Category: Oil and Methane Gas

#Utah Senator Mike Lee and Representative Celeste Maloy look to Congressional Review Act to crush Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, plan: Plus: Another #ColoradoRiver wonkfest; more public lands and #aridification news — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #COriver

Glen Canyon Dam, January 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

March 6, 2026

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Sen. Mike Lee and Rep. Celeste Maloy, both MAGA Republicans from Utah, have formally introduced legislation to use the Congressional Review Act to revoke the Biden-era management plan for Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. If successful, the move would also bar the feds from developing a new management plan that resembles the current one.

The current management plan is not draconian by any means. It was fashioned over years, with oodles of input and compromise, and is far less restrictive than the preservation-oriented alternatives It allowed for motorized vehicle use on designated routes and added almost no new restrictions for livestock grazing. Revoking it is not the same as rescinding the national monument or shrinking its boundaries, and will not open up any of the monument to new mining claims or oil and gas leases.

So it’s not clear what Lee and Maloy hope to achieve, except to strike a blow to a national monument that they don’t like and to throw oversight of 1.9 million acres of public land into disarray. Or maybe they’re just trying to build up their anti-public-land credentials to head off challenges from even more extreme candidates such as, say, Phil Lyman, who just challenged Maloy for her 3rd District congressional seat.

You still have time to let your representatives in Congress know how you feel.

Ugggg.

While well-intentioned greens are parsing BLM director nominee Steve Pearce’s words for indications he might be inclined to sell off public land, the Trump administration is orchestrating a massive de facto transfer of public lands to oil and gas companies.

I’m talking about oil and gas leasing. And no, it’s not an actual transfer of public land; the lessee does not take title to the land, nor can they block public access, but they do get the rights to drill that land and preclude other uses on it. And, once it is drilled, the land is scraped of all vegetation, covered with heavy equipment, poked with a massive drill, hydraulically fractured, and becomes an industrial-scale, methane-, hydrogen sulfide-, and VOC-oozing hydrocarbon factory for many decades to come.

On the auction block this June is a good chunk of slickrock-studded landscape northwest of Moab, between Hwy. 191 and the Green River, along with some parcels in the Lisbon Valley. All in all, the BLM proposes selling off 39 parcels covering some 71,600 acres. You have until March 30 to give your two cents. https://eplanning.blm.gov/Project-Home/?id=6fad61fa-a7f2-f011-8407-001dd80bcf93

***

Of course, sometimes the BLM holds an oil and gas auction and no one comes. That was the case with the Big Beautiful Cook Inlet Oil and Gas Lease Sale (yes, that is the official name) held March 4 in Alaska, in which more than 1 million acres of offshore leases were put on the block. There were zero bids. Zilch. Nada. Someday, maybe every oil and gas lease sale will be like that.

***

A federal judge has halted construction of the Northern Corridor Highway through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area near St. George, Utah, while an advocates’ lawsuit proceeds.

The BLM approved the contested project earlier this year. The Utah Department of Transportation, apparently wanting to get started before a legal challenge could take hold, began erecting fencing along the project, even though their development plan hadn’t been approved. This activity would have disturbed desert tortoise habitat.

The court did not approve, blocking further work until the lawsuit is resolved.

***

In other Utah road news, Garfield County began chip-sealing the first ten miles of the Hole-in-the-Rock Road in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, drawing protest and a lawsuit from environmental groups.

The county has been aching to pave the gravel road, which often becomes riddled with potholes and washboards, for years, but failed to gain BLM approval. Environmental groups have resisted, saying that improving the road could lead to more paving or widening of primitive byways in the area, and would increase the number of people and their impacts on the fragile landscape.

The county has also wielded RS-2477 — an 1866 statute — in an attempt to wrest control over the byway, which leads to the famed Colorado River crossing of the 1879 Latter Day Saint expedition to Bluff. Last July, a federal court granted Garfield County quiet title to the section of the road within the county.

Garfield County interpreted that as a green light to chip seal the road.

That triggered a lawsuit from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance, pointing out that because the road crosses BLM land, the county must still get the agency’s go-ahead for major improvements. It didn’t, but the BLM has done nothing to stop the action, which SUWA says violates federal environmental laws.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

I was accused recently of being all “doom and gloom” when it comes to this year’s snow levels, so I set out to find some good news to report. It didn’t go so well, but I did uncover a few tiny nuggets, including:

  1. After the February storms, the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies reported: “This is rare, but currently we do not have any dust on the snowpack.” That’s good news because dust on the snow decreases albedo (reflectivity), leading to faster snowmelt. We need what little we have to stick around as long as possible. Buzzkill: The really big dust events tend to come in the springtime.
  2. I tend to rely on a handful of high-elevation SNOTEL sites as indicators of how the mountain snowpack is doing. One of them is in Columbus Basin in the La Plata Mountains. Like everywhere else, the snow water equivalent there is way below normal. However, it’s still above 2002 levels for early March, so that’s kind of heartening. I guess?
  3. Hope lies in 1990: That year, snowpack levels in the Animas River watershed were lower on March 6 than they are today. But beginning in mid-March, storms pummeled the region, resulting in a May 3, 1990, snowpack peak that was 94% of normal and bringing runoff up to decent levels. We could see a repeat of that March-April-May miracle!
  4. And … oh. I’ve just been informed that there is no more good news.
As grim as this may be, it also offers a glimmer of hope: The snowpack could still recover like it did in 1990. Source: NRCS.

Now back to our regularly scheduled doom and gloom, bullet style.

  • The late February-early March heat wave across most of the West shattered thousands of daily high temperature records and dozens of monthly ones, topping off the West’s warmest winter on record. Monthly records (121 tied or broken nationwide during the last week of Feb.) include:
    • Dinosaur National Monument in Utah hit 68° F on 2/26;
    • Imperial County, California’s airport reached 97° on 2/28;
    • Albuquerque airport, 77° on 2/25;
    • Hovenweep National Monument in Utah, 70° on 2/28;
    • Havasu, Arizona, and Malibu Hills, California, were both 93° on 2/27;
  • Sampling of daily records (845 broken or tied during the last week of Feb) include:
    • Mancos, Colorado, hit 50° F on 2/28; the aforementioned Columbus Basin (elev. 10,784 feet) reached 48° and Mineral Creek, Colorado, hit 51° that same day;
    • McClure Pass, Colorado, reached 49° on 2/28;
    • Needles, California, and Phoenix both hit 92° on 2/28;
    • South Lake Tahoe airport, 60° on 2/28.

Those kinds of temperatures melt the snow, even on north faces, causing this year’s snow water equivalent graph lines to uncharacteristically dip during a time of year when they normally would be shooting upward. They also heighten risk of wildfires in the low country. On the last day of February, a blaze broke out in Chautauqua Park in Boulder, forcing some evacuations before it was contained. Another one was sparked west of Boulder on March 4.

The North Fork of the Gunnison, which feeds the ditches in and around Paonia and Hotchkiss and the orchards, vineyards, and farms there, is in trouble. This year’s snowpack so far is in the same boat as it was on this date in 2002 and 2018, two very dry years when irrigation ditches were shut off early in the growing season.

Aside from the entire Upper Colorado River watershed, I’m also especially concerned about the North Fork of the Gunnison. Snowpack levels are at a record low for this date, or about the same as they were in 2018, and Paonia Reservoir is currently utilizing just 22% of its storage capacity (note the record high temp on McClure Pass above, at the headwaters of Muddy Creek, which feeds the reservoir). This does not bode well for the many small farmers who rely on the river for irrigation. In 2018, downstream senior rights holders made a call on the river in June, forcing junior irrigators in the North Fork to lose water perilously early in the season.

This bad situation could be exacerbated if the feds were to decide to release water from Paonia Reservoir in an attempt to buoy Lake Powell water levels. While this is hypothetical, it is not beyond the realm of possibility by any means.

And, saving for some sort of April-May miracle, the Colorado River runoff will be extraordinarily scant this spring and summer, almost certainly pushing Lake Powell to critically low levels.

***

That demands a plan, and the Bureau of Reclamation came up with several alternatives last month. Most of the major players have commented on the alternatives, and it’s safe to say that almost no one is satisfied with any of them — albeit for different reasons.

One of the more universal critiques is that none of the alternatives adequately address dry and critically dry scenarios on the river, like the one that is likely to occur this summer. The draft environmental impact statement itself states, “In critically dry periods, all alternatives have unacceptable performance.” That leaves many wondering what, exactly, the Bureau of Reclamation plans to do to keep the system from collapsing over the next nine months.

There is a lot here, and it gets pretty darned deep in the wonk weeds. Still, what I’ve included is a mere sampling of some of the comments from just a few of the commenters in the hope that it will give readers a better idea of where different stakeholders stand, and how complicated and difficult this situation really is.

For those who don’t like weeds, here’s the short version: It’s a tangled mess with a bunch of moving pieces and stakeholders who are digging in their heels to ensure that their constituents get the water they need to drink, irrigate crops, run industries, or whatever. And they’re all butting up against the reality that there simply isn’t enough water in the river to go around.

Ian James has a slightly less crunchy version for the Los Angeles Times.

Here are the comments and commenters:

Four Democratic members of Arizona’s congressional delegation feel that the Lower Basin is getting the dry end of the stick (their comments are similar to those of the Arizona Department of Water Resources):

  • Arizona is understandably displeased because they would take the greatest hit under any alternative. This is not because they are somehow inferior, but because the water rights to the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson, are junior to most other big users in the Lower Basin. “… each alternative, though broad in scope, will translate in practice specifically as drastic reductions to Arizona’s water supply.”
  • “We are deeply troubled that Reclamation all but abandons its increasingly critical role in ensuring the Upper Basin States fulfill their delivery obligations under the Colorado River Compact of 1922 (Compact).” This refers to the non-depletion or minimum-delivery obligation that I’ve written about before.
  • “The DEIS itself acknowledges that ‘widespread impacts on social and economic conditions may also be possible,’ including circumstances in which municipalities may need to pursue alternative or even hauled water sources to maintain basic services. Drastic cuts could have cascading consequences for human health and safety and destabilize the lives and livelihoods of Arizonans, tribal communities, and critical industries that rely on Colorado River supplies.”
  • They say the cuts will damage the state’s agriculture, manufacturing, and aerospace industries and that it will put at risk: “… the largest concentration of advanced semiconductor manufacturing investment in the country, representing roughly $200 billion in announced projects since 2020.” Semiconductor production is extremely water-intensive, with the average factory consuming up to 10 million gallons of ultra-pure water daily.
  • They call on any plans to “include verifiable Upper Basin conservation measures commensurate with Lower Basin conservation measures, including identifying tangible metrics that demonstrate Upper Basin water conservation.”

The Colorado River District, which represents water users on Colorado’s Western Slope, wasn’t so psyched about the alternatives, either:

  • “We believe that Reclamation must institute bold and meaningful changes but that those changes must be implemented in a manner that is consistent with the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the 1944 binational treaty with Mexico, the 1948 Upper Basin Compact, and the other foundational elements of the Law of the River.”
  • “Reclamation must prioritize hydrologic reality over predictability for Lower Basin users. The Draft EIS places undue emphasis on predictability1 for water users, a goal that is unattainable under future climate conditions unless system storage is replenished and overall demands are permanently reduced to match the supply.”
  • “… several alternatives include Upper Basin water conservation ranging from zero to 500,000 acre-feet annually … <but> … fails to analyze the environmental or socioeconomic impacts associated with these conservation volumes.” It adds that a 200,000 acre-feet reduction in the Upper Basin would require fallowing 52,000 acres on the Western Slope.
  • “Lower Basin water use must be reduced by 1.5 million acre-feet at all times, regardless of the alternative. This amount represents system losses (i.e., transit losses and reservoir evaporation) and should not be classified as shortage.” This is a longstanding issue. Reservoir evaporation and other such losses are counted against the Upper Basin’s consumptive use, in part because of the non-depletion obligation. The same is not true for the Lower Basin; when they say they use 7.5 million acre-feet, that does not include evaporation or seepage or other system losses, only what they pull out of the river.
  • “The range of alternatives must include option(s) that perform under critically dry hydrology. Currently, none of the alternatives in the Draft EIS perform under critically dry hydrology. At least one alternative must protect critical infrastructure and respond effectively to significantly lower river flows than historically observed.” We are approaching a critically dry situation this summer, when the feds will have to decide whether and how to keep Lake Powell from dropping below minimum power pool. So far there is no plan for this.
  • “Hydrology must drive Post-2026 operations. Operating guidelines based upon comparative reservoir elevations which do not factor in real time hydrology have been disastrous for protecting storage in Lake Powell and thus, have failed to provide the water supply certainty for the Upper Basin intended by the Law of the River …”
  • “Interbasin transactions must not be allowed in the proposed action.” That is, Upper Basin users with senior rights should not be able to sell their water to Lower Basin users.

The team of Anne Castle, John Fleck, Eric Kuhn, Jack Schmidt, Katherine Tara, and Kathryn Soren, river experts and academics who aren’t representing any specific water user, state, or basin, also weighed in. Their comments, as Fleck put it in his Inkstain blog, could be summed up as: “Tell us what you’re going to do.” And, also:

  • The group calls on Interior to “primarily focus on the Dry and Critically Dry scenarios. … We think it important to be mindful of the underlying year-to-year hydrology of the 21st century as we look to the future. … we are struck by the fact that 50% of the individual years of the 21st century have been Dry or Critically Dry, and only 27% of the years (including 2017, 2019, 2023) have been Moderately Wet or Wet.”
  • “We suggest that the DEIS include a description of an alternative that performs sufficiently well during Dry scenarios and an alternative that performs sufficiently well during Critically Dry scenarios.”
  • “ … it is imperative that Reclamation provide a clear picture of what actions will be implemented in the near term (i.e., next year, next 3 years, next 5 years) to protect critical infrastructure, and to protect public health and safety.”
  • Noting that lawsuits are inevitable regardless of which alternative the feds choose, they urge them to avoid “safe” options and go with a plan with “… the broadest possible interpretation of Reclamation’s and Interior’s authority to provide a predictable and resilient Colorado River so that the system can continue to operate in a reasonable manner while the lawsuits proceed.”
  • Call on the feds to “… explore these areas for possible inclusion in the preferred alternative:
    • Reduction of deliveries in the Lower Basin in excess of 1.48 MAF when insufficient water is available for release.
    • Provision for releases of water from the Colorado River Storage Project initial units as necessary to protect critical elevations in Lake Powell and ensure continued Upper Basin Compact compliance.
    • Operation of federal projects in the Upper Basin to store or use less water during critical periods.
    • Continuation, expansion, and modification of Assigned Water programs (such as Intentionally Created Surplus and Mexican Water Reserve) with improvements to ensure operational neutrality and minimize adverse impact to priority water.
    • Establishing a conservation pool in Lake Powell for storing Upper Basin conserved water to be utilized for Compact compliance purposes. For more on conservation pools, check out the Shannon Mulane’s explainer in the Colorado Sun.
  • The group finds fault with the plan for not addressing “the need for enforceable reductions in the Upper Basin.” They go with the Lower Basin’s interpretation of the non-depletion/minimum-delivery obligation, saying that the Colorado River Compact does not guarantee that the Upper Basin gets half of the water in the river. Plus, they point out that the plan’s demand forecasts for the Upper Basin are unrealistically high, putting more of the burden for cuts on the Lower Basin.

The Southern Nevada Water Authority and Colorado River Commission of Nevadaare especially critical, writing:

  • “Since the onset of drought in 2002, <Nevada water users> have reduced their overall Colorado River water consumption by more than 40 percent even as our population grew by more than 875,000 people. And they, unlike so many others, have not ignored the reality facing the basin by making the flimsy argument that our economy cannot prosper while water consumption decreases.”
  • Like Arizona, they bring up the minimum-delivery/non-depletion clause of the Colorado River Compact and call on the Upper Basin to comply with it.
  • Interior’s “… approach to protecting the Glen Canyon Dam river outlet works by reducing releases from Lake Powell—rather than making infrastructure repairs and improvements—is shortsighted and harms Nevada and the Lower Basin States.”

The Upper Colorado River Commission emphasizes the Lower Basin’s history of exceeding its Colorado River Compact allocation and failing to account for evaporation and other system losses. Colorado’s Upper Colorado River CommissionerBecky Mitchell submitted similar, very detailed comments that emphasized the Colorado River Compact’s equitable division of the river between the Upper Basin and Lower Basin. She points out that the Lower Basin’s interpretation of the minimum-delivery/non-depletion clause contradicts and even negates that division.

📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐

Must read: Teal Lehto’s and Len Necefer’s speculative fiction take on what might happen on the Colorado River, and to the people who rely on it, in 2030 if current climatic trends continue. It’s dramatic and sensational and catastrophic, but it’s also very well informed, smart, and not at all far-fetched, in my humble opinion.

Mining Monitor: Trump uranium mine? Or trolling? Also: A guest post on Glen Canyon Dam — Jonathan P. Thompson #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

The Henry Mountains, which are surrounded by and covered with mining claims, including the Trump 1-4 properties. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

March 3, 2026

The Bureau of Land Management’s Mineral & Land Records System seems like a strange place to get trolled. But I think it just happened. I was looking through the MLRS to try to get an idea of whether insanely high gold and silver prices, and relatively strong uranium prices, had inspired companies or speculators to stake new mining claims n southwestern Colorado and southeastern Utah, when I came across something that seemed almost satirical.

Late last year, Kimmerle Mining Company staked four 20.66-acre lode claims in Garfield County, Utah, on the east slope of the Henry Mountains (just east of Mt. Pennell). The claim’s names? Trump I, Trump 2, Trump 3, and Trump 4.

The Kimmerle family, of Moab, control hundreds of mining claims across southeastern Utah. But they generally don’t mine them, except, it seems, to make a point.

The Kimmerles are the ones who staked mining claims on a mesa just east of Hideout Canyon inside Bears Ears National Monument just months just before the Obama administration withdrew the area from new mining claims. After Trump shrunk the monument to exclude the White Canyon area in 2017, and just before Biden restored the boundaries in 2021, Kimmerle Mining staked five new claims in the area and acquired additional claims from another mining company. Kimmerle Mining promptly filed for a permit to do exploration work there, but the BLM said they had to demonstrate the claims “validity,” or show that they contained “valuable minerals.” The process for doing so would cost up to $100,000.

Shortly thereafter, Kimmerle joined the state of Utah’s lawsuit seeking to eviscerate the national monument, claiming that its establishment had caused him to lose out on mining profits.

No word on whether the firm plans on drilling or mining its Trump claims, but at least we know these folks’ political leaning. 

There have been a handful of other notable mining claim locations in the area in the past six months, including:

  • Platoro West Inc., located in Durango, staked twelve 20.66-acre lode claims southeast of Ouray, Colorado, in the Bear Creek drainage near Darley and Engineer Mountains. The company is registered under the name of William Sheriff, who was recently named executive chairman of Verdera Energy, which has interests in in-situ uranium mining in New Mexico.
  • CCKC Inc., of Philadelphia, located three 20-acre placer claims in Dolores County along the Dolores River upstream of Rico.
  • Roughead Resources of Moab (but which has also been associated with a Houston address) staked fifteen 20.66-acre lode claims in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah near the Mi Vida Mine and the Lisbon Valley Copper Mine. At the same time, the company also staked dozens of claims in Beaver County, Utah.
  • Fermi Metals of Cocolalla, Idaho, staked twenty-three 20.66-acre claims on the southern slope of the La Sal Mountains, just north of the settlement of La Sal. This is near Energy Fuels’ La Sal Complex uranium mines.
  • Geobrines International, of Littleton, Colorado, staked twenty-five 20-acre placer claims in Grand County, Utah, along I-70 between Green River and Cisco. This adds to a cluster of previously filed claims in the same area. They are probably looking to do lithium extraction.
  • Utah Brine Corporation, of Omaha, Nebraska, staked seventy 20-acre claims southwest of the community of La Sal in the Lisbon Valley. UBC appears to be a subsidiary of Omaha Value Inc., which has partnered with an Australian critical materials firm Neometals on its Utah Brine Project, which aims to extract lithium and potash.
  • Antimony Canyon Sovereign Reserve Inc, a division of Australia firm American Tungsten & Antimony, staked nineteen 20.66-acre lode claims near Antimony, Utah, in Garfield County. The plan is to develop an antimony mine here.

In other mining news:

  • Metallic Minerals has been eyeing and drilling into a copper deposit in the La Plata Mountains of southwestern Colorado. While actual mining may be a long ways off, concerned locals are already coming together to keep an eye on the project and push back, if necessary. The La Plata Mountains and Public Lands Coalition now has about 225 members from the region, according to Dan King, the coalition’s administrator. Metallic Minerals’ proposal was just one of the catalysts for the coalition, and its mission is much broader and more regional in scope.

Gold and silver prices have shot up tremendously over the last year, probably due to the Trump-effect on the economy and the U.S. dollar, which is stuck at a ridiculously low exchange rate. Gold is now around $5,000/oz, while silver is hovering around $100/oz., compared to just $30 when Trump took office. Uranium’s doing well, too, sitting consistently in the $80/lb to $90/lb range. 

Which is to say, mining companies suddenly have a lot more incentive to invest in reopening existing, idle mines or even building new ones (assuming they have faith that the high prices will endure). So far, however, it doesn’t seem to have sparked a surge in new mining activity. Even the Revenue-Virginius silver mine near Ouray, which is purportedly ready to produce ore, remains idle. 

The uranium sector does appear to be emerging from its long slumber, but mostly in the form of exploratory drilling, smaller companies selling claims to bigger ones, and staking mining claims on the increasingly sparse sections of public land that aren’t already claimed. Anfield continues work on constructing its Velvet-Wood mine in the Lisbon Valley, but it’s still a ways away from production (and its Shootaring mill is still mothballed and unlicensed). 

Energy Fuels is about the only firm actually producing conventional ore. According to their SEC filings, they pulled about 1.5 million pounds of uranium from the Pinyon Plain mine near the Grand Canyon and 155,000 pounds from their La Sal Complex in 2025. Their White Mesa Mill recovered 1 million pounds of uranium, which is a heck of a lot more than in the past, but still is far short of the facility’s 8-million-pound annual capacity. Despite all of this, the company still lost $86 million in 2025.

Meanwhile, the silver and gold mining corporations raked in massive profits, including:

  • Canadian corporation Barrick, which owns major gold mines in Nevada (Fourmile and Nevada Gold Mines) reported an attributable EBITDA of $8.16 billion last year, the “highest shareholder returns” in the company’s history.
  • Newmont (which jointly owns Nevada Gold Mines with Barrick) reported an adjusted EBITDA of $13.5 billion.
  • Kinross, owner of Bald Mountain and Round Mountain in Nevada, Fort Knox and Manh Choh in Alaska, and Kettle River-Curew Project in Washington, reported adjusted net earnings of $2.2 billion
  • Rio Tinto’s “profit after tax attributable to owners of Rio Tinto (net earnings)” $10 billion. 
  • SSR Mining, which owns a big mine in Nevada, only had a net income of $362 million; but that compares to 2024’s loss of $350 million.

Speaking of commodity prices and profits: American oil and gas companies are poised to make out like bandits thanks to the Trump-Netanyahu war on Iran. 

Iran produces some oil and gas. But more importantly, it borders the Strait of Hormuz and has threatened any oil and gas tankers that try to pass through it, effectively closing the passage. That could stanch the flow of oil and gas to the global market, causing prices to rise. The West Texas Intermediate, or WTI, crude oil price has shot up to about $76, the highest it’s been since before Trump took office. This will cause gasoline prices to climb, but also make drilling in the U.S. more profitable, and could spur companies to start using the stockpile of public land drilling permits they’ve amassed over the last year or so. 

Liquefied natural gas tankers also are unable to get through the Strait to European markets, which will cause prices of the fuel to skyrocket. It could also force European countries to turn to U.S. LNG exporters, which could echo back to natural gas producing states like New Mexico and Wyoming (and also may increase U.S. natural gas prices if the conflict drags on).

Glen Canyon Dam Must Be Modified to Avoid Draconian Water Supply Disruptions

A guest post by Ron Rudolph

Glen Canyon Dam with the river outlets in use as part of the high-flow experimental release. The outlets are only used occasionally and are not engineered for sustained use. Usually, all of the releases go through the penstocks and the hydroelectric turbines. But that won’t be possible if the lake drops below the level known as minimum power pool. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Glen Canyon Dam, which impounds the Colorado River to form Lake Powell, is a single point of failure that poses an unacceptable risk to the functioning of the entire river system. Modifying the dam to allow more water to pass through or around it is an essential component of any plan for allocating the river’s dwindling supply. 

The dam’s structural flaw limits the amount of water that can pass from Lake Powell downstream to Lake Mead. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir, is the primary repository of water for the Colorado River’s so-called Lower Basin states: California, Arizona, and Nevada. A paucity of water released from Lake Powell would eventually force reductions in the amount of water extracted from Lake Mead, diminish drinking water supplies for millions, harm agricultural productivity throughout the southwest, and embroil the federal government, seven states, more than two dozen Tribal Nations, Mexico, and others that share the river’s water in a cascade of costly court cases. 

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

Due to Glen Canyon Dam’s physical limitations, when the elevation of Lake Powell reaches “minimum power pool” or lower, the only way to release water from the dam is through its river outlet works.1 The persistent drought in the southwest, and continued demand for the river’s reduced water supply, makes it highly likely Lake Powell will fall to minimum power pool this year. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimated this month that Lake Powell could fall to minimum power pool by late July, and remain there or lower through 2027.2

The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest forecast for the Colorado River predicts Lake Powell will “most probably” drop below the critical minimum power pool level before the end of this year, jeopardizing Glen Canyon Dam’s structural integrity. In the worst-case scenario, it would do so before summer’s end. This could force the feds to operate the dam as a “run-of-the-river” operation to preserve the dam’s infrastructure and hydropower output, which would significantly diminish downstream flows and threaten Lower Basin water supplies.

In addition, the agency’s February forecast estimates that under “most probable inflow” conditions, Lake Mead would drop below elevation 1,040 in June. If conditions do not improve by the agency’s August forecast, mandatory reductions in water use would be required in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico.3 If the annual amount of water let out from Lake Powell is restricted to the dam’s outlet works, it would result in less water reaching Lake Mead than any year this century, and could trigger even larger reductions in Lower Basin water consumption.4 Releasing water from reservoirs upstream from Lake Powell could forestall the reservoir reaching minimum power pool, however, that is a non-sustainable solution, that fails to address Glen Canyon Dam’s fundamental plumbing problem. 

In January, the Bureau of Reclamation’s draft environmental impact statement — Post-2026 Operational Guidelines and Strategies for Lake Powell and Lake Mead —proposed several options for managing the Colorado River for the next 20 years. None of the alternatives includes remedying Glen Canyon Dam’s structural flaws. 

The Bureau’s proposals have been criticized by some of the largest consumers of Colorado River water who have signaled a willingness to challenge the agency in court. For example, the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which serves nearly 19 million people, noted the Bureau’s proposed alternatives “would likely lead to lengthy litigation.”5 The Central Arizona Project, the second largest consumer of Colorado River water, has identified several “legal deficiencies,” including non-compliance with the Colorado River Compact, and failure to adequately disclose and analyze the environmental, economic and socioeconomic impacts.6

Depending exclusively on the river outlet works to release sufficient water through Glen Canyon Dam is bound to fail, like relying on rainfall to grow crops in Arizona or southern California. The Bureau has warned relying on the outlet works would risk water supply disruptions to those who depend on Lake Powell and Lake Mead.7 The Director of the Bureau’s Technical Service Center has advised against using the outlet works as the sole means for releasing water from the dam,8 as previous high-capacity use of them for only 72 hours caused structural damage, which required nine months to repair. Despite the remedial effort, the Bureau concluded the repairs will not prevent future damage.9 The dam’s design flaw led the Arizona Department of Water Resources to conclude the structural limitations of Glen Canyon Dam must be alleviated.10

The calculus for equitably apportioning the diminishing water in the Colorado River is extremely complicated. But one variable in the equation is as obvious as the bathtub ring surrounding Lake Powell: a new system for conveying water sustainably through or around Glen Canyon Dam must be built. Without it, risks to the Colorado River system, and the communities, agriculture and ecosystems reliant on it, will escalate, as will pressure to impose compulsory reductions in consumptive uses throughout the basin. 

Ron Rudolph, a former assistant executive director of Friends of the Earth, spent 35 years in various engineering companies, including MWH Global, CH2M Hill, Jacobs Engineering, and Cardno with a career focused on infrastructure development and environmental remediation.

1 U.S.Bureau of Reclamation, Technical Decision Memorandum, Establishment of Interim Operating Guidance for Glen Canyon Dam During Low Reservoir Levels at Lake Powell, March 26, 2024, page 9

2 https://www.usbr.gov/lc/region/g4000/riverops/24ms-projections.html

3 When Lake Mead drops below elevation 1,040, a “Level 2 Shortage Condition,” mandatory reductions in water use by Arizona, California, Nevada, and Mexico are required by the 2007 Interim Guidelines for managing Lake Powell and Lake Mead, and the 2019 Lower Basin Drought Contingency Plan

4 The Bureau’s guidance for maximum release of water from each river outlet work (ROW) at minimum power pool elevation is 3,185 cubic feet/second (cfs). The agency has determined only three ROWs would be available simultaneously. If three ROWs operate at full capacity, they would release 9,555 cfs. 1 cfs sustained for a year = 724.acre-feet/year. 9,555 x 724.45 = 6,922,000 acre-feet/year. The maximum releases are specified in USBR, Technical Decision Memorandum, Establishment of Interim Operating Guidance for Glen Canyon Dam During Low Reservoir Levels at Lake Powell, March 26, 2024, page 2. The determination that only three ROWs would be available simultaneously in based on USBR, Near-term Colorado River Operations, Final Supplemental Impact Statement, March 2024, page 2-3. The least amount of water released this century was 7 million acre-feet in 2022, based on data from U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report: Arizona, California and Nevada, 2000-2024

5 Statement of Metropolitan Water District’s General Manager, Shivaji Deshmukh, January 9, 2026

6 Patrick Dent, Assistant General Manager, Water Policy, Central Arizona Project, Report on Post-2026 Draft Environmental Impact Statement, February 5, 2026 

7 U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Near-term Colorado River Operations, Final Supplemental Impact Statement, March 2024, page 1-9, footnote 10

8 USBR, Technical Decision Memorandum, Establishment of Interim Operating Guidance for Glen Canyon Dam During Low Reservoir Levels at Lake Powell, March 26, 2024, page 9

9 USBR, Reclamation completes recoating of outlet tubes at Glen Canyon Dam ahead of schedule, June 18, 2025; https://www.usbr.gov/newsroom/news-release/5184 

10 Email from Trent Blomberg on behalf of Tom Buschatzke, Director, Arizona Department of Water Resources, February 4, 2026

Bringing the crowds back to Arches National Park, other national parks: And other public lands briefs — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

February 24, 2026

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Just when you thought the GOP’s assaults on public lands couldn’t get any worse, the Trump administration launched a new blitzkrieg on environmental protections.That includes eviscerating the National Environmental Policy Act, the federal law requiring agencies to analyze, mitigate, and avoid impacts of major federal projects and projects on public land.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum this week announced the “rescission of more than 80% of Interior’s prior NEPA regulations.” The changes, which includes limiting public comment, are aimed at streamlining permitting across the board, much as the department did with its “emergency permitting procedures” for oil and gas, uranium, coal, and critical minerals projects on public lands.

Associate Deputy Secretary Karen Budd-Falen, who is in hot water over potential ethics violations, lauded the changes, saying in a statement: “These reforms will help unleash American energy, strengthen rural communities ,and deliver real results faster for the American people.” As long as they are fossil fuels, that is, since Interior has put a de facto blockade on solar and wind developments on public lands.

Burgum finalized the NEPA rules a few days after opening 2.1 million acres of previously protected public lands in Alaska’s Dalton Corridor to new mining claims and oil and gas drilling.

***

An oil and gas drilling and hydraulic fracturing operation in the Greater Chaco Region near where the BLM plans to sell more leases this August. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

The Bureau of Land Management is, thankfully, still taking comments on proposed oil and gas leases, though it’s not clear that they will pay them any heed. You have until March 23 to give your two cents on the Farmington Field Office’s plan to auction 12 parcels covering about 16,856 acres this August. The parcels are on the checkerboard, with the biggest block of them about 20 miles east of Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Find more information and comment at the agency’s project page.

***

This week confirmation hearings begin for Steve Pearce, Trump’s pick to lead the BLM and oversee some 245 million acres of public land.

Pearce is a hard-right Republican, former congressman from New Mexico, and no friend of public lands or environmental protections. Pearce’s political career was infused with hostility toward the agency he has been nominated to oversee. Pearce has opposed new national monument designations, is a fan of drilling public lands, has tried to weaken or eliminate the Endangered Species Act, lied about wolves in an effort to defund the Mexican wolf recovery program, received a 4% score from the League of Conservation Voters.

A few months ago we would have considered his confirmation a slam-dunk, since at the time most Republicans were still willing to debase themselves to any degree to curry favor with Trump. But with Trump’s approval rating plummeting as he suffers from more frequent cognitive mishaps and more revelations of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, the Senate may not be so friendly to Pearce.

***

The News: The National Park Service “expands access,” a.k.a. limits or eliminates timed-entry reservation systems, at Arches, Yosemite, Glacier, and Rocky Mountain National Parks, sparking fears that unmanageable crowds will once again overwhelm the popular parks.

The Context: In the wake of the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, when Zoom boomers flooded Western communities and the masses descended on the surrounding public lands, people became increasingly concerned about the resulting crowds at national parks and at popular non-park trails and sites. Not only did the crowds risk damaging the parks’ resources, but they also potentially screwed up the visitors’ experiences.

In Arches National Park, for example, cars backed up at the entry gate for close to a mile, parking lots were crammed with vehicles and trail-jams weren’t uncommon, and on especially busy days park officials had to actually shut the gates and turn folks away — even those who may have traveled from abroad to see Delicate Arch.

To ease the pressure, the National Park Service in 2022 instituted a timed-entry reservation system during the busiest months of the year. This limited the number of people entering the park, but it also ensured the ones that made a reservation that they wouldn’t be turned away. The system led to a sharp drop in visitation during its first year, though the number of people entering the park averaged around 4,000 per day. But it has climbed every year since, including in 2025 when other Canyon Country parks saw visitation decline.

Still, some locals, presumably those of the quantity over quality variety, pushed back, saying the new system was diminishing visitation and hurting the local tourism industry. Last fall, Grand County Commissioner Brian Martinez asked the park service to revoke the timed-entry system and to build up the park’s infrastructure to enable it to maximize visitor numbers. The Trump administration’s park service apparently listened, and now timed-entry is no more.

Neither fire, smoke, nor searing heat can stop the public land swarms — Jonathan P. Thompson

You wanna know how old I am? I’m old enough to remember, way, way back to the days of yore, when federal officials and gateway-town chambers of commerce were wringing their hands in concern over a nationwide decline in visitation to national parks. Over a 13-year period, visitor numbers to 58 “nature-based” national parks—Arches, Yosemite, Yellowstone, …
🐓 Regulatory Capture Chronicles 🦊

Trump’s apparent disdain for clean air (and a healthy public) was manifested in recent weeks as the administration not only rolled back the EPA’s “endangerment finding,” which authorizes it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions, but also the Biden-era mercury toxic air standards. 

Mercury emissions are an environmental and public health hazard. The Four Corners-area coal plants once kicked out more than four thousand pounds of mercury each year, along with thousands of pounds of selenium and copper and hundreds more pounds of lead, arsenic, and cadmium, not to mention sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and other pollutants. 

Aquatic Mercury Cycle. Graphic credit: USGS

Those emissions have decreased considerably over the years as federal regulations kicked in and as coal plants were shuttered altogether. Still, the Four Corners plant puts out about 150 pounds of mercury each year, along with varying quantities of other toxic metals. Most of these pollutants are then deposited in the surrounding water, on the land, and on homes. For years, rain and snow falling on Mesa Verde National Park have contained some of the highest levels of mercury in the nation, and elevated levels have even been found on Molas Pass, just south of Silverton. The mercury is then taken up by bacteria in lakes and rivers, which convert it to highly toxic methylmercury, which then enters the food chain. Mercury messes with fishes’ brains, and even at relatively low concentrations can impair bird and fish reproduction and health. It’s not so good for the people who live near the plant, drink the water, or eat those fish, either.

Because most existing coal plants in the West already complied with the Biden regulations, Trump’s rollback isn’t expected to have a significant effect in most cases (unless power plants dismantle existing pollution-control equipment). However, it is expected to allow the Colstrip coal plant in Montana — one of the nation’s worst polluters — to continue to operate (the operators complained that compliance with the Biden rule would have forced it out of business).

The San Juan Generating Station back when all four units were still operating, and spewing mercury and other nastiness on the area and its residents. The plant was shuttered in 2022 and has mostly been demolished. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🐐 Things that get my Goat 🐐

I probably shouldn’t put this here, but geez, really? Aren’t we over the whole “The West is a big empty space that we can clutter up with our myths and technology and nuclear waste” complex? I guess not. I’m sure this guy, who is clearly from somewhere that is not the Western U.S., means well. But he needs to figure out that the West’s “empty” spaces are actually full of life and beauty and, well, space, which most of us value quite highly.

Granted, the spaces shown in this guy’s pictures do look like they may have been extensively grazed, but that does not mean they are appropriate places for a bunch of damned power- and water-guzzling data centers and their associated energy facilities.

Data Centers: The Big Buildup of the Digital Age — Jonathan P. Thompson

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

🌞 Good News! 😎

A new study has shown that it is possible, in some cases, to build large-scale solar systems without destroying the desert on which they sit.

The Gemini Solar Project in southern Nevada is one of the nation’s largest such facilities, covering about 5,000 acres of desert land. During its construction in 2022, the developers refrained from the full “blade-and-grade” site preparation that is typical, and instead worked to minimize disturbance and leave some areas of vegetation and soils completely intact.

A group of researchers from the Desert Research Institute and the U.S. Geological Survey surveyed the plant population — with a focus on the rare and sensitive threecorner milkvetch — before and two years after construction. Their hypothesis was that the facility would detrimentally affect the plant, and that the areas nearer the panels would see the biggest impacts.

What they found is that not only did the milkvetch survive, but it actually thrived “within the novel environment created at Gemini.” The plants found after construction were larger and more fecund than those found off-site. “Our results suggest that the altered environment created by panel arrays did not alter threecorner milkvetch survivorship at Gemini.”

It’s just one study focused on one solar installation and one plant. But it does suggest that, if done correctly, utility-scale solar development does not have to be a desert’s death knell.

In related, but less sunny news: Lawmakers from a handful of states have proposed bills that would make it easier for residents and businesses to install plug-in or balcony solar panels. While these panels don’t generate a ton of electricity, they are relatively inexpensive and, as the name indicates, are pretty simple to hook up. They are common in parts of Europe, especially Germany, and are gaining popularity in the U.S. since the Trump administration has killed most federal rooftop solar subsidies. The legislation is mostly aimed at allowing folks to plug these things in without a permit or go-ahead from the utility. 

Last year, Utah, of all places, actually passed one of these bills. But so far this year plug-in solar legislation has died in Wyoming and in Arizona, after utilities expressed concerns. Come on! The California bill seems to still be alive. 

Parting Note

I’ll be leading a couple of workshops and giving a talk at this year’s Entrada Institute “Writing from the Land” on May 14-16 in Torrey, Utah. Check it out:

Federal Water Tap, February 23, 2026: In Separate Lawsuits EPA Upholds, Rejects Biden-Era Drinking Water Rules — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org)

The San Juan River has peaked above 8,000 cfs twice in October 2025, reaching the highest levels seen since the 1927 flood. Source: USGS.

