-feet apportionment in the compact. How much they take depends upon how much it snows and rains.
โWe have highs and lows because of hydrology. That can shift a lot. A really good example is from 2021 to 2022. Our use was 4.9 (million acre-feet), and then it went down to 3.9 the following year. That wasnโt because weโre amazing people.โ
It was, Mitchell explained at Crested Butte, as she does in all of her talks, because the upper basin is limited by what Mother Nature actually delivers. The upper basin has no big dams upstream to serve as an aqua bank account. It has to moderate demand based on what kind of snow โ and rain โ year occurs.
Some 92% of all the water in the Colorado River originates in the upper basin states, including the Yampa River, seen here emerging from Cross Mountain Canyon in northwest Colorado. Photo/Allen Best
When thereโs insufficient water, the state engineer in Colorado and his district engineers cut off water users, mostly ranchers irrigating grasses.
The compact struck among the four-upper basin states in 1948 used a more common-sense approach for how to allocate the 7.5 million acre-feet in the 1922 compact. It allocated the water among the four states based on proportions. Colorado gets a little more than half โ and uses most of it. Wyoming has never come close to developing its share. Regardless, the rule of percentages makes sense for an uncertain hydrology.
โWe realized real quickly that Mother Nature reigned supreme,โ said Mitchell. I would be in big trouble if I said the lower basin should do the same. I think they should, but theyโre not there yet.โ
Mitchell used an analogy to describe the difficult transition for the lower basin. It is much harder to take candy from a baby after they have it,โ she said.
โItโs going to be hard for them, and my heart goes out to them. But we have an example up here of how it works. Seniors work with juniors,โ she explained, using the shorthand for senior and junior water uses under the prior appropriation system governing water use in Colorado and most Western states. Ag works with environment interests, utilities with agriculture, and so on. They cut deals in advance of water-short years.
โWe have examples of how to make it work. You have a budget. You have to work within it. Thatโs the deal. And sometimes that budget might fluctuate.โ
โWeโve not lost all of our junior water-right holders in Colorado because of one bad year or two bad years or three bad years, in a row, because we figure out how to make it work. And what we are saying to the lower basin is figure out where the deals are to be made.
And she drew upon her childhood for another dynamic.
โWhat my mom always said is, you can have anything you want, but you canโt have everything you want.โ
Translated to the lower basins, that means โyou canโt have chip factories and the largest agriculture in the world and golf courses and pools and Scottsdale and whatever. You can have the capability to have a strong economy, a sustainable system. You just canโt have it all.โ
The federal government, through the Bureau of Reclamation, an agency housed within the Department of Interior, built the dams. Reclamation manages the dams. As Mitchell said, they turn the spigots. The onus is on the states to create a solution, an agreement of how to share the shrinking river, but the federal government could step in, if forced to. Mitchell said the feds donโt want to.
โThey really want a consensus deal with the seven states,โ she said. Thatโs a hard thing, because thereโs no way to do this without change. The math is the math. The facts are the facts. Thereโs not the 50 million acre-feet in these reservoirs that there were when these (2007) guidelines started. And so the consensus is harder.โ
Mitchell said she wouldnโt disparage those who created the now obviously flawed 2007 guidelines. Climatologists had suggested only a 3% probability of the runoff that has happened since then would come to pass.
โWhat weโre trying to create through this federal process is something that can handle all the hydrologies. How do we all suffer when the river is suffering? How do we all benefit when the river is flush? And what does benefit look like? Thatโs different in the upper basin than in the lower basin.โ
The federal government in this case has been nudging the states toward agreement.
โTheyโre trying to say, โYou know, you might be able to open up different project funding if you guys can get to a deal.โ We know we need a deal. Iโm not going to promise you that weโre going to get there, but it is a goal. And (the federal agencies) are part of that goal. They donโt want to make the hard decisions of cutting people off. They are the water masters in the lower basin. They can turn the valves, and thatโs their role.โ
Added Kenney: โTypically the states are happiest when the federal government is silent, (but) sometimes itโs helpful to have a federal government that is throwing out some ultimatums and some deadlines and some threats.โ
In the last six months, the federal involvement in the negotiations has grown, and it might grow yet. But a big part of the process โ as Mitchell had said โ is that the states need to be coming up with their wish list for Congress for consideration next spring.
