Category: Oil and Methane Gas

#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.

Federal Water Tap, July 21, 2025: Draft House Budget Would Cut Key Water Infrastructure Funds — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org)

December 22, 2008 Kingston Fossil Plant coal ash retention pond failure via the Environmental Protection Agency and the Tennessee Valley Authority

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

The Rundown

  • The House budget, though not as severe as the White House’s, proposes a 25 percent cut to the main source of federal funding for local water systems.
  • Senate approves Trump’s $9.4 billion in cuts to public broadcasting and foreign aid.
  • Other water bills in Congress include tribal water infrastructure funding, sinkhole monitoring, microplastics, and Great Lakes fisheries.
  • Bureau of Reclamation announces $200 million for water recycling projects in two western states.
  • EPA delays requirements to monitor groundwater at coal ash dumps.
  • Before taking summer break, Congress will hold hearings this week on fossil fuel pipeline safety, rising electricity demand, FEMA improvement, and NEPA reviews.

And lastly, Congress’s watchdog finds NRCS could improve its dam safety approach.

“While requests greatly exceeded the funding available for projects, we did our best to provide some funding for all eligible projects given the impact these dollars will have in communities across the country.” Rep. Mike Simpson (R-ID), speaking about water infrastructure earmarks in his committee’s 2026 budget proposal.

By the Numbers

$200 Million: Bureau of Reclamation funding announced for two water reuse projects in the western states. Phoenix will receive $179 million for its North Gateway project, which will produce 8 million gallons of recycled water a day. Washington County Water Conservancy District, which encompasses high-growth St. George in southwest Utah, will see more than $20 million for its regional recycled water system. The final cost for that system is expected at more than $1 billion.

News Briefs

House Proposes Water Cuts
In its draft fiscal year 2026 budget, a House Appropriations subcommittee proposes a 25 percent combined cut to the state revolving funds, the main source of federal funding for local water systems.

The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund would be funded at $895 million, down from $1.1 billion. The Clean Water State Revolving Fund, which is for sewer and stormwater projects, would be funded at $1.2 billion, compared to $1.6 billion in 2025.

Though not as deep as President Trump’s proposal of a 90 percent cut, the budget proposal still drew criticism from water utility groups, who would prefer federal assistance be maintained or increased.

Combined, half of the appropriated funds would be redirected as earmarks to specific projects. This action pulls money out of circulation in the revolving funds, which grow as utilities repay interest. Water groups worry that if Congress continues down this path of carving out earmarks from the revolving funds the viability of the funds will be at risk.

In context: Will Congress Defy Trump on Water Infrastructure Spending?

Delaying Coal Ash Compliance
The EPA granted states and utilities more time to meet federal rules for cleaning up waste pits at coal-fired power plants that pollute groundwater and rivers.

Groundwater monitoring requirements will not be mandatory until August 2029, according to the new timeline. It is a 15-month extension.

In context: President Trump Wants Coal Ash in State Hands

Senate Approves Foreign Aid, Public Broadcasting Cuts
Joining the House, the Senate endorsed the president’s desire to cut $9.4 billion in already approved spending on public broadcasting and foreign aid.

Reuters details the on-the-ground fallout from U.S. foreign aid cuts, documenting 21 water projects that were abandoned before completion.

Other Water Bills in Congress
Besides the budget, members introduced bills on microplastics, tribal water access, and sinkholes.

  • Representatives from Florida and Oregon introduced a bipartisan bill in both chambers that would require a federal study on the damage to human health from microplastics in food and water.
  • The House Natural Resources Committee approved a bill to reauthorize a federal research program for Great Lakes fisheries.
  • The House passed a bill to establish within the U.S. Geological Survey a sinkhole mapping and risk assessment program.
  • Democrats in the House and Senate introduced the Tribal Access to Clean Water Act, a bill that would increase funding authorizations for a number of federal programs that invest in water infrastructure and technical assistance on tribal lands. The largest chunk would be directed to the Indian Health Service, authorized at $500 million annually through 2030 for sanitation facilities. Even if the bill were to pass, Congress would still need to appropriate the money.

Studies and Reports

Dam Safety
The Government Accountability Office reviewed the Natural Resources Conservation Service’s approach to dam safety.

The report found that NRCS could improve in several areas. For one, the agency does not monitor completion of dam inspections with its local project sponsors.

Also, the agency is missing data on the condition of the dams, even those that are rated high-hazard and threaten lives and property downstream if they fail.

NRCS helped to plan, design, and construct nearly 12,000 dams.

On the Radar

Congressional Hearings
A few hearings on tap this week before the representatives take summer break.

On July 22, the House Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on NEPA reviews, which agencies are beginning to shorten.

That same day, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will hold a hearing on fossil fuel pipeline safety. This week marks the 15th anniversary of one of the nation’s largest inland oil spills. In July 2010, an Enbridge pipeline ruptured near Marshall, Michigan, spilling more than 843,000 gallons of oil into local waterways.

Also on July 22, the House Appropriations Committee will vote on the fiscal year 2026 budget bill for EPA and Interior.

On July 23, the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will discuss challenges to meeting rising electricity demand. Data center growth is causing energy demand to soar.

Also on July 23, a House Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee will discuss ways to improve FEMA’s disaster response.

Cybersecurity Webinar for Water Utilities
The EPA and the federal government’s cybersecurity agency will hold a free webinar for water utilities on cybersecurity vulnerabilities.