Click the link to read the article on the Circle of Blue website (Brett Walton):

The Rundown

  • EPA asks federal court to pause part of its regulations for PFAS in drinking water.
  • EPA also says it will uphold Biden-era lead pipe replacement requirements.
  • DOE once again orders a Michigan coal plant to continue operating.
  • Congress will hold hearings this week on safe drinking water, water-related legislation, and an Army Corps authorization bill.
  • U.S. Supreme Court will hold oral arguments this week for the Line 5 oil pipeline case.
  • EPA seeks comments on ways to reduce regulatory burden for hazardous substance spill response plans.
  • FEMA continues to be slow in approving disaster declarations in Democratic-led states.

And lastly, the White House promotes domestic phosphorus mining and glyphosate production by conferring “immunity” under the Defense Production Act.

“Consistent with these findings, I find that ensuring robust domestic elemental phosphorus mining and United States-based production of glyphosate-based herbicides is central to American economic and national security. Without immediate Federal action, the United States remains inadequately equipped and vulnerable.” – President Trump’s executive order that grants these activities (phosphorus mining and glyphosate production) immunity from “damages or penalties” for any activity related to the order. The underlying law is the Defense Production Act. Phosphorus and glyphosate are foundational elements of modern American agribusiness. They are in fertilizer and the weedkiller Roundup. But they are also primary water pollutants that contribute to harmful algal blooms or are linked to cancer and other illnesses.

In context: Toxic Terrain

News Briefs

EPA PFAS Lawsuit
The EPA is continuing to make its case in court that the agency’s Biden-era regulation of four PFAS in drinking water should be paused while it works on a new regulation that would officially rescind them, Bloomberg Law reports.

Two of the regulated chemicals – PFOA and PFOS – have standard numerical limits. The four others – PFNA, PFHxS, PFBS, and GenX – would also be regulated as a group, using what’s known as a “hazard index.” This is the first time the agency has used such an approach for drinking water regulation.

The court in January rejected the EPA’s request to vacate the hazard index component. The agency now wants to separate the hazard index from the rest of the litigation.

Two water utility groups – the American Water Works Association and Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies – filed the lawsuit in June 2024 in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

In the court filing, the agency says that it has drafted a notice of rulemaking to rescind the hazard index and plans to “commence the rulemaking process imminently.”

Lead Pipe Replacement
In a separate lawsuit, the EPA said it would uphold the Biden administration’s 10-year timeline for most cities to replace lead drinking water pipes, the Associated Press reports.

The lawsuit challenging the timeline was also brought by the American Water Works Association, which argued that it was not feasible.

Michigan Coal Plant Operating Order Extended
The Department of Energy once again extended the life of a Michigan coal-fired power plant.

This is the fourth 90-day order to keep the J.H. Campbell Generating Plant operating. The DOE argues that closing the plant is a threat to grid reliability. It is also costing Consumers Energy, the plant owner, a lot of money – at least $80 million through last September. The company will likely recover costs through customer rate increases or surcharges.

Consumers intended to shut down the plant in May 2025.

In context: The Energy Boom Is Coming for Great Lakes Water

Hazardous Spill Response Plans

The EPA, at the prompting of regulated facilities, is considering changing federal requirements for hazardous substance spill plans, which are authorized under the Clean Water Act to guide emergency response in case a large volume of toxic chemicals is released into waterways.

The requirements in questions were established in 2024 during the Biden administration and apply to onshore non-transportation facilities – things like chemical manufacturers, oil and gas operators, gas stations, hospitals.

The agency is seeking comment on whether it should simplify the rules for determining which facilities are required to file response plans. Public comments are due March 20 and can be submitted via www.regulations.gov using docket number EPA-HQ-OLEM-2025-1707.

Studies and Reports

Disaster Declarations and Approvals
FEMA approved a disaster declaration for Louisiana, which the state requested on February 5 following a late-January storm. And it approved a declaration for a Washington, D.C. sewer line that collapsed on January 19.

The federal disaster agency, meanwhile, has rejected or has been slow to approve requests from Democratic-run states. FEMA has not acted on Washington state’s January 21 request.

Arizona and Illinois are appealing requests from last fall that were rejected. Colorado is appealing two requests from January 16 that were denied.

Chinook Salmon Decision
The National Marine Fisheries Service decided against listing the Washington coast segment of Chinook salmon as endangered or threatened, saying the population faces low extinction risk.

This is the result of the agency’s 12-month review, an in-depth assessment of the threats to a species. In response to a petition from the Center for Biological Diversity, the agency had made a preliminary, 90-day decision during the Biden administration that listing the species may be necessary.

Washington coast Chinook salmon spawn north of the Columbia River and west of the Elwha River, a geography that includes the Olympic peninsula.

On the Radar

Line 5 in the U.S. Supreme Court
On February 24, the nation’s high court will hear oral arguments in a case involving the controversial Line 5 oil pipeline that crosses the Straits of Mackinac between lakes Huron and Michigan.

The case centers on a jurisdictional matter: should the lawsuit seeking to shut down the 73-year-old pipeline be heard in state or federal court?

Dana Nessel, the Michigan attorney general, filed the case in state court in 2019 alleging that Enbridge’s continued operation of the pipeline violated state law.

In context: Federal Judge: Michigan Has No Authority to Shut Down Line 5

Colorado River DEIS Comments Due
The Bureau of Reclamation is accepting public comments through March 2 on its draft plan for managing the Colorado River reservoirs after current rules expire at the end of the year.

Submit comments via crbpost2026@usbr.gov.

Congressional Hearings
On February 24, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing on safe drinking water in the United States.

Also on February 24, a Senate Energy and Natural Resources subcommittee will discuss 18 water-related bills, including rural water supply systems, snow water forecasting, and water recycling.

There are two hearings this week on the next Water Resources Development Act, the legislation that authorizes Army Corps projects for dams, levees, ports, and ecosystem restoration.

The action starts on February 24 with a House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee. The head of the Army Corps will testify, as will the chief of engineers.

Then on February 25, the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works holds its own hearing.

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.

2026 Conservation in the West Poll — State of the Rockies Project

Dark Skies Over Bears Ears, Valley of the Gods, Utah, This photo was taken late at night in the middle of the desert. Over the Fourth of July, I traveled to Southeast Utah to interview people and take some final light readings in Blanding and Monticello Utah while working for the State of the Rockies Project Dark Skies Team. The whole summer I had been trying to get a reading within the “no visible light” range. This night I was able to do so. It was so dark that my light meter didn’t even work, but once I switched out my lens to a fisheye, the whole sky appeared on my camera in front of me. For me, this image represents something I had been looking for all summer. I had heard people speak about the sky in Bears Ears and why it was so worth protecting, but to see the stars for myself was something else entirely. Photo by Megan O’Brien, ’25

Click the link to read the release on the Colorado College website:

February 18, 2026

Here’s the release:

Mountain West Voters Show Growing Concerns Over Public Land Protections Heading into 2026 Elections

State of the Rockies Project survey shows tension over direction of land management and energy priorities, and desire for conservation of scarce water resources and public lands.

COLORADO SPRINGS—Results from Colorado College’s 16th annual State of the Rockies Project Conservation in the West Poll released today show widespread concern among Western voters about rollbacks of protections for land, water, and wildlife and cuts to funding for public land management.

The poll, which surveyed voters in eight Mountain West states—Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming—found that Western voters across party lines are prioritizing conservation, recreation, and renewables over fossil fuel development heading into this year’s midterm elections.

Highlights from the Poll

  • 84% of Western voters say that the rollback of laws that protect our land, water, and wildlife is a serious problem, a sharp increase from prior years.
  • 85% of respondents say issues involving public lands, waters, and wildlife are important in deciding whether to support a public official.
  • 86% of Western voters deem funding cuts to public lands a serious problem, including 76% of Republicans.
  • 70% of respondents oppose fast-tracking oil, gas and mining projects on national public lands by reducing environmental reviews and local public input.
  • 72% of Westerners prefer expanding renewable energy over drilling and mining for more fossil fuels.
  • 76% of Western voters—more Western voters than ever before—say they would prefer their member of Congress to place more emphasis on conservation and recreation on public lands over maximizing energy production.
  • 74% of Western voters oppose selling some national public lands for oil and gas development.
  • 91% of Western voters say existing national monument designations should be kept in place.

As policymakers look ahead to the upcoming midterm elections, 85% of voters in Mountain West states say issues involving public lands, waters, and wildlife are important in deciding whether to support a candidate.

“At a time of growing pressure on land and water in the West, the call to action from voters is clear and bipartisan: Westerners want funding and stewardship for public lands and natural resources, ” said Ian Johnson, Director of Strategic Initiatives & Sustainability at Colorado College.

Voters want to prioritize renewable energy sources. When asked to prioritize energy sources, voters across party lines selected solar as their top choice, while coal was the least desired, with only 7% of respondents listing coal as a first or second priority.

Funding cuts to public land management have proven unpopular with Western voters. Recent funding cuts have reduced the number of firefighters, park rangers, scientists, and other employees working to protect public lands, water, and wildlife over the last year. These cuts to public land management have 86% of voters across party lines concerned, including 75% of MAGA supporters.

Western voters also oppose the sale of public lands and the elimination of public land protections. Even with rising housing costs, 76% of Western voters oppose selling public lands for housing. Additionally, 74% of Western voters oppose selling public lands to private companies for oil, gas, and mining development.

Scarce water resources continue to be a concern for Westerners, particularly in states that have experienced droughts. Westerners consider scarce water resources a serious problem, with 87% of Western voters concerned about inadequate water supplies. Accordingly, 83% of voters in states along the Colorado River or its tributaries would support an agreement requiring all states to reduce their use of the Colorado River to preserve its health. This emphasis on water protection is particularly salient, as 80% of Westerners say data centers are a threat to water quality and supply in the West.

This is the sixteenth consecutive year Colorado College gauged the public’s sentiment on public lands and conservation issues. The 2026 Colorado College Conservation in the West Poll is a bipartisan survey conducted by Republican pollster Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy and Democratic pollster Miranda Everitt of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates. The survey is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The poll surveyed at least 400 registered voters in each of eight Western states (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, & WY) for a total 3,419-voter sample, which included an over-sample of Black and Native American voters. The survey was conducted between January 2-18, 2026 and the effective margin of error is +2.4% at the 95% confidence interval for the total sample; and at most +4.9% for each state. The full survey and individual state surveys are available on the State of the Rockies Project website.

About Colorado College

Colorado College is a nationally prominent four-year liberal arts college that was founded in Colorado Springs in 1874. The College operates on the innovative Block Plan, in which its 2,200 undergraduate students study one course at a time in intensive three and a half-week segments. For the past eighteen years, the college has sponsored the State of the Rockies Project, which encourages students to conduct interdisciplinary investigations around the region to build on and deepen what we know about the challenges we face living in the Rocky Mountain West, and what to do about them.

About Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates

Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates (FM3)—a national Democratic opinion research firm with offices in Oakland, Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon—has specialized in public policy oriented opinion research since 1981. The firm has assisted hundreds of political campaigns at every level of the ballot—from President to City Council—with opinion research and strategic guidance. FM3 also provides research and strategic consulting to public agencies, businesses and public interest organizations nationwide.

About New Bridge Strategy

New Bridge Strategy is a Colorado-based, woman-owned and operated opinion research company specializing in public policy and campaign research. As a Republican polling firm that has led the research for hundreds of successful political and public affairs campaigns, New Bridge has helped coalitions bridging the political spectrum in crafting winning ballot measure campaigns, public education campaigns, and legislative policy efforts.

About Hispanic Access Foundation

Hispanic Access Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, connects Latinos with partners and opportunities to improve lives and create an equitable society. Our vision is that one day every Hispanic individual in America will enjoy good physical health and a healthy natural environment, a quality education, economic success, and civic engagement in their communities with the sum of improving the future of America. For more information visit http://www.hispanicaccess.org.

In Stevens Canyon. Photo credit: Joe Ruffert

Putting land into the public’s hands: And other bits and pieces — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Fields, trees, and the Abajos. North of Dove Creek, Abajo Mountains in the distance. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 30, 2026

Updated to get the graphics right.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

If you’ve ever floated the Gunnison River in western Colorado through the Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area between Delta and Grand Junction, you’ve probably noticed that the land on either side of the stream alternates between public parcels and private ranch land. If the Bureau of Land Management has its way, some 4,000 acres of that private land will soon be entering the public domain, according to reporting from the Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. That’s right, the agency is putting more lovely land into the public’s hands. 

The parcels were formerly operated as a ranch by Dick Miller. After he died, the Conservation Fund purchased the land from Miller’s son for an undisclosed amount in order to sell it to the BLM. The associated BLM grazing leases will reportedly be transferred back to the BLM, but it isn’t clear whether they’ll be made available for grazing again.

The BLM is also looking to put a lot of public land into oil and gas companies’ hands. The agency is seeking public input on proposals to lease 74 parcels covering 33,530 acres in New Mexico, and 271 oil and gas parcels totaling 357,358 acres in Wyoming. 

The New Mexico parcels are mostly in the Permian Basin, but do include tracts in the San Juan Basin located north and northeast of Chaco Culture National Historical Park (but not within the ten-mile buffer zone, which remains in place — for now). 

The Wyoming parcels are concentrated in the southern part of the state between Rawlins and Green River, the central part of the state, and the Powder River Basin.

🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅

Wolves in the West have had a rough go of it ever since white settlers showed up in the 1800s and proceeded to slaughter them en masse. And while they’ve been able to recover somewhat in the Northern Rockies, thanks in part to endangered species protections and reintroduction efforts, the move to bring them back to Colorado and the Southwest has hit obstacles — and tragedy, including:

  • Another reintroduced wolf has died in Colorado, reports the Colorado Sun’s Tracy Ross, bringing the total number of wolf fatalities since the start of reintroduction to 11. The cause of death has not been determined.
  • Meanwhile, Colorado Parks and Wildlife has paused new wolf reintroductions because it hasn’t been able to find another state or tribal nation to provide the animals.
  • Utah Department of Agriculture officials killed three wolves in the northern part of the state on Jan. 9. While wolves are protected by the Endangered Species Act in most of the state, they were delisted in one small section along the Wyoming border when protections were lifted for the Northern Rockies population. Now, apparently, the state will kill any wolves that wander into that area, just because they can, and to prevent them from going into the protected zone. That’s despite the fact that the three animals had not killed or stalked any livestock. “I have not heard any of my neighbors, and we haven’t had the experience ourselves that we’ve had actual issues with our cattle and wolves,” area livestock owner Launie Evans told KSL.
  • And in more sad news: “Taylor,” the Mexican gray wolf that wandered out of southern New Mexico and into the Mt. Taylor region, was found dead on I-40 near Grants. Taylor first roamed onto Mt. Taylor early last year, apparently not realizing that the feds don’t allow wolves to cross I-40. Wildlife officials captured him and deported him back to the southland, but he was persistent, and simply turned around and headed north again. He was removed again in November, but couldn’t stay away from Mt. Taylor. This time, on his return journey, he was struck by a vehicle.

    “Taylor’s death is a heartbreaking reminder that highways like I-40 are not just lines on a map, they are lethal barriers for wildlife,” said Claire Musser, executive director of the Grand Canyon Wolf Recovery Project, in a statement. “Abolishing I-40 as a management boundary is long overdue. If we are serious about recovery, we must allow wolves to move freely across suitable habitats and invest in wildlife crossings and landscape-scale connectivity so highways no longer function as death traps.”
  • And, finally, CPW’s latest map of wolf activity is out (at the top of this section), and it shows that wolves have been wandering into new parts of the state. Folks in the Silverton area might just be seeing some soon. If you think you see one, but aren’t sure if it’s a wolf or coyote, this little guide from CPW might help:

Longread: On wolves, wildness, and hope in trying times: How Ol Big Foot’s story restored a shard of optimism — Jonathan P. Thompson

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Public Citizen just released an accounting of some of the ways the Trump administration is subsidizing global mining corporations and their operations on public lands — and the ways in which executives made off like bandits as a result. It’s worth reading the whole report, but here are just a small sampling of highlights:

  • $8.8 million: Amount 13 mining corporations, including Rio Tinto, Resolution Copper, South32, Lithium Americas, and Ambler Metals, spent on lobbying in 2025.
  • $3.5 million: Amount Lithium America paid Interior Department official Karen Budd-Falen’s husband for water rights for its Thacker Pass mine in Nevada. The federal government also took a 5% stake in the company and the mine as a condition of preserving a Biden-era loan.
  • $400 million: Amount the U.S. Defense Department paid for a stake in Las Vegas-based MP Materials, which owns the Mountain Pass rare earths mine in California. The Pentagon also loaned the company $150 million.

The Bureau of Land Management approved the Grassy Mountain gold and silver mine on 469 acres of public land in Malheur County, Oregon. The action allows Paramount Gold Nevada to develop an underground mine, an onsite mill, and “associated storage” (which I’m taking to mean they’ll be able to dispose of toxic mill tailings on public land mining claims).

📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐

Here’s a great piece by Leah Sottile, who has written authoritatively on right-wing movements and more, on the plague of hypocrisy going around right now.

The Truth Does Not Change According to Our Ability to Stomach It: 67. Hypocrisy On the whiplash of this chaotic moment — Leah Sottile

The Border Chronicle is indispensable reading these days and, well, always. This piece, titled Border Patrol Nation, is an important look at the violent history of the Border Patrol.

*

And you really should be reading Wayne Hare’s writing over at the Civil Conversations Project.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Speaking of hypocrisy: I’m sure most of you have heard Trump administration officials saying that federal ICE and/or CPB agents shot Alex Pretti because he brought a gun to a protest. The photos below were all captured at the May 2014 Recapture rally in Blanding, Utah. Quite a few of the attendees — who were on hand to protest “federal overreach” — were armed. None of them were shot. Just sayin’.

Folks exercising the right to bear arms at Recapture Canyon to protest federal overreach. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Musical Sendoff

Ancient energy sources power the future: The AI Age perpetuates #fossilfuel burning. — Jonathan P. Thompson (High Country News) #climate

Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 29, 2026

The latest iteration of the Information Age appears to have arrived in full-force, manifested as AI, the digital cloud, remote work and the mass migration from the material world into cyberspace. 

A couple of decades ago, when I was feeling optimistic, I envisioned this future as a Jetsons-esque world, where the noisy clang of machinery would give way to a soft electrified hum while robots and artificial intelligence performed menial and mundane tasks, freeing us to live like George Jetson, working a leisurely nine hours a week as a digital index operator at a space sprocket firm. 

This new era would be a vast improvement over the worn-out Industrial Age, mainly because it would come with an energy transition. We would ditch our clanky old machinery — all the smokestacks and pollution and internal combustion engines — trading them for sleek cars that, if not flying, would at least be electric, powered by cleaner, gentler and quieter forms of energy, like wind and solar. 

Data center construction at 49th & Race, Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best

But now, the future is here and AI is everywhere, whether you want it to be or not. It can’t yet wash the dishes, and even though it’s begun taking people’s jobs, it hasn’t erased the need to work for a living. It can, however, correct your spelling errors, help researchers crunch huge datasets, diagnose illnesses and even provide what passes for mental health counseling. It can also inject language you never intended into your messages without your knowledge, churn out inane emails and stilted high school essays, and casually plagiarize artists, writers and journalists. 

This new age has its marvelous aspects, I suppose, but it is also disappointing — even baffling. It’s true that it has coincided with the clean(er) energy transition; coal-burning for power generation has been declining since 2007, while solar, wind and battery storage have boomed. And yet instead of allowing us to abandon the most outdated component of the Industrial Age — the production of power via fossil fuel combustion — the Information Age has helped perpetuate this dirty habit. Our most futuristic, newfangled technologies continue to rely on prehistoric energy. 

Every AI query or other cyber-operation that relies on cloud computing is processed by data centers, warehouse-like buildings housing row after row of servers that churn through digital information. Each individual operation might use a fairly small amount of power, but a single data center handling millions of queries per day can guzzle as much electricity as an entire city. 

And now, the buildup of energy-intensive, AI-processing hyperscale data centers threatens to outpace the energy transition, while giving fossil fuel-boosters justification for continuing to rely on dirty energy sources. To meet the burgeoning demand for power, utilities are nixing plans to shutter old coal and nuclear plants, and data center developers are even constructing new natural gas generators to power their facilities. 

Each time you or I queue up an old Jetsons episode on YouTube or ask ChatGPT whether a video was real or fabricated by Grok, the request travels at roughly the speed of light to a data center. Perhaps that data center happens to be a grid-connected facility in, say, the Phoenix metro area, where hyperscale data centers are sprouting like cheatgrass. The facility’s GPUs and CPUs run off electricity funneled in from transmission lines that connect to power plants spread across the utility’s entire grid. 

That means there’s a good chance that some of that power is coming from the Four Corners coal power plant in northwestern New Mexico, or from natural gas plants burning methane from the oil and gas fields in the nearby San Juan Basin. 

How did all that coal and methane get there in the first place? We have to go back some 145 million years to the beginning of the Cretaceous period, when a shallow, briny sea covered much of what is now the Interior West. Over thousands of millennia, the sea advanced and retreated numerous times, laying down layers of sediment — sand, mud, clay — each time, supplemented by silt carried by huge rivers originating in adjacent mountain ranges.

An artist’s reconstruction of a ‘Sarabosaurus dahli’ swimming with ammonites and fish in southern Utah 94 million years ago. Andrey Atuchin/Bureau of Land Management

Embedded within the sediment was organic material, including plants, algae, bacteria, plankton and other microorganisms — along with much larger creatures, from Cretalamna (a megatooth shark) to the Sarabosaurus dahli, which might have resembled some combination of fish, seal and lizard. As the sediment piled up and was subjected to heat and pressure, each layer was transformed into a rock formation: the Dakota sandstone, the Mancos shale, the Mesa Verde sandstone and more. Meanwhile, the organisms decomposed in an oxygen-free environment, eventually transforming into crude oil and methane, or natural gas. 

In the Late Cretaceous, before the dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago, the sea retreated for the final time, leaving behind vast freshwater swamps in what is now the San Juan Basin. The climate back then was downright sultry — rainy and warm and almost tropical. Trees and plants grew profusely in and around the shallow marshes, and fallen leaves and toppled trees decayed rapidly, leaving behind deep accumulations of decayed vegetal matter, or peat. Ultimately, this, too, would be transformed by pressure, heat and millions of years into thick, methane-infused coalbeds that are now part of the Fruitland formation.

Coal Mine Canyon is lined with reddish sandstones and siltstones of Mesozoic age. The Canyon is situated in a remote locale bordering the eastern edge of the Painted Desert. On the mesa above the canyon, are longitudinal sands dunes. The quality of coal in the canyon is poor and active coal mining was discontinued decades ago. Photo credit: Ted Grussing/University of Arizona

These days, huge draglines with house-sized shovels tear into the earth at the Navajo Mine, exhuming the remnants of those swamps at a rate of about 14,000 tons daily. The carboniferous rocks are then shipped a few miles north to the Four Corners power plant. In the nearby gas fields, drillers have poked tens of thousands of holes in the ground and hydraulically fractured the rock formations to get at the hydrocarbons, the physical memories of ancient sea creatures, which are then processed and piped to natural gas power plants.

The fuels are burned, releasing carbon and other pollutants that have been stored for millions of years underground, to generate enough steam to turn turbines to spark an electromagnetic field and send electrons across the desert in massive transmission lines to the Arizona grid. From there, they travel to the data center’s server banks, businesses and homes, ultimately ending up in the outlet next to your bed where you charge your phone. 

Fossil fuel combustion made the Industrial Age possible and continues to drive much of society, both in and out of cyberspace. Yet when you factor in the immense amounts of time, human labor, energy and downright violence required to extract and process and transport these fuels, the whole endeavor seems increasingly bizarre. The strangeness is only magnified by the fact that this ancient form of energy powers the newfangled technology of the Information Age, especially when the same technology has given us access to an abundance of renewable, cleaner forms of power.

#Utah officials pillage public lands — again: BLM greenlights St. George highway; Lawmakers look to repeal GSENM management plan — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

The Antiquities Act of 1906 was signed into law by Theodore Roosevelt, for “… the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest” through the designation of national monuments by the President and Congress. National monuments are one of the types of specially-designated areas that make up the BLM’s National Conservation Lands. Some of the earliest national monuments included Devils Tower, the Grand Canyon, and Death Valley. They were initially protected by the War Department, then later by the National Park Service. More recently, the BLM and other Federal agencies have retained stewardship responsibilities for national monuments on public lands. In fact, the BLM manages more acres of national monuments in the continental U. S. than any other agency. This includes the largest land-based national monument, the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah featured here. National monuments under the BLM’s stewardship have yielded numerous scientific discoveries, ranging from fossils of previously unknown dinosaurs to new theories about prehistoric cultures. They provide places to view some of America’s darkest night skies, most unique wildlife, and treasured archaeological resources. In total, twenty BLM-managed national monuments, covering over five million acres, are found throughout the western U. S. and offer endless opportunities for discovery. Photos and description by Bob Wick, BLM.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 23, 2026

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

St. George, in Utah’s southwest corner, is one of the nation’s fastest growing communities. This is partly because of a nice climate, access to a major interstate, and relative closeness to Salt Lake City and Las Vegas. But it’s also because the landscape in which it sits is stunning, characterized by burnished red sandstone punctuated by dark volcanic formations and the green ribbons of the Santa Clara and Virgin Rivers, all set against the backdrop of the Pine Valley Mountains. In 2009, Congress created the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area on about 45,000 acres of BLM land just north of St. George to protect some of this landscape and its wildlife, and to offer a refuge from the burgeoning mass of humanity.

Satellite view of St. George, the southern end of the Red Cliff National Conservation Area, and the proposed highway corridor just approved by the BLM (in purple). The highway would fragment desert tortoise habitat and near-town hiking areas. Google Earth image.

But the Trump administration — and the state of Utah — have other plans. This week, the Bureau of Land Management approved Utah’s plans to build a four-lane highwaythrough the south end of the conservation area. The stated aim is to accommodate growth, reduce congestion, and speed up the car trip from one section of sprawl to another. But really it will only induce growth and more traffic, while also diminishing one of St. George’s most appealing assets.

The idea for a Northern Corridor Highway has been bantered about for a couple of decades. The proposal seemed to perish in 2016, when the BLM denied Washington County’s bid to build the road through the national conservation area. But when Donald Trump was elected president the first time, the county and the Utah Department of Transportation seized the opportunity to apply for a right of way to build a 4.5 mile, four-lane highway across a portion of the conservation area.

Red Cliff National Conservation Area. The Northern Corridor Highway would connect to the Red Hills Parkway in the mid-ground of the photo about one-third of the way in from the left. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

In January 2021, the outgoing Trump administration’s BLM approved the right of way, even though its own analysis acknowledged that it would destroy tortoise habitat, spread invasive species, and essentially chop off the southern end of the conservation area, destroying trails and damaging the recreation experience. A large coalition of environmental groups under the banner of the Red Cliffs Conservation Coalition sued the BLM, and the agency ultimately agreed to redo the environmental analysis — finally rejecting the proposed highway at the end of 2024 and recommending an expansion of the existing Red Hills Parkway, instead.

Once Biden was out of office, however, the state and Washington County once again appealed to the feds to grant them a right-of-way, arguing that the Red Hills Parkway idea was not feasible. And since the Trump administration and Utah’s elected leaders tend to value roads and more suburban sprawl over tortoises, beauty, and the thriving desert landscape, the BLM opened the door to bulldoze more land to indulge Utah’s road fetish and to make way for yet another monument to America’s car-centric culture.

***

A couple of dispatches ago, I wrote about how curious it was that the Trump administration had yet to move to diminish or eliminate any national monuments during this second term. It may be because they are outsourcing the task to Congress.

Utah’s congressional delegation is expected to introduce federal legislation that would use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Biden-era Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument management plan. If the “resolution of disapproval” passes both chambers of Congress with a simple majority vote, it would erase the plan and bar the Bureau of Land Management from issuing another plan that is “substantially the same” in the future.

This wouldn’t change the boundaries of the monument, but would likely cause management of the area to revert back to the 2020, Trump I-era plan. That plan was not only less protective than the newer one, but only applied to a much smaller area, since in 2017 Trump had significantly shrunk the national monument. Revoking the current management plan, then, would leave vast areas of the monument in a sort of management limbo.

“I strongly denounce any attempt to use the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument Resource Management Plan. This plan reflects years of public input, scientific research, and meaningful Tribal consultation, and dismantling it through procedural shortcuts undermines good governance, responsible land stewardship, and the protection of irreplaceable cultural landscapes,” said Autumn Gillard, Southern Paiute, Grand Staircase-Escalante Inter-Tribal Coalition member, in a written statement. “At this time, I urge lawmakers from both sides of the aisle to uphold the approved resource management plan from January 2025.”

Feds seek public input on Grand Staircase-Escalante management plan — Jonathan P. Thompson

***

Utah officials often say they dislike new national monument designations because, in their minds, protecting land and cultural resources is bad for the economy, mostly because they block new mining and drilling. A new study shows they are wrong.

Headwaters Economics analyzed economic conditions and trends in 30 national monument gateway communities, and found that national monument designations do not disrupt local economies. They also don’t give nearby communities a substantial economic boost. “Employment and population trends continue on the same trajectory after designation,” Headwaters found, “and income growth tends to improve modestly over time.”

From Headwaters Economics’ economic performance of communities near national monuments report.

The findings match up with what one would intuitively expect. National monuments are rarely designated in areas that are currently targeted for new drilling and mining, meaning they are unlikely to affect the existing extractive economies. Meanwhile, they are often established in places that are already experiencing an increase in visitation, meaning that designation wouldn’t necessarily cause a significant jump in tourism.

Take Bears Ears National Monument, for example. It was established in 2016 on federal land in San Juan County, Utah. Both the oil and gas and uranium mining industries were (and are) active in the county. But they weren’t interested in drilling new wells or opening new mines within the monument’s boundaries. Previous oil and gas wells had mostly come up dry — drillers have found much more success in the Aneth and McElmo fields east of the monument. And the Daneros uranium mine, which is been on standby status for years, is outside the boundaries, as well. In other words, monument designation had absolutely zero effect on either industry.

Meanwhile, fears that establishing a national monument in this corner of southeastern Utah would lead to its “discovery” by the masses were overblown, simply because the internet and social media had already lured folks to the area. Indeed, part of the reason people pushed for designation was to try to get a handle on increased visitation and its impacts on natural and cultural resources.

Headwaters has a nice interactive graphic on which you can check out the economic trends around the 30 national monuments. The trends, themselves, are interesting to see: They make it abundantly clear that other factors, especially COVID-19, had a much bigger effect than any national monument designation.

The Meaning of Monuments — Jonathan P. Thompson

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

The Big Data Center Buildup is accelerating. Nearly every day I get news of another proposed hyperscale facility somewhere in the West. A lot of them are not planning on connecting to the power grid, which is good for other utility users, because they won’t have to pay for associated infrastructure upgrades. But in almost every case, their proposed power sources include at least some gas-fired generation. And natural gas, i.e. methane, is not clean energy by any means.

So, while the data center boom has the potential to accelerate the clean energy transition by encouraging more solar, wind, and battery storage, it is also slowing the transition by perpetuating fossil fuel burning and even prompting construction of new fossil fuel-fired facilities.

Projects that have come onto my radar recently include:

  • Laramie County, Wyoming’s commissioners approved Crusoe Energy Systems’ and Tallgrass’ proposed AI data center complex near Cheyenne, despite residents’ pushback over the project’s massive scale. If this thing is built as planned, it will be ginormous, with estimated capital costs of $50 billion. That would not only include the Project Jade’s five data centers and associated structures, but also a 2,700 MW gas-fired power plant — which would be among the largest of its kind in the West. The developers plan to use a closed-loop cooling system, which is less water-intensive than conventional evaporative systems but uses more energy.
  • About 150 miles west of there, Power Company of Wyoming, an Anschutz Corporation subsidiary, is proposing a 2,000 MW gas generating facility in Carbon County to serve growing data center-driven power demand. These are the same folks who are building the Chokecherry Sierra Madre wind project and the TransWest Express transmission line. The controversial, 732-mile TransWest Express was originally billed as a clean-energy line that would carry Wyoming wind to California. Looks like it also will be moving fossil fuel-fired power, as well.
  • Residents of Surprise, Arizona, a section of Phoenix’s sprawl, are getting a little surprise of their own: A proposed data center and dedicated 700 MW natural gas plant adjacent to a residential neighborhood. Residents are not too pleased, according to a story in the Arizona Republic, and are worried about the environmental and health impacts of a gas plant and the data center. The data center would run off the gas plant for the first couple years of operation before connecting with the grid. Then the plant would serve as backup for the center as well as a “peaker” plant, meaning it is fired up during peak demand.
🫣 Correction 🙀

In this week’s Colorado River glossary and primer I inadvertently shrunk the Colorado River watershed quite significantly by leaving out two zeros. It covers about 250,000 square miles, not 2,500. Duh.

Cool Opportunity

The Wright-Ingraham Institute is now taking applications for its three-week immersive fellowship for graduate students and early-career professionals in science, design, policy, the arts, and beyond. This year’s field workshop focuses is on “designing for adaptation in a time of prolonged drought,” and will be held in the San Luis Valley and Taos Plateau from July 6-27. Read more and apply here. 

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

This one popped up on my Facebook feed and I just had to purloin it. It’s downtown Grand Junction in the 1960s (I believe), not long after they refashioned the main drag to make it more people-friendly. It’s funny because a lot of folks in my hometown of Durango are freaking out about a proposal to do something kind of like this, but even less radical, to its downtown. They claim that widening sidewalks and so forth will destroy the historic integrity of the streetscape. In my mind, this photo illustrates how untrue that claim is.

Data Dump: One year into the “energy emergency”: President Trump has helped oil and gas companies, but “drill, baby, drill” remains elusive — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

While Donald Trump seems to think he coined terms like “Drill, Baby, Drill,” the fact is, they’ve been around for a long, long time. This sign appeared at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. While Republican candidate John McCain and his VP candidate Sarah Palin were most vocally calling for increased drilling, the Democrats were also getting behind the nascent “fracking” revolution and touting natural gas as a cleaner bridge fuel from coal to solar and wind. And the so-called shale oil and gas drilling boom took off during the Obama administration. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 9, 2026

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown 📈 Data Dump

Donald Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trail: If elected, he would bring down the cost of groceries (a word that seemed new to him), he would secure the borders, he would end all of the wars on day one, and he would unleash the oil companies so they could “drill, baby, drill” and secure “energy dominance.”

Groceries are still expensive, “border security” is now MAGA-speak for federal agents gunning down innocent bystanders, and not only are the wars still raging, but the administration’s newly named “Department of War” has bombed Iran, Nigeria, and Venezuela, and is now threatening to invade Greenland and even Mexico. 

In fact, the only war that Trump can take credit for ending was Biden’s “war” on energy. And that’s only because the “war” didn’t exist in the first place! It was and remains a figment of the GOP’s imagination.

On Biden’s Energy Dominance — Jonathan P. Thompson

Still, the administration did live up to at least one promise: It used a fabricated “energy emergency” to help increase extractive corporations’ profit margins by rolling back environmental protections, handing out drilling permits like candy at a parade, fast-tracking various mine and oil and gas infrastructure permits, and offering oodles of public land to energy companies. 

But has it really achieve the stated goal, to establish “energy dominance” — i.e. boost production, bring down prices, and end oil imports? 

Maybe the data will help us figure that one out … 

Leasing

As I think we’ve established, the Biden administration did not wage a war on energy or even oil and gas. In fact, under Biden, the nation became the world’s largest oil producer, the largest exporter of liquefied natural gas, and so on, while also fast-tracking solar, wind, and transmission projects on federal lands. 

Biden’s Interior Department did, however, put up some guardrails aimed at protecting some public lands. While it leased out parcels in the Permian Basin without restraint, it also refrained from putting some more sensitive parcels up for auction in more sensitive areas with limited oil and gas production. 

The Trump administration has been far more friendly to oil and gas companies looking to bolster their land-holding portfolios, not only offering up hundreds of thousands of acres, but then putting them up for auction a second time if the first round didn’t attract enough bids.

  • 328,000 acres: Amount of public land and minerals the BLM leased to oil and gas companies between Jan. 20 and Dec. 31, 2025. This brought in about $356 million in revenue. 
  • $327 million: Amount a single oil and gas lease sale for 31 parcels, mostly in New Mexico’s Permian Basin, brought in this January, a record per-acre high average bid amount. 
  • 0: Number of bids received for 23 offered oil and gas lease parcels in Colorado in January. The sale was a “replacement” sale held after the initial auction failed to attract enough bids.

Drilling Permits

President Trump’s BLM issued an average of 909 permits to drill per month during the first year of his second term. This is almost triple the monthly average for Biden’s administration.

Environmentalists often attacked Biden for issuing more drilling permits for public lands than Trump did during his first administration. The comparison was dumb, but whatever. Trump apparently didn’t like Biden’s apparent energy dominance, so he struck back by issuing more than 5,000 drilling permits last year, far exceeding the Biden administration’s monthly and yearly averages.

  • 1,124: Number of drilling permits the BLM issued to EOG Resources in 2025, mostly in the Permian Basin. That compares to 755 for XTO Permian and XTO Energy; 293 for Anschutz Exploration; 503 to Devon Energy; 338 to OXY USA; 241 to Matador Production; 119 to Chevron; 106 to Middle Fork Energy Uinta; and 80 to ConocoPhillips. 
  • 95: Number of drilling permits the BLM’s Farmington Field Office issued in 2025, to Hilcorp, Logos, SIMCOE, DJR Operating, and other companies. While this pales in comparison to the Permian Basin, it is a marked increase from recent years. 
  • 8: Number of drilling permits the BLM’s Moab Field Office issued in 2025. 
  • 100: Approximate number of drill rigs operating in all of New Mexico during any given week of 2025. 
  • 8,949: Number of approved federal drilling permits held by oil and gas companies that were available to drill as of Jan. 2, 2026. That is to say, they have the permits, but haven’t yet used them.
Production

During the past year, domestic crude oil production continued to increase month-to-month, but at a slower rate than it had previously. Oil production on federal lands was down about 2% from fiscal year 2024. This is mostly due to industry’s lack of enthusiasm for more drilling, thanks to a combination of low oil prices and higher expenses due to inflation and tariffs on steel and other equipment. So much for drill, baby, drill.

Oil production from federal and tribal nation lands was down for fiscal year 2025 as of August. Source: U.S. Department of the Interior.

7.9 million: Barrels of crude oil per day the U.S. was importing from other countries in December 2025. That’s marginally less than a year earlier. 

2.1 million barrels/day: Net crude oil imports (imports minus exports) to the U.S. in December 2025. 

Idle Wells
*GSI/OSI: Gas or oil wells oil well that are capable of producing but have not produced during the production month.

I find this to be, perhaps, the most telling chart of all. It shows the number of idle wells on federal mineral leases (which includes public lands and split-estate private lands) by Western state. A lot of the wells have just been wrung dry and have been abandoned and need to be plugged and reclaimed, probably at the taxpayer’s expense. 

Still others, the ones in the GSI (non-producing gas completion) and OSI (non-producing oil completion) columns, are officially capable of producing oil and gas, it’s just that for one reason or another they aren’t producing currently. Dozens of the GSI/OSI wells in Wyoming, for example, are owned by bankrupt companies that were unable to offload them to someone else. 