โSo there is a federal role,โ Kenney summarized. โIt evolves based on how the states are doing. But the tradition is you want the feds to stay away until itโs time for someone to write the check.โ
MItchell had the last word. She again pointed to the meager runoff from this yearโs upper-basin rivers, source of 92% of the riverโs water. Runoff is projected at a little more than 5 million acre-feet into Powell, which is to release 7.48 million acre-feet to the lower basin.
Again, itโs a match problem. And it could get worse.
โIf next year looks anything like this year, or even as a 12 million acre-foot river, actions absolutely have to be taken., and those actions are going to be greater than anybody has put on the table voluntary.โ
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
The clock is ticking for seven states to figure out how theyโll share dwindling water in the Colorado River for the foreseeable future. In a meeting at the Utah State Capitol Thursday [June 26. 2025], the riverโs four Upper Basin state commissioners further embraced the idea of a โdivorceโ with their Lower Basin neighbors โ anย idea also floated at a meeting in eastern Utah last week, as reported by Fox 13.
โToday we stand on the brink of system failure,โ said Becky Mitchell, the commissioner for Colorado. โWe also stand on the precipice of a major decision point.โ
…negotiations between the four Upper Basin states, which includes Utah, Colorado, Wyoming and New Mexico, have been in a standstill with the remaining three Lower Basin states for more than a year. The Interior Departmentโs acting assistant secretary for water and science, Scott Cameron, has met with leadership in the seven states that use Colorado River water since April, working to broker a deal.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
โWe all have to live in the physical world as it is,โ he said, โnot as we might hope it will be.โ
On Thursday, Cameron presented water managers with a deadline. The Interior Department plans to release a draft environmental impact statement evaluating different alternatives for the riverโs future in December, which will then open to public comment. The department will make its final decision on how to proceed by June of 2026.
โThe goal is to essentially parachute in a seven-state deal as the preferred alternative,โ Cameron said.
For that to work, the states will need to reach an agreement by Nov. 11. By Feb. 14, theyโll need to hand over the details of their plan. Whatever the states decide on, Cameron reminded commissioners, will likely take an act of Congress and new policy adopted by most of the affected statesโ legislatures…
The idea of framing the future relationship of the river users as a โdivorceโ was first pitched by the Lower Basin states, Mitchell said. Under that proposal, the Upper Basin states would release water from Lake Powell based on the average natural flow measured at Leeโs Ferry, a point just downstream of the reservoir and upstream of both Grand Canyon National Park and Lake Mead.
โIf done correctly,โ Mitchell said, โit should provide the opportunity for the Upper and Lower basins to manage themselves, with the only real point of agreement being the Powell release.โ
Last night’s storm (July 30, 2021) was epic — Ranger Tiffany (@RangerTMcCauley) via her Twitter feed.
Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):
June 2, 2025
The current warming trajectory could bring 100-year rainstorms as often as every 2.5 years by 2100, driving calls for improved infrastructure and planning.
New research showing how global warming intensifies extreme rainfall at the regional level could help communities better prepare for storms that in the decades ahead threaten to swamp cities and farms.
The likelihood of intense storms is rising rapidly in North America, and the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects big increases in such deluges.
โThe longer you have the warming, the stronger the signal gets, and the more you can separate it from random natural variability,โ said co-author Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a climate scientist with Environment Canada.
Previous research showed that global warming increases the frequency of extreme rainstorms across the Northern Hemisphere, and the new study was able to find that fingerprint for extreme rain in North America.
โWeโre finding that extreme precipitation has increased over North America, and weโre finding thatโs consistent with what the models are showing about the influence of human-caused warming,โ she said. โWe have very high confidence of extreme precipitation in the future.โ
At the current level of warming caused by greenhouse gasesโabout 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial averageโextreme rainstorms that in the past happened once every 20 years will occur every five years, according to the study. If the current rate of warming continues, Earth will heat up 5.4 degrees by 2100. Then, 20, 50 and 100-year extreme rainstorms could happen every 1.5 to 2.5 years, the researchers concluded.