The webinar is July 24 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern. Register here.

Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

The role of aerosols in lesser precipitation in the Southwest U.S.: How what happens in the North Pacific can effect snowfall in the San Juan Mountains — Caitlin Hayes (BigPivots.com)

The Upper Rio Grande near Creede, Colorado. By Jerry R. DeVault KSUJD – Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=12062576

Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Caitlin Hayes):

July 10, 2025

In the late 2010s, when  Flavio Lehner worked for the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, water managers often asked him about the drought in the Southwest. Was the low precipitation simply an unlucky draw in the cycle of long-term weather variations? What role did climate change play? Most importantly, was the drought there to stay?

No one had answers, but Lehner began pursuing them.

Now a study by Lehner and his team, published July 9 in Nature Geoscience, shows that climate change and aerosols have indeed led to lower precipitation in the Southwest and made drought inevitable.

The research is the first to isolate the variables of human-caused climate change and air pollution to show how they directly affect the region’s precipitation; the study predicts that drought conditions will likely continue as the planet warms.

“What we find is that precipitation is more directly influenced by climate change than we previously thought, and precipitation is pretty sensitive to these external influences that are caused by humans,” said Lehner, the senior author. He is now an assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University.

A trend towards lower precipitation in the Southwest started around 1980, with the onset largely attributed to La Niña-like conditions, a climate phenomenon that results in cooler surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean. The new research shows that even if El Niño-like conditions had prevailed instead, the Southwest would not have experienced a corresponding increase in precipitation.

“In our models, if we see a warming trend in the tropical Pacific, we would expect more precipitation in the Southwestern United States, but that’s not the case here,” said first-author and doctoral student Yan-Ning Kuo.

“On top of the El Niño and La Niña sea surface temperature trends, there’s a uniform warming trend because of historical climate change, as well as emissions from anthropogenic aerosols, that both create a certain circulation pattern over the North Pacific. Those two factors prevent the precipitation for the Southwestern U.S. from increasing, even under El Niño-like trends.”

Lehner said the results point to a bigger shift in the connection between the weather in the tropical Pacific and in the U.S., due to climate change and aerosols.

“What we call a teleconnection from that region to the Southwestern U.S. is changing systematically,” he said, “and these external influences really modulate that relationship, so it doesn’t behave exactly how we expect it to behave.”

There is some good news. Researchers expect that the concentration of aerosols – which includes the emissions from vehicles and industry – will drop as China and other countries in East Asia implement policies to improve air quality. But Lehner said warming temperatures may offset those improvements.

“Most experts expect the world as a whole to reduce air pollution, and globally, it’s already going down quite quickly. That’s good news on the precipitation side,” Lehner said. “At the same time, the warming is going to continue as far as we can tell, and that will gradually outweigh those benefits, as a warmer atmosphere tends to be thirstier, gradually drying out the Southwest.”

The researchers were able to determine the role of climate change and aerosols by eschewing prevailing climate models that in recent years have not been able to accurately reflect the sea surface temperatures observed in real-time. The team designed their own simulations that allowed them to plug in data from satellites and statistical models to understand the impact of each contributing factor.

Lehner said the research offers new methods for approaching questions about climate change’s impact on weather patterns, while also specifically helping water managers and other stakeholders in the Southwest plan for the future.

“In the Southwest, people really depend on what little water there is – every drop in the Colorado River, for example, is accounted for through water rights,” he said. “I am excited to go back and show the results to people who need them.”

Co-authors include Isla R. Simpson, Clara Deser and Adam Phillips from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR); Matthew Newman from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); Sang-Ik Shin from NOAA and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences; and Julie M. Arblaster and Spencer Wong from Monash University.

The study was supported by NOAA, the U.S. Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes.

This was originally published in the Cornell Chronicle.

San Juan Mountain foothills and sunset from the window of a plane. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

The Texas Flash Flood Is a Preview of the Chaos to Come — ProPublica.org

It's been a bit since I've done a meteorological deep dive, but the devastating flash #flood in central Texas this July 4th/5th deserve a closer look. #TXwxYes remnants of #Barry were involved helping enhance moisture. A remnant MCV from Mexico on 3 July also played a role.Full evolution below ⤵️

— Philippe Papin (@pppapin.bsky.social) 2025-07-05T22:00:33.079Z

Click the link to read the article on the ProPublica website by Abrahm Lustgarten

July 9, 2025

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?

Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.

Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.

We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.

The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.

There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”

That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.

The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.

What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.

Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.

Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.

Federal Water Tap, July 7, 2025: President Signs Budget Bill, Agencies Move to Streamline Environmental Reviews — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org)

Sensitive satellite-based instruments enable scientists to measure relative variations of Earth’s gravitational field. Data gathered by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) is used in a new study to show that many continental regions are experiencing long-term aridification. Credit: NASA/JPL/University of Texas Center for Space Research

The Rundown

  • President Trump’s budget bill targets a few water projects while eliminating some climate and environment programs.
  • Agencies move to constrain environmental reviews under NEPA.
  • EPA says it will loosen wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants later this summer.
  • GAO reviews NASA’s major projects, including the third generation of a water-tracking satellite.
  • EPA intends to take public comments on its idea to narrow state and tribal reviews under Section 401 of the Clean Water Act.
  • White House orders higher fees for foreign tourists visiting national parks.

And lastly, EPA’s internal watchdog notes the risks of rising seas to federally owned Superfund sites.