This brings up a question: If we are indeed in an “energy emergency,” as the Trump administration has declared, shouldn’t we be pumping all of the oil and gas from existing wells that we possibly can before issuing thousands of new drilling permits, most of which aren’t even being used? 

Let me answer that one: We’re not in an energy emergency. 

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

I came across this cool old map of the Sangre de Cristo land grant while perusing the Green Fire Times’ tribute to Malcolm Ebright, who was a land grant community advocate and historian. In order to get a high-res version I had to, um, copy this from an online auction site (thus the watermarks). I don’t have much to say about it, except it’s a pretty cool map of a very cool area.

#Oil, Ego, and Venezuela: On President Trump’s dangerous “Donroe Doctrine” shenanigans — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Oil pumpjack on La Plata County, Colorado’s, “Dryside.” Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 6, 2026

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

Five years ago today, President Donald Trump incited an angry mob of his followers to attack the nation’s Capitol building in an attempt to overturn the presidential election that he had just lost. He was trying to launch a coup to overthrow America’s democracy. At the time, many of us expected him to be impeached, and maybe even go to jail for this deplorable act. Little could we have guessed that just half a decade later he’d not only be President once again, but would actually be succeeding in his bid to dismantle democracy, and would be doing it with the tacit and explicit support of Congress, the Supreme Court, and his many supporters who don’t seem to be bothered by his cognitive decline, authoritarianism, broken promises, lies, close association with a convicted sex trafficker and pedophile, disregard for the Constitution, and reckless tinkering with the U.S. economy, international affairs, and his constituents’ well-being.

The administration’s invasion of Venezuela is simply the latest, most egregious example. The military went in, lit up Caracas with explosives and gunfire, killed civilians, kidnapped the nation’s leader (who, admittedly, was a nasty authoritarian), and sowed chaos, all without authorization from Congress. The reason? Trump himself says it was to turn the country’s vast oil reserves over to American corporations, which donated generously to Trump’s campaign. But Trump and his minions were equally motivated by the need to stroke Trump’s fragile ego — which has taken a beating thanks to other failures and low approval ratings, and to distract from his ubiquity in the Epstein files (which the DOJ has yet to release as Congress ordered it to do). Don’t be surprised if they invade Greenland or Cuba or even Mexico, next, as stupid as such a scenario might be.

But let’s focus on the oil factor, since that’s the one that’s most likely to trickle down into the Land Desk beat.

Venezuela has a lot of oil, reportedly the largest proved reserves in the world, and it’s mostly made up of heavy, sour crude (more on this in a minute). It’s currently not extracting very much of that oil, for various reasons (the U.S. produces about 20 times more per day than Venezuela). Trump is encouraging American oil companies to go to Venezuela and develop the oil fields and upgrade the infrastructure. This will take time and money, and it’s not clear that petroleum corporations will be interested in this kind of investment while oil prices are low (as they are, currently). Prices are low because demand and supply are more or less balanced, meaning the world doesn’t really need Venezuelan’s oil — at least not now.

Like fine wine, oil is imbued with terroir. That is, its composition varies depending on where it’s from. Most U.S.-produced oil is tight (from tight shales), light (low density), sweet (low sulfur content) crude that requires less processing than heavy (dense), sour (high sulfur) crude. Thing is, many Gulf Coast refineries were constructed before the shale revolution and are equipped to process heavy, sour crude, like the kind that comes from Venezuela. So there is a domestic demand for the stuff.

The active drilling rig count, the most accurate indicator of oil and gas activity, remains stagnant, despite Trump’s call to “drill, baby, drill,” thanks to persistently low oil and gas prices. If Venezuelan oil production increases — and that remains a big “if” — it could further deflate crude prices and dampen enthusiasm for domestic drilling. Source: Baker Hughes

If and when Venezuelan production increases, it will add supply to both the global and domestic markets, which could bring prices down even further. That will lower the cost of driving American gas guzzlers around, and increase greenhouse gas emissions and other pollutants, but it will also reduce incentives to drill new wells, which could ease industry pressure on public lands in the U.S. In the meantime, the Trump administration continues to issue drilling permits at a blistering rate, even though companies aren’t all that interested in using them.

Wise Use Echoes — Jonathan P. Thompson

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Last week, the Durango Herald quoted a National Weather Service meteorologist as saying that the snowpack in the southwestern part of the state was “not too bad.” I guess that depends on your definition of “not too bad.” Because it sure as heck isn’t looking good!

Red Mountain Pass has about half as much snow as it normally does this time of year. Only 1990, 2000, and 2018 rivaled this year for meagre snow levels. Source: NRCS.

The San Juan Mountain snowpack levels are currently at about 50% of normal for the first week of January, and they are tied for third lowest snowpack level on record for this date. That’s not “too bad,” it’s downright dismal. And snow cover is even more meagre in other parts of the state: The Colorado River’s headwaters SNOTEL station is experiencing the lowest snowpack since it started recording in 1986.

No bueno! Source: NRCS.

Still, it may be too early for snow lovers to abandon hope altogether, since a full recovery would not be unprecedented. Take the winter of 1989-90, when the early January snowpack was even worse than it is now. It was my first year in college, and when I came home for Christmas we played volleyball and went hiking in the mostly bare La Plata Mountains instead of going sledding or skiing. (At the time it seemed downright apocalyptic, since it followed the unusually wet 1980s, when snow would pile up in Durango and halt car traffic and turn the streets into nordic ski tracks.) But that March the snows finally came and continued into May, leading to some nice spring skiing and a decent spring runoff. The snowpack of 95-96 followed a similar pattern, as did 1999-2000.

During those years, however, the lack of snow was caused by a lack of precipitation. This year, it’s the result of a combination of light winter precipitation and unusually warm temperatures throughout December and early January. A recovery will require not only more snowfall, but also cooler temperatures, making the outlook a little grimmer.

The Upper Colorado River region has experienced some of its highest daily average temperatures on record this winter. On Christmas Eve, the daily average was a whopping 18° F higher than the median for that day. Source: NRCS.
Parts of the West were hit with five or six times as much precipitation than normal in December, but temperatures were above normal almost everywhere, too, diminishing snowpack. Source: Western Regional Climate Center.
The Phillips Bench SNOTEL station near Teton Pass, Wyoming, shows how the atmospheric rivers have helped the snowpack their rebound.

As of mid-December, the snow drought covered most of the West, but a series of atmospheric rivers pounded the West Coast and the Northern Rockies, bringing snow to higher elevations and more northern latitudes (and big rain and flooding to California). Heavy, wet snow piled up on Teton Pass near Jackson, Wyoming, bringing snow water equivalent levels from far below average to above normal for this date. Road crews triggered a huge avalanche that covered the highway in about 30 feet of snow. And, after the skies cleared, a couple of backcountry skiers triggered a slide near Teton Pass; one of the skiers was caught, buried, and killed. It was the nation’s second avalanche-related fatality this season. A few days later, two Mammoth Mountain ski patrollers were caught in a slide while doing avalanche mitigation work and one of them died.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Now for a little New Year’s treat for all of you weather/map nerds: The Colorado Avalanche Information Center has launched an interactive map that shows 24-hour and 48-hour snowfall and snow water equivalents at various locations across the state’s mountains, letting you see at a click where the good powder is and isn’t. You can click on each station and get all the details, including current temperature and snow depth.

Source: Colorado Avalanche Information Center.

Looking for light in the season of darkness: Plus: Wacky Weather, Data Centers, more.

Sultan Mountain snow and sky. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

December 19, 2025

🐐 Things that get my Goat 🐐

The winter solstice teaches us that we must descend into the darkness before we can return to the light. This solstice season we find ourselves in especially dark times —figuratively speaking.

We can be fairly certain that the earth’s northern hemisphere will begin tilting back towards the light next week. Yet we can only hope that America will find similar relief from the metaphorical shroud of darkness under which it has fallen.

As I monitor the news each day, I find myself spiraling past frustration, disdain, and outrage and sinking into a mire of disbelief and despair. That our government is rife with corruption, short-sightedness, greed, and incompetence is outrageous, but neither new nor surprising. What is new is that those traits are now combined with blatant cruelty, wretchedness, moral vacuity, outright bigotry and racism, and a pathological dearth of empathy and compassion. It’s a toxic stew that emanates from the president, is lapped up by his sycophantic and unqualified cabinet — not to mention the tech broligarchs who debase themselves in hopes of holding onto a few more million of their billions of dollars at tax time, or ease the regulatory burden on their hyperscale AI-powering data centers.

Perhaps most distressing is that the safeguards that once protected the nation from the lunatics or incompetents in power — i.e. the courts, the rule of law, Congress — have themselves been broken down or infected with the same malady of wretchedness.

If you think I’m exaggerating, just consider the current situation: The U.S. military is blowing up Venezuelan boats — and then striking the wreckage again to kill any survivors — and is threatening to go to war with the country and send American soldiers into harm’s way, simply to distract the nation from Trump’s disastrous policies and his close association with known pedophile, sex-trafficker, and scam artist Jeffrey Epstein. And when Democratic members of Congress — and decorated veterans — tell soldiers they will support them if they refuse to break the law, Trump threatens to court-martial them.

That’s outrageous and despicable. That Congress and the courts and the American people aren’t rising up en masse in revolt is depressing. And that’s just one example of so, so many like it. Which explains the extra despair during this dark season.

I’m saying a little pagan prayer that the light will return next year.

But for now, I’m afraid I have some more darkness to report from the Land Desk beat:

  • Back in 2024, former Mesa County clerk and right-wing conspiracy theorist Tina Peters was convicted by a jury of breaching the security of her office’s own election system in 2021 in a futile attempt to prove election fraud. Trump pardoned her, but it didn’t count because it is a state, not federal, crime, and Gov. Jared Polis wasn’t going to play Trump’s game. That made Trump mad, so, in his usual fashion, he governed by spite and is now planning to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder. 
  • This will not only hurt Colorado, but also science and all the people who are affected by climate and weather and the like, which is to say: everybody, this harms us all. Here’s a couple Blue Sky takes from prominent scientists:

  • The U.S. House of Representatives voted yesterday to pass Rep. Lauren Boebert-sponsored legislation that would remove Endangered Species Act protections for gray wolves in the lower 48 states. The bill now goes to the Senate. Congress delisted wolves in the Northern Rockies in 2011, turning management over the states; hunting wolves is no allowed in Montana, Wyoming, and Idaho. This bill could potentially do the same for wolves in California, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, New Mexico, Nevada, and most of Utah.
  • The Bureau of Land Management is going on a bit of a tear when it comes to auctioning off public land leases to oil and gas companies. Just a couple of examples of future sales (June 2026) you can weigh in on:
    • In Utah, the administration is planning on offering 39 parcels covering about 54,000 acres. A bulk of the parcels are located south of the town of Green River, east of the river itself, and adjacent to Tenmile Canyon.
    • And it’s looking to sell 174 oil and gas leases covering more than 160,000 acres in Colorado. They don’t have the maps up for these ones yet, but judging by the descriptions it seems they are scattered across much of the state (but not in southwestern Colorado).
⛈️ Wacky Weather Watch⚡️

Weather is wacky and probably always has been. But this month has got to be one of the weirdest, weather-wise, the West has seen in a while. It’s like the new abnormal on steroids, and it’s hard to deny that much of it has the oily fingerprints of human caused climate change smeared all over it.

This week, alone, the West has experienced:

  • A succession of atmospheric rivers pounded the Northwest, dropping more than 10 inches of rain in places over a few days and bringing several rivers up to record-high flows and causing widespread flooding. The Skagit River near Mt. Vernon, Washington, jumped from about 13,500 cubic feet per-second on Dec. 4 to 133,000 cfs a week and a day later. The Snohomish River saw even more dramatic increases in flow. 
    The flooding and landslides severely damaged U.S. Hwy 2 through the Cascade Mountains, and it could be closed for months. And anywhere between 200,000 and 500,000 homes and businesses were left without power after the floods, rains, and severe winds toppled utility lines, reminding us once again that extreme weather is a far greater danger to the power grid than shuttering coal plants.
    Atmospheric rivers and big storms aren’t abnormal. But because warm air can hold more moisture, these ones may have been intensified by global heating.
  • The storms came on the heels of the warmest meteorological autumn on record in the Northwest (based on 130 years of record-keeping). The result: Huge dumps, even in the mountains, falls mostly as rain, not snow, meaning the snowpack remains relatively sparse across much of the region.
  • The soggy soil of the Northwest coincided with smoky skies in eastern Colorado.I had thought that I could close out my Watch Duty wildfire-monitoring tab for the season, but I had to bring it back up on Wednesday night as wicked winds combined with dry conditions and warm temperatures to whip up a trio of grass fires in Yuma County, Colorado, with another one flaring up along the Colorado-Wyoming line. All fires were contained, but they brought back memories of the 2021 Marshall Fire, which broke out in similar conditions at the end of December.
  • The fires followed a nine-day warm streak on the Front Range, when the mercury in Denver topped out at 60° F or above, including reaching a daily record high of 71° on Dec. 17. The rest of the state was also abnormally warm (after a seasonably chilly beginning to the month).
  • Expect the same to continue into the New Year. While Utah and western Colorado may get some precipitation, it’s likely to be either rain or sloppy snow — i.e. Schneeregen — due to unseasonably high predicted temperatures.

Most ski areas in the Interior West are open now, but that doesn’t mean the conditions are good. To the contrary, they’re generally lousy almost everywhere, with snowpack levels hovering around 50% of “normal” everywhere from Utah’s Wasatch Range to Vail to Wolf Creek in southwestern Colorado. In most of those places the story of the season is the same: It started off with heavy rainfall, followed by a succession of decent snow storms that offered false hope, only to be dashed by a run of warm snow-melting temperatures.  So far the story’s even more extreme in the Sierra Nevada, where the mountains are utterly devoid of snow, despite massive, flood-inducing rains this fall. The following graphics from the Wolf Creek Pass SNOTEL station tell the story of most of the region:

The water year started with a deluge and flooding on the San Juan River through Pagosa. While precipitation leveled off after that, accumulations remain above normal and significantly higher than on this date last year.
The problem: All of that water fell as, well, water, not snow, thanks mostly to high temperatures. Note how average daily temperatures have been above the median, sometimes way above it, all water year so far.
The result: way below “normal” snowpack levels. They are also significantly lower than at this time last year, and last year sucked, to put it bluntly. While all of the rain eased drought conditions and restored some moisture to the soil, the lack of snow does not bode well for spring runoff — or the reservoirs and water users that depend on it.
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

The backlash to the Big Data Center Buildup is gaining steam, and the resistance to the energy- and water-guzzling server farms is scoring a few victories and suffering defeats.

  • Earlier this month, Chandler, Arizona’s city council voted to reject Active Infrastructure’s proposed rezoning request that would have cleared the way for the developer to raze an existing building and replace it with an AI data center complex. The denial followed widespread opposition from residents, and in spite of lobbying by former Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in favor of the facility and the developer’s pledge to use closed-loop cooling, which consumes less water (but more energy) than conventional cooling systems.
  • Opposition to a proposed data center in Page, Arizona, was dealt a blow when a referendum to block a land sale for the facility was rejected because the petition didn’t meet legal requirements. Beth Henshaw has more on the Page proposal over at the Corner Post, a cool nonprofit covering the Colorado Plateau.
  • Pima County, Arizona’s supervisors approved an agreement with Beale Infrastructure advancing its proposed Project Blue data center. The developer is pledging to match 100% of its energy consumption with renewable sources and to use a less water-intensive closed-loop cooling system. Opposition to the facility has been fierce.
🌞 Good News! 😎

These days we hear a lot about how utility-scale wind and solar developments harm the flora and fauna of the desert. But one solar installation near Phoenix is providing sanctuary for wildlife, as reported by Carrie Klein in Audubon recently. Wild at Heart, a raptor rehabilitation center, rescued a bunch of burrowing owls from a housing development construction site. But instead of returning them to the wild (which is becoming more and more scarce in Arizona), they set them up in plastic tunnels they built amid a 10,000-acre solar installation. The owls are not only surviving, but are thriving and successfully reproducing. Finally, a bit of light! 

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Moon and tree, Bryce Canyon National Park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Bureau of Land Management nominee draws criticism from #conservation groups over support for selling public land — Micah Drew (UtahNewsDispatch.com)

Signage welcomes visitors to Bureau of Land Management land near Cedar City on Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. (Photo by Spenser Heaps for Utah News Dispatch)

Click the link to read the article on the Utah News Dispatch website (Micah Drew):

December 4, 2025

Republicans are rallying around former New Mexico Rep. Steve Pearce, Trump’s nominee to oversee the land management agency

Conservation groups in Montana and across the West are raising concerns about Steve Pearce, a former New Mexico representative who is President Donald Trump’s newest nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management. 

The nomination has reignited a fight over the management of public lands which was highlighted during negotiations over Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” due to proposed amendments to sell off federal land. The fight also spawned two new bipartisan caucuses in Congress, both co-chaired by Montanans, and predicated on public land access and management. 

In Montana and the two Dakotas, the BLM manages more than 8.3 million acres of federal land. Nationwide, the BLM oversees 245 million acres of federal land, along with 700 million acres of subsurface rights for extraction and energy development, putting the position directly in the crosshairs of energy developers and outdoor industry groups. 

According to the Center for Western Priorities, Pearce amassed a “lengthy anti-public lands record,” sponsoring bills to shrink national monuments and increase extraction on national forest land. 

Many conservation groups are specifically honing in on Pearce’s long record of advocating to sell off federal lands, including sponsoring legislation in Congress to authorize land sales or exchanges with local governments. 

In a letter to then-House Speaker John Boehner in 2012, Pearce wrote that of the federal lands located in the West, “most of it we do not even need.”

He proposed using land sales to reduce the deficit, similar to rhetoric heard earlier when Interior Secretary Doug Burgum equated federal lands to the nation’s “balance sheet.”

“We cannot afford to hand the keys to 245 million acres of our public lands over to someone who has spent his career trying to auction them off to the highest bidder,” Aubrey Bertram, staff attorney and federal policy director at Wild Montana, said. “Steve Pearce’s record is crystal clear: he believes public lands should be privatized for billionaires’ benefit, not protected for the people’s.”

But Pearce’s nomination has been greeted with enthusiasm by mining and energy companies that operate on federal land, as well as by many Republican officials, including Montana Sen. Steve Daines.

“I knew Steve in the House days, and Steve is a great pick. And I particularly like the fact that it’s a Westerner,” Daines said in an interview. “I think it’s helpful when we have leaders in those important positions that come from the West, when they understand uniquely the challenges we face as it relates to federal land, state land, private land. And Steve Pearce has lived it and breathed it.”

Daines is a member of the newly formed Senate Stewardship Caucus, which is co-chaired by Montana Sen. Tim Sheehy. 

The two Montanans also bucked their party earlier this year by joining Senate Democrats in a resolution that would have prevented the use of public land sales to reduce the deficit. 

Representatives for Daines and Sheehy did not respond to questions about Pearce’s nomination. 

Sheehy has not publicly stated whether he will support Pearce. 

But Montana’s federal delegation has been supportive of increasing coal and energy extraction in the state. 

In eastern Montana, Congress recently voted to overturn a Biden-era restriction on resource extraction on federal land, reopening nearly 1.7 million acres to future coal leasing.  

All members of the state’s delegation supported the move calling it vital to the state’s economy and the nation’s energy security.

Pearce has roots in the oil and gas industry that stretch beyond his political work. 

In the 1980s, Pearce founded an oilfield services company in New Mexico, which he later sold when he won his first election. 

Starting in 2003, he represented New Mexico in Congress for seven terms.

He lost races for the U.S. Senate in 2008 and governor in 2018. 

While conservation and public land advocates have pushed back against Pearce’s nomination, industry groups have applauded Trump’s pick. 

The National Cattleman’s Beef Association said Pearce’s experience makes him “thoroughly qualified to lead the BLM and tackle the issues federal lands ranchers are facing.”

The Western Energy Alliance, comprising oil and gas companies across nine western states, also put out a statement of support for Pearce. 

“As a westerner coming from a state that’s nearly 20 percent BLM land, he understands the bureau’s mission. As a former congressman and chair of the Congressional Western Caucus, his record shows he’s been a champion of multiple-uses of public lands. Steve has been a longtime friend who understands the value of energy development among other uses,” the Alliance said. 

This story was originally produced by Daily Montanan, which is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network which includes Utah News Dispatch, and is supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity.

This map shows land owned by different federal government agencies. By National Atlas of the United States – http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/fedlands.html, “All Federal and Indian Lands”, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32180954

Might good come from the NREL name change?: Maybe, but also plentiful skepticism about scrubbing of ‘renewable energy’ from name of laboratory by President Trump’s team  — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

National Renewable Energy Laboratory

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):

December 2, 2025

Changing a name is simple enough, if somewhat expensive and time-consuming, at least in the case of businesses.

But what to make of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s new name? Is the change all bad for the laboratory and for its mission of the last 34 years?

It became National Laboratory of the Rockies as of Monday. It had been known as NREL since 1991 and before that had been the Solar Energy Research Institute since its founding in 1977 during the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

The laboratory has become one of the nation’s — and perhaps the world’s — seminal institutions devoted to engineering an energy transition. As of October, it had 3,717 employees after a reduction of 114 during May.

“Clearly an effort is underway (by President Donald Trump)‚ to downplay renewable energy as a premier, viable energy source in the United States. So it is hard to separate the politics from this given the timing,” said David Renee, who worked at the laboratory from 1991 until his recent retirement.

Renee said that in part he was very disappointed to see the words “renewable energy” deleted from the name but does see the new name allowing the institution to broaden its mission to reflect needs of the ever-more-complex electrical grid.

“I can see some good, long-term benefits from this. It gives the laboratory flexibility to have a broader scope,” he said. “A lot of the work is not exclusively related to renewable energy but more related to grid reliability and expansion, of which renewables play an important part. So one could argue that the name change was overdue anyway in order to be consistent with other national laboratories, which are mostly named for their locations and not the technology.”

The United States has 17 national laboratories engaged in energy and other research, and most are named for their local geographies. New Mexico, for example, has the Sandia and Los Alamos labs, the former named for a mountain range and the latter a town. Renee arrived in Golden from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and retired after running the solar resource assessment program.

Ron Larson, one of the earliest employees of the solar institute who arrived in 1977, a time when solar was 100 times more expensive than it is now, also tends toward a charitable view of the name change.

A possible reason, and a valid one, he said, could be that other national labs wanted more to do on renewable energy topics and are qualified to do so. “Too, maybe some at NREL have wanted to expand into other sectors, including fossil fuels and nuclear.”

See: “Jimmy Carter’s overlooked Colorado nexus” Big Pivots, Jan. 2, 2025.

Peter Lilienthal, an NREL employee from 1990 to 2007, when he formed an energy-related business, was less charitable. He was incensed by a statement from Audrey Robertson, the assistant secretary of energy, in Monday’s announcement.

“The energy crisis we face today is unlike the crisis that gave rise to NREL,” Robertson said. “We are no longer picking and choosing energy sources. Our highest priority is to invest in the scientific capabilities that will restore American manufacturing, drive down costs, and help this country meet its soaring energy demand. The National Lab of the Rockies will play a vital role in those efforts.”

Lilienthal called that statement gaslighting. “That is just not true,” he said of Robertson’s assertion about no longer picking energy sources. He points to the promises of President Donald Trump on the campaign trail and elsewhere to restore fossil fuels and discourage renewable energy. This, he said, will slow the energy transition away from fossil fuels, he believes.

Jud Virden, the director of the renamed laboratory since October, said the new name “embraces a broader applied energy mission entrusted to us by the Department of Energy to deliver a more affordable and secure energy future for all.”

That statement clearly fits in with the narrative of Chris Wright, the Colorado-born director of the Department of Energy. A graduate of Cherry Creek High School, in south Denver, Wright was a rock climber and skier before going to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to study engineering, first mechanical and then electrical. He also later studied at the University of California at Berkeley.

In April, Wright returned to Colorado to tour NREL. Afterward, he met with reporters, where he said that he had worked on solar energy during graduate school and then geothermal. Only later, needing a paycheck, did he begin work in the oil and gas industry. In Denver, he founded Liberty, an oil and gas field services company, in 2011.

In his remarks, Wright did not dismiss renewable energy, but he did — as he had done before — dismiss “climate alarmism.” He said the science does not support the perception of risk that has, in part, driven the work to make renewable energy affordable and integrated into the electrical grid.

Wright sees the need for more energy being paramount and climate change worries a hindrance to archiving that plentitude that will result in higher standards of living.

“The biggest barrier to energy development the last few decades is people, for political reasons, calling climate change a crisis,” he claimed.

He went on to cite 3 million people dying every year because they don’t have clean cooking fuels or the 4 or 5 million people dying because they don’t have sufficient food as well as the disconnect notices to American consumers for non-payment.

“If you call climate change a crisis and you don’t look at any data, you can pass laws to do anything.

Chris Wright has argued that energy scarcity poses a greater threat to quality of life than climate change. Here, he speaks to reporters in April 2025 while Martin Keller, then the director of NREL, looks on. Photo/Allen Best. Top image/National Laboratory of the Rockies.

In an essay published in The Economist in July, Wright said much the same thing.

See: “Climate change is a product of progress, not an existential crisis.”

Wright also talked about the need to deliver plentiful energy and lowering energy prices. He talked about the drive to integrate artificial intelligence data centers into the U.S. economy.

“Artificial Intelligence is critical. This is a phenomenal new technology. People are seeing the great consumer services it provides, the business efficiencies it provides, and we are very early on.”

And again, he talked about the need to expand electrical production as necessary to support artificial intelligence. Even without strong demand for data centers, he said, electricity prices have been rising.

“We’ve seen 20 to 25% rise in the price of electricity over the last four years. Americans are mad and angry and upset about that, which is why they’re all worried about AI — ‘No, we don’t want new demand on our grid that’s just going to make our prices more expensive.’ — We need to show them we can walk and chew gum at the same time. We’ve got to grow our electricity production capacity without raising the prices to consumers, and we’ve got to keep our grid stable, not just the complicated system stable, but the increasing cyber threats of people that want to do us harm on our grid.”

Chuck Kutscher took a broad view of the change. A mechanical engineer by training, he began working at NREL in the 1980s before retiring in 2018.

“NREL is widely viewed as the leading renewable energy laboratory in the world. In the U.S. and throughout the world, solar and wind dominate the new electricity generation being deployed because they are now the lowest in cost and are also the fastest to deploy, in addition to avoiding air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. China is clearly the world leader in renewable energy development and deployment, but NREL has played a critical role in keeping the U.S. competitive,” he said in a statement.

“As a Department of Energy lab, NREL takes direction from DOE. The current administration made it clear in the last election that it would support fossil fuels. DOE does have a lab that focuses primarily on fossil fuels, the National Energy Technology Lab, so continuing to have a lab that performs R&D on renewables makes perfect sense, especially given the transition to renewable energy happening around the world. I’m sure the new lab director is working hard to preserve NREL’s tremendous expertise and important work in renewable energy while at the same time being responsive to DOE directives to strengthen the lab’s portfolio in areas such as AI and data centers.”

The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best

Inside #Wyoming’s fight against cheatgrass, the ‘most existential, sweeping threat’ to western ecosystems — Mike Koshmrl (WyoFile.com)

A patch of cheatgrass, pictured here in January 2025, emerged from a mountainside along the east shore of Flaming Gorge Reservoir. Cheatgrass has steadily invaded the lower Green River Basin, about half of which “needs attention,” according to the Sweetwater County Weed and Pest District. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Mike Koshmrl):

December 1, 2025

An all-hands-on-deck effort, tens of millions in funding and a breakthrough herbicide are slowing but not halting a destructive force steadily enveloping the best sagebrush left on Earth.

POWDER RIVER BASIN—Brian Mealor scanned the prairie east of Buffalo, but his mind drifted west to a haunting scene in northern Nevada. 

In the burn scar of the Roosters Comb Fire, a single unwelcomed species had taken over, choking out all competitors. Mealor saw few native grasses or shrubs, scarcely a wildflower. 

Not even other weeds.

“Literally everything you see is cheatgrass,” Mealor recalled of his June tour of the scar. “I just stood there, depressed.”

A sea of cheatgrass photographed about 20 miles north of Battle Mountain, Nevada, off of Izzenhood Road. (Claire Visconti/University of Wyoming)

Mealor already knew plenty about the Eurasian species’ capacity to decimate North American ecosystems since he leads the University of Wyoming’s Institute for Managing Annual Grasses Invading Natural Ecosystems. But he was still shocked walking through the endless cheatgrass monoculture taking over the 220,000 once-charred acres northwest of Elko. 

The same noxious species, he knew, is steadily spreading in Wyoming.

The ecological scourge made Silver State officials so desperate that they were planting another nonnative, forage kochia, because it competes with less nutritious cheatgrass and offers some nourishment for native wildlife, like mule deer. 

“They’ll just die, because there’s nothing there,” Mealor said. “That’s why we have to do stuff. Because we could turn into that.” 

Brian Mealor, center, looks off into the sagebrush along the outskirts of the House Draw Fire scar near Buffalo in November 2025. The 2024 blaze eliminated over 100,000 acres of core sage grouse habitat, including 18 active leks. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Scientists, rangeland managers and state and county officials are doing everything in their power to prevent Wyoming from becoming another landscape lost to cheatgrass. There’s a powerful new herbicide that’s helping. And funds enabling the spraying of hundreds of thousands of acres are being secured and raised. Yet, Wyoming is still losing its cheatgrass fight, and ultimately far more resources are needed to turn it around.

“Let’s not kid ourselves,” said Bob Budd, executive director of the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “The magnitude of the need is utterly staggering. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars over the next decade. That’s daunting.”

Budd voiced that warning Tuesday while addressing a statewide group that focuses on bighorn sheep, which depend on seasonal ranges being invaded by cheatgrass. A recent study co-authored by Mealor underscores the need to act soon to protect Wyoming’s wildlife. UW researchers concluded that cheatgrass, which is only edible in spring, could cost northeast Wyoming’s already struggling mule deer half their current habitat in the next couple of decades.

Eighteen months ago, green sagebrush plants would have dominated this vista all the way to the horizon in the Powder River Basin. Today, because of the House Draw Fire, it’s a golden prairie — the lighter-hued portions are dominated by invasive cheatgrass and Japanese brome. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

On Nov. 6, the Sheridan-based professor joined fellow academics, biologists and volunteers on a field trip to a mixed-grass prairie. Like the Nevada burn scar, this was a Wyoming landscape on the mend from wildfire. In fact, it wasn’t a grassland until last year. 

Before Aug. 21, 2024, the ground where they stood had been considered the best of what’s left of northeast Wyoming’s sagebrush biome. 

Transformation

A lightning storm that sparked a conflagration abruptly ended that era. Over the course of two days, the House Draw Fire tore a 10-mile-wide, almost 60-mile-long gash into the landscape, inflicting over $25 million in damage. In a fiery blink, the native plant community mostly disappeared. 

Once-prized sagebrush within roughly 100,000 acres of the burn area is basically gone, a worrisome loss of habitat for the region’s already struggling sage grouse. What grew back isn’t a monoculture, like in Nevada. Native species are easily found. But portions of the Powder River Basin’s rolling hills are now dominated by big densities of cheatgrass and Japanese brome, another invasive annual grass. Without mature sagebrush shrubs to compete with, there’s reason to believe the invaders, which flourish with fire, will expand their grip. 

“It’s not like you have a fire and all of a sudden you’re just completely covered with cheatgrass,” Mealor said. “There’s a lag.”

Cheatgrass grows in thick amid sagebrush southeast of Buffalo, adjacent to the House Draw Fire scar. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

The Johnson County Natural Habitat Restoration Team is throwing everything it can at the fire scar to try to prevent invasive grasses from taking over. Armed with $12 million in state funds, crews will aerially spray some 120,000 acres with a cheatgrass-killing herbicide. Aerial sagebrush seeding is also underway on 3,000 acres of burned-up sage grouse nesting habitat. And there are even funded plans to build hundreds of simple erosion-controlling Zeedyk structures to protect the wet meadows within the fire scar. 

Yet, on a broader scale, Mealor is a realist about the immense challenge of keeping cheatgrass and its noxious counterparts at bay in Wyoming, let alone enabling sagebrush to stage a comeback — a costly, complicated feat. 

“If we were talking about a 25,000-acre fire here and there,” Mealor said, “it would be a little different.” 

About a half-million acres of northeastern Wyoming burned in 2024, the state’s second-largest fire year in modern history. Wyoming lawmakers agreed to carve out $49 million for wildfire recovery grants statewide, less than half of Gov. Mark Gordon’s requested amount. Optimistically, Mealor said, the awarded sum might be enough to treat a million acres. That sounds significant — it’s half the acreage of Yellowstone. But cheatgrass is spreading just about everywhere in a state that spans 62 million acres.

Gov. Mark Gordon gives his State of the State address Feb. 12, 2024, at the Capitol in Cheyenne. (Ashton J. Hacke/WyoFile)`

“If you think about it from a statewide level, it’s not a lot,” Mealor said of the funding. “That’s not an attack. I’m not downplaying the importance of the money that was set aside by the Legislature for this. It’s a lot of money. But it’s also not enough.” 

The governor, who’s a rancher by trade, has voiced the same concern. Pushing for $20 million in cheatgrass spraying funds during the Legislature’s 2024 budget-making process, Gordon acknowledged Wyoming is “losing the battle” against invasive annual grasses. Lawmakers ultimately agreed to $9 million, less than half the requested amount, according to the budget. 

‘Best of the best’

The incursions that cheatgrass, Japanese brome and fellow invasives medusahead and ventenata are making into Wyoming rangelands are significant because of what’s at stake. The Equality State is the cornerstone of what remains of the sagebrush-steppe biome, a 13-state ecosystem vanishing at a rate of 1 million-plus acres per year.  

“Half of the best of the best is in Wyoming,” said Corinna Riginos, who directs the Wyoming science program for The Nature Conservancy. 

In 2020, the U.S. Geological Survey, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and Western Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies completed a conservation plan to proactively restore the United States’ declining sagebrush habitat. This map from the plan illustrates Wyoming’s importance, being the stronghold of the biome. (USGS)

The Lander-based scientist is spearheading a Camp Monaco Prize-winning project that seeks to safeguard the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem from cheatgrass. The flanks of the ecosystem, such as the Golden Triangle, southwest of the Wind River Range, contain some of the most expansive unbroken tracts of sagebrush remaining on Earth. Distribution maps show that almost all of those areas are in Wyoming. It’s no coincidence that the same places also host remarkable biological phenomena, like the world’s largest sage grouse lek and longest mule deer migration. 

Riginos’ research is focused on defensive measures to catch and kill cheatgrass early on, when it exists at low levels. Keeping the invasion out of core tracts of sagebrush, she said, is a more efficient use of funds than trying to shift heavily contaminated landscapes back to what they used to be. 

“Maybe we live with what they are, we cope with it, rather than trying to recover from it,” Riginos said of cheatgrass-dominated areas. 

Cheatgrass grows where reddish stripes appear on the hillsides leading up to Washakie Reservoir in June 2024. The green stripes are where an herbicide, Indaziflam, was experimentally applied. Rangeland managers have since scaled up the effort, funding 16,000 acres of cheatgrass removal in the Washakie Park area. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Within Wyoming, invasive grass experts don’t have to go far from the world’s most unsullied sagebrush stands to find heavily infested landscapes. In June 2024, Riginos toured cheatgrass treatments in the Wind River Indian Reservation’s Washakie Park area. Although they stood about 40 straight-line miles from the Golden Triangle, scientists, wildlife managers and weed experts on the tour were surrounded by hillsides purple-hued from cheatgrass. 

“You have to respect it, as an organism,” Riginos said. “The adaptability and just kind of sheer ability to get a toehold and take over is pretty remarkable.”

Cheatgrass gets its name from its ability to “cheat” surrounding vegetation out of moisture and nutrients. Its mechanism for success is essentially a head start. It germinates in the fall and starts growing in cold temperatures. Then it overwinters, matures, throws off prolific amounts of seeds and dies by midsummer when native grasses and forbs are much earlier in their life cycle.

A patch of cheatgrass colors a 7,500-foot-high northern Wyoming Range ridgeline in November 2025. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

On top of the advantageous life cycle, the West’s ever-increasing, climate-driven wildfires help cheatgrass flourish. When a cheatgrass-infested area burns and becomes more cheatgrass dominant, it’s more prone to burn again, creating a vicious feedback loop. 

Giving cheatgrass yet another advantage, research has shown the plant in North America adapts well to different locales. That trait enables it to flourish in a wide range of temperatures and moisture conditions across the West, Riginos said.

“I don’t want to see the West become a wasteland of cheatgrass, I really don’t,” she said. “I feel that this is the most existential, sweeping threat to our western ecosystems. It really concerns me.” 

Closing in

All those traits have enabled an impressive, though foreboding, expansion. Since its introduction from Europe in the 1800s, cheatgrass has spread to all 50 states and parts of Canada and Mexico. There are signs it’s not slowing down. Rangeland ecologists have detected an eightfold increase in cheatgrass across the Great Basin since the 1990s, according to the National Wildlife Federation. 

Simultaneously, sagebrush-dominated landscapes have sustained a decline. A 2022 U.S. Geological Survey reportfound that an average of 1.3 million acres are being lost or degraded every year. That’s an area larger than Rhode Island.

Although the spread of Wyoming cheatgrass hasn’t been as overwhelming as in lower-elevation, drier western states, the invasion has, and continues to be, successful. A whitepaper distributed by the Wyoming Outdoor Council in the state Capitol during the 2024 funding fight reported that invasive annual grasses already affect 26% of the Equality State’s landmass, which pencils out to over 16 million acres.

Cheatgrass is widespread along the east side of South Pass, just a couple dozen miles away from the most expansive and intact reaches of the sagebrush biome remaining on Earth. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Historically, Wyoming land managers believed that much of the nation’s least-populated state was too high and too cold for cheatgrass to gain much ground. But the climate has tilted in its favor, according to Jeanne Chambers, an emeritus U.S. Forest Service research ecologist who has studied cheatgrass for decades.

“Cooler temperatures, especially those cold nighttime temperatures, used to keep cheatgrass at bay,” Chambers said. “But now that things are warming up and people and livestock and animals are all over the place, the propagules — the seeds — are getting everywhere.” 

As a result, slightly lower-elevation reaches of Wyoming, like the Bighorn Basin, are seeing more and more cheatgrass, she said. The same goes for where the salt desert transitions into sagebrush in the state’s southwestern corner.   

“Those areas are pretty vulnerable,” Chambers said. 

Cheatgrass sprouts off a badland-like formation near Burlington in November 2025. The noxious grass is widespread in the Bighorn Basin, and wildfires that have flared up in recent years are exacerbating its spread. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Wyoming specialists in those communities corroborate the claims.

“Cheatgrass is moving into our county, primarily on the south end — but it’s not exclusive to the south end,” Sweetwater County Weed and Pest Supervisor Dan Madson said. “There are hot spots throughout the county invading mule deer, antelope and elk habitats, as well as sage grouse core areas.” 

Some of the encroachments are well north into the Green River Basin and Red Desert, noted sagebrush strongholds. North of Rock Springs, north of Superior and in the Seedskadee National Wildlife Refuge are all places being actively invaded, Madson said.  

Sweetwater County is scaling up its response, Madson said. The county is spending about $750,000 to spray nearly 12,000 acres of cheatgrass this year and plans to treat more like 15,000 acres in 2026. 

But money is a limiting factor. Wyoming landscapes have been the recipient of many millions of federal dollars, including from the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which have complemented the state’s contributions. 