โThe changes in the return periods really stood out,โ she said. โThat is a key contributor to flash flooding events and it will mean that flash flooding is going to be an increasing concern as well.โ
Better Science, Better Forecasts
The 2013 floods in Boulder, Colorado that killed nine people and caused more than $2 billion in property damage are a good example of how such climate studies can help improve flood forecasts, said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.
โThat was an exceptional event and the rain was like tropical rain. The radars greatly underestimated the magnitude as a result,โ said Trenberth who returned to his home in Boulder during the floods with a broken foot, only to have to climb on his roof to direct the gushing water away from his house.
From: The Great Colorado Flood of September 2013
A subsequent study found that the rain resulted from an unusual atmospheric brew over Colorado. Mountain thunderstorms mingled with a juicy atmospheric river from the tropics, dropping up to 17 inches of rain in a few days, nearly as much as Boulderโs annual average total. Human-caused climate change โincreased the magnitude of heavy northeast Colorado rainfall for the wet week in September 2013 by 30%,โ the study found.
A separate study concluded that global warming actually decreased the likelihood of the 2013 floods. The conflicting results hint at the complexities of climate research, but, since then, the influence of human-caused climate change on extreme weather has become more clear.
The risks will continue to increase as the atmosphere warms, said David R. Easterling, a climate extremes researcher and director of the U.S. National Climate Assessment. โThe detection has been there for a while on a lot of extreme events,โ said Easterling, who was not involved in the new study. โWeโre going to see increases in extreme events, and we need to be prepared.โ
Easterling said most current infrastructure, such as dams and bridges, was designed based on rainfall values from the mid- to late-20th century and was not built to withstand the more frequent extreme rains identified by the new research.
โThere are going to be much more damaging floods that are going to wash out a lot of the infrastructure,โ he said. โYouโll see more floods and bigger floods and major impacts to our civil engineering infrastructure.โ
According to the Environmental Protection Agencyโs website, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that the percentage of total precipitation coming from intense single day events has increased significantly since about 1980, with nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events occurring since 1990. The EPAโs precipitation indicator website also shows similar changes at the global scale.
Warmer Air, More Moisture and Shifting Storm Tracks
One way to visualize the planetโs climate system is as a heat-driven pump that tries to balance the planetโs energy by circulating it around the globe and cycling it from oceans, to land, to the atmosphere. Global warming puts more heat into the pump and that energy is manifested elsewhere in the system. For instance, for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, the atmosphere holds 7 percent more moisture that can fall as extreme rain, hail or snow.
But global warming can increase rainfall by much more than 7 percent in individual events. In Hurricane Harvey, for example, the estimated boost in rainfall was about 30 percent, said Trenberth.
โThe outcome depends on the kind of storm. If the rainfall is in or near the center of the storm, as for a hurricane, then the extra oomph from the latent heat release intensifies the storm and makes it bigger and longer lasting,โ he said. โThis can also happen for an individual thunderstorm.โ He was not involved in the new study.
For storms outside the tropics, the most rain happens away from the center, which doesnโt necessarily make the rain more intense, but can affect the way the storms move and develop, he added.
โThis is the atmospheric river phenomenon and requires the weather situation to remain stuck for a bit, as a river of moisture from the subtropics, like the pineapple express, pours into a region,โ he said. A 2019 study showed that atmospheric rivers cause most of the flood damage in the Western United States already, and global warming is projected to intensify those events.
In a 2019 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Pfleiderer and other scientists looked at how global warming changes weather patterns in ways that make heat waves, droughts or rainstorms longer or more intense. With global temperature increases of 2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (the range to which the Paris climate agreement hopes to limit warming), periods of heavy rain would increase 26 percentโthe most of all the weather phenomena studiedโthe research found.
Friederike Otto, acting Director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, said new research showing how global warming affects extreme rain regionally complements studies that identify the effect on individual events.
As a co-investigator with World Weather Attribution, Otto has been involved in a series of recent studies looking at how global warming affects droughts, heat waves and extreme rain. The strongest signal, as she expected, was with heat waves, but she expects rain events โfar outside the observations so far.โ
โOne thing I only started to realize in the last year, is how important attribution is for making projections,โ she said. Climate attribution studies show how the warming of the planet makes some extremes more likely, and intensifies other weather events. Linking measurements of what actually happens with model predictions โgives you more confidence that the changes are because of climate change,โ she said.