“If contaminants from federal facility Superfund sites are released into the surrounding communities, the health, jobs, and environment of millions of U.S. residents may be threatened. Further, the federal funds expended to implement those remedies would have been wasted.” – Report from the EPA Office of Inspector General that identifies 49 federally owned Superfund sites at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.

By the Numbers

$658 Million: Expected baseline cost of the third generation of NASA’s satellite mission that measures changes in the planet’s water storage. The GRACE-C mission is scheduled for July 2029, according to a Government Accountability Office review of NASA’s major projects. Operating for more than two decades, the GRACE satellites have been instrumental in tracking global groundwater depletion.

News Briefs

NEPA Overhaul
Cabinet and other agencies – including the Interior Department, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and Army Corps of Engineers – announced they will revise their rules for environmental reviews of major projects and prioritize shorter and quicker assessments of potential harms.

The agencies are shortening the administrative timeline for implementing a new rule, arguing that the standard notice-and-comment process would be an unnecessary delay and “contrary to the public interest.”

The Council on Environmental Quality, the White House arm that traditionally oversees NEPA, revoked its regulations in April in response to an executive order promoting domestic energy production. The agencies, now seeking faster, more efficient reviews, are establishing their own rules.

Besides the arrival of the new administration, recent legal rulings have also rearranged the playing field for environmental reviews.

In justifying its action, each agency cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in May in Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, Colorado. That ruling, in a case which centered on a railroad line in Utah for crude oil, allowed for narrowly focused environmental reviews that assess only a specific project and not the actions – like upstream oil drilling and downstream oil refining – it would enable.

Budget Bill
The budget reconciliation bill, which could add $3 trillion to the national debt over the next decade, barely mentioned water directly.

Among the few call outs: The bill delivers $1 billion for surface water storage and water conveyance in the western United States. The money is for projects that increase or restore capacity of Bureau of Reclamation water conveyance systems or increase their use. Increasing reservoir storage capacity – such as raising Shasta Dam, a Republican-driven idea that’s been on the table for years – is also acceptable. The money is available through September 30, 2034.

More broadly, climate and environment programs were chopped. Unobligated Inflation Reduction Act funds – those not yet committed to a recipient – were yanked back for programs on climate data, environmental justice block grants, reducing air pollution at schools, and more.

National Parks Fees
President Trump ordered the Interior Department to increase national park entry fees for foreign visitors. The additional revenue would be channeled to infrastructure improvements at the parks or to increase park access.

Still Storm Watching, For Now
NOAA said it would delay by one month the termination of certain storm-tracking satellite data, the Associated Press reports.

Studies and Reports

Superfund Sites at Risk from Rising Seas
The federal government owns 157 Superfund sites. Forty-nine of those sites are at risk of flooding from rising seas and increased storm surge.

The assessment comes from the EPA’s internal watchdog, which published the report to draw attention to federal liabilities related to climate change and the nation’s most toxic sites.

The at-risk Superfund sites are clustered at military sites around Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, and San Francisco Bay.

Arizona Groundwater Assessment
The U.S. Geological Survey published a report on water quality in the Coconino aquifer in northern Arizona, where it could be a water source for the Hopi Tribe and Navajo Nation.

On the Radar

Water Quality Permitting
The EPA is considering a rulemaking that would narrow the scope of Clean Water Act reviews undertaken by states and tribes.

These Section 401 reviews have been a target of the Trump administration. Energy companies complain that states have used their review authority to block fossil fuel infrastructure such as natural gas pipelines.

Before the rulemaking, the EPA is asking for public input. The agency opened a docket for written submissions, and it will hold two online events at a time to be announced.

File written comments at www.regulations.gov using docket number EPA-HQ-OW-2025-0272. The deadline is August 6.

Another Slogan Commission
Through an executive order, President Trump established the President’s Make America Beautiful Again Commission.

The commission’s objectives – “promote responsible stewardship of natural resources while driving economic growth; expand access to public lands and waters for recreation, hunting, and fishing; encourage responsible, voluntary conservation efforts; cut bureaucratic delays; and recover America’s fish and wildlife populations through proactive, voluntary, on-the-ground collaborative conservation efforts” – in some ways conflict with the administration’s desire to cut budgets and greenlight fossil fuel projects.

One of the commission’s charges is to recommend to the president “solutions to expand access to clean drinking water and restore aquatic ecosystems to improve water quality and availability.” Stay tuned.

Power Plant Wastewater
Lee Zeldin, EPA administrator, said his agency later this summer will relax wastewater pollution rules for thermal power plants that burn fossil fuel and nuclear fuel.

The Biden administration placed stricter limits on these wastewater discharges last year. In a press release, Zeldin said compliance deadlines would be extended. The agency will also reconsider technological requirements for preventing polluted discharges.

Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

Study from 2020 Shows #GlobalWarming Intensifying Extreme Rainstorms Over North America — Bob Berwyn (InsideClimateNews.org)

Last night’s storm (July 30, 2021) was epic — Ranger Tiffany (@RangerTMcCauley) via her Twitter feed.

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):

June 2, 2025

The current warming trajectory could bring 100-year rainstorms as often as every 2.5 years by 2100, driving calls for improved infrastructure and planning.

New research showing how global warming intensifies extreme rainfall at the regional level could help communities better prepare for storms that in the decades ahead threaten to swamp cities and farms. 

The likelihood of intense storms is rising rapidly in North America, and the study, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, projects big increases in such deluges.