Wyoming contains half of the core sagebrush-steppe habitat, in dark blue, that remains in the United States. Light blue signifies areas habitat managers have identified as having potential for restoration and tan areas are classified as “other rangeland.” (U.S. Geological Survey)

Still, the pace of infestation statewide and in Sweetwater County far exceeds the total resources available. 

“We could easily, easily triple that [15,000 acres] in a year,” Madson said, “and still have enough to do for the rest of my career.”

Funding issues aren’t only due to federal government turmoil. One potential pot of $11 million that would have been directed toward spraying evaporated when the Wyoming Senate opted to forgo a supplemental budget. 

“That money got lost,” said Budd, at the Wyoming Wildlife and Natural Resource Trust. “It actually hurt some parts of the state that were doing a very good proactive job, managing to keep cheatgrass down.”

‘Defending the core’

The upper Green River Basin is one example of a landscape where cheatgrass advances have been reversed. Its remoteness, harsh climate and high elevation helped, but those factors alone didn’t prevent a slow incursion of the virulent vegetation early in the century. By 2014, for example, hues of red and purple — hallmarks of cheatgrass — were painting the ridges rising over Boulder Lake. 

The Sublette County Weed and Pest District fought the invasion with repeated treatments. In 2018 alone, some 30,000 acres of the western front of the Winds were aerially sprayed. It worked. 

By the summer 2020, no cheatgrass was being detected at Boulder Lake, once a hotspot, District Supervisor Julie Kraft said. Nowadays, she said, no major problem areas remain in Sublette County.

In August 2019, a recreational shooter hit an exploding target and sparked the Tannerite Fire, which ripped across the pictured ridge on the north end of Boulder Lake. Afterwards, cheatgrass that was already in the area grew in thick where the sagebrush once stood, but the mountainside was subsequently treated and today the invasive grass occurs only in trace levels. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Kraft even felt “good” about the future of her cheatgrass fight, expressing uncommon optimism for those grappling with an organism overtaking so many places. 

“A couple of years ago, I might not have said the same thing,” Kraft said. “But with this new tool, and particularly because of the influx of money that came [during] the [Biden] administration, it allowed us to do so much more.” 

That new tool is an herbicide, Indaziflam. It’s a product, also known by its trade name, Rejuvra, that provides far more enduring protection against cheatgrass than any previous chemical treatment. It works by attacking the seedbank and shallow root structure of cheatgrass, while not infiltrating the soil deep enough to kill perennial native grasses and plants like sagebrush. 

“It depletes it down until there won’t be a seedbank of cheatgrass anymore,” Kraft said. “We’ve seen that on our sites. Year one, you can go out and grab handfuls of cheatgrass seed off the top of the soil. Year two, you can’t find those handfuls anymore. By year three, you can’t dig [cheatgrass seeds] out of the bottoms of sagebrush.”

Sublette County, a stronghold of the sagebrush biome, has fared better than other parts of Wyoming at keeping cheatgrass at bay. Still, patches can be found here or there, like this pocket overlooking Half Moon Lake in March 2025. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

The June 2024 outing that drew Riginos, the Nature Conservancy scientist, to Washakie Park along the east slope of the Winds included a stop at an experimental Indaziflam treatment plot. 

Although a mix of the herbicide had been misted over strips of cheatgrass nearly four years earlier, its effect remained obvious and unmistakable. Curing, purple drooping brome blanketed untreated strips, and native green grasses filled the niches between. 

“It’s holding still,” said Aaron Foster, Fremont County’s weed and pest supervisor, who led the cheatgrass treatment tour on the reservation. “It’s been holding now for four growing seasons. Pretty impressive.”  

On President Trump’s arroyo-phobic Clean Water Act rule: Plus: Congress kills another RMP, sows chaos; President Trump endangers Endangered Species Act — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Ephemeral desert water. Jonathan P. Thompson photo

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 25, 2025

The News: The Trump administration last week weighed in on the 53-year battle over what waterways are covered by the 1972 Clean Water Act — with a draft rule that would narrow the definition of “Waters of the United States,” or WOTUS. The rule would effectively remove federal CWA protections from hundreds of arroyos, rivers, and ephemeral streams in the Southwest, giving developers industries more latitude to alter or pollute those waterways. The public has until Jan. 5 to submit comments.

The Context: For years, the Environmental Protection Agency and Army Corps of Engineers—the agencies charged with enforcing the CWA—considered WOTUS to include everything from arroyos to prairie potholes to sloughs to mudflats, so long as the destruction or degradation thereof might ultimately affect traditionally navigable waters or interstate commerce (which could include recreation, sightseeing, or wildlife watching). It was a broad definition that gave the agencies latitude to “restore and maintain the chemical, physical, and biological integrity of the Nation’s waters,” as Congress mandated when creating the law in 1972.

Developers and property rights ideologues pushed back on this definition, saying it was too broad and therefore gave the feds too much power to curb pollution or restrict development. The issue ended up in the courts and, ultimately, to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The waters were muddied, so to speak, by the 2006 Supreme Court split decision on the Rapanos case. The late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote what would become the right-wing’s preferred definition of waters of the U.S. He argued that they should include only “relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water … described in ordinary parlance as streams[,] … oceans, rivers, [and] lakes.” Scalia’s definition emphatically excluded “ephemeral streams” and “dry arroyos in the middle of the desert.” Justice Anthony Kennedy disputed Scalia, saying instead the CWA should extend to any stream or body of water with a “significant nexus” to navigable waters, determined by a wetland’s or waterway’s status as an “integral part of the aquatic environment.”

Then, in 2023, in its ruling on the Sackett case, the SCOTUS majority deferred to Scalia’s Rapanos definition, writing: “… we conclude that the Rapanos plurality was correct: the CWA’s use of ‘waters’ encompasses ‘only those relatively permanent, standing or continuously flowing bodies of water forming geographical features that are described in ordinary parlance as streams oceans, rivers and lakes.’”

It’s up to the relevant agencies to translate these rulings into actual rules, often adding their own ideological twists. The W. Bush, Obama, and Trump I administrations issued their own post-Rapanos definitions of WOTUS, Biden weighed in post-Sackett, now Trump II is submitting its own set of industry-friendly, deregulatory definitions.

The EPA’s proposed definition of ‘‘waters of the United States’’ would include:

“Relatively permanent,” under the new rule, would mean

And then there’s this weird and vague, yet critical, term, “wet season,” which the rule defines as:

Sometimes you have to wonder whether the bureaucrats who come up with these things have ever even been to the Western U.S., particularly the arid Southwest.

The “relatively permanent” requirement clearly excludes thousands of arroyos, ephemeral streams, washes, gullies, and even rios and rivers — from the Santa Cruz to the Rillito to the Santa Fe to the Puerco and the Dirty Devil — from CWA jurisdiction. Indeed, it leaves huge swaths of the Southwest without Clean Water Act protections, and at the mercy of respective states or counties. A 2008 EPA study estimates that ephemeral and intermittent streams make up 59% of all of the waterways in the U.S. (excluding Alaska) and over 81% in the arid and semi-arid Southwest (AZ, NM, UT, CO, CA).

Source: U.S. EPA.

The ecological benefits of ephemeral streams are obvious to any Western wanderer who happens to venture down a seemingly dry and barren arroyo bed, where they may find cool air, the smell of water even on the hottest day, tiny tracks of animals seeking sanctuary from the sun, the lascivous bloom of a datura, and cottonwoods and even willows miles and miles away from any “relatively permanent” water source. And if that’s not enough, then consider that peer-reviewed research has found that these same ephemeral streams are major contributors to the water quantity and quality of the entire river drainage network of which they are a part.

Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org

A 2024 study by Craig Brinkerhoff et al concludes: “This ephemeral influence directly implicates downstream water quality standards: Excluding ephemeral streams from coverage under the CWA would substantially narrow the extent of federal authority to regulate water quality in the United States.”

While the administration was looking to provide “clarity,” the “wet season” provision does exactly the opposite, especially when one tries to apply it to the desert Southwest. If southern Arizona has a wet season, wouldn’t it be the days and weeks of the late summer monsoon? Many arroyos do run continuously during a good monsoon season, even if it is only for two or three weeks. So would that put them back under CWA jurisdiction?

How these proposed changes would play out on the ground is a bit of a puzzle — especially given the “wet season” ambiguity. But what is clear is that developers of big housing projects in the desert outside Phoenix or Las Vegas or Tucson, for example, would be allowed to fill in or build roads through arroyos and washes without obtaining a federal CWA permit from the Army Corps of Engineers. That would leave it to the state and county to implement their own, similar, permitting systems if they chose to do so.

As one might expect, the energy industry, developers, ranchers, and farmers generally support the changes, since it will eliminate some of the red tape that tangles up and delays projects.

“For U.S. oil and natural gas operators, this is a game-changer,” wrote the head of a Texas petroleum industry group in the Odessa American. “Picture the Permian Basin or Bakken Formation: vast swaths dotted with intermittent draws and playas that previous rules treated like sacred rivers, triggering Section 404 permits under the U.S. Army Corps that could drag on for years and cost millions in mitigation. Now, with ephemeral features sidelined and groundwater off-limits, operators can overcome those hurdles for well pads, access roads, and seismic surveys.”

If you live in the West, you probably live near at least one of the ephemeral streams that would lose federal protections under these new definitions. You might want to go walk up it sometime soon before it goes away.

In the meantime, you have until Jan. 5 to send your comments, identified by Docket ID No. EPA–HQ– OW–2025–0322, by any of the following methods:

  • Federal eRulemaking Portal: https://www.regulations.gov/ (our preferred method). Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
  • Email: OW-Docket@epa.gov. Include Docket ID No. EPA–HQ–OW– 2025–0322 in the subject line of the message.
  • Mail: U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, EPA Docket Center, Water Docket, Mail Code 28221T, 1200 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20460.

Read more about the Clean Water Act, WOTUS, and the value of ephemeral waterways here (but remember, you gotta become a paid subscriber to bust through the paywall!)

News Roundup: Arroyos on trial; Superstition Vistas; Lake Powell bridge — Jonathan P. Thompson

Scene from a huge coal mine in the Powder River Basin. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Congressional Republicans have apparently decided that the best way to turn over public lands to the extractive industries is to do away with the plans guiding management of those lands. Earlier this year, Congress revoked three Bureau of Land Management resource management plans in Montana, North Dakota, and Alaska. Now, they’ve done the same for the RMP for the BLM’s Buffalo Field Office in Wyoming, which covers a good portion of the coal-rich Powder River Basin.

These mark the first times ever that the Congressional Review Act, which is intended to give Congress the power to review and possibly revoke recently implemented administrative rules, has been used in this manner. That’s in part because RMPs have not been considered “rules” in the past, meaning they are not subject to congressional review.

Resource Management Plans provide a framework for managing large swaths of land and authorize the BLM to permit mining, drilling, grazing, and other activities. They endeavor to balance the agency’s multiple-use mandate with environmental protections, guiding resource extraction and development away from sensitive areas and toward more appropriate ones, for example. They can take years to develop, and incorporate science, legal considerations, court orders, tribal consultation, and input from local officials and the general public.

And then, with just a few hours of debate and no opportunity for public input, Congress can toss the whole thing into the can. 

In this case, the main target was a provision of the Biden-era RMP that halted new coal leasing on that swath of public land. While the moratorium was celebrated by environmentalists and panned by fossil fuel lovers when it was implemented late last year, it was largely symbolic, since existing leases contain enough coal to meet demand at least until 2040. So revoking the ban similarly won’t lead to any new mining anytime soon, nor are resulting lease sales likely to fetch much industry interest or acceptable bids. 

But in their haste to scrap the ban, Congress also may have taken away the BLM’s power to issue new leases altogether — not just for coal, but for oil and gas drilling, grazing, or any other use. And not just for the Buffalo Field Office, either. This is a bit wonky, but basically it goes like this:

  • By applying the CRA to RMPs, Congress is saying that RMPs are “rules.”
  • According to the CRA, rules must be submitted to Congress before they can take effect.
  • No RMP that has been implemented since 1996 has been submitted to Congress.
  • Therefore, no post-1996 RMP has legally taken effect, making it invalid.
  • The Federal Land Policy Management Act says the BLM can only issue permits, leases, rights of way, and other authorizations “in accordance with” a valid land use plan, or RMP.
  • Therefore all permits, leases, ROWs, and other authorizations issued under post-1996 RMPs — including over 5,000 oil and gas leases, and hundreds more coming up for auction in the near future — are invalid.

This summer, 31 law professors and public land experts called on Congress to refrain from using the CRA to revoke RMPs. “The resulting uncertainty could trigger an endless cycle of litigation,” they wrote, “effectively freezing the ability of the BLM and other agencies to manage public lands for years, if not decades to come.”

Just last week, a group of conservation organization legal analysts expanded on the potential for chaos, and called on the BLM to pause new leasing and address the “potential legal deficiencies” of oil and gas leases covering some 4 million acres that were issued under now potentially invalid RMPs. The agency should not issue drilling permits for those leases, the analysts wrote, and it should consider canceling the leases.

Somehow, I don’t think the BLM under the current administration is going to follow that suggestion. Given its track record, it seems more likely that the agency will see the sudden lack of valid RMPs as an open gate through which it can ferry its pro-extractive agenda. This one is almost sure to end up in court.

🦫 Wildlife Watch 🦅

The Trump administration is proposing new regulations that would dial back Endangered Species Act protections and weaken the landmark law to “strengthen American energy independence,” according to an Interior Department news release.

The new rules would:

  • Make it more difficult for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat in areas that are not currently occupied by an endangered species — likely because they were extirpated from the area — but that are essential for the conservation of that species. This would make recovering an endangered species that much more difficult.
  • Remove a rule that extends ESA protections to species that are listed as “threatened,” which is one step away from “endangered.” This would potentially remove protections for species such as the marbled murrelet, vernal pool fairy shrimp, western snowy plover, Gunnison sage grouse, northern sea otter, and many others.
  • Direct agencies to give economic impacts greater weight when deciding whether to extend ESA protections to a species. This could have potentially pushed the feds to, say, back off on listing the Tiehm’s buckwheat under the ESA, because doing so would potentially restrict or nix a proposed lithium mine in its only known habitat.
  • Make it more difficult for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service to designate critical habitat in areas that are not currently occupied by an endangered species — likely because they were extirpated from the area — but that are essential for the conservation of that species. This would make recovering an endangered species that much more difficult.
  • Remove a rule that extends ESA protections to species that are listed as “threatened,” which is one step away from “endangered.” This would potentially remove protections for species such as the marbled murrelet, vernal pool fairy shrimp, western snowy plover, Gunnison sage grouse, northern sea otter, and many others.
  • Direct agencies to give economic impacts greater weight when deciding whether to extend ESA protections to a species. This could have potentially pushed the feds to, say, back off on listing the Tiehm’s buckwheat under the ESA, because doing so would potentially restrict or nix a proposed lithium mine in its only known habitat.

“This plan hacks apart the Endangered Species Act and creates a blueprint for the extinction for some of America’s most beloved wildlife,” said Stephanie Kurose, deputy director of government affairs at the Center for Biological Diversity, in a written statement.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Raven and the red, white, and blue. Digital Painting by Jonathan P. Thompson.

And, finally, the Land Desk readers have spoken, and they have chosen El Burro Blanco as the name for the new Land Desk dispatch-mobile, with Hank coming in a distant second.

Moab seeks bigger crowds? — Jonathan P. Thompson

The big data center buildup: An AI server farm tsunami threatens to overwhelm the West’s power grid and water supplies — Jonathan P. Thompson (High Country News)

Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 25, 2025

This is an installment of the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox.

In early November, Texas-based New Era Energy & Digital announced plans to build a “hyperscale,” meaning massive, AI-processing data center complex in Lea County, New Mexico, the epicenter of the Permian Basin oil and gas drilling boom. The campus will be so big, and use so much power, that, if and when it is built, it will come with its own nuclear and gas power plants, with a mind-blowing combined generation capacity of about 7 gigawatts. That’s like piling the West’s largest nuclear and natural gas plants — Palo Verde and Gila River, both near Phoenix — on top of one another, and then adding another 800 megawatts. That kind of power could electrify something like 5.3 million homes, though these power plants’ output presumably will all go toward more pressing requirements: processing movie streaming, doomscrolling, social media posting and, especially, AI-related activities. [ed. emphasis mine]

Despite the enormity of this proposal, it has received very little news coverage. This is not because anyone is trying to keep it secret, but rather because such announcements have become so common that it’s hardly worth mentioning every new one. New Era’s hyperscale server farm and others like it are still a long way from generating and then devouring their own electricity. But even if only a fraction of the current proposals succeed, they will transform the West’s power grid, its landscapes and its economies as significantly as the post-World War II Big Buildup, when huge coal plants and hydroelectric dams sprouted across the region to deliver power to burgeoning cities via high-voltage transmission lines.

Data center construction at 49th & Race, Denver. Photo credit: Allen Best

In fact, this transformation is already underway. A new report from the nonprofit NEXT 10 and University of California Riverside found that, in 2023, data centers in California pulled 10.82 terawatt-hours of electricity — 1 terawatt equals 1 trillion watts — from the state’s grid, or about enough to power 1 million U.S. households. This resulted in about 2.4 million tons of carbon emissions, even with California’s relatively clean energy mix. (On more fossil fuel-reliant grids, the emissions would have been twice that, or even more.) These same centers directly and indirectly consumed about 13.2 billion gallons of water for cooling and electricity generation. In Silicon Valley, more than 50 data centers accounted for about 60% of one electricity provider’s total load, prompting the utility to raise its customers rates to fund the transmission and substation upgrades and new battery energy storage the facilities required.

These facilities are also colonizing cities and towns far from Big Tech’s Silicon Valley epicenter. Over 100 data centers — structures that resemble big-box stores overflowing with row after row of computer processors — have already sprung up in Phoenix-area business parks, and the planned new ones could increase Arizona’s total power load by 300% over current levels, according to utilities. Recently, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep burning coal at the Four Corners Power Plant beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement to help meet this growing demand.

Data center developments around the West include:

  • NorthWestern Energy signed on to provide up to 1,000 MW of power — or nearly all of the utility’s generating capacity — to Quantica Infrastructure’s AI data center under development in Montana’s Yellowstone County.
  • The 290-mile Boardman-to-Hemingway transmission project under development in Idaho and Oregon was initially designed to serve about 800,000 PacifiCorp utility customers. But in October it was revealed that the line now will deliver all of its electricity to a single industrial customer in Oregon, most likely a new data center.
  • In September, an NV Energy executive told a gathering in Las Vegas that tech firms are asking the utility to supply up to 22,000 megawatts of electricity for planned data centers. Since the utility has largely moved away from coal, this new load would likely be met by generation from existing and planned natural gas facilities, along with proposed utility-scale solar installations.
  • Xcel Energy expects to spend about $22 billion in the next 15 years to meet new data centers’ projected power demand in Colorado, potentially doubling or even tripling legacy customers’ rates. Xcel and the state’s public utilities commission are currently working to reverse the planned closure of a coal plant due to projected data center-associated electricity shortages.
  • Wyoming officials are doing their best to lure data centers and cryptocurrency firms to the state, and it seems to be working. This summer, Tallgrass proposed building an 1,800 MW data center, along with dedicated gas-fired and renewable power facilities, near Cheyenne. It would add to Meta’s facility in Cheyenne and the 1,200 MW natural gas-powered Prometheus Hyperscale data center under development in Evanston. Observers say electricity demand from these centers could transform the physical and regulatory utility landscape and potentially drive up costs for “legacy” customers.
  • New Mexico utilities are struggling to meet growing demand from an increasing number of data centers while also complying with the state’s Energy Transition Act’s requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Doña Ana County approved tax incentives for Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus in Santa Teresa in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Developers have indicated they plan on building dedicated power generation, though they have not yet disclosed the energy sources.
  • Numerous companies are eyeing Delta, Utah, as a site for new data centers, drawn by the area’s relatively cheap land, existing agricultural water rights and the fact that it’s home to the Intermountain Power Project, a colossal coal plant built during the original Big Buildup in the years after World War II. The plant is scheduled to be converted to run on natural gas and, ultimately, hydrogen, but Utah lawmakers want at least one of its units to continue to burn coal. They just need a buyer for the dirty power it would produce, and data centers could fit the bill. Fibernet MercuryDelta is looking to construct the 20 million-square-foot Delta Gigasite there, and Creekstone Energy plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity there, with power coming from coal, solar and natural gas.
The Intermountain Power Project plant in Delta, Utah. The plant was scheduled to be converted away from coal, but Utah lawmakers want it to continue to burn coal. They need a buyer for the dirty power, and data centers could fit the bill. By Doc Searls from Santa Barbara, USA – 2014_11_21_lhr-lax_330, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=38536818

The Western power grid is interconnected but also divided into 38 balancing authorities, or grid operators. Nearly every one of them is expected to see an increase in data center-driven demand over the next decade or so as the Big Digital Buildup gains steam, and few of them are currently equipped to meet that demand. In fact, the North American Electricity Reliability Corp. warned this month that growing data center-driven power demand is increasing the risk of outages this winter in parts of the West. Therefore, many of the largest data centers are going to need to generate their own power, while utilities also will have to scramble to add generating capacity and associated infrastructure as quickly as possible to serve the region’s on-grid facilities. The costs of that new infrastructure will be borne by each utility’s ratepayers.

How will the needed power be generated?

There’s simply no way utilities and developers can meet the projected demand with solar and wind, alone. So, utilities are already making plans to keep existing coal plants running past previously scheduled retirement dates, and to build new natural gas plants and even nuclear reactors. Yes, nukes: Google, Switch, Amazon, Open AI and Meta are all looking to power proposed facilities with the new — so new they have yet to be developed — crop of small, modular and advanced reactors, if and when they are finally up and running.

Can data centers be “sustainable”?

These developments will have environmental consequences, some more than others. Fossil fuel burning feeds climate change and pollutes the air, and oil and gas drilling and coal mining ravage landscapes; utility-scale solar and wind facilities can harm wildlife habitat and often require hundreds of miles of new transmission lines to move the power around; and nuclear power comes with unique safety hazards and a nagging radioactive waste problem, while the uranium mining and milling industry risks reenacting its deadly Cold War legacy. Even a facility that gets all of its power from solar and batteries is still using resources that, without the extra demand, would otherwise be replacing fossil fuels on the grid. And, unless it has a closed-loop air-cooled system, the data center will still consume water for cooling, usually from municipal drinking water systems.

Wyoming-based Prometheus Hyperscale has made waves with its ambitious and seemingly visionary talk of building “sustainable” data centers with dedicated clean energy generation, water recycling and efficient cooling systems that would capitalize on the cold in the Northern Rockies. It’s even talked about harnessing the heat from the servers to warm greenhouses and shrimp-farming operations. Maybe, one day, the power will be supplemented by nuclear micro-reactors. But so far, the company’s walk is not exactly matching its talk. In the beginning, at least, the facility will run on natural gas, and Prometheus says it will offset carbon emissions by paying another company to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from biofuel plants in Nebraska.

Is resistance futile?

Resistance to the imminent server farm tsunami and its outsized energy and water use is widespread, but because these are local projects considered on local levels, battling them can feel a bit like playing whack-a-mole. After Tucson-area residents defeated the city’s plan to annex the proposed Project Blue data center, which would have enabled it to use treated wastewater for cooling, the developers simply moved the project into the county and planned to use an air-cooling system, which requires less water but more energy. When opposition continued, the firm committed to investing in enough renewable energy on Tucson Electric Power’s grid to offset all of its electricity use.

Also working against the resistance is the fact that many local governments and utilities actually welcome the onslaught. Data centers can bring jobs and tax revenues — assuming the state, county or municipality doesn’t exempt them from taxes — to economically distraught areas. Meanwhile, utilities are champing at the bit to sell more of their product and raise rates to pay for the needed additional infrastructure. When announcing all the data centers headed for Nevada, NV Energy executive Jeff Brigger noted that the utility is “excited to serve this load.”

While much of the opposition to data centers is based on their environmental impacts and the effects they might have on utility rates and on the communities where they’re built, the notion of AI itself is also a factor. It’s one thing to see a lot of water or power used to grow food, for instance, but quite another to see coal power plants continue to run simply so that a computer can write a high school essay or answer an inane question or draw a picture or even serve as a companion of sorts. To be fair, AI does have potentially significant and positive applications, such as diagnosing medical conditions and crunching large quantities of data to find, say, possible cures for cancer or solutions to geopolitical problems.

But before it goes about changing the world, maybe AI ought to start with itself and figure out how to do its thing without using so much energy and water.

#COP30 Backpedals on #Climate Action: Offering no new plans to cut fossil fuels, the UN’s climate conference failed to produce a roadmap to stop #GlobalWarming — Bob Berwyn (InsideClimateNews.org)

The convention center in Belem, Brazil, where COP30, the United Nations annual climate talks, took place over the past 12 days. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

November 22, 2025

BELÉM, Brazil—After negotiators at COP30 retreated from meaningful climate action by failing to specifically mention the need to stop using fossil fuels in the final conference documents published Saturday, the disappointment inside the COP30 conference center was as pervasive as the diesel fumes from the generators outside the tent.

This year’s United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change was billed as the “COP of Truth” by host country Brazil, but it could go down in history “as the deadliest talk show ever,” said Harjeet Singh, founding director of the Satat Sampada Climate Foundation in India and strategic advisor to the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative.

COP30 was yet another “theater of delay” with endless discussions, and the creation of yet more administrative duties, “solely to avoid the actions that matter—committing to a just transition away from fossil fuels and putting money on the table,” he said.

A draft text released Nov. 18 clearly spelled out the need to transition away from fossil fuels, but in the final version, the language was watered down, merely acknowledging that “the global transition towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development is irreversible and the trend of the future.”

After setting out ambitious targets ahead of the climate talks, COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago, the secretary for climate, energy and environment in Brazil’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, acknowledged the disappointment. 

“We know some of you had greater ambitions for some of the issues at hand. I know the youth civil society will demand us to do more to fight climate change,” he said during the opening of the final plenary.

Do Lago pledged to press for more action during his upcoming year as the COP president.

“I, as president of COP30, will therefore create two roadmaps, one on halting and reversing deforestation and another on transitioning away from fossil fuels in a just, orderly, and equitable manner,” he said.

That was not enough for some leading climate scientists. 

“Implementation requires concrete roadmaps to accelerate the phase out of fossil fuels, and we got neither,” said Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Indigenous climate activists marched on Friday through the conference hall at COP30 in Belem, Brazil, to protest continued fossil fuel exploitation on Indigenous lands. Credit: Bob Berwyn/Inside Climate News

During the closing plenary, a representative from Colombia said that her country refused to accept parts of the decision as written. “Denying the best available science not only puts the climate regime at risk, but also our own existence. Which message are we sending the world, Mr. President?”

In a post on X, Colombian President Gustavo Petro elaborated, saying, “I do not accept that in the COP 30 declaration. It is not clearly stated, as science says, that the cause of the climate crisis is the fossil fuels used by capital. If that is not said, everything else is hypocrisy.”

He noted that life on the planet is only possible “if we separate from oil, coal, and natural gas as a source of energy … Colombia opposes a COP 30 declaration that does not tell the scientific truth to the world.”

After several similar objections, do Lago suspended the plenary to consult with the UNFCCC secretariat about how to proceed, since the entire process is built on consensus. And while consensus isn’t the same as unanimity, the U.N.’s climate body has faced repeated criticism in recent years for ignoring the pleas of smaller countries amid the rush to finalize COP agreements.

But apparently there was enough consensus to proceed.

Looking for bright spots, former Irish President Mary Robinson, now a member of The Elders, a group of global leaders that works to address issues, including climate change, said the deal is far from perfect, but it shows that countries can still work together “at a time when multilateralism is being tested.”

Robinson said the COP30 outcome includes concrete steps toward establishing a mechanism to ensure no countries are left behind in the transition away from fossil fuels.

“We opened this COP noting the absence of the United States administration,” she said. “But no one country, present or absent, could dampen the ‘mutirao’ spirit,” or collective effort.

Given the recent rise of global political tensions, she said Belém “revealed the limits of the possible, but also the power of the determined. We must follow where that determination leads.”

In another of the final documents, COP30 emphasized “the inherent connection between pursuing efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5 °C and pursuing just transition pathways,” and that such a pathway leads to “more robust and equitable mitigation and adaptation outcomes.”

The conference’s adoption of a just transition mechanism was hailed as a huge win by the Climate Action Network International, an umbrella group that represents hundreds of local, regional and national grassroots organizations working on climate justice. In a statement, the group called it “one of the strongest rights-based outcomes in the history of the UN climate negotiations.”

The outcome could have been even better with stronger leadership from the European Union, which publicly advocated for more ambition, but opposed key provisions in closed-door negotiations, several observers said.

“With the U.S. absent, the European Union had a chance to lead; instead, they stepped into the vacuum as the primary obstructionist,” said Singh, including opposition to language on fossil fuel phaseout timetables.

He said the European Union member countries were “playing a cynical blame game while the planet burns.” Decisions made at this and previous COPs provided the tools needed to address the crisis, but the political will and the money to implement them are still lacking.

Built to Fail: Rules at UN Climate Talks Favor the Status Quo, Not Progress: Experts say stifling bureaucratic procedures that are disconnected from the #ClimateCrisis have consistently stalled COP negotiations — Bob Berwyn (InsideClimateNews.org) #COP30

This section of the Colorado River at the boat launch near Corn Lake dipped to around 150 cfs in lake August 2025. Known as the 15-mile reach, this stretch of river should have at least 810 cfs to meet the needs of endangered fish. CREDIT: HEATHER SACKETT/ASPEN JOURNALISM

By Bob Berwyn

November 12, 2025

This article originally appeared on Inside Climate News, a nonprofit, non-partisan news organization that covers climate, energy and the environment. Sign up for their newsletter here.

Frustration about slow progress at the United Nations climate talks boiled over this week. After hours under the equatorial sun at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, scores of protesters pushed past security guards Tuesday evening and briefly occupied parts of the negotiating area, calling for an end to mining and logging in the Amazon, among other demands.

The clash symbolized a deeper tension at the heart of the U.N. climate summits. The people demanding change are often outside the gates while those with power inside are bound by rules that slow progress to a crawl.

UNFCCC officials said two people suffered minor injuries and that parts of the venue were temporarily closed for cleanup and security checks. The U.N. and local police are investigating the protests and the talks resumed on schedule Wednesday morning. 

On Instagram, a group calling itself Juventude Kokama OJIK posted a video of the Blue Zone occupation and called it an act against exclusion.

“They created an ‘exclusive’ space within a territory that has ALWAYS been Indigenous, and this violates our dignity,” the group wrote. “The demonstration is to say that we will not accept being separated, limited, or prevented from circulating in our own land. The territory is ancestral, and the right to occupy this space is non-negotiable.”

The Tuesday tumult was a stark contrast to normal proceedings at the annual conference, where delegates with swinging lanyards and beeping phones usually file meekly through the metal detectors and past the espresso kiosks as if they’re heading to an office supply expo rather than negotiations to avert catastrophic climate collapse.

Somehow, that urgency rarely crept inside, partly because the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change runs the annual meetings like a corporate conference, said Danielle Falzon, a sociologist at Rutgers University whose research on the climate talks draws on dozens of interviews with negotiators and other participants from both developed and developing countries at most COPs since 2016. 

In the UNFCCC setting, she said, success is measured by how long you stay in the room, how polished your presentation is, how fluent you are in bureaucratic English—and how well you can pretend that the world isn’t burning outside.

“I’d like to go to the negotiations and see people taking seriously the urgency and the undeniability of the massive changes we’re seeing,” she said. “I’d like to see them break through the sterilized, shallow, diplomatic language and talk about climate change for what it actually is.”

For all its talk of unity, the climate summit has struggled to deliver because the talks mirror the global inequalities they are meant to fix, Falzon said. Based on her research, COP hasn’t made much progress because it still fails to serve the countries that have contributed least to the problem but are suffering the most from it.

The negotiations, she said, are dominated by well-staffed teams from wealthy, developed nations that can afford to be everywhere at once. Smaller delegations from less-developed countries often can’t even attend the dozens of overlapping meetings.

“Everyone is exhausted but people from smaller delegations are just trying to keep up,” she said. That exhaustion, she added, shapes the talks themselves: those with the most capacity set the pace and define the terms, while the rest simply try not to fall behind.

“You can’t just pretend that all countries are equal in the negotiating space,” she said.

The imbalance is built into the institution, she said. The U.N. climate process was designed to keep everyone at the table, not to shake it. That makes it resilient, but also resistant to change, and she said her multiyear study of the talks shows the system values consensus and procedure over outcomes and the appearance of progress over actual results. 

“Much of what’s called success at COP now is the creation of new texts, new work programs, rather than real climate action,” she said. After 30 years of meetings, the pattern delivers new agendas, new acronyms and new promises that keep the gears grinding but rarely move the needle on emissions, she added.

Most people involved in the climate talks see the need for change, but Falzon said that institutions are built to preserve themselves.

How (Not) to Talk About Climate

Part of the paralysis Falzon describes stems from a reluctance to speak plainly about the emergency it exists to address, said Max Boykoff, a climate communications researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder.

“The problems associated with climate change were first framed as scientific issues all the way back in the 1980s, and that has become the dominant way we understand a changing climate,” Boykoff said. “But that has crowded out other ways of knowing; emotional, experiential, aesthetic, or even just visceral ways of understanding that something’s not right.”

The experts at COP “tend to focus on what can be measured and reported, on outputs and deliverables, which shapes the negotiations themselves,” he said. “The cadence of those encounters becomes ritualized to their detriment.”

A quick look at some of the daily notifications from COP30 displays what Boykoff describes, with invitations to a “High-Level Ministerial on Multilevel Governance” or “The Launch of the Plan to Accelerate Multilevel Governance and the Operationalization of the Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships.” 

Such language, he said, reflects a culture that prizes precision and hierarchy over connection and clarity. It’s a diplomatic shorthand that signals professionalism while numbing urgency, and it narrows the space for creativity, emotion, or reflection, he added.

Boykoff said the only way to move beyond the rituals of repetition may be to break them. 

“What we really need,” he said, “is to shake it up, to create spaces that let people reflect, feel, and engage in new ways. Because if we keep doing the same thing year after year, we shouldn’t expect different results.”

Falzon said the technocratic UNFCCC language reflects the dominance at the talks of an “old world hierarchy in which rich countries set the agenda, poor countries fight to be heard, and the system keeps reproducing the conditions it’s supposed to fix. 

“It’s not just the negotiations that are unequal,” she said. “The whole thing mirrors the inequalities of the world it’s meant to change.” 

President Trump picks Steve Pearce to run Bureau of Land Management: Also: Drill, baby, drill continues during shutdown; appropriately sited #solar — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Stone and evening light, Bears Ears National Monument, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 7, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

The Trump administration has nominated Steve Pearce, a hard-right Republican and former congressman from New Mexico, to lead the Bureau of Land Management. Pearce’s political career was infused with hostility toward public lands and the BLM, so, as one would expect for these guys, Trump chose him to oversee those lands and head up the same agency.

Pearce has opposed new national monument designations, is a fan of drilling public lands, has tried to weaken or eliminate the Endangered Species Act, lied about wolves in an effort to defund the Mexican wolf recovery program, received a 4% score from the League of Conservation Voters. … the list goes on.

A hat button expresses a sentiment common in parts of the rural West — and among the folks the Trump administration picks to run the Bureau of Land Management. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

You may remember that Trump’s first pick to helm the BLM didn’t work out so well. Soon after his inauguration, he nominated oil and gas lobbyist Kathleen Sgamma to fill the post and carry out his “energy dominance” agenda on public lands. But Sgamma pulled out after it was revealed that in the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots and invasion of the U.S. Capitol, Sgamma wrote that she was “disgusted by the violence” and “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.”

Meanwhile, Trump’s first-term pick, William Perry Pendley, was never confirmed due to his checkered past, and was found to unlawfully be serving as acting director.

If confirmed, Pearce would probably be involved in determining whether the Trump administration will revoke a ban on new oil and gas leasing within 10 miles of Chaco Culture National Historical Park’s boundary. The Biden administration implemented the ban on the urging of Pueblo leaders to keep drilling away from the park and Chacoan-era Great Houses that surround it, but to which the national park protections do not extend.

The Navajo Nation initially supported the leasing moratorium, as well, but under the Buu Nygren administration reversed itself after allotment owners within the buffer zone protested, saying the ban would indirectly hamper drilling on their allotments and cut into their royalty income.

Project 2025, the extreme right-wing’s playbook for the Trump administration, called for revoking the leasing moratorium, and doing so certainly fits with Trump’s “energy dominance” and “drill, baby, drill” agenda. Late last month the Interior Department informed tribal leaders it was moving forward with and sought their input on possibly re-opening the land to the oil and gas industry.

Indigenous leaders call for oil and gas leasing reform — Jonathan P. Thompson

Meanwhile, the BLM is busy auctioning off oil and gas leases on public land in the Greater Chaco Region just outside the buffer zone around the park.

This week (yes, during the government shutdown), the agency leased about 3,100 acres of land to oil and gas companies in the San Juan Basin. This was regardless of multiple formal and informal protests opposing the lease sale, including ones from environmental groups, the Torreon/Star Lake Chapter of the Navajo Nation, and Sovereign Energy, a Pueblo women-led organization committed to advancing tribal energy sovereignty and protecting sacred landscapes.

“The BLM’s continued approval of lease sales in and around the Ojo Encino, Torreon/Star Lake, and Counselor Chapters not only perpetuates harm to frontline communities,” Sovereign Energy wrote, “but also demonstrates a systemic failure to uphold federal trust and treaty responsibilities. These lands are not vacant or disposable — they are the living homelands of Indigenous peoples with profound cultural and ceremonial importance.”

One parcel received no bids, while the bidders on five others will pay just $10 to $12 per acre for the exclusive right to drill them. A seventh parcel, in Rio Arriba County, received a high bid of $501 per acre.

The agency is planning a June auction to lease a 160-acre parcel and a 671-acre parcel in the Greater Chaco Region. The larger tract is a few miles northeast of Lybrook and the other one is about seven miles southeast of Lybrook in piñon-juniper-strewn hills.

***

The federal government shutdown may be depriving thousands of workers of paychecks, imperiling food stamps and other benefits, and leading to delayed and cancelled flights nationwide, but it isn’t stopping the Trump administration from implementing its “drill, baby, drill” agenda.

The BLM has issued 628 drilling permits for federal lands since the shutdown began, according to the Center for Western Priorities’ oil and gas tracker, including 530 in New Mexico, of which seven were issued by the Farmington Field Office for drilling in the San Juan Basin (the rest were for the much busier Permian Basin).

Rig counts remain relatively low, which indicates that oil and gas companies are snatching up as many drilling permits as they can while the getting is good, but may not use them anytime soon.

A Delta County hayfield (freshly cut in early November(!!!!), with the Garnet Mesa Solar Project in the background.

🔋 Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌

Parts of the agriculture-heavy Delta County in western Colorado could certainly be described as pastoral or idyllic, with the rows of vineyards and fruit orchards beautifully framing the West Elk and Ragged Mountains in the background. In summer (and even in November, this year), hay bales sit in freshly cut green fields and sparkling yellow and flame-orange cottonwoods rise up along stream and ditch banks. 

So when I heard a couple years back that the Delta County commissioners had put the kibosh on a proposed utility-scale solar project, in part because it would defile prime agricultural land and views, I was somewhat sympathetic. It would, indeed, be atrocious to wipe out a viable orchard to make way for a sea of solar panels. That said, I was a bit flabbergasted, too, since Delta County is normally pro-private property rights to a fault (I doubt they’d deny an industrial-scale feedlot or chicken farm or, for that matter, a coal mine), and because the region needs new, clean energy sources to replace and displace natural gas and coal generation. 