Escalating Impacts Require Adaptation and Resilience
Floods caused by extreme rain are among the costliest climate-related disasters. A NOAA compilation of billion-dollar disasters lists a long string of deadly catastrophes caused, at least in part, by extreme rain. These include the January 2020 floods in New York, Michigan and Wisconsin, where significant damage along the shoreline of Lake Michigan was compounded by extremely high water levels in the lake, as well as a lack of seasonal ice cover.
In 2019, extreme and persistent spring rainfall in the Midwest led to one of the costliest inland flooding events on record. Floodwaters inundated millions of acres of farms, along with numerous cities and towns and Offut Air Force Base in Nebraskaโthe third U.S. military base to be damaged by a billion-dollar disaster in a six-month period. In all, that wave of flooding caused $10.9 billion in damage, NOAA estimated.
Earlier this month, persistent heavy rains contributed to the failure of a dam in Michigan, and Easterling said heavy rains were also implicated in the 2017 Oroville Dam failure that cost $1.1 billion and forced the evacuation of 180,000 people. The flooding caused by record rainfall from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was a big part of the $125 billion worth of damage caused by the storm.
Extreme rain can also have an impact on a smaller scale. In mountainous areas, heavy precipitation over even a small area can be disastrous. In the Rocky Mountains, such cloudbursts have caused toxic floods of acidic water from abandoned mines, and in the European Alps, scientists say extreme rains are unleashing larger and more destructive rockfalls and landslides.
โWe are going to get more intense, extreme precipitation, this is one of the things we are sure about,โ said Hannah Cloke, a University of Reading natural hazards researcher and hydrologist specializing in flood forecasting.
The United Kingdom has been hit repeatedly by extreme rain in recent years, including Storm Desmond in 2015, which was linked with global warming and caused at least $550 million in damage, flooding nearly 10,000 homes and businesses. Cloke said the recent flooding has apparently even shaped her daughterโs world view. For a recent school assignment, the nine-year-old used plastic bottles to build a floating house reminiscent of the movie Waterworld.
โMost of the design standards for storm infrastructure are not high enough for the predictions, or even what weโre seeing right now,โ she said. โWe have to get away from the idea that you can just carry on business as usual. We have to adjust our expectations of what could happen. We need to get people out of harmโs way and be realistic about where we live.โ
Cloke said the certainty of increased extreme rainfall means that communities have to adapt by creating or restoring natural areas that can soak up the rains in the uplands, and cities need to be redesigned with green roofs and other measures to prevent flood waters from piling up and destroying property. More and more, flood experts are thinking in terms of socio-hydrology, she said.
โYou canโt just look at the water, at the heavier rain, and how fast itโs running down the rivers,โ she said. โItโs about how humans and water interact at all levels, and how politics controls where the water is. Itโs about who is at risk of flooding and whether those people have any agency to reduce the risk.โ
New research like the PNAS study that shows the regional fingerprint of global warming on extreme rainfall can help reduce the risk, she said, because it enables better short-term forecasts.
โWe have a lot of the right science in place but we still canโt predict the exact locations and amounts,โ she said. โWe donโt quite understand the development of the water cycle and we often underestimate rainfall for those reasons. But we shouldnโt be surprised that these rains are happening. Weโre going to see entire cities at a standstill.โ
It's been a bit since I've done a meteorological deep dive, but the devastating flash #flood in central Texas this July 4th/5th deserve a closer look. #TXwxYes remnants of #Barry were involved helping enhance moisture. A remnant MCV from Mexico on 3 July also played a role.Full evolution below โคต๏ธ
The North Fork River valley. Photo credit: Colorado Farm & Food Alliance
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Caroline Llanes). Here’s an excerpt:
July 1, 2025
At Thistle Whistle Farm in Hotchkiss, farmer Mark Waltermire grows a wide variety of crops on his 16 acres.
“A lot of greens, onions, shallots, cabbage, kohlrabi, carrots, beets, parsnips, burdock root, scorzonera and saltapie, and then heirloom tomatoesโฆ” he lists when prompted.