“The longer you have the warming, the stronger the signal gets, and the more you can separate it from random natural variability,” said co-author Megan Kirchmeier-Young, a climate scientist with Environment Canada.

Previous research showed that global warming increases the frequency of extreme rainstorms across the Northern Hemisphere, and the new study was able to find that fingerprint for extreme rain in North America.

“We’re finding that extreme precipitation has increased over North America, and we’re finding that’s consistent with what the models are showing about the influence of human-caused warming,” she said. “We have very high confidence of extreme precipitation in the future.” 

At the current level of warming caused by greenhouse gases—about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial average—extreme rainstorms that in the past happened once every 20 years will occur every five years, according to the study. If the current rate of warming continues, Earth will heat up 5.4 degrees by 2100. Then, 20, 50 and 100-year extreme rainstorms could happen every 1.5 to 2.5 years, the researchers concluded.

“The changes in the return periods really stood out,” she said. “That is a key contributor to flash flooding events and it will mean that flash flooding is going to be an increasing concern as well.”

Better Science, Better Forecasts

The 2013 floods in Boulder, Colorado that killed nine people and caused more than $2 billion in property damage are a good example of how such climate studies can help improve flood forecasts, said Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado.

“That was an exceptional event and the rain was like tropical rain. The radars greatly underestimated the magnitude as a result,” said Trenberth who returned to his home in Boulder during the floods with a broken foot, only to have to climb on his roof to direct the gushing water away from his house.

From: The Great Colorado Flood of September 2013

A subsequent study found that the rain resulted from an unusual atmospheric brew over Colorado. Mountain thunderstorms mingled with a juicy atmospheric river from the tropics, dropping up to 17 inches of rain in a few days, nearly as much as Boulder’s annual average total. Human-caused climate change “increased the magnitude of heavy northeast Colorado rainfall for the wet week in September 2013 by 30%,” the study found.

A separate study concluded that global warming actually decreased the likelihood of the 2013 floods. The conflicting results hint at the complexities of climate research, but, since then, the influence of human-caused climate change on extreme weather has become more clear.

The risks will continue to increase as the atmosphere warms, said David R. Easterling, a climate extremes researcher and director of the U.S. National Climate Assessment. “The detection has been there for a while on a lot of extreme events,” said Easterling, who was not involved in the new study. “We’re going to see increases in extreme events, and we need to be prepared.” 

Easterling said most current infrastructure, such as dams and bridges, was designed based on rainfall values from the mid- to late-20th century and was not built to withstand the more frequent extreme rains identified by the new research.

“There are going to be much more damaging floods that are going to wash out a lot of the infrastructure,” he said. “You’ll see more floods and bigger floods and major impacts to our civil engineering infrastructure.”

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s website, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration indicates that the percentage of total precipitation coming from intense single day events has increased significantly since about 1980, with nine of the top 10 years for extreme one-day precipitation events occurring since 1990. The EPA’s precipitation indicator website also shows similar changes at the global scale.

Warmer Air, More Moisture and Shifting Storm Tracks

One way to visualize the planet’s climate system is as a heat-driven pump that tries to balance the planet’s energy by circulating it around the globe and cycling it from oceans, to land, to the atmosphere. Global warming puts more heat into the pump and that energy is manifested elsewhere in the system. For instance, for every 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit of warming, the atmosphere holds 7 percent more moisture that can fall as extreme rain, hail or snow. 

But global warming can increase rainfall by much more than 7 percent in individual events. In Hurricane Harvey, for example, the estimated boost in rainfall was about 30 percent, said Trenberth.

“The outcome depends on the kind of storm. If the rainfall is in or near the center of the storm, as for a hurricane, then the extra oomph from the latent heat release intensifies the storm and makes it bigger and longer lasting,” he said. “This can also happen for an individual thunderstorm.” He was not involved in the new study.

For storms outside the tropics, the most rain happens away from the center, which doesn’t necessarily make the rain more intense, but can affect the way the storms move and develop, he added.

“This is the atmospheric river phenomenon and requires the weather situation to remain stuck for a bit, as a river of moisture from the subtropics, like the pineapple express, pours into a region,” he said. A 2019 study showed that atmospheric rivers cause most of the flood damage in the Western United States already, and global warming is projected to intensify those events.

In addition to simply having more moisture in the atmosphere, global warming may also drive more extreme rainfall by shifting global weather patterns, said climate scientist Peter Pfleiderer, with Climate Analytics in Berlin. 

In a 2019 study published in the journal Nature Climate Change, Pfleiderer and other scientists looked at how global warming changes weather patterns in ways that make heat waves, droughts or rainstorms longer or more intense. With global temperature increases of 2.7 to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (the range to which the Paris climate agreement hopes to limit warming), periods of heavy rain would increase 26 percent—the most of all the weather phenomena studied—the research found.

Friederike Otto, acting Director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford, said new research showing how global warming affects extreme rain regionally complements studies that identify the effect on individual events.

As a co-investigator with World Weather Attribution, Otto has been involved in a series of recent studies looking at how global warming affects droughts, heat waves and extreme rain. The strongest signal, as she expected, was with heat waves, but she expects rain events “far outside the observations so far.”

“One thing I only started to realize in the last year, is how important attribution is for making projections,” she said. Climate attribution studies show how the warming of the planet makes some extremes more likely, and intensifies other weather events. Linking measurements of what actually happens with model predictions “gives you more confidence that the changes are because of climate change,” she said.