Eventually the county relented — in part because the proponents agreed to design the project to allow for sheep grazing — and approved the project. Now the Garnet Mesa solar project is complete. I went and checked it out last week, and it wasn’t until I actually saw it that I understood where, exactly, it is — and how my concerns about it wrecking idyllic farmland were misplaced.

Don’t get me wrong: Garnet Mesa has a distinct, spare sort of beauty to it. Its wide-open spaces afford lovely views of Grand Mesa and the other mountains in the distance, and there is an occasional irrigated hayfield here and there (along with patches of the aforementioned cottonwoods). But the ash-gray soil has very high levels of selenium, making growing things difficult, and the whole area has long been a sort of sacrifice zone and dumping place for dilapidated single-wides, old cars, and various other detritus. 

It is the kind of place, in other words, that a developer might expect to be able to put up a solar project — even a really big one — without much resistance, especially on private land that hadn’t been in agriculture for years, if ever. But these days it seems that there’s a sort of knee-jerk opposition to almost any solar development, large or small, on relatively undisturbed public lands or long-abused private lands. And that’s really too bad.

Meditations on solar, Joshua trees, and the movement to kill clean energy — Jonathan P. Thompson

Certainly developers, even of “clean energy,” should not be given carte blanche to build wherever they see fit. And they absolutely should look to brownfields, industrial rooftops, parking lots, and other already-developed areas to put their energy installations, first. But the fact is, we’re never going to be able to generate enough clean energy to displace coal and natural gas without some utility-scale installations on land that isn’t a rooftop or a parking lot. 

Admittedly, the Garnet Mesa project is striking looking, and I have to agree with a friend’s description of it as “totally industrial.” But it’s also got its own aesthetic appeal to it, it doesn’t mar the long-distance vistas, and the fact that those panels are generating enough power to electrify some 18,000 homes without burning or emitting anything is super cool, if you ask me.

Garnet Mesa solar project. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
📖 Reading (and watching) Room 🧐
  • Krista Langlois has a nice and heartbreaking piece in High Country News reflecting on the ICE raids in Durango, the subsequent protests, and the violent response to the protesters. 
  • Jerry Redfern continues his strong reporting for Capital & Main on oil and gas industry misdeeds in New Mexico’s San Juan Basin with a story about the Hodgson ranching family that is butting heads with Hilcorp Energy. The Hodgsons used to have a decent working relationship with the oil companies, but when Hilcorp moved in and acquired ConocoPhillips’ assets, things went downhill. Now, the Hodgsons — along with their neighbors Don and Jane Schreiber — are pushing back and trying to get Hilcorp to clean up their act. It isn’t an easy row to hoe by any means.
  • NM LAWS coalition is hosting a screening of Annie Ersinghaus’s new documentary, The Land of Sacrifice: The Burden of New Mexico’s Oil and Gas Extraction on Nov. 22, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Totah Theater in Farmington. After the film, there will be a Q&A with a panel of local experts and advocates. Check out the trailer below.
  • I just finished watching The Lowdown, Sterlin Harjo’s new tv series, and I gotta say: It’s really damned good. I highly recommend it.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

I recently joined Kate Groetzinger and Aaron Weiss of Center for Western Priorities to talk uranium mining and the so-called nuclear renaissance. You can listen to our discussion here or, if you don’t mind looking at my made-for-radio mug, you can watch it by clicking on the image below.

📸 Parting Shot  🎞️
A climber enjoys an unusually warm late-October day in Unaweep Canyon. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

President Biden’s ban on mining claims near #Arizona national park could be revoked — AZCentral.com

An image of the ruins of Chetro Ketl in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico, United States); shown is the complex’s great kiva. By National Park Service (United States) – Chaco Canyon National Historical Park: Photo Gallery, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1536637

Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral website (Arlyssa D. Becenti). Here’s an excerpt:

November 7, 2025

Key Points

  • The Bureau of Land Management informed Navajo President Buu Nygren that it intends to revoke a ban on new mining claims and mineral leases on more than 300,000 acres surrounding Chaco Canyon.
  • Then-President Joe Biden withdrew the land from mining and mineral activity in 2023, a move meant to protect land and cultural resources in the region.
  • The ban on new activity upset many people who live near the canyon and who rely on mineral leases or mining claims for income. The issue has also divided tribal leaders in Arizona and New Mexico.

The Bureau of Land Management is moving to revoke a 2023 order that had prevented new mining claims and mineral leases for 20 years on more than 300,000 acres of public land surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park. In a letter to Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren, the BLM’s Farmington Field Office said it would initiate government-to-government consultation to fully revoke Public Land Order 7923, which was issued under former President Joe Biden. The order withdrew approximately 336,404 acres of public land in a 10-mile radius surrounding Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico from new mining claims and mineral leasing, while preserving valid existing rights. It has been controversial among many Navajo Nation members living near the area who rely heavily on gas and oil leasing of their property…That decision has also created tension between the Navajo Nation and Pueblo tribes that share deep cultural and ancestral connections to Chaco Canyon.

Dinosaurs, big rains, thin #snowpack, oh my — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Bisti Badlands in the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico. The area has yielded many important fossil finds. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

November 4, 2025

The San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado is known for producing oodles of fossil fuels over the last century. But it is really so, so much more than that: An epicenter of cultures, lovely landscapes, and geological wonders. It is also a hotspot for fossils, some of which recently have yielded new information about the dinosaurs’ last days on earth. 

While it’s generally accepted that non-avian dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid some 66 million years ago, researchers have long debated whether the big reptiles were doing well leading up to the cataclysmic event, or were already in decline and headed for extinction. A study published last month in Science, based on the fossil record of the San Juan Basin, finds that a diverse array of dinosaurs were actually flourishing at the end of the Cretaceous period. Had it not been for that asteroid, they might have stuck around for quite a bit longer. 

The authors sum up their findings:

Pretty cool stuff. Read the study here. 

And that’s not all for San Juan Basin dinosaur news! In September, a team of researchers announced they had identified a new species of duck-billed dinosaur in northwestern New Mexico. The Ahshiselsaurus, an herbivore, weighed up to nine tons and spanned up to 35 feet from bill to tail. 

In a news release, the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs notes that the bones that led to the identification were unearthed in 1916 in what is now the Ah-shi-sle-pah Wilderness in San Juan County. “In 1935, the fossils were classified as belonging to another hadrosaurid called Kritosaurus navajovius. However, this new research identified distinctions between these fossils and all known hadrosaurids, including several key differences in the animal’s skull.”

Cottonwood trees in full autumn splendor in the Paradox Valley, Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

This past weekend, my sister held the annual garlic-planting and apple cider-making ritual at her farm in the North Fork Valley in western Colorado. Folks from all around gather to help put thousands of garlic cloves into the ground. At the same time, a handful of us crank the handle and toss apples into the 125-year-old cider press that my ancestors brought to the Animas Valley from Pennsylvania in the early part of the century. 

It was a lovely day, with an intensely blue, cloudless sky and high temperatures in the 60s. We felt lucky to have such conditions in early November, but they weren’t wildly abnormal. Though a few places in the region set daily high temperature records, at least as many also set daily low temperature records as the mercury dipped down to around 22° F, even in the lowlands, overnight.

More striking to me was when I stopped in Silverton on the trip back to Durango to take a bike ride on the new trails on Boulder Mountain. That mountain biking is even an option in Silverton in early November is a little odd. That the trails were bone dry at 10,600 feet in elevation is even odder. And that I was not just warm, but downright hot and sweaty in just short sleeves and shorts felt downright weird.

A cursory look at the data reveals that this has been one of the wettest — and least snowiest — starts to a water year on record, at least in southwestern Colorado. The huge, flood-spawning rains of October pushed the accumulated precipitation levels up into record high territory. But most of that liquid abundance fell as rain, not snow, even at high elevations. And the warm temperatures that followed has deteriorated what little snowpack existed. It’s striking to see only a thin layer of white painting its designs on north-facing slopes at 12,000 or 13,000 feet. And without a radical shift in weather (which is certainly possible), it’s hard to imagine ski areas opening by Thanksgiving.

Still, we’re only about one month into the 2026 Water Year, so it’s far too early to draw any conclusions from the data. Last year started out as one of the snowier seasons on record, before fading out into a pretty sparse snow year.

North-facing peaks in the San Juan Mountains, late October 2025. There’s snow, but a lot less than one would expect. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

📖 Reading Room 🧐

  • Nick Bowlin and ProPublica just published an extensive investigation into oil and gas field “purges,” which is when injecting produced wastewater underground forces toxic water to spew out of old wells in mind-blowing volumes, killing vegetation and trees and contaminating the earth.|
    Bowlin’s investigation focuses on Oklahoma — where regulators are doing little to address it — but these purges occur anywhere that produced wastewater is injected into the ground as a way to dispose of it, which is to say every oil and gas field from Wyoming to New Mexico. Each barrel of oil pulled from the ground is accompanied by anywhere from three to 30 barrels of brackish wastewater that can be contaminated with an assorted soup of hazardous chemicals. This means that hundreds of billions of this stuff must be disposed of each year, usually by deep injection.
    As oil production continues, and as more and more wells are “orphaned” or abandoned without being plugged, the purge problem will only grow worse. 
  • KUNC’s Alex Hagar has a nice, good-news piece on how beavers are returning to Glen Canyon and its tributary canyons as Lake Powell’s water levels recede. It’s yet more evidence that if — when — Lake Powell disappears, the canyons it and ecosystems it drowned will eventually recover, and may do so far more quickly than might be expected.
🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌

Those of you who watch Denver television will certainly recognize longtime Denver 7 weather forecaster. He retired a little while back and has taken on a sort of second career advocating for a Super Grid — an integrated, nationwide, direct current, underground power grid designed to move power from where it’s generated to where it’s needed when it’s needed. 

It’s a cool idea, but also a very, very ambitious one. Instead of rehashing all of the details, I’ll let you watch this video of his presentation, which gives a very informative overview of the whole energy situation.

Michael Mann to Bill Gates: You can’t reboot the planet if you crash it — Bulletin of Atomic Scientists

Bill Gates poses with Rick Perry in 2019, during Perry’s tenure as Secretary of Energy under the first Trump administration. (Public Domain)

Click the link to read the article on the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website (Michael Mann):

October 31, 2025

“I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.” Thus wrote the famous psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1966.

If Maslow were around today, I imagine he might endorse the corollary that if your only tool is technology, every problem appears to have a technofix. And that’s an apt characterization of the “tech bro”-centered thinking so prevalent today in public environmental discourse.

There is no better example than Bill Gates, who just this week redefined the concept of bad timing with the release of a 17-page memo intended to influence the proceedings at the upcoming COP30 international climate summit in Brazil. The memo dismissed the seriousness of the climate crisis just as (quite possibly) the most powerful Atlantic hurricane in human history—climate-fueled Melissa—struck Jamaica with catastrophic impact. The very next day a major new climate report (disclaimer: I was a co-author) entitled “a planet on the brink” was published. The report received far less press coverage than the Gates missive. The legacy media is apparently more interested in the climate musings of an erstwhile PC mogul than a sober assessment by the world’s leading climate scientists.

Gates became a household name in the 1990s as the Microsoft CEO who delivered the Windows operating system. (I must confess, I was a Mac guy). Microsoft was notorious for releasing software mired with security vulnerabilities. Critics argued that Gates was prioritizing the premature release of features and profit over security and reliability. His response to the latest worm or virus crashing your PC and compromising your personal data? “Hey, we’ve got a patch for that!”

That’s the very same approach Gates has taken with the climate crisis. His venture capital group, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, invests in fossil fuel-based infrastructure (like natural gas with carbon capture and enhanced oil recovery), while Gates downplays the role of clean energy and rapid decarbonization. Instead, he favors hypothetical new energy tech, including “modular nuclear reactors” that couldn’t possibly be scaled up over the time frame in which the world must transition off fossil fuels.

Most troublingly, Gates has peddled a planetary “patch” for the climate crisis. He has financed for-profit schemes to implement geoengineering interventions that involve spraying massive amounts of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere to block out sunlight and cool the planet. What could possibly go wrong? And hey, if we screw up this planet, we’ll just geoengineer Mars. Right Elon?

Such technofixes for the climate, in fact, lead us down a dangerous road, both because they displace far safer and more reliable options—namely the clean energy transition—and because they provide an excuse for business-as-usual burning of fossil fuels. Why decarbonize, after all, if we can just solve the problem with a “patch” later?

Here’s the thing, Bill Gates: There is no “patch” for the climate crisis. And there is no way to reboot the planet if you crash it. The only safe and reliable way out when you find yourself in a climate hole is to stop digging—and burning—fossil fuels. [ed. emphasis mine]

It was arguably Gates who—at least in part—inspired the tech-bro villain Peter Isherwell in the Adam McKay film “Don’t Look Up.” The premise of the film is that a giant “comet” (a very thinly veiled metaphor for the climate crisis) is hurtling toward Earth as politicians fail to act. So they turn to Isherwell who insists he has proprietary tech (a metaphor for geoengineering, again thinly veiled) that can save the day: space drones developed by his corporation that will break the comet apart. Coincidentally, the drones are designed to then mine the comet fragments for trillions of dollars’ worth of rare metals, that all go to Isherwell and his corporation. If you haven’t seen the film (which I highly recommend), I’ll let you imagine how it all works out.

For those who have been following Gates on climate for some time, his so-called sudden “pivot” isn’t really a “pivot” at all. It’s a logical consequence of the misguided path he’s been headed down for well over a decade.

I became concerned about Gates’ framing of the climate crisis nearly a decade ago when a journalist reached out to me, asking me to comment on his supposed “discovery” of a formula for predicting carbon emissions. (The formula is really an “identity” that involves expressing carbon emissions as a product of terms related to population, economic growth, energy efficiency, and fossil fuel dependence). I noted, with some amusement, that the mathematical relationship Gates had “discovered” was so widely known it had a name, the “Kaya identity,” after the energy economist Yōichi Kaya who presented the relationship in a textbook nearly three decades ago. It’s familiar not just to climate scientists in the field but to college students taking an introductory course on climate change.

If this seems like a gratuitous critique, it is not. It speaks to a concerning degree of arrogance. Did Gates really think that something as conceptually basic as decomposing carbon emissions into a product of constituent terms had never been attempted before? That he’s so brilliant that anything he thinks up must be a novel discovery?

I reserved my criticism of Gates, at the time, not for his rediscovery of the Kaya identity (hey—if can help his readers understand it, that’s great) but for declaring that it somehow implies that “we need an energy miracle” to get to zero carbon emissions. It doesn’t. I explained that Gates “does an injustice to the very dramatic inroads that renewable energy and energy efficiency are making,” noting peer-reviewed studies by leading experts that provide “very credible outlines for how we could reach a 100 percent noncarbon energy generation by 2050.”

The so-called “miracle” he speaks of exists—it’s called the sun, and wind, and geothermal, and energy storage technology. Real world solutions exist now and are easily scalable with the right investments and priorities. The obstacles aren’t technological. They’re political.

Gates’ dismissiveness in this case wasn’t a one-off. It was part of a consistent pattern of downplaying clean energy while promoting dubious and potentially dangerous technofixes in which he is often personally invested. When I had the chance to question him about this directly (The Guardian asked me to contribute to a list of questions they were planning on asking him in an interview a few years ago), his response was evasive and misleading. He insisted that there is a “premium” paid for clean energy buildout when in fact it has a lower levelized cost than fossil fuels or nuclear and deflected the questions with ad hominem swipes. (“He [Mann] actually does very good work on climate change. So I don’t understand why he’s acting like he’s anti-innovation.”)

This all provides us some context for evaluating Gates’ latest missive, which plays like a game of climate change-diminishing bingo, drawing upon nearly every one of the tropes embraced by professional climate disinformers like self-styled “Skeptical Environmentalist” Bjorn Lomborg. (Incidentally, Lomborg’s center has received millions of dollars of funding from the Gates Foundation in recent years and Lomborg recently acknowledged serving as an adviser to Gates on climate issues.)

Among the classic Lomborgian myths promoted in Gates’ new screed, which I’ll paraphrase here, is the old standby that “clean energy is too expensive.” (Gates likes to emphasize a few difficult-to-decarbonize sectors like steel or air travel as a distraction from the fact that most of our energy infrastructure can readily be decarbonized now.) He also insists that “we can just adapt,” although in the absence of concerted action, warming could plausibly push us past the limit of our adaptive capacity as a species.

He argues that “efforts to fight climate change detract from efforts to address human health threats.” (A central point of my new book Science Under Siegewith public health scientist Peter Hotez is that climate and human health are inseparable, with climate change fueling the spread of deadly disease). Then there is his assertion that “the poor and downtrodden have more pressing concerns” when, actually, it is just the opposite; the poor and downtrodden are the most threatened by climate change because they have the least wealth and resilience.

What Gates is putting forward aren’t legitimate arguments that can be made in good faith. They are shopworn fossil fuel industry talking points. Being found parroting them is every bit as embarrassing as being caught—metaphorically speaking—with your pants down.

For years when I would criticize Gates for what I consider to be his misguided take on climate, colleagues would say, “you just don’t understand what Gates is saying!” Now, with Donald Trump and the right-wing Murdoch media machine (the Wall Street Journal editorial board and now an op-ed by none other than Lomborg himself in the New York Post) celebrating Gates’ new missive, I can confidently turn around and say, “No, you didn’t understand what he was saying.”

Maybe—just maybe—we’ve learned an important lesson here: The solution to the climate crisis isn’t going to come from the fairy-dust-sprinkled flying unicorns that are the “benevolent plutocrats.” They don’t exist. The solution is going to have to come from everyone else, using every tool at our disposal to push back against an ecocidal agenda driven by plutocrats, polluters, petrostates, propagandists, and too often now, the press. [ed. emphasis mine]

This graph shows the globally averaged monthly mean carbon dioxide abundance measured at the Global Monitoring Laboratory’s global network of air sampling sites since 1980. Data are still preliminary, pending recalibrations of reference gases and other quality control checks. Credit: NOAA GML

The nation’s energy dominance falters: President Trump is killing clean energy, and it’s not even helping fossil fuels — Jonathan P. Thompson (High Country News) #renewable

Welcome to the Landline, a monthly newsletter from High Country News about land, water, wildlife, climate and conservation in the Western United States. Sign up to get it in your inbox. Screenshot from the High Country News website.

Click the link to read the article on the High County News website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

October 30, 2025

Amid all of Donald Trump’s haphazard policymaking and chaos-mongering, one part of his agenda has remained remarkably consistent throughout both terms: the quest for something he calls “energy dominance.” While Trump probably thinks he coined the concept, only the name is new; it’s really merely a macho rebranding of what was traditionally known as “energy independence,” the desire to produce the nation’s energy domestically rather than import it from potential adversaries. The yearning for energy independence became a focus back during the Nixon era, when geopolitical tensions sparked overlapping energy crises. Ever since, it’s been pursued by every administration, both Democratic and Republican.

So, yes, even cardigan-wearing, thermostat-adjusting Jimmy Carter was an energy dominance guy, maybe even the most successful one. Same goes for Presidents Obama and Biden. What distinguishes Trump — despite all of his regulatory rollbacks, his “Drill, Baby, Drill” and “Mine, Baby, Mine” and “Beautiful Clean Coal” rhetoric and various “emergency” orders — is that his push for dominance has not only been ineffective, it has actually served to weaken the domestic energy industry and has even diminished its ability to produce the power needed to keep modern society running.

If Trump really cared about energy dominance, independence or abundance, he would use all of the tools at his disposal to “win” this war. Even an energy warrior who didn’t give a hoot about pollution or the climate would insist on keeping the fastest-growing energy sources — wind and solar with battery backup — in the nation’s arsenal, along with nuclear, geothermal, hydropower and natural gas, simply for practical reasons, relying on what previous administrations have called an “all-of-the-above” approach.

Instead, Trump has essentially discarded the most promising and effective energy technologies by eliminating federal tax credits for wind power and both rooftop and utility-scale solar, shuttering new wind projects on federal land and in federal waters, subjecting proposed utility-scale solar on federal land to additional scrutiny and red tape, and canceling the Solar for All program that aimed to bring clean energy and energy self-reliance to lower-income families. More recently, the administration clawed back over $7 billion in Biden-era funding for clean energy and grid-reliability projects, many of which were in Western states and all of which came from states that favored Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 election.

Meanwhile, Trump’s administration is trying to prop up the decrepit and rusty weapons of old, i.e. fossil fuels, and putting them on the front lines in the apparent hope that they don’t crumble away before his term ends.

The administration plans to fork out about $625 million in subsidies in hopes of revitalizing the flagging coal industry and has rolled back myriad regulations (also a form of subsidy) on coal-fired power plants. It has also opened 13 million acres of public land across the West to new coal leasing and overturned Biden-era bans on new leasing in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming and Montana. At the same time, it has inexplicably canceled funding for carbon capture projects aimed at prolonging nearby coal plants’ lives.

Trump is clearly not looking to achieve energy dominance, but rather to exercise his countless grievances and realize some historical fantasy — while, of course, helping fossil fuel executives rake in a few more bucks while they still can. It’s a sort of qualified bid for coal and oil dominance, so long as it benefits red-leaning states.

But so far, even that’s not going too well.

Earlier this month, the Bureau of Land Management held its first coal lease sale in over a decade on public land in the Powder River Basin. There was only one would-be buyer, the Navajo Transitional Energy Company, which bid just $186,000 for a tract containing about 167 million tons of coal — meaning about one-tenth of one cent per ton. That’s in contrast to sales in 2012 that brought in over $1 per ton. The feds rejected the bid on the grounds that it didn’t comply with the Mineral Leasing Act since it didn’t fetch fair market value. The Interior Department promptly canceled another sale in the Powder River Basin for 441 million tons of coal just days before it was scheduled to take place. And a third sale, this one on public lands in southwestern Utah, attracted only one low bid as well; and it, too, was rejected.

One of the generating units at the power plant at Kemmerer, Wyo., is being shut down this year [2017] to reduce emissions that are causing regional haze. 2009 photo/Allen Best

And just days after the administration announced its plans to pour taxpayers’ cash into the coal industry, PacifiCorp, the largest grid operator in the Western U.S., doubled down on its plans to convert its Naughton coal plant in Wyoming to run on natural gas. Idaho Power actually proposed a rate decrease for its customers after it cut costs by shutting down a unit at a Nevada coal plant. Meanwhile, no utility anywhere has seriously proposed building any new coal plants, mainly because it is simply an obsolete, expensive and dirty technology.

The president’s continual desire to “Drill, Baby, Drill” is experiencing a failure to launch, as well. The BLM has handed out drilling permits like Shriners throwing candy to the crowd at a parade, continuing to do so at an alarming rate despite the government shutdown. During the first six months of Trump’s term, the administration issued 2,660 permits to drill on public lands — about 524 per month. That eclipses Biden’s biggest year of 2023, when he issued 317 per month and garnered the disdain of climate activists.

And yet, drill rig counts, the most accurate indicator of the industry’s enthusiasm and a good barometer of future crude oil and natural gas production levels, have remained stagnant during Trump’s term. In fact, they’re significantly lower than they were a year ago, shortly before Trump was elected. That’s due in part to low oil prices, which is something Trump has pushed for (and maybe prodded Saudi Arabia and other OPEC members to encourage by increasing their own oilfield pumping), but also because Trump’s disorderly trade wars are sowing confusion, while his tariffs on steel and aluminum are raising costs for drillers.

The most recent Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas survey of oil and gas executives revealed how poorly Trump’s policies are playing out in the oilfields. Most of the executives surveyed said that Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and federal royalty reductions would bring down their “break-even” costs only slightly, and that they would not appreciably increase production.

Generally speaking, optimism is in short supply in the oilpatch these days.

“It’s going to be a bleak three-plus years for the oilpatch,” one executive said, in a survey that was designed to be anonymous to encourage a candid response. Another noted: “After Liberation Day, we cut our drilling budget in half from 10 wells to five wells.”

And yet another declared, “We have begun the twilight of shale. Several multibillion-dollar firms that have previously been U.S.-onshore-only are making investments in foreign countries and riskier (waterborne) geologies.” They went on to question what will happen to the hundreds of thousands of abandoned and orphaned wells when the drilling boom ends, noting, “Society will not treat us kindly unless we do our part to clean up after we are gone.”

Area of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge coastal plain, looking south toward the Brooks Range. By U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – images.fws.gov (image description page), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5787251

Last week, the Trump administration moved to reopen 1.56 million acres on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain to oil and gas leasing, just as he did in 2017 at the outset of his first term. The first lease sale in the refuge was held in 2021, just days before Biden was inaugurated, but it attracted only low bids — none from major oil companies — with most of the leases going to an Alaska state agency. Another auction in January 2025 drew no bids at all. The industry simply isn’t all that interested.

Just as Biden’s heightened regulations on oil and gas drilling didn’t slow drilling or production, Trump’s determined deregulation is unlikely to speed it up. Nor will his hostility toward solar and wind kill their momentum: Firms are bringing utility-scale projects online at a rapid rate and financing new proposals despite the lack of federal incentives. Federal policies can serve to mitigate energy development’s impacts or perhaps bolster the companies’ profits somewhat, but they are only one of many factors that influence how much and at what rate development occurs. All the political rhetoric in the world won’t help; so-called energy dominance simply cannot be willed — or forced — into existence.

Friday quick takes: Energy impotence? Uranium. Floods and reservoirs — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

The West Elk coal mine near Somerset, Colorado. It’s the largest coal producer in the state. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

October 17, 2025

🔋Notes from the Energy Transition 🔌

President Donald Trump’s quest for what he calls energy dominance has run into a few snags, many of which are of his own making. Let’s set aside, for a moment, the fact that the term “energy dominance” doesn’t really make sense (What is energy dominating? Or are we dominating energy? Or …????). Let’s assume that it’s just an insecure male’s version of energy independence (so woke!), or just a dumb term for producing enough energy to keep all the data centers running. 

In that case, don’t you think you’d want to use all of the tools — or weapons, if you prefer — at your disposal? Certainly any reasonable person, even one who doesn’t care about pollution or greenhouse gas emissions, would do that, pushing for more solar, wind, battery storage, hydropower, and geothermal, in addition to nuclear and natural gas. But as has been shown over and over, Trump tends to let his personal whims — along with a desire to crush everything that he thinks Democrats favor — erase rationality. 

As a result, he has waged war on the most promising energy sources (i.e. solar and wind), while trying to dust off the old, dying ones (i.e. fossil fuels) and prop them up on the battle lines in hopes they won’t fall down too soon. Well, it’s not working out so well. 

Oil and gas drilling is continuing on federal lands, although at a much slower pace than during the Biden administration, even though Trump has handed out drilling permits like candy at a parade. That’s in part due to low oil prices, and in part due to higher drilling costs: Trump’s tariffs have increased the price of pipe and other materials used on the rigs.

The number of rigs actively drilling has stayed somewhat steady over the last nine months, but rig counts remain below what they were in 2023 and 2024 and there are no signs that Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric is having the desired effect. Source: Baker Hughes, Land Desk graphic.

But the most obvious failure is playing out in the administration’s bid to revitalize the flagging coal industry. Let’s take a look:

  • After the administration and congressional Republicans made much ado about rescinding Biden-era moratoria on new federal coal leasing, the Interior Department rushed to auction off parcels containing hundreds of millions of tons of coal in Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. They flopped:
    • In Montana, the Navajo Transitional Energy Company bid $186,000 for a tract containing an estimated 167 million tons of coal adjacent to its Spring Creek Mine in the Powder River Basin. That’s a mere 1/10 of one cent per ton. Contrast that with other Powder River Basin leases in 2012 that brought in more than $1/ton. The feds rejected the bid, saying it was below fair market value. 
    • The dismal result prompted the Bureau of Land Management to cancel the 441-million-ton West Antelope coal lease sale in Wyoming. 
    • And then the Interior Department rejected a single lowball bid for a lease containing about 6 million tons of federal coal in Utah. 
    • On a somewhat related note: After the Trump administration announced it would subsidize the coal industry to the tune of $625 million, PacifiCorp said it would go forward with its plans to convert the Naughton coal plant in Wyoming to run on natural gas.

You’d think that maybe the administration would get a hint and adjust their strategy accordingly. Yeah, right.

A warning sign in the Lisbon Valley. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Last week, Anfield Energy announced that Utah regulators had approved its proposed Velvet Wood uranium mine in the Lisbon Valley. “Permitting Complete, Construction to Follow,” the company’s press release says, adding that they expected to break ground within 30 days. The project was the first beneficiary of Trump’s accelerated “energy emergency” permitting, and the BLM completed its environmental review in a mere 13 days. 

The company may be jumping the gun a bit. The Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining actually gave only tentative approval to the project, conditioned upon the company posting a $539,000 bond. And it specifies that no ground disturbance can happen until the project gets other applicable agencies’ go-ahead. 

But as Sarah Fields of Uranium Watch points out, Anfield has not yet received approvals from other state agencies for its radon ventilation shafts, wastewater treatment plant, or its air quality permit.

Trump “emergency” fast-tracks Utah uranium mine — Jonathan P. Thompson

Paradox Valley.

***

Anfield — or at least its PR team — is busy as of late. They also announced that they had completed the first phase of exploratory drilling at the defunct JD-7 uranium mine in the Paradox Valley. While these announcements are a dime-a-dozen, I was a bit intrigued by this one, because the JD-7 is like a poster child of the follies of the last uranium “boom.” It’s an open pit, a gaping wound overlooking the valley, but never actually produced any uranium because the “boom” busted before it even really began. Somehow I’m not convinced that this time will be much different.

A day in Uranium Country — Jonathan P. Thompson

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

As one might expect, the recent rains and resulting flooding boosted reservoir levels. Navajo Reservoir saw its surface level jump considerably (rising about 10 feet) due to all that water in the San Juan River. However, it’s still lower than it was this time last year.

Source: Lake Navajo Water Database

Lake Powell, which is much, much bigger, only added 1.28 feet to its surface level, and remains 32 feet below what it was on this date last year. But as the following graph shows, the big water is still making its way into the reservoir, so its level could keep climbing.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

I’m on the road right now, making my way from southern Oregon to southwestern Colorado via a circuitous route. And no, I’m not in the Silver Bullet (I’ll reveal the purpose of the trip later, along with more details about Land Desk transportation). I don’t have my good camera with me, but I’ve tried to get some snapshots anyway.

Gravestones in City Cemetery, Yreka, California. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
Snow and water in the eastern Sierras. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Basin and Range country along Hwy 50. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

I was wrong about President Trump, okay!?: But I was right about “governance by spite” — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Carrizo Sunrise. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

October 7, 2025

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

I was wrong, and woefully so. I want to apologize for that and let you know how remorseful I am: I dearly, dearly wish that I was right. But alas …

See, back in November I wrote a dispatch about what to expect from the incoming Trump administration, particularly concerning public lands and the environment. It actually turned out to be fairly accurate on the public lands stuff, but there was this one offending paragraph that, I fear, may have lulled some of my readers into complacency (when they should have been preparing to resist). Here it is:

Oh, boy. Trump has been in office for less than nine months, and already he’s checked off all of the boxes that naive little me figured (and hoped) he would never dare even attempt. He and Goebbels-clone Stephen Miller and friends are going full-on fascist and trampling on the First Amendment and the U.S. Constitution in general, they are prosecuting political opponents, they are using the “Department of War” to target the “enemy within,” they are suing and bullying the media for reporting the truth and making fun of him, and they have engaged in a brutal — and performative — intimidation and terror campaign against immigrants and anyone who “looks” like they might be an immigrant. Making it even worse, the President of the United States treats it all like some sort of joke, acting like a pre-pubescent middle school bully while posting stupid videos portraying he and Russell Vought (a primary architect of Project 2025, which Trump disavowed during the campaign) as the grim reaper out to destroy America’s democracy (and the economy).

So, yeah, I was way off. Apologies for my naivety.

But I was right about one thing. I predicted Trump would practice governance by spite. He has, and done it to the extreme. Not only are his words malicious, but so are his policies, fueled by a lust for vengeance. His tariffs are aimed at punishing other countries (even though they ultimately only punish American consumers and businesses — even his beloved oil and gas industry).

His quest for “Energy Dominance” is anything but that. Sure, he’s trying to help out his fossil fuel tycoon buddies, but I think he’s even more interested in retribution against the “libs” and the environmentalists that takes the form of an all-out assault on the environment, the climate, public lands — and everyone who cherishes or depends on these things. If he wanted to bolster energy, he would have at least stood aside and let the burgeoning solar and wind do their thing alongside fossil fuels by taking an “all of the above” approach. Instead, he has done everything possible to stifle these energy sources, simply because they are cleaner than coal and gas. He shut down the Solar for All program, thus denying thousands of low- and middle-income families access to rooftop solar and a smidgeon of their own energy independence and lower utility bills. Where’s the dominance in that?

And now the Trump administration has canceled some $8 billion in federal funding for clean energy, efficiency, and grid reliability projects across the nation, many of them in the West. And while one might think that this is just another assault on clean energy (which it is), or maybe a way to slash expenses to pay for tax cuts for billionaires (that, too), it’s primarily motivated by, yet again, revenge: The cuts were limited to states that voted for Kamala Harris in the 2024 election.

Yes, you read that correctly. While funding was zeroed out for blue states, identical projects in neighboring red states were left untouched. He is doing this to punish Democrat-leaning states, but the victims end up being small and large businesses that banked on those funds, the folks who work for those firms, the environment, and ultimately folks like you and me who will see our utility bills increase (because someone has to pay for those grid upgrades). And guess what? You won’t be saved just because you’re in a red congressional district.

This is not normal, nor is it politics as usual.

In fact, the funding that the Trump administration is taking away from individuals, organizations, and businesses, was allocated by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the Inflation Reduction Act, both of which Congress passed during the Biden administration. The vast majority of the funding from those bills went to Republican states and districts that voted for Trump in 2024. The funded projects created thousands of new jobs across the country and added up to billions in investment in communities in the Phoenix area, along Colorado’s Front Range, in Nevada, and elsewhere.

I’m not saying all of these projects were wonderful, or that they’d all succeed. Some were full on boondoggles, others would inflict more harm than good. But the funding was approved by Congress, and the organizations that received them were banking on them, had invested a great deal of their own money into the funded projects, and had built up workforces. For the administration to then take back the money, some of which had already been spent, for purely political, vindictive reasons, is both wrong and cruel.

And if you think that this is just for a bunch of solar panels, think again. Here’s a list of some of the biggest projects that were defunded (which includes some funds that Trump had previously cancelled).

  • $2.2 billion: Amount rescinded for hydrogen fuel production and distribution hubs in California and the Pacific Northwest.
  • $250 million: Amount clawed back from the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon to fund transmission and power grid upgrades.
  • $70 million: Amount rescinded from Xcel Energy to install 1,000 megawatt-hour iron-air battery energy storage systems in Colorado and Minnesota.
  • $50 million: Amount rescinded from the Tribal Energy Consortium’s Ignacio, Colorado-based program aimed at reducing methane emissions from tribal owned and operated oil and gas wells and facilities located on tribal lands.
  • $326 million: Amount rescinded from Colorado State University for a projectdesigned to develop methods for reducing methane emissions from oil and gas wells.
  • $15 million: Amount rescinded from Kit Carson Electric Cooperative in northern New Mexico for a grid resilience project.
  • $6.6 million: Amount rescinded from Navajo Transitional Energy Company for studying and developing a carbon capture retrofit project for the Four Corners coal-burning power plant in New Mexico.

Hundreds of millions of dollars more are being clawed back from Portland General Electric, Southern California Edison, Tri-State Generation and Transmission, the Imperial Irrigation District, and the Electric Power Research Institute — the list goes on and on. But it never extends to similar projects in red states.

Even as Energy Secretary Chris Wright was announcing the funding cuts, for example, his department went forward with a $2.23 billion loan for Lithium Americas and its contentious Thacker Pass mine in Nevada (which voted Republican in the last presidential election). In exchange, the administration took a 5% equity stake in both the company and in the firm. Never mind that the project is opposed by the Reno-Sparks Indian Colony, the Burns Paiute Tribe, and the Summit Lake Paiute Tribe, as well as by numerous environmental groups, and that the price of lithium is lower than it’s been since 2021. Go figure.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

As expected (and as I correctly predicted would happen), the Trump administration is busy unraveling environmental protections and resource and travel management plans for public lands around the West. The most recent targets include:

  • The Bureau of Land Management’s Rock Springs resource management planwhich covers about 3.6 million acres of public lands in southwestern Wyoming, including the Red Desert. A solid, common-sense plan was first released about two years ago that aimed to push energy and other development away from the most sensitive areas. It was years in the making, and was a compromise. And yet, Wyoming’s right-wing was up in arms, saying it was too restrictive. That prompted the BLM to go back to the drawing board and incorporate more public input. They came back with a far less restrictive plan, a compromised compromise, I guess you could call it. That’s not enough for the current administration and their industry donors, however: The BLM is going to revise it again, this time to bring it in line with Trump’s “Unleashing American Energy” agenda. More details and commenting instructions here. 
  • The BLM is “reassessing” the off-road route designations in its Labyrinth/Gemini Bridges travel plan that includes about 300,000 acres of slickrock-covered public lands near Moab. The new plan was issued late in 2023, and left a whopping 800 miles of roads and trails opened to motorized travel. The off-road-vehicle lobby sued to overturn the plan, but were shot down in court. You have until Oct. 24 to comment on this one.
During water year 2025, drought moved into and intensified throughout most of the Interior West. Source: U.S. Drought Monitor.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

The 2025 water year has come to an end (on Sept. 30), and while we know it was a fairly lousy one for most of the Western U.S., the data is now beginning to come in letting us know just how lousy it was. Some of the stats aren’t updated yet, and may not be for a while, thanks to the government shutdown and the Trump administration’s fear of the word “climate.” 

For the most part, the water year started out quite nicely, precipitation wise, with above “normal” amounts of rain and snow falling in October and November. But that was followed by a severe lack of snow, a dry, warm spring, and a late-to-arrive monsoon. The snowpack deteriorated, spring runoff was weak, and drought intensified under the hot, dry sun of summer, with only a bit of relief finally arriving in September. 

Resulting low streamflows led to a 33-foot drop in Lake Powell’s surface level during the water year. Here are the charts and the numbers:

  • 8.08 million acre-feet: Total Lake Powell inflows, water year 2024 (Unregulated inflows = 7.98 MAF)
  • 3,578 feet: Lake Powell’s surface elevation on Oct. 1, 2024
  • 5.14 million acre-feet: Total flows into Lake Powell during the 2025 water year. (Unregulated inflows = 4.69 MAF)
  • 3,545 feet: Lake Powell’s surface elevation on Oct. 1, 2025
  • 11.96 MAF: Inflows during water year 2023
  • 21.65 MAF: Inflows during water year 1984 (the highest since Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1963). 
  • 9.85%: Percent of the Western U.S. that was experiencing severe to exceptional drought at the beginning of the 2025 water year.
  • 44.12%: Percent of the Western U.S. that was experiencing severe to exceptional drought at the end of the 2025 water year.

🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡

You just can’t make this stuff up. MAGA-world is rife with conspiracies about the Charlie Kirk killing last month, which is hardly surprising. I guess it’s tough for some folks to believe that some 22-year-old Mormon kid from a Republican, gun-loving family could assassinate a right-wing entertainer and provocateur on his own. He must have had help from that ever-elusive Antifa (which is not an organization, but simply a shortening of the term anti-fascist). Or maybe it was Mossad — a favorite theory among a certain sect of the right wing. 