Waltermire’s farm is in Colorado’s North Fork Valley, in the West Elk Range of the Rockies. The growing season is short, and the climate is semi-arid. As Waltermire notes, climate change is impacting how he operates…Waltermire is considering a solution [to the warmer atmosphere] that would create a dual use of his land. He wants to build five acres of solar panels on his land โ about a megawatt of power โ and continue growing his tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, and leafy greens under them. The solar panels would provide shade, something that would benefit his many crops, as well as his goats, chickens, and ducks…It’s called agrivoltaics, combining agriculture with photovoltaic, or solar, panels…[Byron Kominek] explains that selling the energy from these solar panels can help farmers, even during bad years.
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
July 3, 2025
Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.
Josh Shipley rides a Harley in his spare time and likes to take his family on off-road Jeep trips and has hunted across North America.
On Wednesday morning, Shipley had to fight tears as he talked about the impact on his business, Alternative Power Enterprises, and the families of the employees of the earthquake-inducing bill now being debated in Congress.
โRemoving these tax credits at the end of the year is going to be extremely detrimental,โ he said on a press call orchestrated by the staff of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. โWe actually donโt believe weโre going to be able to stay in business.โ
The business is based in Ridgway, one of two smaller solar installation companies there. It has eight employees, and they have five spouses and seven children. They do work from Paonia to Silverton.
โItโs not just eight people that are going to be affected by this,โ he said. The business, he explained, has been around for 30 years, and in recent years it has been able to start helping low-income families to get solar.
โI think in the last three years, 120 families in our area have benefited,โ he said. โIf I canโt survive, the other parts of this business are going away. I canโt be there to help those individuals.โ
Shipley said he bought the business in 2020 with the assumption that federal tax credits would be phased out, but not until 2032.
The bill, he said, is a tragedy for U.S. energy policy.
โRepublicans are always talking about independence and being โ sorry, Iโm getting a little emotional โ getting and being dominant in our industries. This is how we become energy dominant. Itโs not just wind. Itโs not just solar. Itโs not just natural gas plants. Itโs not just nuclear power plants.
โIt takes every single one of these technologies for us to create that โ excuse me โ and to keep these families โ Iโm sorry, excuse me โ but it will take all of these forms of energy to create that dominance,โ he said. This billโs going to kill that. There are no ifโs, andโs, or butโs about it. Small businesses will go out of business because of it. There will not be the workforce that is going to be required to create that energy dominance later, when theyโve realized what theyโve done.โ
Hickenlooper, who had arrived late the night before from Washington D.C., touched on several provisions of what he called the โcruel, reckless billโ that the Senate had passed on Sunday morning.
โThis was a vote that would strip 17 million Americans, including many, many children, of their health care, push more than 300 rural hospitals to close, gut investments in affordable clean energy,โ he said โIt would expand our national debt at a level that we have never imagined before, and all this just to accommodate these lavish tax cuts for wealthy Americans, most of whom arenโt asking for the tax cuts. It is a form of madness, fiscal madness, and I think itโs cruel.โ
U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the bill passed by his fellow senators โcruel.โ Credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Later, he explained that the bill would gut the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. โIt was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now itโs been itโs like running into a brick wall,โ he said.
โWeโre going to lose over a million jobs in this country. I mean, these are careers, hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP, lost wages. Weโre going to see the cost of electricity go up. Weโre going to kill new renewable energy that prevents blackouts just when weโre in the process of trying to accommodate AI. We need more energy. Weโve got over 8,000 solar jobs just in Colorado.โ
Speaking later, KC Becker described the bill as triggering an all-hands-on-deck moment for the solar industry in Colorado. In April, she became the executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association.
โPeople are nervous from the smallest companies to the largest companies. Itโs been a whirlwind,โ she said. โThe bill was expected to get better in the Senate. It actually got worse in the Senate because of the excise tax (on solar and wind production, now discarded).โ
Right now, many solar providers are working hard, because they have inventories of panels. But the demand, if this bill gets passed as new constructed, will cause demand to drop off a cliff after Dec. 31.
The big question in Colorado โ and part of the national dialogue โ is whether any of Coloradoโs representatives in Congress who are Republicans will buck the marching orders of President Donald Trump. Rep. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, both freshman and both Republican, voted for the bill after saying nice things about renewable energy.
Fort Lupton-based Evans was barely elected last November from the Eighth District north of Denver, his first run at Congress. Grand Junction-based Hurd has a more comfortable position in the Third District, which covers much of the Western Slope plus much of southern Colorado.