Escalating Impacts Require Adaptation and Resilience

Floods caused by extreme rain are among the costliest climate-related disasters. A NOAA compilation of billion-dollar disasters lists a long string of deadly catastrophes caused, at least in part, by extreme rain. These include the January 2020 floods in New York, Michigan and Wisconsin, where significant damage along the shoreline of Lake Michigan was compounded by extremely high water levels in the lake, as well as a lack of seasonal ice cover.

In 2019, extreme and persistent spring rainfall in the Midwest led to one of the costliest inland flooding events on record. Floodwaters inundated millions of acres of farms, along with numerous cities and towns and Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska—the third U.S. military base to be damaged by a billion-dollar disaster in a six-month period. In all, that wave of flooding caused $10.9 billion in damage, NOAA estimated.

Earlier this month, persistent heavy rains contributed to the failure of a dam in Michigan, and Easterling said heavy rains were also implicated in the 2017 Oroville Dam failure that cost $1.1 billion and forced the evacuation of 180,000 people. The flooding caused by record rainfall from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 was a big part of the $125 billion worth of damage caused by the storm.

Extreme rain can also have an impact on a smaller scale. In mountainous areas, heavy precipitation over even a small area can be disastrous. In the Rocky Mountains, such cloudbursts have caused toxic floods of acidic water from abandoned mines, and in the European Alps, scientists say extreme rains are unleashing larger and more destructive rockfalls and landslides.

“We are going to get more intense, extreme precipitation, this is one of the things we are sure about,” said Hannah Cloke, a University of Reading natural hazards researcher and hydrologist specializing in flood forecasting. 

The United Kingdom has been hit repeatedly by extreme rain in recent years, including Storm Desmond in 2015, which was linked with global warming and caused at least $550 million in damage, flooding nearly 10,000 homes and businesses. Cloke said the recent flooding has apparently even shaped her daughter’s world view. For a recent school assignment, the nine-year-old used plastic bottles to build a floating house reminiscent of the movie Waterworld.

“Most of the design standards for storm infrastructure are not high enough for the predictions, or even what we’re seeing right now,” she said. “We have to get away from the idea that you can just carry on business as usual. We have to adjust our expectations of what could happen. We need to get people out of harm’s way and be realistic about where we live.”

Cloke said the certainty of increased extreme rainfall means that communities have to adapt by creating or restoring natural areas that can soak up the rains in the uplands, and cities need to be redesigned with green roofs and other measures to prevent flood waters from piling up and destroying property. More and more, flood experts are thinking in terms of socio-hydrology, she said.

“You can’t just look at the water, at the heavier rain, and how fast it’s running down the rivers,” she said. “It’s about how humans and water interact at all levels, and how politics controls where the water is. It’s about who is at risk of flooding and whether those people have any agency to reduce the risk.” 

New research like the PNAS study that shows the regional fingerprint of global warming on extreme rainfall can help reduce the risk, she said, because it enables better short-term forecasts. 

“We have a lot of the right science in place but we still can’t predict the exact locations and amounts,” she said. “We don’t quite understand the development of the water cycle and we often underestimate rainfall for those reasons. But we shouldn’t be surprised that these rains are happening. We’re going to see entire cities at a standstill.”

It's been a bit since I've done a meteorological deep dive, but the devastating flash #flood in central Texas this July 4th/5th deserve a closer look. #TXwxYes remnants of #Barry were involved helping enhance moisture. A remnant MCV from Mexico on 3 July also played a role.Full evolution below ⤵️

— Philippe Papin (@pppapin.bsky.social) 2025-07-05T22:00:33.079Z

A jarring pothole — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

Josh Shipley. Credi: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

July 3, 2025

Josh Shipley rides a Harley and drives a Jeep. He says ending federal tax credits for solar may upend his business.

Josh Shipley rides a Harley in his spare time and likes to take his family on off-road Jeep trips and has hunted across North America.

On Wednesday morning, Shipley had to fight tears as he talked about the impact on his business, Alternative Power Enterprises, and the families of the employees of the earthquake-inducing bill now being debated in Congress.

“Removing these tax credits at the end of the year is going to be extremely detrimental,” he said on a press call orchestrated by the staff of U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper. “We actually don’t believe we’re going to be able to stay in business.”

The business is based in Ridgway, one of two smaller solar installation companies there. It has eight employees, and they have five spouses and seven children. They do work from Paonia to Silverton.

“It’s not just eight people that are going to be affected by this,” he said. The business, he explained, has been around for 30 years, and in recent years it has been able to start helping low-income families to get solar.

“I think in the last three years, 120 families in our area have benefited,” he said. “If I can’t survive, the other parts of this business are going away. I can’t be there to help those individuals.”

Shipley said he bought the business in 2020 with the assumption that federal tax credits would be phased out, but not until 2032.

The bill, he said, is a tragedy for U.S. energy policy.

“Republicans are always talking about independence and being — sorry, I’m getting a little emotional — getting and being dominant in our industries. This is how we become energy dominant. It’s not just wind. It’s not just solar. It’s not just natural gas plants. It’s not just nuclear power plants.

“It takes every single one of these technologies for us to create that — excuse me — and to keep these families — I’m sorry, excuse me — but it will take all of these forms of energy to create that dominance,” he said. This bill’s going to kill that. There are no if’s, and’s, or but’s about it. Small businesses will go out of business because of it.  There will not be the workforce that is going to be required to create that energy dominance later, when they’ve realized what they’ve done.”