But then there’s Candace Owens, MAGA podcaster and Crazytown mayoral candidate. She’s raising the possibility that Phil Lyman was involved in the plot to assassinate Kirk. Yes, that Phil Lyman: the former San Juan County Commissioner who gained notoriety after leading an ATV ride — with Ryan Bundy and his “militia” buddies making a cameo — down Recapture Canyon just days after the Bunkerville standoff. Lyman has since swerved further and further into MAGA-land, served as a Utah state representative, received a pardon from Trump, and hurled some conspiracy-laden accusations of his own after losing the gubernatorial election to Gov. Spencer Cox. 

I tried to listen to Owens’ argument and alleged evidence (including the link, with a suggestion not to click on it) regarding Lyman and couldn’t make any sense of it. But I guess Owens’s following is big enough for folks to take it kind of seriously. Even Cox, whom Lyman has assailed with accusations of his own, took to social media to defend his right-wing rival. Meanwhile, I’ll be making some popcorn while I wait to see how this one plays out.

#Solar and #wind power has grown faster than electricity demand this year, report says — The #Denver Post

May 6, 2023 – Volunteers with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s (NREL’s) ESCAPES (Education, Stewardship, and Community Action for Promoting Environmental Sustainability) program lend a hand to Jack’s 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)

Click the link to read the article on The Denver Post website (Alexa St. John). Here’s an excerpt:

October 6, 2025

Worldwide solar and wind power generation has outpaced electricity demand this year, and for the first time on record, renewable energies combined generated more power than coal, according to a new analysis. Global solar generation grew by a record 31% in the first half of the year, while wind generation grew by 7.7%, according to the report by the energy think tank Ember, which was released after midnight Tuesday London time. Solar and wind generation combined grew by more than 400 terawatt hours, which was more than overall global demand increased in the same period, it found. The findings suggest it is possible for the world to wean off polluting sources of power — even as demand for electricity skyrockets — with continued investment in renewables including solar, wind, hydropower, bioenergy and geothermal energies.

“That means that they can keep up the pace with growing appetite for electricity worldwide,” said Małgorzata Wiatros-Motyka, senior electricity analyst at Ember and lead author of the study.

At the same time, total fossil fuel generation dropped slightly, by less than 1%.

“The fall overall of fossil may be small, but it is significant,” said Wiatros-Motyka. “This is a turning point when we see emissions plateauing.”

The firm analyzes monthly data from 88 countries representing the vast majority of electricity demand around the world. Reasons that demand is increasing include economic growth, electric vehicles and data centers, rising populations in developing countries and the need for more cooling as temperatures rise. Meeting that demand by burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas for electricity releases planet-warming gases including carbon dioxide and methane. This leads to more severe, costly and deadly extreme weather.

Are nukes the solution to the data center problem?: Or are data centers the solution to the nuclear reactor infeasibility problem? — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) 

Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 30, 2025

“America’s Data Centers Could Go Dark,” the subject line of the email read.

If only, I mused. I’m less worried about data centers going dark than about everything else going dark because of data centers. But whatever. That’s not what the PR person (or AI bot?) who sent the email was trying to say. They were there to ask, rhetorically: “Can Microreactors Save the Day?” They then offered to connect me with James Walker, CEO of a firm called NANO Nuclear Energy, who would then try to sell me on his KRONOS MMR™, described as a “compact, carbon free” way to power data centers.

There is a lot of hysteria around data centers these days. Folks like me are worried about how much energy and water they use, and the effect that might have on the grid, the climate, scarce water supplies, and other utility customers. Others are panicking over the possibility that the U.S. might fall behind in the AI race — though I have no idea what winning the race would entail or look like.

A Dog Day Diatribe on AI, cryptocurrency, energy consumption, and capitalism — Jonathan P. Thompson

And, in our capitalistic system, where there is fear, there are myriad solutions, most of which entail building or making or consuming more of something rather than just, well, you know, turning off the damned data centers. The Trump administration would solve the problem by subsidizing more coal-burning, while the petroleum industry is offering up its surplus natural gas. Tech firms are buying up all the power from new solar arrays and geothermal facilities, long before they’re even built.

Perhaps the most hype, and the loftiest promises of salvation, however, involve nuclear power and a new generation of reactors that are smaller, portable, require less up-front capital, and supposedly not weighed down with all of the baggage of the old-school conventional reactors, which not only cost a lot to build, but also tend to evoke visions of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, or Fukushima.

Yet for all the buzz — which may be loudest in the Western U.S. — it’s far from certain that this so-called nuclear renaissance will ever come to fruition. The latest generation of reactors may go by slick, newfangled names, but they are still expensive, require dangerous and damaging mining to extract uranium for fuel, produce waste, are potentially dangerous — and are still largely unproven.

Experimental Breeder Reactor II on the Idaho National Laboratory. The reactor was shut down and decommissioned in 1994. Now Oklo is building a new reactor, using similar technology, nearby. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Several years ago I visited Experimental Breeder Reactor I, located west of Idaho Falls. It has been defunct since 1963 and is now a museum, and a sort of time capsule taking one back to heady times when atomic energy promised to help feed the exploding, electricity-hungry population of the post-war Western U.S. and its growing number of electric gadgets (remember electric can openers?).

The retro-futuristic facility is decked out with control panels and knobs and valves and other apparatus that possess the characteristic sleek chunkiness of mid-century high-tech design. A temperature gauge for the “rod farm” goes up to 500 degrees centigrade, and if you look closely you’ll see a red button labeled “SCRAM” that, if pushed, would have plunged the control rods into the reactor, thereby “poisoning” the reaction and shutting it down. If you have to push it, you’d best scram on out of there.

I couldn’t help but get caught up in the marvels of the technology. On a cold December day in 1951, scientists here had blasted a neutron into a uranium-235 atom and shattered it, releasing energy and yet more neutrons that split other uranium atoms, causing a frenetically energetic chain reaction identical to the one that led to the explosions that annihilated Hiroshima and Nagasaki several years earlier. Mass is destroyed, energy created. Only this time the energy was harnessed not to blow up cities, but to create steam that turned a turbine that generated electricity that illuminated a string of lightbulbs and then powered the entire facility — all without burning fossil fuels or building dams.

This particular reactor was known as a “breeder” because its fuel reproduces itself, in a way. During the reaction, loose neutrons are “captured” by uranium-238 atoms, turning them into plutonium-239, which is readily fissionable, meaning it can be used as fuel for future reactions.

A diagram of the atomic fission and breeding process at Experimental Breeder Reactor-I in Idaho. The reactor began generating electricity in 1951. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

At first glance it seems like the answer to the world’s energy problems, and two years after EBR-I lit up, Dwight D. Eisenhower delivered his 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech. Nuclear energy would help redeem the world from the terrible scourge of atomic weapons, the president said; it would be used to “serve the needs rather than the fears of the world — to make the deserts flourish, to warm the cold, to feed the hungry, to alleviate the misery of the world.”*

Now, with Arizona utilities teaming up to develop and build new reactors; with Wyoming’s, Idaho’s, and Utah’s governors collaborating on their nuclear-powered “Energy Superabundance” effort; and with Oklo looking to build a modern version of EBR-I not far from the original, it’s beginning to feel like 1953 all over again. Only now the nuclear reaction promises to serve the needs of cyberspace rather than the real world — to make AI do your homework, to cool the server banks, to feed the Instagram feeds, to send out those Tik-Toks at twice the speed.

Advertisement from 1954.

Seven decades later, Eisenhower’s hopes have yet to be fulfilled.

It turns out a lot of people aren’t comfortable with the idea nuclear reactions taking place down the road, regardless of how many safety backstops are in place to avoid a catastrophic meltdown a la Chernobyl. Nuke plants cost a lot of money and take forever to build. They need water for steam generation and for cooling, which can be a problem in water-constrained places and even in water-abundant areas: Diablo Canyon nuke plant sucks up about 2.5 billion gallons of ocean water to generate steam and to cool the reactors, before spitting it — 20 degrees warmer — back into the Pacific. This kills an estimated 5,000 adult fish each year, along with an additional 1.5 billion fish eggs and fry and messes up water temperature and the marine ecosystem. And while nukes are good at producing baseload power (meaning steady, 24/7 generation), they aren’t very flexible, meaning they can’t be ramped up or down to accommodate fluctuating demand or variable power sources like wind and solar.

And then there’s the waste. The nuclear reaction itself may seem almost miraculous in its power, simplicity, and even purity.

But the steps required to create the reaction, along with the aftermath, are hardly magical. To fuel a single reactor requires extracting hundreds of thousands of tons of ore from the earth, milling the ore to produce yellowcake (triuranium octoxide), converting the yellowcake to uranium hexafluoride gas, enriching it to concentrate the uranium-235, and fabricating the fuel pellets and rods.

Each step generates ample volumes of toxic waste products. Mining leaves behind lightly radioactive waste rock; milling produces mill tailings containing radium, thorium, radon, lead, arsenic, and other nasty stuff; and enrichment and fabrication both produce liquid and solid waste. It has been about 40 years since the Cold War uranium boom busted, and yet the abandoned mines and mills are still contaminating areas and still being cleaned up — if you can ever truly clean up this sort of pollution.

Yet the reaction, itself, generates the most dangerous form of leftovers, containing radioactive fission products such as iodine, strontium, and caesium and transuranic elements including plutonium. This “spent nuclear fuel,” or radioactive waste, is removed from the reactor during refueling and for now is typically stored on site. Efforts to create a national depository for these nasty leftovers have failed, usually because the sites aren’t deemed safe enough to contain the waste for a couple hundred thousand years, or because locals don’t want it in their back yard. If it were to fall into the wrong hands, it could be used in a “dirty bomb,” a conventional explosive that scatters radioactive material around an area.

Plus, breeder reactors, especially, produce plutonium, which can then be used in nuclear warheads (India used U.S.-supported breeder technology to acquire nuclear weapons). That’s one of the reasons folks soured on the technology and the U.S. ended its federal plutonium breeder reactor development program in the 1980s. The other reasons were high costs and sodium coolant leaks (and resulting fires). After the EBR-I shut down in 1963, because it was outdated, the Idaho National Laboratory built EBR-II nearby. It was shut down and decommissioned in 1994.

Nevertheless, Oklo — one of the rising new-nuke stars — is touting its use of similar technology as the EBR-II, i.e. liquid-metal-cooled, metal-fueled fast reactor, as a selling point for the reactor it is currently developing at the INL.

The envisioned new fleet of reactors go by many names: SMRs, or small modular reactors, and advanced, fast, micro, or nano-reactors. Most of them can be fabricated in a factory, then trucked to or assembled on-site. Some are small enough to fit in a truck. They can be used alone to power a microgrid or a data center, or clustered to create a utility-scale operation that feeds the grid.

Their main selling point is that they require less up-front capital than a conventional reactor, that you can build and install one of these things for a fraction of the cost and a fraction of the time (once the reactors are actually licensed, developed, and produced on a commercial scale, which is still not the case).

A decade ago, companies like NuScale were also promoting them as ways to power the grid in a time of increasing restraints on carbon. Now that the feds are not only declaring climate change a “hoax,” but also forbidding agencies from even uttering the term, that no longer carries as much weight. Instead, almost every new proposal now is marketed as a “solution” to the data center “problem.” Google, Switch, Amazon, Open AI, and Meta are all looking to power their facilities with nukes, if and when they are finally up and running.

The new technology is not monolithic. Some are cooled in different ways, or use different types of fuel, but they all work on the same principle as old-school conventional reactors. As such, they also require the same fuel-production process, also have potential safety issues, and also create hazardous waste.

In fact, a 2022 Stanford study found that small modular reactors could create more, and equally hazardous, waste than conventional reactors per unit of power generated. The authors wrote: “Results reveal that water-, molten salt–, and sodium-cooled SMR designs will increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by factors of 2 to 30 {compared to an 1,100 MW pressurized water reactor}.”

The cost thing isn’t all that clear cut, either. The smaller reactors may be cheaper to build, but because they don’t take advantage of economies of scale, they are more expensive per unit of electricity generated than conventional reactors, and still can be cost prohibitive.

In 2015, for example, Oregon-based NuScale proposed installing 12 of its 50-MW small modular reactors at the Idaho National Laboratories to provide 600 MW of capacity to the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems, or UAMPS (which also includes a handful of non-Utah utilities). In 2018 — after receiving at least $288 million in federal subsidies — NuScale upped the planned capacity to 720 MW, saying it would lower operating costs. 

But what started out as a $3 billion project in 2015 kept increasing, so that even after it was ramped down to 421 MW, the projected price tag had ballooned to $9.3 billion in 2023 (still about one-third of the cost of the new Vogtle plant in Georgia, but with a fraction of the generating capacity). UAMPS’s collective members, realizing there were plenty of more cost-effective ways to keep their grids running, canceled the project later that year.

It kind of makes you wonder: Is this new wave of nuclear reactors solving the data center energy demand problem? Or are data centers’ energy-gobbling habits solving the nuclear reactors’ cost and feasibility problems?

Data Centers: The Big Buildup of the Digital Age — Jonathan P. Thompson

I suspect it’s a little bit of both, with the balance swinging toward the latter. In that case, nuclear reactors are not alone: The Trump administration is using data center demand as the prime justification for propping up the dying coal industry. 

Before the Big Data Center Buildup, utilities really had no need for expensive, waste-producing reactors — they could more cheaply and safely build solar and wind installations with battery storage systems for backup. If needed, they could supplement it with geothermal or natural gas-fired peaker plants. 

But if data centers end up demanding as much power as projected (like 22,000 additional megawatts in Nevada, alone), utilities will need to pull out all the stops and add generating capacity of all sorts as quickly as possible, or they’ll tell the data centers to generate their own power. Either scenario would likely make small nukes more attractive, even if they do cost too much, and even if it means that data centers end up being radioactive waste repositories, too. 

Another plausible scenario is that the tech firms figure out ways to make their data centers more efficient; that it’s more cost-effective (and therefore profitable) to develop less energy- and water-intensive data processing hardware than to spend billions on an experimental reactor that may not be operating for years from now. 

What a novel concept: To use less, rather than always hungering for more and more and more.

What do fens do? Make peat, store water and help combat #ClimateChange: Meet the researchers restoring these unique wetlands high in #Colorado’s San Juan Mountains — Anna Marija Helt (High Country News)

Scientists secure jute netting over mulch on a newly planted section of the Ophir Pass fen in Colorado’s San Juan Mountains. Anna Marija Helt/High Country News

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Anna Marija Helt):

September 28, 2025

The resinous scent of Engelmann spruce wafted over a shallow, mossy pool surrounded by lush sedges near the 11,800-foot summit of Ophir Pass, in southwestern Colorado’s rugged San Juan Mountains. This type of wetland, known as a fen, forms when perennial water saturates the ground, limiting plant decomposition and allowing organic matter to accumulate as peat. 

Just downhill, however, on that hot, sunny July day, another part of the fen was visible: a degraded area, bare soil exposed on a steep slope. 

Peatlands — fens and bogs — are key climate regulators. (Bogs are maintained by precipitation, but fens, which, in North America, occur in the Northeast, Midwest and Mountain West, depend on groundwater.) Their peat retains plant carbon that would otherwise decompose and be released as carbon dioxide. Despite covering only about 4% of Earth’s land area, peatlands store a third of the world’s soil carbon — twice the amount trapped in forest biomass. “Fens are old-growth wetlands,” said Delia Malone, a recently retired field ecologist with the Colorado Natural Heritage Program. Some of Colorado’s fens are over 10,000 years old. 

In relatively dry southern Colorado, they also provide a secondary round of water storage. The first round is Colorado’s snowpack, which, as it melts, feeds groundwater that fens’ spongy peat captures and later releases to dwindling waterways and drying landscapes after the snow is gone. 

But the steep and degraded bare patch at Ophir Pass no longer functions. Where sedges, mosses, bog birch and other wetland species should be thriving, white PVC groundwater testing wells dot the ground, and heavy straw tubes called wattles reduce water and sediment runoff into the creek below. 

“This is the steepest peatland we’ve ever tried to restore, as far as I know,” said wetland ecologist Rod Chimner, a professor at Michigan Tech. In the Rockies, fens lie at high elevations, which complicates restoration. Approximately 2,000 fens have been mapped so far in the San Juans, and about 200 need work. Chimner’s Ph.D. advisor, David Cooper, began restoring the area’s fens decades ago, and together they’ve literally written the book on mountain peatland restoration. Now, Chimner and staff from Mountain Studies Institute (MSI) — a local nonprofit research and education center — are restoring an ecosystem born from the last ice age but damaged by bulldozing in the 1970s. 

Dams, road-building and other human activities harm Colorado’s fens, which can take 1,000 years to build just 8 inches of peat soil. The Ophir Pass fen is a rare iron fen, fed by groundwater rendered acidic by iron pyrite. The resulting chemistry supports unique plant communities — and leaves iron and other minerals incorporated in the peat or deposited in hardened layers. This fen was likely damaged by bog iron mining, which has degraded several iron fens in the San Juans. 

Wattles on a steep degraded section of the fen. Anna Maria Helt/High Country News
Lenka Doskocil examines roots in peat that could be centuries old. Anna Maria Helt/High Country News
A restored pool flanked by sedges. Anna Maria Helt/High Country News

CLOUDS STARTED TO BUILD as workers used hand saws to extract plugs of sedge and soil from a healthy, already restored part of the fen. Like Goldilocks’ bed, the plugs have to be just right: Too large or too many, and digging them up disturbs the soil surface; too small, and they won’t survive transplantation. “As long as it has at least one rhizome, it will plant and spread,” said Lenka Doskocil, a research associate with MSI’s Water Program and Chimner’s graduate student. She split a plug, revealing rhizomes embedded in the rusty-brown peat, then nestled it into a bucket of plugs. Sometimes, workers plant nursery plugs or greenhouse starts from seeds collected in the area. 

Chimner and Doskocil hauled the first bucket of plugs up to the bare patch, began digging small, regularly spaced holes, then gently inserted one sedge plug per opening. A stiff breeze provided relief as several other people joined in. “Take your time and do it right,” Chimner said encouragingly as he stepped back to observe. Otherwise, the plugs wouldn’t take.

Doskocil spotted an older plug protruding from the soil. But it wasn’t from rushed planting: Frost heave, a freeze-thaw cycle that thrusts soil upwards, had kicked it out of the ground, she said, tucking it back in. Frost heave complicates planting and breaks rhizomes, preventing nearby plants from colonizing bare soil. But Chimner’s past research has yielded a solution: Team members insulated the surface around each newly transplanted sedge with Excelsior, a shredded aspen mulch tough enough to withstand several winters. “We’re giving them little down jackets,” Chimner said.

A rhythm of extract-portage-dig-plant-mulch ensued as the iron-painted ridge of Lookout Peak towered to the north. A passenger yelled “thank you” from a truck descending the pass. Doskocil broke open a handful of peat, revealing roots that were hundreds of years old, if not older.

Planting the steepest quarter acre here has been difficult, and a 2021 fire didn’t help. “We’re kind of starting all over again” in that section, Chimner explained. They’re experimenting with direct seeding, which is common in wetland restoration, but challenging at the high-elevation site. “I’ve seeded here three times,” said Haley Perez, a community science program assistant with MSI. 

Conservation biologist Anthony Culpepper, associate director of MSI’s Forest Program, gestured uphill toward what used to be a bare “Mars slope.” He listed the challenges: timing, winds that blow seeds away, variable winter and monsoonal precipitation, a short growing season, a sunbaked slope and animals that eat the seeds. Still, over many seasons and with multiple collaborators — several federal agencies, San Juan National Forest, Purgatory Village Land, the National Forest Foundation, San Juan Citizens Alliance and others — they’ve made great progress. That former Mars slope is now covered with mat-forming, soil-stabilizing wetland plants, including rare species. 

The fen is wetter from strategic placement of wattles and check dams, wooden slats that slow surface water flow so that it soaks into the ground instead of running straight downhill. In turn, more groundwater has enabled transplantation and spread of thousands of plants. Much of the fen is now green, with mosses and other vegetation colonizing on their own. “This is the first time I’ve seen arnica at the site,” said Culpepper, who also noted the lack of invasives, a promising sign. 

MSI takes an adaptive approach to restoration: Research guides planning and execution, and outcomes are carefully monitored to guide future work. That’s important in a region and state where rising temperatures and declining snowpack are predicted to lower water tables, which could disrupt new peat formation and even promote peat decomposition, potentially shifting some fens from carbon storage to carbon release. “How do we get our systems to a spot where they’re resilient enough to withstand the challenges that are going to continue to come?” asked Doskocil. MSI and its collaborators are working on it — at Ophir Pass; at Burrows Fen, a new project north of Silverton; and elsewhere throughout the San Juans. 

Fat raindrops landed as the group debated whether to secure the mulch with a layer of jute netting. A wind gust decided it; they added the netting and then, just as the sun returned, trooped uphill to their vehicles to head home. Someone asked Chimner if he was satisfied with the day. “When I can look down and see all green, I’ll be satisfied,” he replied.   

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

This article appeared in the October 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “Fen fixers.”

Orange rivers signal toxic shift in Arctic wilderness: Warming soil unleashes metals deadly to fish and food chains — University of #California, Riverside

Salmon River Brooks Range Alaska: Photo credit: Taylor Rhoades/University of California, Riverside

Click the link to read the release on the University of California website (Jules Bernstein):

September 8, 2025

In Alaska’s Brooks Range, rivers once clear enough to drink from now run orange and hazy with toxic metals. As warming thaws formerly frozen ground, it sets off a chemical chain reaction that is poisoning fish and wreaking havoc on ecosystems. 

Researcher testing murky waters in Alaska’s Brooks Range. (Photo: Taylor Rhoades)

As the planet warms, a layer of permafrost — permanently frozen Arctic soil that locked away minerals for millennia — is beginning to thaw. Water and oxygen creep into the newly exposed soil, triggering the breakdown of sulfide-rich rocks, and creating sulfuric acid that leaches naturally occurring metals like iron, cadmium, and aluminum from rocks into the river. 

Often times, geochemical reactions like these are triggered by mining operations. But that is not the case this time. 

“This is what acid mine drainage looks like,” said Tim Lyons, a biogeochemist at the University of California, Riverside. “But here, there’s no mine. The permafrost is thawing and changing the chemistry of the landscape.”

How the Salmon River looked prior to the permafrost thawing. (Patrick Sullivan/University of Alaska)

A new paper detailing the severity of the contamination has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Though the study focuses on the Salmon River, researchers warn that similar transformations are already underway across dozens of other Arctic watersheds. 

“I have worked and traveled in the Brooks Range since 1976, and the recent changes in landforms and water chemistry are truly astounding,” said David Cooper, Colorado State University research scientist and study co-author. 

Ecologist Paddy Sullivan of the University of Alaska first noticed the dramatic changes in 2019 while conducting fieldwork on Arctic forests shifting northward — another consequence of climate change. A pilot flying Sullivan into the field warned him the Salmon River hadn’t cleared up after the snowmelt and looked “like sewage.” Alarmed by what he saw, Sullivan joined forces with Lyons, Roman Dial from Alaska Pacific University, and others to investigate the causes and ecological consequences. 

The research team on site in the Alaska wilderness. (Photo: Taylor Rhoades)

Their analysis confirmed that thawing permafrost was unleashing geochemical reactions that oxidize sulfide-rich rocks like pyrite, generating acidity and mobilizing a wide suite of metals, including cadmium, which accumulates in fish organs and could affect animals like bears and birds that eat fish.

In small amounts, metals aren’t necessarily toxic. However, the study shows that levels of metals in the river’s waters exceed U.S. Environmental Protection Agency toxicity thresholds for aquatic life. In addition, the iron-clouded waters reduce the amount of light reaching the bottom of the river and smother insect larvae eaten by the salmon and other fish.

While current metal concentrations in edible fish tissue are not considered hazardous to humans, the changes to the rivers pose indirect but serious threats. Chum salmon, a key subsistence species for many Indigenous communities, might struggle to spawn in gravel beds choked with fine sediment. Other species, such as grayling and Dolly Varden, may also be affected.

Hoof prints serve as reminders that river contamination affects more than fish. There are implications for whole ecosystems. (Photo: Taylor Rhoades)

“It’s not just a Salmon River story,” Lyons said. “This is happening across the Arctic. Wherever you have the right kind of rock and thawing permafrost, this process can start.”

Unlike mine sites, where acid drainage can be mitigated with buffers or containment systems, these remote watersheds might have hundreds of contamination sources and no such infrastructure. Once the chemical process begins, the only thing that can stop it is recovery of the permafrost.

“There’s no fixing this once it starts,” Lyons said. “It’s another irreversible shift driven by a warming planet.” [ed. emphasis mine]

The study, funded by the National Science Foundation’s Rapid Response program, highlights the potential danger for other Arctic regions. The researchers would like to help communities and land managers anticipate future impacts and, when possible, prepare for them.

“There are few places left on Earth as untouched as these rivers,” Lyons said. “But even here, far from cities and highways, the fingerprint of global warming is unmistakable. No place is spared.”

Big Tech invades #Nevada’s power grid (and desert): Data Center Watch; President Trump Ticker; Messing with Maps — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 23, 2025

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

Last week, Jeff Brigger, an executive with NV Energy, Nevada’s largest utility — and a Berkshire Hathaway subsidiary — told a gathering in Las Vegas that tech firms are asking the utility to supply up to 22,000 megawatts of electricity to support planned data centers.

That is an insanely enormous amount of generation capacity. It’s about two-and-a-half times NV Energy’s current peak demand of 9,000 MW, according to a Las Vegas Review-Journal story. It’s enough to power about 11 million homes. And it’s equivalent to the generating capacity of five Palo Verde generating stations, the nation’s largest nuclear power plant.

Brigger noted, correctly, that these are “unprecedented times” before going on to say that the utility is “excited to serve this load.” I bet they are. Not only does it mean selling a hell of a lot more of their product, but it will also require investing in new infrastructure in a massive way, for which they can then recover the costs, with a profit, from all of their ratepayers. Warren Buffet’s about to get even richer — so long as power line-sparked wildfires don’t drain his utilities of all their cash.

To its credit, NV Energy has largely moved away from coal generation, shutting down its heavily polluting Reid Gardner plant near Moapa and replacing it with battery storage and solar. It is in the process of shutting down its North Valmy coal plant, too, but instead of tearing it down, the utility will convert it to run on natural gas, adding to its already substantial fleet of the fossil fuel-burning facilities. It’s likely that a portion of that requested 22,000 MW will come from new methane-fired plants.

But a great deal of the new capacity will also come from solar power. NV Energy is currently constructing the $4.2-billion Greenlink West transmission line between Las Vegas and Reno. And it is seeking Bureau of Land Management approval for its Greenlink North line that will run along Highway 50, also known as the Loneliest Road in America. These lines will open up hundreds of square miles of public land to utility-scale solar development, with most or all of the power going to data centers in the Reno and Las Vegas areas.

Proposed path of the Greenlink North transmission project. Credit: BLM

Look, I’d much rather see a solar or wind facility than a coal or natural gas plant. No matter how you figure it, the environmental and human health toll from burning fossil fuels is far greater than solar or wind power. A solar plant doesn’t spew sulfur dioxide and mercury and arsenic into the air (and bodies of those nearby); nor will it explode catastrophically, as a natural gas pipeline did this week in southern Wyoming, damaging a freight train and sending up flames visible from Colorado. Coal mining and natural gas extraction often occurs on public lands, damaging the ecosystem, fragmenting wildlife habitat, and polluting the water.

So it’s one thing when a new giant solar installation leads to a fossil fuel generator being retired. Yet the Big Data Center Buildup’s energy needs are so high that utilities end up deferring coal and gas plant retirements, building more gas plants, and carpeting public lands with solar. As the Center for Biological Diversity’s Patrick Donnelly put it in an email: “Turns out the destruction of the desert for renewable energy isn’t about displacing fossil fuels, it’s about feeding the big tech machine.”

Of course, at this point it’s anyone’s guess whether those solar and wind installations are ultimately built. While some are already under development in Nevada along the Greenlink West line, the Greenlink North line has yet to garner BLM approval. And since it is intended to carry primarily solar-generated electrons, it could face added scrutiny from the Trump administration. Meanwhile, Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” wiped out federal tax credits for solar and wind, making new developments less feasible.

It’s somewhat surprising that data centers continue to flock to the Las Vegas area given the water constraints. Nevada has butted up against the limits of its 300,000 acre-feet (down to 279,000 under current restrictions) Colorado River allotment for years. That has forced the Southern Nevada Water Authority to crack down on water consumption by banning new lawns, limiting pool sizes, and putting a moratorium on commercial and industrial evaporative cooling systems like those used by many data centers in arid regions.

As long as the moratorium stays in place — a Nevada lawmaker unsuccessfully tried to ban the ban this year — it will force new data centers in the Vegas-area to use less water-intensive, but more energy-intensive, cooling methods1. Still, the Las Vegas data centers that began operating prior to the 2023 ban use a lot of water: more than 716 million gallons, or about 2,200 acre-feet2, in 2024, according to Las Vegas Valley Water data obtained and reported by the Review-Journal.

It’s a bit overwhelming, especially since it all came on so fast. I looked back through the news and noticed that just five years ago talk about data centers’ energy and water use was confined to a few cryptocurrency miners setting up shop in rural Washington to take advantage of cheap hydropower. While the impact was big locally, it wasn’t yet throwing utilities’ long-term plans into disarray. But here we are.

Stopping the Big Data Center Buildup may not be possible. But there are ways to mitigate the impacts, and the Great Basin Water Network has some good ideas for doing so.

***

In other data center news, the Doña Ana County commissioners voted 4-1 to approve tax incentives for Project Jupiter, a proposed $165 billion data center campus in Santa Teresa in the southeastern corner of New Mexico. Once again it’s a situation in which the community and region need the economic benefits and diversity the campus offered, but which is also short on water. As such, it sparked both opposition and support.

New Mexico journalist Heath Haussamen has the most in-depth rundown in a series of stories at haussamen.com.

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

You may wonder why a place would try to lure, welcome, or even allow data centers into their communities, given their hefty resource consumption.

Sometimes they don’t: Tucson’s city council recently rejected a proposed data center after local residents raised concerns about water and power use and a lack of transparency. (The developers re-upped their proposal for a site outside the city, but opponents aren’t backing down).

The answer, as is often the case, is for the economic shot in the arm they offer. These sprawling facilities each create hundreds of construction jobs, which offer relatively high wages (even if they are short lived). Then they need employees to operate the centers (although not nearly as many). And they pay property taxes.

Right now, Las Vegas and Nevada as a whole seem to need a little help, given that they are one of the nation’s biggest victims of Trumponomics. Visitor volume to Las Vegas was down 11% in June and 12% in July compared to the same months in 2024, with hotel occupancy rates also taking a big hit. The state has lost 600 federal government jobs since Trump took office. And it has shed a whopping 7,300 construction jobs since January. Ouch.

On a similar note, Wyoming’s mining and logging sector shed about 1,000 jobs since January, a 6% drop. That’s surprising, given that this includes coal and uranium miners and oil and gas workers, who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of Trump’s “energy dominance” agenda. Go figure.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Here’s one more from the USGS’s Guidebook of the western United States: Part E – The Denver & Rio Grande Western route, published in 1922. This map shows a segment of the Wasatch Front in Utah. I’ve also included a Google Earth image of the same area now. It’s remarkable to me because back then Salt Lake City was a small city that stood on its own; now it’s surrounded by a sea of sprawl. Salt Lake was a bit bigger then (or rather, the lake level was higher than it was when the Google Earth image was made; when the map was made in 1909 it was 4,203 feet, now it’s about 13 feet lower). And Bingham Canyon still was a canyon, with little towns in it, rather than the gaping hole known as the Bingham Canyon copper mine.

U.S. Representative Paul Gosar looks to eliminate two #Arizona national monuments: Plus — Mining Monitor, Hydrocarbon Hoedown, Messing with Maps — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Rock fins jutting up at the south foot of the Henry Mountains laccolith in southern Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 19, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

For the most part, President Donald Trump has done everything we feared the candidate would do and then some: following Project 2025 to a T, gutting environmental and public health protections, shredding the First Amendment (to the point of even losing Tucker Carlson), threatening political opponents, and generally embracing authoritarianism.

But when it comes to public lands, there is actually one act we expected the administration to do shortly after the inauguration, but that it hasn’t yet attempted: Shrinking or eliminating national monuments, especially those designated during the Clinton, Obama, and Biden administrations. Even after Trump’s Justice Department opined (wrongly, I’d say) that the Antiquities Act authorizes a president to shrink or revoke national monuments, the administration didn’t actually do it.

I suspect this is because they realize how deeply unpopular that would be. Sure, Trump’s first-term shrinkage of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments may have garnered some support from a handful of Utah right-wingers, but they’d be behind him regardless. Meanwhile, it pissed off a lot of Americans who value public lands but might otherwise support Trump’s policies.

That’s not to say the national monuments are safe. It’s just that the administration seems to be intent, for now, to outsource their destruction to their friends in Congress. The House Republicans’ proposed budget, for example, would zero out funding for GSENM’s new management plan — a de facto shrinkage.

And now, Rep. Paul Gosar, a MAGA Republican from Arizona, has introduced bills that would nullify Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni – Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon National Monument and the Ironwood Forest National Monument northwest of Tucson. The former blocks new mining claims in an area that has been targeted for uranium extraction. And the latter, established by Bill Clinton in 2000, covers a 189,713-acre swath of ecologically rich Sonoran Desert near the gaping wound known as the Asarco Silver Bell copper mine. The national monument designation blocked new mining claims.

Ironwood Forest is immensely popular with locals, and the Marana town council in August voted unanimously to oppose efforts to reduce or revoke the monument designation.

Interestingly enough, neither of the national monuments are in Gosar’s district, which covers the heavily Republican western edge of the state, so he won’t suffer from voter blowback if the legislation succeeds.

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Congressional Republicans, with some Democratic support, are again trying to pass legislation that would allow mining companies to dump their waste on public lands.

The Mining Regulatory Clarity Act of 2025, introduced by Rep. Mark Amodei, R-Nevada, made it through the House Natural Resources Committee this week on a 25-17 vote. It would tweak the 1872 Mining Law to ensure that mining companies can store tailings and other mining-related waste on public land mining claims that aren’t valid, meaning the claimant has not proven that the parcels contain valuable minerals. This was actually the norm for decades until 2022, when a federal judge ruled that the proposed Rosemont copper mine in Arizona could not store its tailings and waste rock on public land. That ruling was followed by a similar one in 2023, leading mining state politicians from both parties to try to restore the pre-Rosemont Decision rules.

The bill would supplement Trump’s executive order from March invoking the Defense Production Act to expedite mining on public lands, and his “emergency” order that fast-tracks mining and energy permitting on public lands.

***

Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

IsoEnergy, the company that owns the controversial Daneros Mine just outside Bears Ears National Monument and the Tony M Mine, plans to begin exploratory drilling at its Flatiron claims in Utah’s Henry Mountain uranium district. Last year, the Canada-based company staked a whopping 370 lode claims on federal land. Along with two Utah state leases, this adds up to about 8,800 acres south-southwest of Mt. Hillers.

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown

A peer-reviewed study out of UCLA recently found that pregnant women living near the Aliso Canyon natural gas storage facility in Los Angeles during the sustained blowout of 2015 experienced more adverse birth outcomes than expected. Specifically, the prevalence of low birthweight was 45% to 100% higher than those living outside the affected area. This should concern not only folks living near Aliso Canyon (which is still operational), but also anyone who lives near an oil and gas well or other facility.

Aliso Canyon is a depleted oil field in the hills of the Santa Susana Mountains in northern LA. Southern California Gas pipes in natural gas, pumps it into the oil field, and stores up to 84 billion cubic feet of the fuel there. In October 2015, one of the wells blew out and for the next 112 days spewed a total of about 109,000 metric tons of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and the main ingredient of natural gas.

That’s bad. But also mixed into the toxic soup that erupted from the field were other compounds such as mercaptans including tetrahydrothiophene and t-butyl mercaptan, sulfides, n-hexane, styrene, toluene, and benzene. All really nasty stuff that you don’t want in your air, and that is often emitted by oil and gas wells. The authors write:

“The emissions of BTEX and other HAP compounds are of particular concern as even at levels below health benchmarks they have been linked to health effects, including neurological, respiratory, and developmental effects.”

That appears to have been the case with the Aliso Canyon blowout, where “low birth weight and term low birth weight was higher than expected among women living in the affected area whose late pregnancy overlapped with the disaster.”

It’s simply more confirmation that fossil fuel development and consumption can take a big toll on the environment, the climate, and the people who live in or near the oil and gas patch or associated infrastructure. And that limits on methane emissions are important, even if you don’t care about climate change.

***

Long-time Land Desk readers might remember my story about the Horseshoe Gallup oil and gas field and sacrifice zone in northwestern New Mexico. I wrote about how the area had been ravaged by years of drilling and largely unfettered development, how the wells had been sold or handed off to increasingly irresponsible and slipshod companies as they were depleted, and how that had left dozens of abandoned facilities, oozing and seeping nasty stuff, but were not cleaned up because state and federal regulators still considered them to be “active.”

A trip through a sacrifice zone: The Horseshoe Gallup oilfield — Jonathan P. Thompson

Saga of an Oil Well (The Horseshoe Gallup Field Sacrifice Zone Part II) — Jonathan P. Thompson

The field is still there, along with most of the abandoned wells. But Capital & Main’s Jerry Redfern reports that some of the worst sites, including the NE Hogback 53, are being cleaned up. Well, sort of. The extensive reclamation of the well and the tank battery was started, only to be halted in May at the end of the state’s fiscal year. It resumed in July, and is expected to cost about $650,000.

This highlights the need for stronger enforcement and, most importantly, adequate reclamation bond requirements. At prices like that, cleaning up just the Horseshoe Gallup could cost tens of millions of dollars, and the taxpayer will be left to shoulder most of the bill.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

Clarification: In Tuesday’s dispatch on the Colorado River and Lake Powell, I wrote that another dry winter would put “… the elevation of Lake Powell at 3,500 feet by this time next year. And, due to the infrastructure’s limitations, Glen Canyon Dam would have to be operated as a ‘run of the river’ facility.” That probably needs a bit more explanation. 

One smart reader pointed out that even after the surface level of Lake Powell drops below minimum power pool, or 3,490 feet in elevation, the dam can still release up to 15,000 cfs from its river outlets. Technically, managers would not be forced to go to run of the river until the surface level dropped below 3,370 feet, which is known as “dead pool.”

However, the Bureau of Reclamation is very wary of relying on the river outlets, because they weren’t designed for long-term use and could fail under those circumstances. So, BoR is intent on keeping the water levels above minimum power pool so that all releases can go through the penstocks and the hydroelectric turbines. “In effect,” the authors of the paper wrote, “at least for the short term, the engineering and safety issues associated with the ability to release water through Glen Canyon Dam mean that the amount of water actually available for release from Lake Powell is only that which exists above elevation 3500 feet.”

So, as long as this is the case, the BoR will need to go to run of the river as soon as the elevation drops to 3,500 feet. I hope that helps clear things up!

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Today’s map is less about the map than it is about the publication it comes from, the USGS’s Guidebook of the Western United States Part E. the Denver & Rio Grande Western Route, published in 1922. This thing is super cool, and super detailed (it’s 384 pages long). It’s got some great photos and maps, like this one (click on the image to see it in larger size on the website).

Besides having a cool, hand drawn style, this map struck me because it was made prior to the reservoirs on the Gunnison River. And it shows how the railroad tracks used to go into the Black Canyon at Cimarron and continue along the river all the way to Gunnison (most of that section is now under water). I suppose I should have known that was where the tracks went, but it never really occurred to me before. Credit: USGS

Related to that map were these two photos illustrating the miracle of irrigation.