Also speaking on the webcast press conference were the four Democrats who are members of Coloradoโs delegation in the House of Representatives, Gov. Jared Polis, and various individuals from health care providers, most from more rural parts of Colorado.
The take-away message was that this bill will dramatically hurt poorer people who are unable to afford health care without governmental assistance. That, however, can also be true in urban areas.
U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was momentarily reduced to fighting tears when she talked about the giant erosion of programs to help low-income people. โWhen I think about my mom who works a low-wage job, without access to medical care,โ said Pettersen, who then choked up. For her, this was politics, but the bill was also deeply personal.
On the evening of June 24, the GWCโs Doug Kenney joined Becky Mitchell, Coloradoโs lead negotiator on Colorado River matters, at the Crested Butte Public Policy Forum for a conversation about current and future Colorado River issues. Well over 100 people packed the Center for the Arts for the public event that in previous years has featured speakers as varied as Ted Turner, Sandra Day OโConnor, and the GWCโs Senior Fellow Anne Castle.
The primary focus of discussion was how โbig riverโ issuesโthat is, the changing rules determining how Colorado River supplies are shared amongst the seven statesโimpact the availability of water on Coloradoโs West Slope. This required a review of the three numbers in the basin that increasingly are out of step: the amount of water entering the system each year through snowmelt and rain; the amount of water consumed by water users throughout the basin; and the amount of consumptive use that has been promised to water users in the Colorado River Compact and other laws. This mismatch of supplies, demands and allocations is not a new problem, but is of particular urgency now as Lakes Powell and Mead are two-thirds empty, the EIS process for new determining new reservoir operations is well underway, and the current year runoff is shaping up as one of the worst in decades.
The conversation was led by Julie Nania, an icon in Crested Butte for her work with High Country Conservation Advocates in protecting Mt. Emmonsโthe so-called โRed Ladyโโfrom development into a molybdenum mine, as well as her service on the Board of Directors of the Upper Gunnison Water Conservancy District and as Executive Director and Faculty Chair of the Coldharbour Institute based at Western Colorado University. Julie began her career at Colorado Law (class of 2011), which included a post-graduate fellowship with the GWC from 2013-2014 working on tribal water rights. Julie stands as a great example of the GWCโs ongoing influence in protecting the resources and places that we all value.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
A serious mess, also known as the NE Hogback #53 well and associated infrastructure. Chuza, the most recent owner of the site in the Horseshoe Gallup oil field in northwestern New Mexico, went bankrupt. That left New Mexico and federal taxpayers holding the cleanup bill. The site has been partially reclaimed, but only partially. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
๐ข๏ธย Hydrocarbon Hoedownย ๐ย Data Dumpย ๐
A new report on New Mexicoโs abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells presents an alarming and expensive scenario for the state. It reveals that while the industry generates a lot of revenue for the state, cleaning up its mess is also poised to cost state and federal taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. No, this report was not put out by an environmental or progressive advocates, but by the stateโs legislative finance committee.
New Mexico has been an oil and gas hotspot for more than a century, during which drillers have sunk at least 121,000 wells, mostly in the San Juan and Permian basins in the northwest and southeast portions of the state. Newly drilled wells typically kick out a large volume of oil and/or gas during the first months after drilling, generating a lot of cash for their operators and for state coffers, and helping to push production numbers for the state through the roof.
Decline curve generated by decline curve analysis software, utilized in petroleum economics to indicate the depletion of oil & gas in a petroleum reservoir. By Richard Banks – Sent to me personally, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33914059
But the wells are soon afflicted with whatโs known as the decline curve, meaning that the longer they pump, the less they pump. You know, itโs kind of like aging in people. Eventually, aging will render all oil and gas wells into low-producing stripper wells (Iโm not sure how this analogy extends to the human realm, but hey โฆ) that kick out less than 10 barrels of oil per day. Thousands of New Mexico wells are extreme strippers, producing one barrel or less daily. Yet they continue to spew methane, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds at the same as or an even higher rate than their younger, more vital counterparts.