Hickenlooper, who had arrived late the night before from Washington D.C., touched on several provisions of what he called the “cruel, reckless bill” that the Senate had passed on Sunday morning.

“This was a vote that would strip 17 million Americans, including many, many children, of their health care, push more than 300 rural hospitals to close, gut investments in affordable clean energy,” he said “It would expand our national debt at a level that we have never imagined before, and all this just to accommodate these lavish tax cuts for wealthy Americans, most of whom aren’t asking for the tax cuts. It is a form of madness, fiscal madness, and I think it’s cruel.”

U.S. Sen. John Hickenlooper called the bill passed by his fellow senators “cruel.” Credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

Later, he explained that the bill would gut the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. “It was a major step towards addressing climate change, and now it’s been it’s like running into a brick wall,” he said.

“We’re going to lose over a million jobs in this country. I mean, these are careers, hundreds of billions of dollars of lost GDP, lost wages. We’re going to see the cost of electricity go up. We’re going to kill new renewable energy that prevents blackouts just when we’re in the process of trying to accommodate AI. We need more energy. We’ve got over 8,000 solar jobs just in Colorado.”

Speaking later, KC Becker described the bill as triggering an all-hands-on-deck moment for the solar industry in Colorado. In April, she became the executive director of the Colorado Solar and Storage Association.

“People are nervous from the smallest companies to the largest companies. It’s been a whirlwind,” she said. “The bill was expected to get better in the Senate. It actually got worse in the Senate because of the excise tax (on solar and wind production, now discarded).”

Right now, many solar providers are working hard, because they have inventories of panels. But the demand, if this bill gets passed as new constructed, will cause demand to drop off a cliff after Dec. 31.

The big question in Colorado — and part of the national dialogue — is whether any of Colorado’s representatives in Congress who are Republicans will buck the marching orders of President Donald Trump. Rep. Gabe Evans and Jeff Hurd, both freshman and both Republican, voted for the bill after saying nice things about renewable energy.

Fort Lupton-based Evans was barely elected last November from the Eighth District north of Denver, his first run at Congress. Grand Junction-based Hurd has a more comfortable position in the Third District, which covers much of the Western Slope plus much of southern Colorado.

Also speaking on the webcast press conference were the four Democrats who are members of Colorado’s delegation in the House of Representatives, Gov. Jared Polis, and various individuals from health care providers, most from more rural parts of Colorado.

The take-away message was that this bill will dramatically hurt poorer people who are unable to afford health care without governmental assistance. That, however, can also be true in urban areas.

U.S. Rep. Brittany Pettersen was momentarily reduced to fighting tears when she talked about the giant erosion of programs to help low-income people. “When I think about my mom who works a low-wage job, without access to medical care,” said Pettersen, who then choked up. For her, this was politics, but the bill was also deeply personal.

Data Dump: Abandoned oil and gas wells in #NewMexico: Also: Public lands continue to take a beating, despite one small victory — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

A serious mess, also known as the NE Hogback #53 well and associated infrastructure. Chuza, the most recent owner of the site in the Horseshoe Gallup oil field in northwestern New Mexico, went bankrupt. That left New Mexico and federal taxpayers holding the cleanup bill. The site has been partially reclaimed, but only partially. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

July 2, 2025

🛢️ Hydrocarbon Hoedown 📈 Data Dump 📊

A new report on New Mexico’s abandoned and orphaned oil and gas wells presents an alarming and expensive scenario for the state. It reveals that while the industry generates a lot of revenue for the state, cleaning up its mess is also poised to cost state and federal taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. No, this report was not put out by an environmental or progressive advocates, but by the state’s legislative finance committee.

New Mexico has been an oil and gas hotspot for more than a century, during which drillers have sunk at least 121,000 wells, mostly in the San Juan and Permian basins in the northwest and southeast portions of the state. Newly drilled wells typically kick out a large volume of oil and/or gas during the first months after drilling, generating a lot of cash for their operators and for state coffers, and helping to push production numbers for the state through the roof.

Decline curve generated by decline curve analysis software, utilized in petroleum economics to indicate the depletion of oil & gas in a petroleum reservoir. By Richard Banks – Sent to me personally, GFDL, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33914059

But the wells are soon afflicted with what’s known as the decline curve, meaning that the longer they pump, the less they pump. You know, it’s kind of like aging in people. Eventually, aging will render all oil and gas wells into low-producing stripper wells (I’m not sure how this analogy extends to the human realm, but hey …) that kick out less than 10 barrels of oil per day. Thousands of New Mexico wells are extreme strippers, producing one barrel or less daily. Yet they continue to spew methane, hydrogen sulfide, and volatile organic compounds at the same as or an even higher rate than their younger, more vital counterparts.

A trip through a sacrifice zone: The Horseshoe Gallup oilfield — Jonathan P. Thompson

This is problematic for a number of reasons. For one, the operators of stripper wells are likely to be smaller, less financially secure companies, and it’s easier and cheaper for them to keep the wells in a nearly inactive state — during which the wells continue to ooze pollutants into the air and groundwater — than to decommission, plug, and reclaim them. It may make economic sense to abandon these wells, or for the companies to cease to exist and “orphan” the wells, leaving them to the state or federal taxpayers to clean up, since reclamation bonds are woefully inadequate. And, finally, these wells generate almost nothing in production taxes, meaning that they aren’t contributing much to the state’s conservation fund, a portion of which is used to clean up abandoned and orphaned wells.