Map of the Gunnison River drainage basin in Colorado, USA. Made using public domain USGS data. By Shannon1 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=69257550

#Colorado poised to join lawsuit over alleged endangered species violations linked to oil trains — David O. Williams (ColoradoNewsline.com) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

A Union Pacific train travels along the Colorado River near Cameo on May 16, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (David O. Williams):

September 21, 2025

Projects in Utah’s Uinta Basin could significantly increase hazardous oil shipments through Colorado

Colorado, along with 15 other states, is poised to sue the federal government for ignoring endangered species regulations in a wide range of infrastructure projects on public lands. One of those projects, a controversial proposal to expand an oil shipping facility in Utah, would significantly increase hazardous rail shipments through Colorado.

Phil Weiser, Colorado’s attorney general, and the attorneys general of the other states provided in a July 18 letter to Trump administration officials a 60-day notice of their intent to sue. The notice expired last week.

The letter cites violations of the Endangered Species Act it says have occurred in pursuit of an executive order, called “Declaring a National Energy Emergency,” which President Donald Trump signed on his first day in office in January. 

“The ESA and implementing regulations do not allow agencies to routinely avoid and delay implementation of the ESA’s protections of endangered species and their critical habitats in the manner you have directed and which your agencies are carrying out,” the letter says.

The letter was addressed to Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and the directors of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The letter lists pipeline, cable and mining projects in states from Washington to Illinois — including the Wildcat Loadout Facility Right-of-Way Amendment on U.S. Bureau of Land Management land near Price, Utah — that it says pose risks to listed endangered species or critical habitat for fish and aquatic mammals from rainbow trout to salmon to sturgeon to whales.

The letter says Trump’s executive order declaring an energy emergency to fast-track fossil fuel production, despite record oil production in the United States, “unlawfully directs the (Army) Corps and Interior to bypass legal requirements, including those provided in the ESA. Congress did not authorize agencies to routinely bypass the ESA’s requirements to develop the President’s preferred energy sources.”

Asked if by signing onto the pending endangered species lawsuit, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser is signaling he intends to join a separate lawsuit challenging the legality of Trump’s “energy emergency” executive order, a spokesperson for Weiser said that has yet to be determined.

“The notice of intent to sue to enforce the ESA could be a basis for joining the lawsuit challenging the White House energy emergency executive order,” Weiser spokesman Lawrence Pacheco wrote in an email this month. “The attorney general, however, has not made a decision on joining the EO lawsuit.”

Pacheco did not provide additional information on when the endangered species litigation will be filed or how it will be announced.

“We announce all lawsuits that we join or file ourselves,” Pacheco said. “I don’t have any idea on timing.”

Sued by environmental groups

The Wildcat Loadout expansion, as first reported by Newsline in 2023, has been plagued by air quality violations and other matters related to Native American antiquities. It would allow crude oil producers in the Uinta Basin to vastly expand drilling and transportation, including by rail through Colorado. Another proposed project in the basin, the bitterly opposed Uinta Basin Railway, would allow for even greater oil shipments. When the U.S. Supreme Court in late May cleared the way for the 88-mile rail link project, proponents said their next step was “completion of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) process.“

The BLM in early July invoked Trump’s emergency declaration to complete an accelerated environmental review of the permit for the Wildcat facility, which could increase oil capacity on the main rail line through Colorado by up to 80,000 barrels a day. Combined with the expansion of other nearby facilities, it will allow for the trucking and transfer to rail of up to 75% of the oil proposed for the Uinta Basin Railway project.

The railway project, estimated to cost at least $2.4 billion to build, would allow for up to 350,000 barrels of oil per day — more than doubling U.S. oil-by-rail transport — to move in heated oil tankers for 100 miles along the headwaters of the Colorado River, under the Continental Divide at Winter Park and through Denver on their way to refineries along the Gulf Coast. Backers of the project are seeking low-interest U.S. Department of Transportation private activity bonds.

Eagle County and five environmental groups sued to overturn U.S. Surface Transportation Board approval of the railway in 2022. They were initially successfully, but the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a favorable 2023 federal appellate court decision. Eagle County has long sought more direct state involvement in litigation opposing the project.

In a press release following the Supreme Court ruling, Keith Heaton, director of Utah’s Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, which has been using taxpayer dollars to pursue the railway project, said, “It represents a turning point for rural Utah — bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options, and opening new doors for investment and economic stability. We look forward to continuing our work with all stakeholders to deliver this transformative project.”

The coalition is not a sponsor of the Wildcat Loadout project.

Asked for project updates and comment on the pending endangered species litigation, Melissa Cano, director of communications for the Uinta Basin Railway and the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, replied in an email: “At this time, the coalition does not have additional information or updates to provide beyond what has already been made publicly available. What I do wish to stress is that the Uinta Basin Railway Project is moving forward.”

Uinta Basin Railway project proposed routes.Credit:Surface Transportation Board

Interior Department moves to repeal public lands rule, shifting focus to energy — KUNC

Oil and gas production on Bureau of Land Management land in Wyoming. The Trump Administration’s move to repeal a Biden-era conservation rule aligns with a greater push for energy production on public lands. Photo credit: Bureau Of Land Management

Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Rachel Cohen). Here’s an excerpt:

September 11, 2025

[President Trump’s] Administration is moving to repeal a major Biden-era rule that elevated conservation in federal land use decisions, paving the way for expanded energy production on public lands. The Public Lands Rule was among the Biden Administration’s signature efforts to protect and restore Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land in the face of climate change and increasing land fragmentation. The BLM is legally required to manage public lands for “multiple use” and “sustained yield” under the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and also to maintain natural, cultural and historic resources for future generations. But critics say the agency prioritized extractive uses. The Public Lands Rule clarified that conservation could be an official use of the land, alongside grazing, oil and gas drilling, mining and logging. Among other things, it created a framework for leases focused on restoring or maintaining landscapes. In a press release Wednesday, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum announced the agency’s proposal to repeal the rule, saying promoting conservation in this way threatened to curtail traditional land uses.

“The previous administration’s Public Lands Rule had the potential to block access to hundreds of thousands of acres of multiple-use land – preventing energy and mineral production, timber management, grazing and recreation across the West,” said Secretary Burgum. “The most effective caretakers of our federal lands are those whose livelihoods rely on its well-being. Overturning this rule protects our American way of life and gives our communities a voice in the land that they depend on.”

#NewMexico’s billion-dollar orphaned oilfield problem: After oil companies go bust, the state is left paying to clean up abandoned wells, tanks, machinery and sludge pits — Jerry Redfern (High Country News)

Dave Fosdeck climbs a hill of dirt surrounding an excavation at the site of a Chuza tank battery outside Farmington, New Mexico, in June. The orange staining in the hole is the result of years of leaking oil waste from the tanks and equipment that once sat here. Jerry Redfern

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jerry Redfern):

September 17, 2025

This story was originally published by Capital & Main and is republished here by permission.

Dave Fosdeck crested a dirt berm on the Hogback, a ridge of hills west of Farmington, New Mexico, when the scent hit him. “Whoa! It stinks!” he yelped. It was June, and he was there with two others to look at the cleanup operations around a battery of massive oil tanks that sat abandoned for years in this rolling, high-desert corner of New Mexico.

The berm surrounds a hole where a semi-buried tank the size of a backyard swimming pool once sat, collecting and leaking waste sludge from surrounding oil wells. Nearby is an even bigger but much newer hole where a cleanup crew had removed contaminated soil. The void wasn’t fully excavated but already was big enough to drop a small house in. The pit’s sides were stained orange and an even stronger petroleum smell rose from it. 

For years, a separator, a semi-trailer-sized machine that split valuable oil from wastewater and other contaminants, sat here. And for years, that separator leaked those toxic compounds onto the ground, where they soaked in, leading to the orange, contaminated soil and foul air. 

The two holes, the stink and a few massive piles of dirt were about all that remained of a facility — known as a tank battery — that treated oil from 30 nearby wells for decades. In addition to the separator and sludge pit, the site was home to seven cylindrical green tanks the size of small grain silos, a decades-old tanker truck with flat tires, several plastic barrels and dozens of ruptured, unlabeled, cube-shaped tanks leaking mystery chemicals. That’s mostly gone now, except for the white and yellow chemical staining on the ground where those cubical tanks leaked. 

“I can’t believe they didn’t dig that all out,” Fosdeck said. 

For a few years, all of this belonged to Chuza Oil, which went bust in 2018, leaving the wells, tank battery and other equipment to bake in the high desert sun. In 2022, Fosdeck, Mike Eisenfeld of the San Juan Citizens Alliance and local rancher Don Schreiber identified the remote site covered in abandoned wells and leaking equipment and began nagging federal and state officials to do something about it.

A view of the Chuza tank battery in 2023. It had been abandoned for years at this point and several unmarked plastic containers were clearly leaking. Jerry Redfern

This spot in the Hogback exemplifies a worrying, expensive trend in New Mexico’s changing oilfield remediation landscape, where well operators declare bankruptcy and abandon highly contaminated and dilapidated facilities for state and federal agencies to clean up. It’s a national trend that sweeps from the country’s first oilfields in Pennsylvania to the California coast.

Currently, New Mexico pays contractors as much as $165,000 to plug an old oil well, according to the Oil Conservation Division, the state’s primary oil and gas regulator. That’s $65,000 more than the Division reported paying just three years ago. A recent report by the state’s Legislative Finance Committee warns that New Mexico could be on the hook for up to $1.6 billion in cleanup costs in coming years from bankrupt oil and gas companies and rising plugging costs. (The report also gave the Oil Conservation Division a tongue lashing over “inconsistent cost control” in its oilfield remediation contracts.) 

And while the report does talk about cleaning up tank batteries — and describes three very expensive examples — it doesn’t mention how many more may be lurking in the state’s oilfields, or what they could cost the state in the future.

Well plugging involves pulling old equipment out of the ground and scraping and flushing the wellbore before sealing it. So when a contractor arrives on site, often, “Nobody knows what they’re dealing with because it’s subsurface,” said Jason Sandel, the president of Aztec Well Servicing. Pipes rust. Pipes break. Wells might be shallower or deeper than recorded. After the pipe comes out, the contractor injects a series of cement plugs underground to keep oil, gas and other contaminants from migrating to water-bearing formations.

A tank battery has none of that, so at first glance cleaning one up looks like the easier task. But that’s not necessarily the case. The Chuza Oil tank battery site covers only about half an acre, and according to the Oil Conservation Division, the cleanup operation is on track to cost more than $650,000, much of that incurred because it was necessary to dig out and truck away the contaminated soil where the separator leaked at the remote location.

In mid-June, the cleanup clearly wasn’t finished. Orange barrier netting flapped in the wind around the pits, and the orange staining and gassy reek indicated more contaminated soil awaited removal. (Sidney Hill, public information officer for the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department, said that work stopped in May due to the end of the state’s 2025 fiscal year and resumed in July with the new fiscal year.)

Fosdeck, Eisenfeld and Schreiber have spent years tracking and highlighting problems in the oilfields around Farmington. Fosdeck, on his own, follows the paper trails of abandoned wells and other fossil fuel ventures. Schreiber and Eisenfeld rattle the cages of state and federal government officials to get oil, gas and coal sites cleaned up. 

“This whole part of the equation — the cleanup part — has been neglected,” Eisenfeld said. That’s one of many reasons why he thinks digging for oil, gas and coal shouldn’t be done in the first place.

Randy Pacheco retired recently from a company that plugs and cleans up old well sites like Chuza’s, and before that he was dean of the School of Energy at San Juan College in Farmington, the state’s oilfield trade school. He visited the Hogback field with Fosdeck, Eisenfeld and Schreiber before the cleanup began. It wasn’t the worst thing he had ever seen, but, still, it was a mess.

“I think there’s people who have big aspirations to make a lot of money in the oil and gas industry and they end up purchasing these assets and then they don’t know what to do,” he said. 

Even so, the site confounded him. “How would you get yourself in this kind of a mess?” he wondered about the abandoned equipment and dilapidated tank battery he saw. “Who’s selling them those dreams?”

Mike Eisenfeld, the energy and climate program manager at the San Juan Citizens Alliance, checks out a piece of abandoned equipment in the remains of the Chuza oilfield in June. Jerry Redfern

SOMETIMES THE DREAM sells itself.

Bobby Goldstein is best known for producing Cheaters, a COPS-style reality TV show of hidden cameras, secret lovers, slapped faces and shattered dreams. 

“I’ve got a thousand episodes that run wild all over the world, every day, all day,” Goldstein said. Those episodes made him wealthy. In July, over a long, free-wheeling phone call, Goldstein explained in his smooth Texas patter how he, a Dallas lawyer and TV impresario, followed a dream to become an oil man and how that venture completely collapsed.

“I’ll never forget all this shit,” he said.

In 2010, Goldstein persuaded a couple of acquaintances to go into the oil business with him. They formed Chuza Oil — the name behind the Hogback mess — and, for a little less than $3 million, they bought Parowan Oil, a small company with some old wells and a tank battery near Farmington. 

“[I] grew up around a bunch of rich brats whose families were big oil people,” he said. “They made the earth shake and I always thought, ‘Man, I wish I had some sense to do that.’ That opportunity came about, and I went on it.”

He continued, “I never was an oil man. I was a speculator, and for a minute there I looked real smart. … You see, I bought the land cheap, [and] oil rose and rose and rose.”

Goldstein said Chuza spent about $2 million redeveloping the oilfield infrastructure. “We made a vast improvement to the field so that it would be more efficient and more likely to be operational. So, over time, most all of those wells were working … I even moved to Santa Fe where I could be closer,” he said. “Shit, I bought a jet so I could fly out there direct in an hour and a half and be on that field. I was out there a lot.”

What happened next set the stage for the collapse of Chuza Oil and what became of the Hogback Field.

Goldstein said the company spent millions drilling two fracked wells, which involved ramming huge amounts of water, sand and chemicals into long, horizontal branches of a main wellbore to fracture the surrounding rock and loosen oil and gas trapped within. 

Those wells produced for two months, but the oil was laden with paraffin. The naturally occurring, waxy hydrocarbon can slowly clog wells, in much the same way that cholesterol blocks arteries. In addition, the fracking loosened paraffin in Chuza’s other wells, fouling them as well, Goldstein said.

Then, a financial catastrophe: “The son of a bitch [partner] that was supposed to pay for the wells left us a $3 million unpaid bill with various creditors,” Goldstein said. “So not only did we have a fiscal issue going on, but we also had production issues and the company wound up into a Chapter 11,” he said.

“If everybody had listened to me on that field, we’d probably already sold it for $200 or $300 million. But people that have a little money think they know something, especially when they inherited it and never worked for it,” Goldstein said. “Those are the worst kind of idiots to have to deal with.”

After spending around $15 million to buy and expand the operation, Goldstein said Chuza Oil collapsed into years of bankruptcy litigation, foreclosure, 30 abandoned, paraffin-clogged wells and one messy tank battery.

“It was my Tom Sawyer experience,” Goldstein said. “I did something that I never had any background in, training for, education. And it was just a Wild West venture capital gamble.”

And if he made a show about the experience? “I would call it ‘Pricks and Jackasses Gone Wild,’” he said.

As for his former oilfield in New Mexico, Goldstein said, “I don’t really know what’s going on.” He was unaware that the wells had been plugged and the tank battery removed. In part, that’s because he’s no longer responsible.

One reason to set up a corporation is to protect its principals from fiscal fallout should the company fail. And in that, Chuza Oil succeeded: Bankruptcy protected Goldstein and the other partners from paying for the cleanup.

Chuza’s assets were on Navajo tribal trust land, managed by the U.S. government for the benefit of the tribe. The Bureau of Land Management managed those operations, making it responsible for the overall cleanup that began late last year.

Fosdeck, left, and Schreiber talk while standing next to an abandoned Chuza oil well west of Farmington, New Mexico, in 2023. The site is on tribal trust land and the warning sign is written in Navajo. Jerry Redfern

Federal regulations give the Bureau the ability to go after earlier but still extant owners to clean up well sites abandoned by recent owners. In this case, Chuza Oil was the last in a string of owners stretching back to the 1940s for some of the oldest wells. In the end, a Bureau spokesperson said Marathon Petroleum, BP America, Woodside Energy/BHP and Enerdyne plugged 23 Chuza wells they sold years ago. BLM asked the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division to plug five wells and deal with the tank battery — none of which had extant previous owners. The Bureau plugged the remaining two wells. The cost of the cleanup bypassed Goldstein and the bankrupt Chuza Oil entirely. 

Goldstein wasn’t too wistful about his wells getting torn out and smoothed over. “I’m sure the Navajo are glad that all that shit’s gone. I don’t think they ever liked all that going on there and it’s a beautiful piece of land. It was really nice to be out there,” he said.

“Special experience for me,” he concluded.

THE CLEANUP OF Chuza Oil’s wells and tanks represents a nominal victory after years of work by Fosdeck, Eisenfeld, Schreiber and others to expunge the legacy of neglect from the northwest corner of the state. But the victory is small. 

According to Oil Conservation Division numbers from the beginning of September, New Mexico has 70,000 oil and gas wells and 6,717 registered tank batteries. About 100 new wells are drilled each month. Eventually, all of those will have to be plugged, and the land returned to something resembling its natural state.

The Legislative Finance Committee report notes that over the past 20 years, operators themselves plugged 95% of nonproducing wells in New Mexico, as the law requires. The remaining 5% were declared orphaned wells and plugged by the Oil Conservation Division. 

The report says there are around 700 orphan wells awaiting state plugging with another 3,400 inactive or low-producing wells that could be added to the list in the near future. Extrapolating forward, the report suggests New Mexico could be on the hook for up to $1.6 billion in cleanup costs over the coming years as more small companies declare bankruptcy before fulfilling their obligations to plug their wells and remove equipment. 

New Mexico’s Oil and Gas Reclamation Fund — filled by a fraction of a tax paid by oil and gas producers — covers the costs of implementing the Oil and Gas Act, which defines how the industry can operate in the state. The fund also pays for plugging and reclamation costs of abandoned wells and facilities. Earlier this year, the fund had $66 million, its highest balance ever. The state has kept that much in the fund by paying for plugging operations with $55.5 million in recent federal grants, as well as forfeited financial assurances that well owners are required to carry but rarely cover the actual costs of cleanup. The Finance Committee report says that the state is eligible for another $111 million from the feds. 

All told, it’s a long way from $1.6 billion.

“That is why the Reclamation Fund is not a substitute for adequate bonding and financial assurance from operators,” state Rep. Matthew McQueen (D – Galisteo) said. He thinks that the report’s $1.6 billion estimate is “scary enough,” but could be low. He said the report seems to expect a stable future for an industry with a notorious boom-and-bust cycle. “In a significant downturn, the State’s liability could skyrocket rapidly” as weak companies fold and abandon wells, he said.

Smaller companies are often the first to feel economic shocks, and the state has a lot of smaller oil and gas producers. In 2024, 326 companies reported producing 740 million barrels of oil to New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division. Just 25 companies produced 92% of that total. The numbers are similar for natural gas production.

Fosdeck holds a methane detector as it lights up from a leak at an abandoned Chuza oil well in 2023. Schreiber shields the detector from the wind with his hat. Jerry Redfern

In the last legislative session, McQueen proposed a bill that would have kept well owners on the hook for remediation costs into the future if they sell wells to owners that go bankrupt — similar to what the federal government does. “It would cause the industry to self-police and make sure that any future operators had the wherewithal to properly remediate well sites,” he said. It didn’t pass.

McQueen also proposed legislation to weed out potential buyers without the money or know-how to run an oil production business, as well as so-called bad actors with histories of negligence or bankruptcy. That, too, didn’t pass.

The Finance Committee report recommends several procedural and definition changes, as well as creating a law allowing the Oil Conservation Division to disallow well sales if “the purchaser is unlikely to be able to fulfill its asset retirement obligations” — much like McQueen proposed. It also called for increasing the required financial assurances paid by oilfield operators for cleanup costs on low-producing wells, which are more likely to be orphaned.

However, the Chuza Oil assets wouldn’t have been subject to these proposed laws, because the wells and tank battery were on federal land not subject to state jurisdiction, despite the fact that the state ended up paying for the cleanup.

Ben Shelton, deputy cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department — the mothership to the Oil Conservation Division — said, “The report got a lot right, including identifying a need for [the Division] to be able to scrutinize transfers more closely in order to reduce the likely incidences of orphaned wells.”

Shelton said that the Division didn’t have an estimate for either the number of orphaned tank batteries or their average cleanup costs, but the oilfield cleanups of a trio of tank batteries were some of the most expensive the state paid for in the last couple of years, at $623,000, $5.1 million and $7.6 million. The estimated $650,000 Chuza Oil tank battery cleanup will eventually join the list.

As of publication, that months-long process wasn’t finished. And in the end, the cleanup around the Chuza Oil tank battery, while expensive and time-consuming, isn’t necessarily uncommon, according to Sandel at Aztec Well Servicing, which is cleaning up the site. 

“There were many more yards of contaminated soil than expected. … But I don’t think that’s abnormal,” Sandel said. “I wouldn’t characterize it as outside the bounds at all.”

We welcome reader letters. Email High Country News at editor@hcn.org or submit a letter to the editor. See our letters to the editor policy.

#ClimateChange is accelerating, scientists find in ‘grim’ report — Dana Nuccitelli (YaleClimateConnections.org)

A restoration project at Virginia Beach. Photo: U.S. Army/Pamela Spaugy

Click the link to read the article on the Yale Climate Connections website (Dana Nuccitelli):

September 15, 2025

They warn that humanity is just three years from overshooting the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C target, with seas rising faster than ever. But the report also contains a little bit of good news.

The amount of heat trapped by climate-warming pollution in our atmosphere is continuing to increase, the planet’s sea levels are rising at an accelerating rate, and the Paris agreement’s ambitious 1.5°C target is on the verge of being breached, according to a recent report by the world’s top climate scientists. 

“The news is grim,” said study co-author Zeke Hausfather, a former Yale Climate Connections contributor, on Bluesky. 

A team of over 60 international scientists published the latest edition of an annual report updating key metrics that are used in reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the leading international scientific authority on climate change. 

Earth out of balance 

Climate change is caused by variations in Earth’s energy balance – the difference between the planet’s incoming and outgoing energy. Nearly all incoming energy originates from the sun. The Earth absorbs that sunlight and sends it back out toward space in the form of infrared light, or heat. Greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide absorb infrared light, and so increased levels in those gases trap more heat in the atmosphere, warming the planet’s surface and oceans.

The new report finds that as a result of this increasing greenhouse effect, Earth’s energy imbalance has been consistently rising every decade. In fact, the global imbalance has more than doubled just since the 1980s. And from 2020 to 2024, humans exacerbated the problem by adding about 200 billion more tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

This increase in trapped energy has continued to warm Earth’s surface temperatures. The new study estimated that at current rates, humans will burn enough fossil fuels and release enough climate pollution to commit the planet to over 1.5°C of global warming above preindustrial temperatures within about three more years, in 2028.

The most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published in 2021, concluded that average temperatures had increased 1.09°C since the late 1800s. The new study updates this number to 1.24°C, driven largely by the record-shattering hot years of 2023 and 2024.

The paper also finds that global surface temperatures are warming at a rate of about 0.27°C per decade. That’s nearly 50% faster than the close to 0.2°C-per-decade warming rate of the 1990s and 2000s, indicating an acceleration of global warming.

Human-caused and total observed average global surface temperature increase since the Industrial Revolution. Created by Dana Nuccitelli with data by https://climatechangetracker.org/igcc from June 17, 2025.

That warming causes the water in the ocean to expand and land-based ice to melt, both of which contribute to rising sea levels. Since 1900, global sea levels have risen by nine inches, at an average rate of 1.85 millimeters per year. But the rate of sea level rise since 2000 has been twice as fast, at 3.7 millimeters per year. And over the past decade it’s risen faster yet, at 4.5 millimeters per year. In other words, sea level rise is also accelerating.

“Unfortunately, the unprecedented rates of global warming and accelerating sea-level rise are as expected from greenhouse emissions being at an all-time high,” University of Leeds climate scientist and the study’s lead author Piers Forster wrote by email.

Global mean sea level rise since the early 20th century, accelerating since the start of the 21st century. Created by Dana Nuccitelli with data by https://climatechangetracker.org/igcc from June 17, 2025.

A thin silver lining

Most, but not all, of the findings in the new paper are grim. For example, although humanity will almost certainly miss the more ambitious 1.5°C target in the Paris agreement, the study finds that its primary target of limiting global warming to 2°C remains within reach. At current emissions rates, 2°C global warming will be breached around midcentury, but that still leaves several decades to bring emissions down.

“Future emissions control future warming,” Forster said. “And if the world were to rapidly act on carbon dioxide and methane emissions, we could halve the rate of warming.”

The study identifies glimmers of hope that climate policies and solutions around the world could soon begin to move emissions in this direction.

“I think there is not much silver lining in the report per se given the apparent acceleration of warming,” Hausfather said in an email to Yale Climate Connections. “But I would note that global CO2 emissions have slowed notably over the past 15 years or so, and the cost of clean energy continues to fall. We are clearly moving away from the worst-case emissions scenarios, even if we are still heading toward potentially catastrophic warming of 3°C by 2100.”

China will be a key player in determining the future evolution of Earth’s climate. Because of its large population and rapid economic growth, China is responsible for nearly one-third of global climate pollution. But as the result of a rapid deployment of clean technologies, China’s emissions have begun to slightly decline over the past year.

“This is also the decade when global [greenhouse gas] emissions could be expected to peak and begin to substantially decline,” the report’s authors conclude. “Depending on the societal choices made in this critical decade, a continued series of these annual updates could track an improving trend.”

Where are the anti-tyranny, federal overreach folks when you need them? — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Looking up Recapture Canyon in the Lands Between. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 9, 2025

🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡

Please forgive me for being confused about the state of our nation, about the actions of our president, and about the reaction to it.

See, a decade ago, Western state politicians — particularly conservative Republicans and, if you will, Sagebrush Rebels — were up in arms, sometimes literally, about something they called “federal overreach.” In most cases, it referred to actions by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service that ranged from closing roads or prohibiting motorized vehicles in sensitive areas to attempting to round up cattle that had been grazing illegally on public land to arresting suspected pothunters to enforcing laws on federal land.

When a herd of assault-weapon toting self-proclaimed militia showed up at Cliven Bundy’s Bunkerville ranch in 2014, they were resisting federal overreach; when Phil Lyman led a flock of ATV riders down Recapture Canyon in Utah, he was protesting federal overreach; when Ammon and Ryan Bundy led the siege of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, they were protesting federal overreach.

In 2014, congressional Republicans even held a hearing on what they called “Threats, Intimidation, and Bullying by Federal Land Managing Agencies.” In this case, according to witnesses, “bullying” included enforcing the Endangered Species Act and failing to coordinate with the local sheriff.

Indeed, in 2011 Dennis Spruell, then-sheriff of Montezuma County, Colorado, threatened to arrest land management officials who dared to close roads across federal lands. He continued: “The sheriff is the ultimate law enforcement authority. I have an obligation to protect my county from enemies, both foreign and domestic. So if the federal government comes in and violates the law, it’s my responsibility to make sure it stops.”

A couple of years later, 28 Utah sheriffs wrote a letter to President Obama threatening violent revolt if he were to enact gun control. “No federal official will be permitted to descend upon our constituents and take from them what the Bill of Rights — in particular Amendment II — has given them,” they wrote. “We, like you, swore a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and we are prepared to trade our lives for the preservation of its traditional interpretation.”

All of which is a very wordy lead in to a question: Where the hell is the concern about federal overreach now?

The Trump administration is figuratively shredding the U.S. Constitution on an almost daily basis; masked federal ICE agents are terrorizing immigrants and citizens, alike; the administration is forcing utilities to keep operating coal plants; and not only has it sent the National Guard and even the Marines into Democratic-led cities unbidden in clear violation of states rights, but Trump himself declared “war” on an American city in a social media post. This makes a bit of BLM “overreach” look like child’s play.

If anything would warrant a response from the so-called militia, or the folks who oppose gun control because it would hamper their ability to resist tyranny, it would be this. Or so it seems. After all, sending the Marines to Los Angeles appears to have violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it illegal “to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws.” This Reconstruction-era law is often used by “constitutional” sheriffs and federal overreach crowd to bolster their positions.

So where’s Ryan Bundy and his pocket Constitution? Where are Richard Mack and the “constitutional sheriffs” and the folks that used to rail about posse comitatus? Where’s Phil Lyman, who repeatedly called the Obama administration and the BLM “despotic” for daring to increase protections on public lands and for sending in law enforcement officers to arrest folks who violated the Antiquities Act?

They are, it turns out, nowhere to be found. The reason is obvious: All of the “federal overreach” grievance was performative. An act based not on principle, but on false victimhood, on a sense of entitlement, on a selfish desire the liberty to do what they please, not for Liberty as a principle or creed. So long as ICE doesn’t come after them, their cattle, their guns, they don’t have any beef with federal overreach, no matter how egregious or harmful — especially if it’s done in the name of retribution and “owning the libs.”

But there is an exception, and a surprising one to me. Ammon Bundy, who led the armed takeover of the wildlife refuge in Oregon, told Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer that he actually finds the military occupation of cities “very concerning.” I’ll admit I didn’t catch Mencimer’s story, which was published a month ago, until I was writing this piece, and was looking for possible Bundy reactions. Ammon told her he has been relatively subdued (he hasn’t occupied any federal facilities yet) in response to Trump because he’s got enough legal troubles as it is 1.

While I’m no supporter of Ammon Bundy, you got to hand it to him for his consistency. He rightly considers the ICE raids as an affront to the founding principles of the United States. And he points out — apparently referring to his one-time allies — “It has been my sad experience that most people will set principles, justice, and good aside to spite those whom they despise.” You got that one right. [ed. emphasis mine]

Wise Use Echoes: The rhetoric and ideology of today’s right-wing extremism mirrors that of a lesser-known anti-public lands movement of the 1990s — Jonathan P. Thompson

Sage Brush Rebellion folks, Recapture Canyon, Utah Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Like millions of people from around the globe, I watched the images of coup-pawns invading the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 with shock, rage, and sadness. But, like many others, I wasn’t surprised. After all, almost exactly five years earlier we had been transfixed and alarmed by another violent attack on an American institution, the occupation of the Malheur…

1 *Ammon Bundy was one of the few people to speak out against the Trump administration and FBI head Kash Patel for honoring the FBI agents who shot and killed LaVoy Finicum amid the Malheur occupation, and for fabricating the circumstances surrounding the incident.

Federal Water Tap, September 8, 2025: House Budget Bill Increases Army Corps Spending — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org)

Click the link to read the article on the Circle of Blue website (Brett Walton):

September 8, 2025

The Rundown

  • House passes a water and energy spending bill for fiscal year 2026 that boosts Army Corps construction budget.
  • White House uses an illegal maneuver to retract an additional $3.2 billion in foreign aid.
  • With Congress having returned from summer break, committees will hold hearings this week on water infrastructure, AI, energy efficiency, permitting reform, and the state of federal forests.

And lastly, NOAA expands a national flood mapping project..

“Energy strength is national strength – fueling jobs, innovation, and resilience in every community – and no longer will traditional energy sources be punished for being affordable and reliable.” – Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) in a written statement after the House passed a fiscal year 2026 spending bill for water and energy agencies. Cole did not mention the failures of natural gas plants in the winter storm in 2021 that forced multi-day blackouts in Texas and led to a number of deaths. Nor that solar photovoltaic is the cheapest source of new electricity in the U.S.

By the Numbers

$3.2 Billion: Foreign aid spending retracted by Donald Trump using a “pocket rescission” that withholds spending late in the fiscal year. The retracted funds are from USAID’s development assistance program, which is meant for poverty reduction. But the administration opposes spending on things like climate adaptation abroad. The Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog for Congress, calls the pocket rescission an illegal maneuver.

News Briefs

2026 Budget
The 2026 fiscal year is just over three weeks away, and Congress is making typical slow progress on the budget bills.

Last week, with a one-vote margin, the House passed a spending bill for energy and water agencies.

The bill increases the Army Corps construction budget by nearly 40 percent, to $2.55 billion. That is for waterway navigation, flood protection, and ecosystem restoration. It also adds 10 percent to the operations and maintenance budget.

See: US Army Corps of Engineers fully funds Denver restoration project

Energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, however, were cut 47 percent.

The bill does not include the EPA, which is handled in a separate piece of legislation.

Not making the September 30 deadline and needing to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running is the way Congress now works. According to Pew Research, the last year that a budget was completed on time was 1997.

Studies and Reports

Flood Maps
Real-time and predictive flood maps from NOAA are now available for 60 percent of the U.S. population.

The mapping service provides a model-based picture of areas currently underwater from river flooding. It also forecasts the area that will be flooded in the upcoming five days.

Regions that are not yet depicted in the maps include the intermountain West and the northern Plains.

Irrigation Organizations
The USDA’s Economic Research Service published a report on the structure of irrigation organizations in the country. These are a mix of Bureau of Indian Affairs projects, mutual companies, unincorporated mutuals, and special-purpose government units.

On the Radar

California Water Meeting
On September 9, the Bureau of Reclamation will hold its quarterly public meeting to provide updates on the coordinated operation of the two big canals in the state: the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project.

The meeting will run from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Pacific. Join via Microsoft Teams using this link. The meeting ID is 262 767 956 444 and the passcode is f74jJg

House Hearings
On September 9, a House Natural Resources subcommittee will hold a hearing on the nation’s federal forests.

That same day a different Natural Resources subcommittee will discuss the economic implications of the “energy dominance” agenda.

Also on September 9, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will discuss energy efficiency standards for buildings. Republicans have criticized efficiency standards for both water and energy as a waste of money.

On September 10, the Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on three permitting reform bills.

And also on September 10, a Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee will hold a hearing on implementation of previous iterations of the Water Resources Development Act.

Senate Hearing
On September 10, a Senate Commerce subcommittee will discuss the Trump administration’s AI plan. The witness is Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.

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.

Screenshot from Kestrel Kunz’s presentation at the CRWUA 2023 Annual Conference.

Republicans are still waging war on public lands — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

September 5, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Can I just make a little confession: I don’t like constantly writing about the Republicans’ relentless attacks on Americans’ public lands, the agencies that oversee them, and the regulations designed to protect them. I’d much rather be delivering some good news, or pondering some historical mystery or old maps, or explaining the complicated workings of the Colorado River’s plumbing, the power grid, or oil and gas drilling.

And yet, the Trump administration and the GOP simply won’t let up, so neither can I. For those of you who come here for not-so-gloomy content, please stick around. The nightmare has to end sometime. Doesn’t it? (And just to be clear, much more heinous things are happening outside the public lands/environmental sphere like, you know, the loss of democracy and the rapid slide into authoritarianism — but this is the Land Desk, so I’ll stick to land coverage, mostly.)

The latest developments include:

  • In an unprecedented move, House Republicans this week voted to wield the Congressional Review Act to “disapprove” Bureau of Land Management Resource Management Plans in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota. It is the first time the CRA — which allows Congress to revoke recently implemented administrative rules — has been used to eviscerate an RMP. That’s in part because RMPs are not considered “rules,” according to a January opinion by the Interior Department’s Solicitor. The Senate is expected to vote on the resolutions soon.
    These plans provide a framework for managing large swaths of land and authorize the BLM to permit mining, drilling, grazing, and other activities. They endeavor to balance the agency’s multiple-use mandate with environmental protections, guiding resource extraction and development away from sensitive areas and toward more appropriate ones, for example. They can take years to develop, and incorporate science, legal considerations, court orders, tribal consultation, and input from local officials and the general public. 

    Overturning the three RMPs in question would reopen: 2 million acres in Montana’s Miles City Field Office planning area to future coal leasing; 4 million acres to coal leasing and 213,000 acres to oil and gas leasing in North Dakota; and 13.3 million acres in Alaska’s Central Yukon planning area to oil and gas leasing and mining claims. The Alaska move would also revive the Ambler Access Project, a proposed 211-mile road through the Brooks Range foothills and the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve that would provide mining companies access to copper and zinc deposits. 

    But it also throws management of these planning areas, covering some 30 million acres, into question. While the Miles City resolution only targets a court-ordered, coal leasing-specific amendment to the RMP, the others include the entire RMPs, and don’t say anything about whether the agency is supposed to revert back to the older — sorely outdated (the 2024 Central Yukon RMP replaced a 1986 version) — RMPs, or simply try to manage the land without RMPs (which they are not authorized to do). The CRA not only revokes the “rules,” but also bans the agency from issuing a rule in “substantially the same form.” That will severely limit the BLM in efforts to replace the revoked RMPs, and could hinder it from issuing any permits or authorizations at all. 

    Using the CRA in this way (as if RMPs were “rules”) also blows a cloud of uncertainty over every other RMP implemented since 1996, when the CRA was passed. First off, it makes other Biden-era RMPs subject to being revoked by Congress. More broadly, if Resource Management Plans are deemed subject to the CRA, wrote Interior Solicitor Robert Anderson in January, it would create “uncertainty as to whether post-1996 RMPs have ever gone into effect, which also raises questions as to the validity of implementation decisions issued pursuant to these plans …” 

    Prior to the House vote, 31 law professors and public land experts called on Congress to refrain from using the CRA to revoke RMPs. “The resulting uncertainty could trigger an endless cycle of litigation,” they wrote, “effectively freezing the ability of the BLM and other agencies to manage public lands for years, if not decades to come.”
  • The Interior Department has been on a bit of a tear recently, especially when it comes to blocking solar and wind projects and encouraging fossil fuel extraction, especially coal. Over the last month, the department has:
    • Fast-tracked the environmental impact statement for Canyon Fuel Company’s application to expand the Skyline Mine in Utah via lease modifications.
    • Approved Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s bid to expand its Antelope Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin to an additional 857 federal acres.
    • Accelerated its review of the proposed Black Butte Mine expansion in southwestern Wyoming.
    • Moved forward with coal lease sales in Utah (the Little Eccles tract as requested by Canyon Fuel Company) and Montana (at the Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s Spring Creek Mine).
  • The Trump administration is moving to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which limits new roadbuilding in parts of the National Forest that are currently roadless. It would open up nearly 45 million acres of public land to new roadbuilding and, by extension, new logging, mining, and drilling, including in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Colorado’s and Idaho’s state-specific roadless rules would be spared from this move. At least for now. 

    It’s important to remember that this rule didn’t and doesn’t shut down roads — of which there are already far too many criss-crossing our public lands — it just keeps new ones from being built. That’s important because roads are, well, pretty darned bad for forests and deserts and everywhere else. 

    Roads fragment landscapes, they enhance erosion, and liberate dust to be carried away by the wind, degrading air quality. Vehicles traveling on the roads leak oil and other nasty fluids, while also spewing exhaust and disrupting the natural sounds of the wild. A study found that a toxicant used to protect car-tires is winding up in streams, killing salmon. Most problematic: a backcountry road serves as a giant hypodermic syringe, injecting humanity and accoutrements deep into the backcountry, where they can do more damage to otherwise difficult-to-access, sensitive areas. 

    You can comment here until Sept. 19.
  • Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued new restrictions on the Land and Water Conservation Fund yesterday, possibly hampering the program’s effectiveness.Still, it could have been worse.

    Congress established the LWCF in 1964 to further conservation and enhance recreation by using offshore oil and gas drilling revenues to acquire private land in or near national parks, wilderness areas and forests, and then making it public. It has been popular with both parties, and in 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act with bipartisan support, permanently funding the LWCF to the tune of $900 million annually and creating a separate account for national park and public lands maintenance. After the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., showed Trump a photo of a spectacular parcel acquired by the fund in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the president agreed to sign the bill into law.