This is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, the operators of stripper wells are likely to be smaller, less financially secure companies, and itโs easier and cheaper for them to keep the wells in a nearly inactive state โ during which the wells continue to ooze pollutants into the air and groundwater โ than to decommission, plug, and reclaim them. It may make economic sense to abandon these wells, or for the companies to cease to exist and โorphanโ the wells, leaving them to the state or federal taxpayers to clean up, since reclamation bonds are woefully inadequate. And, finally, these wells generate almost nothing in production taxes, meaning that they arenโt contributing much to the stateโs conservation fund, a portion of which is used to clean up abandoned and orphaned wells.
The near constant drone of drilling for over a century has resulted in a near-constant addition of low- to non-producing wells to New Mexicoโs rosters. While responsible and financially solvent companies plug and reclaim their own wells, many smaller operators simply walk away.
New Mexicoโs Oil Conservation Division is currently responsible for plugging close to 1,000 abandoned and orphaned wells, including 700 on state or private land, and for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sites (such as leaky tank batteries).
Detail of interactive map showing orphaned, inactive, and low-producing wells on state and private land in the San Juan Basin (this leaves out hundreds of additional such wells on federal lands).
At recent rates, plugging them will take close to a decade, not including remediation/reclamation. OCD is also responsible for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sties. In total, plugging, remediation, and reclamation of all currently orphaned wells and infrastructure on state and private land is estimated to cost a minimum of $208 million, and likely more. And thatโs just for now.
The report goes on to say: โโฆ in addition to wells the state already has legal authority to plug, thousands of inactive and low-producing wells are at risk of being orphaned, potentially increasing the stateโs liability by many orders of magnitude.โ There are about 1,400 inactive at high risk of being orphaned on state and private land, according to the OCD. And there are thousands more that are extremely low-producing wells โ putting out less than one barrel of oil equivalent per day โ for which the โexpected cost of cleanup far exceeds predicted future revenues, increasing their risk of being orphaned.โ
And the kicker: โAltogether, the stateโs current and near-future liability for well plugging and site remediation is estimated to be between $700 million and $1.6 billion.โ
More data from the report:
38,817 Number of stripper wells, meaning they produce less than 10 barrels of oil-equivalent daily, in New Mexico, making up about 64% of the stateโs active wells. This number will continue to increase.
$100,000 Average cost to plug single oil and gas well.
450% Percent the average state-contracted cost to plug an oil and gas well in New Mexico has increased since 2019.
$250,000 Maximum amount of financial assurance an operator in New Mexico must post to cover the costs of plugging and reclaiming its wells. This cap applies whether the operator has five wells or 500 wells, meaning it actually provides almost no financial assurance whatsoever.
$46.4 million Amount spent by the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division to plug and reclaim 360 wells and associated infrastructure between 2019 and 2024.
9% Percent by which the cost of plugging a gas well exceeds that of an oil well. Most of the wells in the San Juan Basin are gas wells.
$208 million Estimated cost to New Mexico to plug, remediate, and reclaim all existing orphaned and abandoned wells and infrastructure on state and private land.
$5.6 million Amount in financial assurance associated with orphaned wells or their operators, meaning most of the costs will be shouldered by the taxpayers โ either via the state reclamation fund or federal grants.
$66.7 million April 2025 balance of New Mexicoโs oil and gas reclamation fund (which is funded by a portion of conservation tax revenues).
$6 million Tax revenue New Mexicoโs 3,024 wells producing less than 1BOE/day would generate with the West Texas Intermediate oil price at $70/barrel (itโs currently lower than that). Plugging and reclaiming those same wells would cost an estimated $531 million to $885 million. โThe vast majority of the wellsโ87%โare owned by private companies whose financial health is difficult for regulators to assess.โ
$1.6 millionย Amount New Mexico paid in 2024 to plug six of Ridgeway Arizonaโs wells under a 2023 settlement agreement with the company. Under the agreement, the state pays to plug 299 of the companyโs wells, and the company reimburses the state $2 for each barrel of oil it sells, with a minimum payment of $30k per month. But at current rates, the total cost to plug the remaining wells could be $60 million or more, meaning it would take the company as long as 170 years to pay it off.
๐ต Public Lands ๐ฒ
By now youโve probably heard that Sen. Mike Lee pulled his public land sell-off provision from the budget reconciliation bill that the Senate just passed following intense backlash. And perhaps youโre planning on celebrating the salvation of Americaโs public lands on July 4.