Saga of an Oil Well (The Horseshoe Gallup Field Sacrifice Zone Part II) — Jonathan P. Thompson

The near constant drone of drilling for over a century has resulted in a near-constant addition of low- to non-producing wells to New Mexico’s rosters. While responsible and financially solvent companies plug and reclaim their own wells, many smaller operators simply walk away.

New Mexico’s Oil Conservation Division is currently responsible for plugging close to 1,000 abandoned and orphaned wells, including 700 on state or private land, and for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sites (such as leaky tank batteries).

Detail of interactive map showing orphaned, inactive, and low-producing wells on state and private land in the San Juan Basin (this leaves out hundreds of additional such wells on federal lands).

At recent rates, plugging them will take close to a decade, not including remediation/reclamation. OCD is also responsible for remediation and reclamation of an additional 500 well sites and 18 infrastructure sties. In total, plugging, remediation, and reclamation of all currently orphaned wells and infrastructure on state and private land is estimated to cost a minimum of $208 million, and likely more. And that’s just for now.

The report goes on to say: “… in addition to wells the state already has legal authority to plug, thousands of inactive and low-producing wells are at risk of being orphaned, potentially increasing the state’s liability by many orders of magnitude.” There are about 1,400 inactive at high risk of being orphaned on state and private land, according to the OCD. And there are thousands more that are extremely low-producing wells — putting out less than one barrel of oil equivalent per day — for which the “expected cost of cleanup far exceeds predicted future revenues, increasing their risk of being orphaned.”

And the kicker: “Altogether, the state’s current and near-future liability for well plugging and site remediation is estimated to be between $700 million and $1.6 billion.”

More data from the report:

  • 38,817 Number of stripper wells, meaning they produce less than 10 barrels of oil-equivalent daily, in New Mexico, making up about 64% of the state’s active wells. This number will continue to increase.
  • $100,000 Average cost to plug single oil and gas well.
  • 450% Percent the average state-contracted cost to plug an oil and gas well in New Mexico has increased since 2019.
  • $250,000 Maximum amount of financial assurance an operator in New Mexico must post to cover the costs of plugging and reclaiming its wells. This cap applies whether the operator has five wells or 500 wells, meaning it actually provides almost no financial assurance whatsoever.
  • $46.4 million Amount spent by the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division to plug and reclaim 360 wells and associated infrastructure between 2019 and 2024.
  • 9% Percent by which the cost of plugging a gas well exceeds that of an oil well. Most of the wells in the San Juan Basin are gas wells.
  • $208 million Estimated cost to New Mexico to plug, remediate, and reclaim all existing orphaned and abandoned wells and infrastructure on state and private land.
  • $5.6 million Amount in financial assurance associated with orphaned wells or their operators, meaning most of the costs will be shouldered by the taxpayers — either via the state reclamation fund or federal grants.
  • $66.7 million April 2025 balance of New Mexico’s oil and gas reclamation fund (which is funded by a portion of conservation tax revenues).
  • $6 million Tax revenue New Mexico’s 3,024 wells producing less than 1BOE/day would generate with the West Texas Intermediate oil price at $70/barrel (it’s currently lower than that). Plugging and reclaiming those same wells would cost an estimated $531 million to $885 million. “The vast majority of the wells—87%—are owned by private companies whose financial health is difficult for regulators to assess.”
  • $1.6 million Amount New Mexico paid in 2024 to plug six of Ridgeway Arizona’s wells under a 2023 settlement agreement with the company. Under the agreement, the state pays to plug 299 of the company’s wells, and the company reimburses the state $2 for each barrel of oil it sells, with a minimum payment of $30k per month. But at current rates, the total cost to plug the remaining wells could be $60 million or more, meaning it would take the company as long as 170 years to pay it off.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

By now you’ve probably heard that Sen. Mike Lee pulled his public land sell-off provision from the budget reconciliation bill that the Senate just passed following intense backlash. And perhaps you’re planning on celebrating the salvation of America’s public lands on July 4.

There’s so much BS in Lee’s statement. How, for example, does selling public land to developers keep it from being ruined for the next generation? It doesn’t, it just locks up that land for every generation except those that can afford to buy a house in the new subdivision that would go there. Public land is not “locked away from the people who live there.” But it would be locked away if it was privatized. And while there is no property tax on public lands, there are federal payments in lieu of taxes, or PILT, which a county can use to fund schools and search and rescue operations. Plus, public lands generate billions in revenue for gateway communities through public land users’ sales and lodgers taxes and local spending.

Well, I hate to be Mr. Buzzkill, but while this victory may be sweet, it does little to offset the bitterness brought by continuing attacks on public lands, along with democracy, morality, decency, and, well, America, itself, this Independence Day week.

The “Big, Beautiful Bill” perpetuates and amplifies the massive transfer of wealth from low- and middle-income and working-class Americans to the richest 10%. It will slash Medicaid and other vital programs Americans have paid into and rely upon, while also dismantling tribal sovereignty. And yet, it will also drive up the deficit by trillions of dollars due to additional spending on the military industrial complex, which is reaching its tentacles further into immigration enforcement, wildlife blocking border walls, deportations, and $450-million-per-year concentration camps. With Trump threatening to revoke citizenship from U.S.-born citizens whom he considers threats (e.g. Zohran Mamdani and Elon Musk), those camps may end up housing his political opponents. I really hate to make this comparison, but that is some severe Nazi-esque nastiness.