    Initially Trump and Burgum wanted to divert hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund and use it to maintain infrastructure in national parks and other public lands. But they backed off, perhaps because they knew congressional Republicans would bear the brunt of the backlash. Instead, Burgum tacked a bunch of restrictions on how the funds can be used, which could slow or nix proposed land acquisitions.

I wrote about the fund and the threats for High Country News.

On an entirely unrelated note, I happened upon this quote the other day while reading How to Blow Up a Pipeline, by Andreas Malm:

📖 Reading Room 🧐

There’s a nice piece in the New York Times Magazine about Rose Simpson, a fabulous artist from Kha’p’o Owingeh, aka Santa Clara Pueblo, in New Mexico. I’ve long admired Simpson’s work, along with that of her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, and grandmother, Rina Swentzell (best known as a scholar and architect). It’s great to see her get this kind of recognition. Rose’s figurines are striking, while her beautifully painted El Camino (yeah, the car) is simply bad ass. Check out the article, and her website and Instagram. 

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

A while back I mentioned the new surfing wave on the Animas River in Farmington and how that has been rendered un-surfable by low streamflows. I don’t have any good news to report on that, but I do have a link to a live webcam of the surf wave, which is pretty cool and a good way to check in on the lower Animas River from anywhere at anytime!

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

Some readers have asked what they can do about data centers, AI, and their profligate energy and water use. There aren’t any easy answers. You can’t exactly boycott data centers unless you’re willing to remove yourself from the modern age. After all, virtually the entire digital world requires data centers to operate, including me sending you this newsletter. Abstaining from AI might be a little easier, except that you’re often using it without knowing, simply because the tech companies employ it as a default (try doing a Google search and you’ll see that the first result is usually an AI-generated answer; you can opt out by adding “-ai” after your search query, but you’re still using a data center). 

I would recommend learning as much as you can about the technology and how much water and power each one uses. This piece from The Conversation provides a good breakdown of some of these things, and is a good place to start.

Data Centers: The Big Buildup of the Digital Age — Jonathan P. Thompson

Here’s a crazy one: Texas firm BorderPlex Digital Assets is looking to build what they say will be a $165 billion data center complex in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Holy frijole, that’s a lot of cash (all of the property in neighboring El Paso County is currently valued at $95 billion, according to El Paso Matters. 

The developers are claiming Project Jupiter, as it’s called, would create 750 new jobs, use minimal amounts of water, and would be powered by a dedicated, on-site microgrid. But the details are sparse on exactly how they would cool the facilities (which is the where most of the water use comes from) and what their electricity generation sources would be. Solar? Natural gas? Nuclear?

Seems like these details should be made public before the county commissioners enter into a deal with the developers in which they would issue industrial revenue bonds and exempt the facility from property taxes in exchange for a $300 million payment. El Paso Matters has more on the plan.

A Dog Day Diatribe on AI, cryptocurrency, energy consumption, and capitalism — Jonathan P. Thompson

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Aneth Oil Field. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Federal Water Tap, September 1, 2025: EPA Won’t Strengthen #Wastewater Pollution Rules for Meat and Poultry Industries — Brett Walton

Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868

Click the link to read the article on the Circle of Blue website (Brett Walton):

September 1, 2025

The Rundown

  • EPA withdraws a proposed rule to reduce wastewater pollution from slaughterhouses.
  • EPA will seek to cut federal protections for wetlands.
  • USDA will prepare an environmental impact statement for repealing the Roadless Rule that shields national forests and grasslands from logging and road building.
  • New Mexico and Texas agree to Rio Grande lawsuit settlement.
  • CBO reports on U.S. agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.
  • EPA proposes allowing Wyoming to manage its own coal-waste program.
  • Interior Department completes work on soil burn severity assessment for a large fire north of the Grand Canyon.

And lastly, the Department of Energy supports a feasibility study for what would be one of the country’s largest pumped storage hydropower projects.

“The seven states need to recognize that there is pain and sacrifice all over the place and try and get past that visceral perception and figure out what they can do to work together to provide water reliability for the 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River.” – Scott Cameron, senior adviser to the interior secretary, speaking at a meeting of the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Work Group on August 20. Cameron, who said he is “cautiously optimistic” about a seven-state deal on managing the river before the current operating rules expire at the end of next year, said the basin needs to look for strategies to reduce consumption and “to facilitate transfers and exchanges.”

By the Numbers

10 Percent: Share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions generated by agriculture, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. The main pollutants in this total are nitrous oxide, a byproduct of fertilizer, and methane, which comes from livestock manure and cow burps.

$21 Million: Research and development funding from the Department of Energy for hydropower projects. The largest portion ($7.1 million) is to investigate the feasibility of a massive pumped storage hydropower project proposed for Navajo Nation land. Pumped storage toggles water between a lower and upper reservoir, a system that functions like a battery. New Mexico State University is the co-investigator for Carrizo Four Corners, the 1,500-megawatt pumped storage project that could provide 70 hours of energy storage, far more than the several hours of storage provided by the largest lithium-ion batteries.

News Briefs

Slaughterhouse Waste
The Environmental Protection Agency will not strengthen wastewater discharge rules for meat and poultry producers. The rules were proposed during the Biden administration.

To justify the action, the agency cited its desire to lower food prices and reduce industry operating costs.

The Biden-era rule intended to reduce the volume of pollutants that enter waterways from some 3,879 slaughterhouses nationally. Those pollutants include nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter, fecal coliform, and grease. They contribute to harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen dead zones in rivers, lakes, and coastal ecosystems.

A Narrow Wetlands Definition
The EPA is preparing to release a rule by the end of the year that would shrink the number of wetlands with federal protection under the Clean Water Act, E&E News reports.

According to a slide presentation seen by E&E, the agency “would regulate wetlands only if they meet a two-part test: They would need to contain surface water throughout the ‘wet season,’ and they would need to be abutting and touching a river, stream or other waterbody that also flows throughout the wet season.”

The changes are in response to a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that provided narrower, but undefined criteria for determining which water bodies have federal protection.

Rio Grande Settlement
By signing a settlement agreement, New Mexico, Texas, and the Justice Department are closer to ending a long-running dispute over water rights from the Rio Grande and the groundwater pumping that affects river flows, Inside Climate News reports.

“The settlement package includes new formulas to calculate how much water each entity is owed; an agreement for New Mexico to reduce groundwater depletion, and changes to the operating manual for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Rio Grande Project.”

Roadless Rule
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing ahead with its attempt to undo a 24-year-old rule that prevents logging and road building in “roadless” areas of national forests and grasslands.

Rescinding the Roadless Rule, which was adopted in the last month of the Clinton administration, will affect more than 44 million acres, mostly in 10 western states.

The department will prepare an environmental impact statement for its intent to repeal the rule. It argues that more local control over land management decisions are needed.

Comments are due September 19. Submit them via http://www.regulations.gov using docket number FS-2025-0001.

Studies and Reports

Dragon Bravo Fire Burn Severity
An Interior Department team completed an evaluation of the soil burn severity of the Dragon Bravo Fire, which has burned across more than 149,000 acres north of the Grand Canyon.

The fire severely burned the soils on just over 2 percent of the acres. Another 26 percent was moderately burned. The most severe burns cook the soil, which increases surface runoff after storms. Erosion and downstream floods can be the result.

In context: As Flames Scorch Western Forests, Flagstaff Area Offers Roadmap for Post-Wildfire Flood Prevention

On the Radar

Emergency Alert System Improvements
The Federal Communication Commission is beginning the process to assess and potentially upgrade the nation’s emergency alert systems that local agencies use to inform residents about natural hazards like floods and fires.

The commission is taking public comments through September 25. Submit them hereusing docket number 25-224.

Wyoming Coal Waste
The EPA wants to grant more states the authority to regulate waste products from burning coal for electricity. Wyoming is the latest state to seek this power, called primacy.

The agency is proposing to approve Wyoming’s bid to oversee its coal ash permitting program.

A public meeting will be held October 30. Public comments on the proposed approval are due November 3. Details are in the above link.

Three states currently have primacy. North Dakota’s application is being reviewed.

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.

#DataCenters The Big Buildup of the Digital Age: Server farms are colonizing the West’s power grids and upending the energy transition — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 26, 2025

🤖 Data Center Watch 👾

What I’m about to write is strange, even a little surreal, even to me. It seems over the top, hyperbolic, and alarmist, all things I try to avoid in my writing (unless I’m going for satire). But here it is: The Big Data Center Buildup is transforming the West (and other regions) as quickly and radically as the post-war Big Buildup of coal plants and other power infrastructure in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.

See what I mean by hyperbolic? After all, data centers are just big box stores filled with walls of computer, processors, servers, and other equipment rather than cheap plastic items. How transformative could they really be?

Very, it turns out. As I’ve written here before, data centers use huge amounts of energy and water, and if they keep sprouting like weeds in business parks and rural areas, then they very well could not only hamper, but reverse the transition away from fossil fuels.

Tech bros will certainly say I’m being hysterical, and point to the latest estimates showing that each AI query uses a tiny fraction of the energy and water that a person consumes by doing other cyberspace activities or, for that matter, simply existing in modern times. Google, for example, says a “median” Gemini text query uses .24 watt-hours of electricity, which is about the same as watching 9 seconds of television, or microwaving for 1 second, or running a refrigerator for six seconds. And growing the beef for a single hamburger uses hundreds of times more water than hundreds of AI queries.

As far as I can tell, these figures are accurate. But what do they really tell us? I suppose we can feel a bit less guilty about succumbing to the temptation to use that iPhone AI thingy to identify something we photograph, or for asking ChatGPT to pen a song. It has no bearing, however, on what’s playing out on the ground, which is a sort of colonization of the power grid by larger and larger server farms.

I closely follow energy-related news as part of my job, and hardly a day goes by when I don’t encounter a story about the growing electricity demand from new data centers and utilities scrambling to keep up. Less than a decade ago, most Western utilities were expecting power consumption to plateau or even begin decreasing by now.

In 2018, for example, California utility regulators approved a plan to shutter Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors in 2024 and 2025. Doing so would deprive the state’s grid of enough juice to power some 1.7 million homes. But Pacific Gas & Electric, the plant’s operator, figured it wouldn’t be a problem, since demand was expected to decline over time due to efficiency gains and more rooftop solar, and they could cover the rest with new renewables.

Instead, demand has increased substantially on PG&E’s grid since then, in large part due to new data centers in Silicon Valley, and it’s likely to continue to balloon over the next couple of decades. This forecast-blowing turnaround has prompted PG&E to toss out its old resource plans, work on acquiring more energy generation, and delay Diablo Canyon’s retirement for at least another five years. The pattern is being repeated all over the West with alarming regularity. It seems as if no place is safe from the invasion.

Some recent examples:

  • In late July, PG&E said it expects 10 gigawatts of new data center capacity to connect to its grid over the next ten years. Ten gigawatts, or 10,000 megawatts, is about one-fourth of the total demand on the California grid on a hot summer’s day, or equivalent to about five Diablo Canyons. It’s a crapload of power, in other words, and there’s no way they’re going to serve that kind of demand growth with just solar and wind, especially since a certain administration is doing all it can to stop all solar and wind from being built. It’s also notable because it’s a 20% increase in projected data center capacity since May.
  • NorthWestern Energy signed on to provide up to 1,000 MW of power — or nearly all of the utility’s generating capacity — to Quantica Infrastructure’s AI data center under development in Montana’s Yellowstone County. This would require the utility to either construct or purchase additional power, which could lead to higher rates for their existing customers. Now NorthWestern is proposing to merge with Black Hills Corp., another electricity and gas utility, saying the combined utility would be better positioned to meet rising power demand from, you guessed it, new data centers.
  • Xcel Energy expects to spend about $22 billion in the next 15 years to meet new data centers’ projected power demand in Colorado, potentially doubling or even tripling legacy customers’ rates. Also of concern: If the projections are overblown, Xcel could end up building a bunch of new generation that’s not needed, leaving the utility and its customers with a bunch of stranded assets.
  • Wyoming officials have worked to lure data centers and cryptocurrency firms to the state, and it seems to be working. Earlier this month energy firm Tallgrass proposed building an 1,800 MW data center, along with dedicated gas-fired and renewable power facilities, near Cheyenne. That adds to Meta’s facility in Cheyenne and the 1,200 MW natural gas-powered Prometheus Hyperscale data center under development in Evanston. Observers say electricity demand from these centers could transform the physical and regulatory utility landscape and potentially drive up costs for “legacy” customers.
  • New Mexico utilities are struggling to meet growing demand from an increasing number of data centers, while also complying with the state’s Energy Transition Act’s requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
  • Numerous companies are eyeing Delta, Utah, as a site for new data centers. This is in part because land is cheap there. But also because it is home to the Intermountain Power Project, a massive coal plant built during the Big Buildup. The plant is scheduled to be converted to run off natural gas and, ultimately, hydrogen, but Utah lawmakers want at least one of its units to continue to burn coal. They just need a buyer for the dirty power: Enter data centers. Fibernet MercuryDelta is looking to construct the 20-million-square-foot Delta Gigasite there; and Creekstone Energy plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity there, with power coming from coal, solar, and natural gas.
  • And Arizona’s largest utilities say demand from planned new data centers could increase total power load by 300% over current levels. Recently, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep burning coal at Four Corners Power Plant beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement to help meet this growing demand.

Sometimes the tech firms will purchase renewable power or build their own solar, wind, or geothermal facilities. But in most cases, they rely partly or wholly on fossil fuel generation, whether it’s from the grid — which is still largely dominated by natural gas and coal in many places — or from dedicated generators. While a lot of solar is still being added to the grid, it isn’t enough to keep up with rapidly growing demand. Plus, it may not last. The GOP phased out federal tax credits for wind and solar. And the Trump administration killed the Solar for All program that funded rooftop solar for lower-income households, and crippled the REAP program, which helps farmers install solar panels. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has vowed to make it as difficult as possible to develop solar and wind on federal lands.

What that means is that we’re likely to see another Big Buildup for the cyber age. It will include single new data centers that span nearly 500 acres and consume more power than all of the homes of Montana and Wyoming combined. And it will include the generating facilities to run the servers and to keep them cool. In the absence of policies limiting fossil fuel burning and preventing cost shifts to existing customers, we’re all going to pay the price.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Bullfrog Creek and the Little Rockies, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Meditations on Monkeywrenching: Also: The Data Center boom and the Four Corners Power Plant — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 12, 2025

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, it’s basically an analog meme you pin to your clothing to let folks know which political candidate or other cause you might support.

I’m pretty sure I had a “John Anderson for President” 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: “Track, Telly, Twinkie,” or something along those lines. Maybe the little collection included a “Gilbert Slade for County Commissioner,” that I would have picked up at one of Slade’s 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: “Fight Blight / Burn a Billboard Tonight.” 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 Abbey’s 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 button’s text preceded the novel. The slogan was a favorite of David Brower, according to John McPhee’s “Encounters of the Archdruid,” which ran in the New Yorker in 1971.

Though I wouldn’t 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 “Black Decade.”

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 Metals’ 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 “train time.”

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 — the story goes 1 — 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: “Let’s just burn it.”

And so, on one dark night, that’s 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 — within reason — 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 friend’s 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 “energy independence” 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 I’m 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-wrenching’s literary debut. It’s not. Two years before Abbey published his book, there was Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die, which followed a trio on a Florida-to-Idaho road trip in a quest to blow up a dam.

Harrison’s 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 story’s narrator, a bit of a cad with relationship issues, is on a fishing trip and escapist odyssey in Florida’s Keys when he encounters Tim. During a drinking session, the narrator tells Tim offhandedly that there’s a dam in the Grand Canyon, or at least they are planning one, pushing Tim into a melancholic slump. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “it will fill up with water.”

Tim is immediately fixated by the idea, noting that he has never seen the Grand Canyon. The narrator “had seen Glen Canyon years ago before it was literally drowned and liked it better but any comparison was absurd with such splendors.” After a little more thought, he notes, casually: “We probably ought to blow up the goddamn thing.”

Tim takes the idea and runs with it, though it isn’t 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, Tim’s 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, “where a wealthy rancher ruined a good steelhead stream … out of greed and contempt for the natural world.” Once the new target is picked, the narrator feels “strong and clean and very moral. Heroic, in fact.” 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. Abbey’s 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 Abbey’s 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 bulldozers’ 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 “eco-terrorist,” the connotations of which became far more grim after 9/11 3. The FBI then declared monkeywrenching to be one of the nation’s 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 — or even Guantanamo Bay — for years. Monkeywrenching, however, did not die. In 2016, for example, a crew of “Valve Turners” 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 it’s MWG’s 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. I’ve 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 there’s a bit of a literary revival of monkeywrenching. It’s one of the methods employed by climate activists in Stephen Markey’s 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 Malm’s 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 don’t think that’s quite right. The tone of the newer book and film is far different — more urgent and somber — than MWG or a Good Day to Die. And the motives of the protagonists are also more serious and deep, if you will. Pipeline’s characters, for example, mostly were direct victims of the fossil fuel industry, making their sabotage a form of self-defense, while the Deluge’s eco-saboteurs see themselves as warriors fighting for the planet’s very survival.

It’s not surprising that eco-sabotage is experiencing a revival, even if it’s 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 “energy emergency.” They are literally blocking the public’s 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. 4 Instead, climate activists are 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 the World Championships in Scotland to the Tour de France, and Just Stop Oil even defaced Charles Darwin’s 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 — even if only “symbolically” — relate to environmental destruction? And what’s with targeting Darwin’s grave? While I appreciate the zeal, I can’t help but wonder: If you’re going to vandalize something and risk jail time, why not do something that makes a direct and immediate difference — 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 — preferably without harming anybody. He’s not looking to send a message, to make a symbolic gesture, or raise awareness. He’s just trying to fix something that’s 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.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that anyone go out and do anything illegal. I’m just saying that when a person’s home — whether that’s a house, a community, a Place, or the entire planet — comes under attack, it shouldn’t 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 — 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 — and polluting — for another seven years beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement. 

The coal-burning extension is part of the state’s largest utility’s 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 state’s 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 administration’s 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. It’s the Big Buildup all over again, only this time it’s high-tech server farms sprouting all over the place, with power generating sources struggling to keep up.

1 *I didn’t hear this story until after my father died, so this is all second-hand and the details may be a bit off.

2 I won’t 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, “adolescent,” and so forth. Maybe that’s 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 ** 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.

Commentary: #Colorado fires expose danger of ‘energy dominance’ hypocrisy, U.S. Representative Jeff Hurd owes constituents an apology — Quentin Young (ColoradoNewsline.com)

A crew member fights a fire in western Colorado in this photo posted Thursday. (Elk and Lee Fire Information Facebook)

Click the link to read the commentary on the Colorado Newsline website (Quentin Young):

August 14, 2025

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 fire’s 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 “be here for the long haul to help recover.”

But nowhere did he offer the most appropriate gesture: an apology.

Hurd, along with the other three Republican members of Colorado’s U.S. House delegation, has promoted drill-baby-drill policies as part of a Trumpist “energy dominance” 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, “I was wrong.”

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 state’s 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.

“And they are burning at rates unprecedented in recent fire history,” the authors wrote. “While historical fire suppression and other forest management practices play a role in the West’s 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.”

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 Hurd’s hometown of Grand Junction and much of his district. Either Hurd is oblivious to the science or he’s cynically chosen to side with oil and gas industry interests.

During the freshman Hurd’s campaign last year, he sometimes seemed to align with an “all of the above” energy policy, which at least purports to include renewables, but he also signaled a strong preference for fossil fuel extraction over wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. He even champions coal, the most damaging of fossil fuels, a position he’s reinforced 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 America’s the U.S. should maximize production.

“If 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,” he told CPR in September.

But that’s like saying that since people are going to abuse fentanyl even though it’s deadly, America should manufacture a superior product to preempt China’s more dangerous supply. An immoral practice should be avoided because it’s 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 Hurd’s district are exposing “energy dominance” as disastrously self-defeating.

President Trump’s war on energy: If we’re in an energy emergency, why kill the cleanest, best, and fastest growing sources? — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

The Route 66 Solar Energy Center near Grants, New Mexico. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 25, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

During both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry often accused the administration of waging a “war on energy.” 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 “fracking” 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, Biden’s 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 — renewable energy, that is, namely wind and solar power. They’ve 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 Oregon’s coast. And they’ve done it all as America is supposedly gripped by an “energy emergency.”

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 — deceptively and cynically titled, “Managing Federal Energy Resources and Protecting the Environment” — 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 “a reasonable range of alternatives that includes projects with capacity densities meeting or exceeding that of the proposed project.”

Capacity density is basically the amount of energy a project can generate per acre. According to the Interior Department’s calculations (we’ll 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)
  • Gas combustion turbine: 2.13 to 4.23 MW/acre
  • Ultra-supercritical coal plant w/out carbon capture: .69 MW/acre
  • Geothermal: .16
  • Solar PV w/ battery storage: .04
  • Onshore wind: .01
  • Offshore wind: .006

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 “whether the use of federal lands for any wind and solar projects is consistent with the law.”

This isn’t a new argument: The specter of “renewable energy sprawl” 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 doesn’t their chart include hydroelectric, which has the lowest capacity density of all?

Also, the Interior Department’s 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 — along with its associated Navajo Mine (current mining areas as well as reclaimed areas), Morgan Lake, and coal combustion waste disposal facilities — 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.

I’d 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. That’s because he knows we’re not really in an “energy emergency,” 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 Trump’s 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 that’s simply irresponsible, at best. [ed. emphasis mine]

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

Speaking of fake energy emergencies … In May, the Bureau of Land Management completed its environmental review and approval of the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in Utah’s 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 mine’s proponent, Anfield Resources, apparently doesn’t share the Trump administration’s 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-Wood’s 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.

It’s 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 I’m going to write anything about it — since I did write a book about it — but I don’t think there’s much more to say, really.

The Gold King Mine continues to drain acidic, heavy metal-laden water — though it is being treated before it’s released into the watershed — and neighboring mines continue to do the same (though they aren’t being treated). Superfund designation hasn’t 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 wasn’t technically abandoned when it blew out), and injected “acid mine drainage” into the public’s vocabulary, it hasn’t 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 that’s in short supply these days.

If you’d 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.

On Superfund and the Gold King, 9 years later — Jonathan P. Thompson

Wonkfest: Sunnyside Gold King Settlement, explained — Jonathan P. Thompson

Gold King documents and map unearthed — Jonathan P. Thompson

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 Agency’s-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.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

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 Colorado’s 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 Canyon’s 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 100° F or more every day this week, and there’s no significant rainfall in sight.

Toxicity: The Invisible Tsunami — Deep Science Ventures

Click the link to access the report on the Deep Science Ventures website:

How pervasive toxicity threatens  human and planetary survival

What if one of the biggest threats to our health and planet is invisible, yet found in our air, food, and water?

Our latest report is the first time that a single report has attempted to analyse the broader collective problem and solution spaces of chemical toxicity answering the questions: how and why are toxic chemicals produced, how do they get into our bodies and the environment, and how do they affect the health of humans and other organisms?

Over eight months, we conducted an extensive analysis, including reviewing countless peer-reviewed studies and 50+ interviews with global experts. This research shows that the impacts of chemical toxicity are largely underestimated, contributing to increasing cancer rates, declining fertility, and a surge in chronic diseases, alongside ecosystem damage.

The overarching conclusion is that chemical toxicity is an underestimated risk to society and deserves significantly more attention and resources. 

But this report isn’t just about the problem; it’s a call to action for solutions. We highlight critical industry, regulatory gaps and, most importantly, identify key areas for innovation and urgent funding that can put us on the right path to increase our understanding and make positive changes where it’s most needed.

We identified three opportunity areas that demand solutions: pesticides (herbicides and insecticide), food contact materials, personal care products.

Key takeaways include:

  • Over 3,600 synthetic chemicals from food contact materials are found within human bodies globally.
  • PFAS have contaminated the entire world, with levels in rainwater often exceeding safe drinking water limits.
  • Over 90% of the global population is exposed to air pollution exceeding World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines.
  • The impact of pesticide use on cancer incidence may rival that of smoking and is linked to leukaemia, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, bladder, colon, and liver cancer. Prenatal pesticide exposure increases the odds of childhood leukemia and lymphoma by over 50%.

To learn more, you can download both the executive summary and the full report below. If you’re curious about how to create an impactful and commercially viable company in this space, we’d love to hear from you!

Download the report.

The US government has declared war on the very idea of #ClimateChange — CNN

Youth plaintiffs walking and chatting outside the courthouse in Montana summer 2023. Photo credit: Robin Loznak via Youth v. Gov

Click the link to read the article on the CNN website (Zachary B. Wolf):

August 1, 2025

…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 Trump’s well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world’s largest oil producer. His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week 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 that’s 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 that’s been tied to climate change.
  • Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them 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 Trump enacted legislation 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 Biden’s EPA and is also to challenge California’s 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, the 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 — or any role at all — the US will not attend.
  • Cuts to the federal workforce directly targeted offices and employees focused on climate change.

#Drought intensifies and spreads: Also: Introducing Data Center Watch, alfalfa exports fall, federal agency trolling — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk (Jonathan P. Thompson):

August 1, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

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 it’s only at about half that by the time it gets to Farmington, New Mexico’s, 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 Canyon’s 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 “due to continuous hot and dry conditions and erratic winds.” 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 Tribe’s 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.

📈 Data Center Watch 📊

The Land Desk is adding another beat to its roster, the Data Center Watch, which is just to say that I’ll 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 utilities’ resource planning into disarray.

Cheyenne, Wyoming, is already home to six data centers. That doesn’t count Meta’s $800 million center that is under construction there, or energy firm Tallgrass’s 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 Services’ 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 Power’s 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 Energy’s 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 today’s forecast peak demand for California’s 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 — the proposed Cheyenne server farm would use more power than all of the state’s households. As recently as half a decade ago, most utilities weren’t expecting the speed and magnitude of the big data center buildout. Now it’s 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 — each with impacts of their own — 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.

📈 Data Dump 📊

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 doesn’t 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, it’s worth tracking both — alfalfa and data centers, I mean. So here’s 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.

🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡

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: They’re so proud of their racism and fetishization of fossil fuels that they plaster social media with their proclamations thereof — 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 “American Progress.”

Both are gross in their own way.

What the hell kind of sexualization of coal — i.e. “She is the moment” — are they going for in that first one? Friggin’ 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 Hitler’s term given that he was inspired by the U.S.’s policies toward Native Americans). Not only is the use of the word “Heritage” in this way a dog whistle to white supremacists, but it’s also kind of weird to be talking about defending the “Homeland” 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.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

I don’t want to leave y’all with that awful taste in your mouth, so here are a couple of nicer images of one of my favorite flowers out there.

Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

No, there is not plenty of water for data centers: And, yes, we should worry about it, along with the facilities’ power use — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #RioGrande #aridification

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.

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

July 29, 2025

📈 Data CENTER Dump 📊

When I first read a recent headline in Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring newsletter, I assumed it was a sort of joke to rope me into reading. “There’s plenty of water for data centers,” it said, reassuringly. “Probably the last worry you should have about either water or AI.”

Unfortunately, he wasn’t 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, I’d 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 Lee’s proposal to sell off public land was “pretty reasonable” and an “okay idea on the merits”).

Yglesias acknowledges that data centers use water, and that more data centers will lead to more water consumption. But it’s okay, he says, because “We’re not living on Arrakis, and rich countries are not, in general, abstemious in their water usage.”

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? It’s 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 — frivolous or otherwise. So, it should be fine to use a lot more water for data centers in perpetuity, since water is “sufficiently plentiful.” 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 don’t change their ways. Adding a fleet of water-guzzling hyperscale data centers to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Tucson, where water is anything but “sufficiently plentiful,” will only exacerbate the crisis.

A Dog Day Diatribe on AI, cryptocurrency, energy consumption, and capitalism — Jonathan P. Thompson

Researchers have tried various methods to determine how much water a single ChatGPT query or AI-assisted Google search uses as compared to, say, streaming a Netflix video or writing a standard e-mail. 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 isn’t always publicly available, and also because data centers’ water use can vary depending on location, as do their 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 70° to 80° 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 Google’s data centers withdrew 8.65 billion gallons of water globally in 2023 1.

Energy-Water Nexus Data Dump 1: Fracking — Jonathan P. Thompson

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 doesn’t seem like much (it’s 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 — or 2.5 million gallons — 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 Yglesias’s purported “sufficiently plentiful” 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 Phoenix’s 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 — or 50.8 million gallons — per year. That’s 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 don’t 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 it’s time to update the old saying: “I’d rather see a cow than a data center.”

Western water: Where values, math, and the “Law of the River” collide, Part I — Jonathan P. Thompson

Data centers aren’t 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 that’s 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 West’s water and driving its power grid to the snapping point? Here’s 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.

It’s 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 community’s water supply or the reliability of the power grid.

Proper policy isn’t 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.

📖 Reading Room 🧐

  • The Land Desk is reading all of y’all’s great responses to last week’s open thread about forms of resistance. Check it out and weigh in if you haven’t already.
  • Len Necefer has had some really strong pieces on his All At Once by Dr. Lennewsletter recently, including this one 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 Diné 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. I’ve always thought it would be super cool to boat the reaches between Farmington and Bluff (actually, I’ve always wanted to boat from Durango to Farmington to Bluff). 
  • Another Substack that’s been getting my attention is Time Zero, a podcast and Substack on “the nuclearized world.” The Wastelanding series is about the legacy of uranium mining and milling on the Colorado Plateau, the Navajo Nation, and on Pueblo lands. Very powerful stuff. 
  • The Colorado Sun’s Shannon Mullane has a good story 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 it’s known, was finally built.

Cisco Resort and other water buffalo oddities — Jonathan P. Thompson

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

#ClimateChange Is Real in #Colorado: EPA Denial of Science Comes at Major Costs — Governor Jared Polis

East Troublesome Fire. Photo credit: Northern Water

Click the link to read the release on Governor Polis’ website:

JULY 29, 2025

DENVER – Today, by repealing the 16-year-old “Endangerment Finding,” which determined that greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution poses a threat to public health and welfare, the Trump administration’s U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) paved the way for more extreme weather and natural disasters, hurting Colorado communities. 

“This 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 EPA’s 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,” said Governor Jared Polis. 

Climate change is already negatively impacting Coloradans in all aspects of life. Homeowner’s insurance costs are skyrocketing due to increased hail and fire claims. Extreme weather is destroying homes, jobs, and crops. In 2024, the United States experienced $27 billion in weather- and climate-related disasters. And higher temperatures are increasing the risk of illness and medical emergencies. 

MAGA continues to pillage public lands: Plus: President Trump issues oodles of drilling permits; national park visitation; inane coal policy — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

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

Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

July 22, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

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 doesn’t 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 Biden’s 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.’s APDs (approved permit to drill) were for coalbed methane wells (which is just natural gas extracted from coal seams) in places like New Mexico’s and Colorado’s San Juan Basin, Wyoming’s Sublette County, or Colorado’s Piceance Basin. They are smaller and lower-producing than the horizontal “fracking” wells that sparked the “shale revolution” 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 it’s 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 — and so much else — in the “One Big Beautiful” law, MAGA is looking to rub a little bit of acid in those wounds with the House’s 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 wing’s 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 today’s 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 a $110.4 million cut below fiscal year 2025’s level, or an 8% decrease.
  • The U.S. Geological Survey’s budget will be slashed by 5.6%, or $82 million.
  • The National Park Service will see it’s budget cut by about $176 million, a 6% decrease.
  • The Environmental Protection Agency will have its funding 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 Service’s budget will be reduced by $16.8 million.
  • The National Institute of Environmental Health Science will see a budget cut of $27.9 million, or 35%.
  • Some good news: The Indian Health Service would 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 Trump’s 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 Trust’s 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 “Freedom City.”

But this is more than just about bean counting. It’s 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 Monument’s 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 Biden’s restoration of the monument’s original boundaries and trashes the new management plan and all of the work that went into it.

The GOP’s bill also would suffocate the BLM’s 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.

Can a new rule fix the Bureau of Livestock and Mining? (Jonathan P. Thompson)

The appropriation bill is also a sort of MAGA love letter to the fossil fuel industry, including provisions such as:

  • Cutting off funding for — and thereby killing — the Biden administration’s 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 “expression of interest” 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 administration’s methane fee aimed at incentivizing oil producers to sell natural gas — a byproduct of oil drilling — 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 administration’s 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 nation’s largest and nastiest solid waste streams.

The GOP isn’t too fond of wildlife. The bill takes aim at numerous endangered species — from the lesser prairie chicken and grizzly, to the gray wolf, wolverine, and long-eared bat — and blocks funding for bans or restrictions on lead ammunition, even though that’s a leading killer of condors and some birds of prey.

The condors of Marble Canyon — Jonathan P. Thompson

I’ve been really curious about how the Trump administration’s 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 they’re still around? Would the administration’s 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?

We’re six months in to this nightmare … er … administration, and there aren’t 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?).

I’ve 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 isn’t accessible by boat. Or that’s 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 Energy’s social media account did tweet this stupidity, I’m sorry to say.

🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb … 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 Americans’ coal, then you could say they are marking the product up by about 800%. 

It seems like a pretty good deal for the corporations — and a crappy one for us taxpayers. But it wasn’t enough, apparently, so the Republicans lowered the royalty rate to a measly 7%. And just so you understand, this isn’t just for new coal leases, it’s for all existing and future coal leases on public lands and for the public’s 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 — which is not a given — 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 here’s 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 a report by Wyoming Public Radio’s Caitlin Tan. That’s 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. That’s $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 that’s not how it works. Coal mines aren’t going to produce more just because it’s 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.

Dismantling of EPA’s Scientific Research Arm Fulfills Key Chemical Industry Goal — Marianne Lavelle (InsideClimateNews.com)

EPA-estimated cancer risk in the region (Cancer Alley). By MiseDominic – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=147151609

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Marianne Lavelle):

July 21, 2025

Companies feared rules and lawsuits based on the Office of Research and Development’s assessments of the dangers of formaldehyde, ethylene oxide and other substances.

Soon after President Donald Trump took office in January, a wide array of petrochemical, mining and farm industry coalitions ramped up what has been a long campaign to limit use of the Environmental Protection Agency’s assessments of the health risks of chemicals.

That effort scored a significant victory Friday when EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced his decision to dismantle the agency’s Office of Research and Development (ORD).

The industry lobbyists didn’t ask for hundreds of ORD staff members to be laid off or reassigned. But the elimination of the agency’s scientific research arm goes a long way toward achieving the goal they sought. 

In a January 27 letter to Zeldin organized by the American Chemistry Council, more than 80 industry groups—including leading oil, refining and mining associations—asked him to end regulators’ reliance on ORD assessments of the risks that chemicals pose for human health. The future of that research, conducted under EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System program, or IRIS, is now uncertain.

“EPA’s IRIS program within ORD has a troubling history of being out of step with the best available science and methods, lacking transparency, and being unresponsive to peer review and stakeholder recommendations,” said an American Chemistry Council spokesperson in an email when asked about the decision to eliminate ORD. “This results in IRIS assessments that jeopardize access to critical chemistries, undercut national priorities, and harm American competitiveness.”

The spokesperson said the organization supports EPA evaluating its resources to ensure tax dollars are being used efficiently and effectively.

H. Christopher Frey, an associate dean at North Carolina State University who served as EPA assistant administrator in charge of ORD during the Biden administration, defended the quality of the science done by the office, which he said is “the poster case study of what it means to do science that’s subject to intense scrutiny.”

“There’s industry with a tremendous vested interest in the policy decisions that might occur later on,” based on the assessments made by ORD. “What the industry does is try to engage in a proxy war over the policy by attacking the science.”

Among the IRIS assessments that stirred the most industry concern were those outlining the dangers of formaldehyde, ethylene oxide, arsenic and hexavalent chromium. Regulatory actions had begun or were looming on all during the Biden administration.

The Biden administration also launched a lawsuit against a LaPlace, Louisiana, plant that had been the only U.S. manufacturer of neoprene, Denka Performance Elastomer, based in part on the IRIS assessment of one of its air pollutants, chloroprene, as a likely human carcinogen. Denka, a spinoff of DuPont, announced it was ceasing production in May because of the cost of pollution controls.

Public health advocates charge that eliminating the IRIS program, or shifting its functions to other offices in the agency, will rob the EPA of the independent expertise to inform its mission of protection.

“They’ve been trying for years to shut down IRIS,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists and lead author of a new study on Trump administration actions that the group says undermine science. “The reason why is because when IRIS conducts its independent scientific assessments using a great amount of rigor … you get stronger regulations, and that is not in the best interest of the big business polluters and those who have a financial stake in the EPA’s demise.”

The UCS report tallied more than 400 firings, funding cuts and other attacks on science in the first six months of the Trump administration, resulting in 54 percent fewer grants for research on topics including cancer, infectious disease and environmental health.

EPA’s press office did not respond to a query on whether the IRIS controversy helped inform Zeldin’s decision to eliminate ORD, which had been anticipated since staff were informed of the potential plan at a meeting in March. In the agency’s official announcement Friday afternoon, Zeldin said the elimination of the office was part of “organizational improvements” that would deliver $748.8 million in savings to taxpayers. The reduction in force, combined with previous departures and layoffs, have reduced the agency’s workforce by 23 percent, to 12,448, the EPA said.

With the cuts, the EPA’s workforce will be at its lowest level since fiscal year 1986.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, EPA has taken a close look at our operations to ensure the agency is better equipped than ever to deliver on our core mission of protecting human health and the environment while Powering the Great American Comeback,” Zeldin said in the prepared statement. “This reduction in force will ensure we can better fulfill that mission while being responsible stewards of your hard-earned tax dollars.”

The agency will be creating a new Office of Applied Science and Environmental Solutions; a report by E&E News said an internal memo indicated the new office would be much smaller than ORD, and would focus on coastal areas, drinking water safety and methodologies for assessing environmental contamination.

Zeldin’s announcement also said that scientific expertise and research efforts will be moved to “program offices”—for example, those concerned with air pollution, water pollution or waste—to tackle “statutory obligations and mission essential functions.” That phrase has a particular meaning: The chemical industry has long complained that Congress never passed a law creating IRIS. Congress did, however, pass many laws requiring that the agency carry out its actions based on the best available science, and the IRIS program, established during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, was how the agency has carried out the task of assessing the science on chemicals since 1985.

Justin Chen, president of the American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, the union representing 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said the organizational structure of ORD put barriers between the agency’s researchers and the agency’s political decision-making, enforcement and regulatory teams—even though they all used ORD’s work.

“For them to function properly, they have to have a fair amount of distance away from political interference, in order to let the science guide and develop the kind of things that they do,” Chen said. 

“They’re a particular bugbear for a lot of the industries which are heavy donors to the Trump administration and to the right wing,” Chen said. “They’re the ones, I believe, who do all the testing that actually factors into the calculation of risk.”

ORD also was responsible for regularly doing assessments that the Clean Air Act requires on pollutants like ozone and particulate matter, which result from the combustion of fossil fuels. 

Frey said a tremendous amount of ORD work has gone into ozone, which is the result of complex interactions of precursor pollutants in the atmosphere. The open source computer modeling on ozone transport, developed by ORD researchers, helps inform decision-makers grappling with how to address smog around the country. The Biden administration finalized stricter standards for particulate matter in its final year based on ORD’s risk assessment, and the Trump administration is now undoing those rules.

Aidan Hughes contributed to this report.