Thereโs so much BS in Leeโs statement. How, for example, does selling public land to developers keep it from being ruined for the next generation? It doesnโt, it just locks up that land for every generation except those that can afford to buy a house in the new subdivision that would go there. Public land is not โlocked away from the people who live there.โ But it would be locked away if it was privatized. And while there is no property tax on public lands, there are federal payments in lieu of taxes, or PILT, which a county can use to fund schools and search and rescue operations. Plus, public lands generate billions in revenue for gateway communities through public land usersโ sales and lodgers taxes and local spending.
Well, I hate to be Mr. Buzzkill, but while this victory may be sweet, it does little to offset the bitterness brought by continuing attacks on public lands, along with democracy, morality, decency, and, well, America, itself, this Independence Day week.
The โBig, Beautiful Billโ perpetuates and amplifies the massive transfer of wealth from low- and middle-income and working-class Americans to the richest 10%. It will slash Medicaid and other vital programs Americans have paid into and rely upon, while also dismantling tribal sovereignty. And yet, it will also drive up the deficit by trillions of dollars due to additional spending on the military industrial complex, which is reaching its tentacles further into immigration enforcement, wildlife blocking border walls, deportations, and $450-million-per-year concentration camps. With Trump threatening to revoke citizenship from U.S.-born citizens whom he considers threats (e.g. Zohran Mamdani and Elon Musk), those camps may end up housing his political opponents. I really hate to make this comparison, but that is some severe Nazi-esque nastiness.
The Senateโs bill gives more handouts to the oil and gas and coal industries, while revoking tax credits for wind and solar power, which could kill those industries when they are needed most.
And yes, some of you may cheer a weaker renewable-energy industry, since it will mean fewer utility-scale installations blanketing the desert. I get that. But it will also hurt rooftop solar and larger installations on big box stores, over parking lots, or in fallow agricultural land, brownfields or other appropriate sites. A western Colorado farmerโs plan to install solar panels to generate electricity and shade his crops, for example, is imperiled by the GOPโs plans.
This at a time when strain on the power grid is exponentially increasing due to the outsized demand of more and more AI-powering, hyperscale data centers. That power will come from somewhere, and if itโs not solar or wind or batteries, then itโs likely to be from pollution-intensive coal and natural gas (mined and drilled from public lands), fish-killing hydropower, or new nuclear reactors (that will require uranium mined from public lands).
And keep in mind, oil and gas leasing and mining claims represent a sort of quasi-privatization of public lands. Sure, the government retains title to the land, but the corporations get access to the minerals within, can rip the land apart to get to them, and can cut off public access with the necessary permits. With its accelerated 14-day โenergy emergencyโ permitting process, the Trump administration is making it a heck of a lot easier for corporations to mine, drill, and otherwise develop public lands, sans public input. The latest beneficiaries include:
NorthWestern Energy, which was given the Bureau of Land Management green light to build aย 74-mile natural gas pipelineย between Helena and Three Forks, Montana.
Ormat got the BLM go-ahead to move forward on three separate geothermal projects in Nevada: โข Exploration work at theย Diamond Flat projectย near Fallon; โข Upgrades at theย McGinness Hills projectย in Lander County; โข Exploration drilling at theย Pinto Geothermal Projectย near Denio.
Iโm not suggesting that these are horrible projects that shouldnโt have been approved. Geothermal holds a lot of potential as a relatively clean, round-the-clock baseline power source, and these are merely upgrades and exploration, not full on developments. Still, geothermal development and even exploration have impacts and can affect groundwater aquifers, springs, and wetlands. Land agencies should have as much time as it takes to adequately analyze potential effects, and tribal nations should be consulted and have time to do their own analysis. And if itโs happening on public lands, then the public deserves to know about it and have an opportunity to weigh in. None of that is possible under this 14-day permitting process.
So, yeah, happy Fourth of July, yโall and welcome to the Divided States of Project 2025. And on that note, the Land Desk will be taking the rest of the week off.
๐ธ Parting Shot ๐๏ธ
Just getting into the olโ July Fourth spirit with this picture of Raymond “Squeekโ Huntโs signs near his mutton meat slaughterhouse and shop in Waterflow, New Mexico. I mean, it does have an American flag in it, after all.