The Senate’s bill gives more handouts to the oil and gas and coal industries, while revoking tax credits for wind and solar power, which could kill those industries when they are needed most.

And yes, some of you may cheer a weaker renewable-energy industry, since it will mean fewer utility-scale installations blanketing the desert. I get that. But it will also hurt rooftop solar and larger installations on big box stores, over parking lots, or in fallow agricultural land, brownfields or other appropriate sites. A western Colorado farmer’s plan to install solar panels to generate electricity and shade his crops, for example, is imperiled by the GOP’s plans.

This at a time when strain on the power grid is exponentially increasing due to the outsized demand of more and more AI-powering, hyperscale data centers. That power will come from somewhere, and if it’s not solar or wind or batteries, then it’s likely to be from pollution-intensive coal and natural gas (mined and drilled from public lands), fish-killing hydropower, or new nuclear reactors (that will require uranium mined from public lands).

And keep in mind, oil and gas leasing and mining claims represent a sort of quasi-privatization of public lands. Sure, the government retains title to the land, but the corporations get access to the minerals within, can rip the land apart to get to them, and can cut off public access with the necessary permits. With its accelerated 14-day “energy emergency” permitting process, the Trump administration is making it a heck of a lot easier for corporations to mine, drill, and otherwise develop public lands, sans public input. The latest beneficiaries include:

I’m not suggesting that these are horrible projects that shouldn’t have been approved. Geothermal holds a lot of potential as a relatively clean, round-the-clock baseline power source, and these are merely upgrades and exploration, not full on developments. Still, geothermal development and even exploration have impacts and can affect groundwater aquifers, springs, and wetlands. Land agencies should have as much time as it takes to adequately analyze potential effects, and tribal nations should be consulted and have time to do their own analysis. And if it’s happening on public lands, then the public deserves to know about it and have an opportunity to weigh in. None of that is possible under this 14-day permitting process.

So, yeah, happy Fourth of July, y’all and welcome to the Divided States of Project 2025. And on that note, the Land Desk will be taking the rest of the week off.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Just getting into the ol’ July Fourth spirit with this picture of Raymond “Squeek” Hunt’s signs near his mutton meat slaughterhouse and shop in Waterflow, New Mexico. I mean, it does have an American flag in it, after all.

Western public land sale axed from Senate budget bill: #Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee withdraws a plan that could have auctioned more than a million acres — Angus M. Thuermer Jr. (WyoFile.com)

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

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):

June 28, 2025

Utah Sen. Mike Lee withdrew his land-sale provision from the Senate reconciliation budget bill Saturday evening.

“I was unable to secure clear, enforceable safeguards to guarantee that these lands would be sold only to American families – not to China, not to Blackrock, and not to any foreign interest,” Lee posted on X. “For that reason, I’ve made the decision to withdraw the federal land sales provision from the bill.”

The Republican had sought to require the sale of Bureau of Land Management property — owned by all Americans — to help Western communities resolve affordable housing worries. Critics said existing laws allow such sales and that the measure violated a core western value — public access to public land.

More than one million acres of public land were at stake. The provision required the government to auction the property rapidly and with curtailed public involvement.

Conservationists, hunters and anglers and outdoor recreation businesses erupted in virtual applause after Lee conceded. Opposition across the West stirred thousands to rally in support of continued ownership of and access to their publicly owned property.

“Public lands are the cornerstone of our conservation legacy,” Chris Wood, president and CEO of Trout Unlimited said in a statement heralding the provision’s demise.

Others were less reserved.

“Total faceplant,” wrote Land Tawney, co-chair of American Hunters & Anglers.

“He rewrote his scheme multiple times,” Tawney said of Lee. “And tonight? He yanked his own language from the bill,” Tawney wrote in a statement.

Al Gore: Why #climate action is unstoppable — and “climate realism” is a myth

Can fracking #wastewater be reused?: #NewMexico’s legislators are eager to repurpose “produced water,” but environmental organizations say that there is no safe way to do that — Shi En Kim (High Country News)

A DEQ worker collects samples from Alkali Creek below where produced water from the Moneta Divide Field is discharged. (Wyoming DEQ)

Click the link to read the article on the High County News website (Shi En Kim):

June 9, 2025

On Oct. 2, 2024, a geyser erupted in Toyah, a town in west Texas 50 miles from the New Mexico border. This was not a case of water miraculously appearing in the desert, a deliverance from the area’s long-standing drought. Rather, it was an environmental disaster: a blowout from an orphaned oil and gas well.

What gushed from the ground wasn’t actually water, but rather a vile brine of heavy metals, radioactive substances, chemical additives and noxious organics — the by-product of fracking. 

The Toyah incident is the latest of at least eight leaks over the preceding 12 months in the Permian Basin, a fracking hub across west Texas and southeastern New Mexico. It highlights the increasingly urgent challenge of what to do with fracking’s wastewater — what fossil fuel companies euphemistically call “produced water.” But some New Mexico legislators have a solution in mind: For the last few years, they’ve proposed reusing the wastewater off the oil field for industrial purposes, such as data center cooling and hydrogen production.

Part of their argument is that New Mexico desperately needs water. More than 90% of its residents live in areas facing drought. In the next 50 years, the already-arid state will see its ground- and fresh water sources shrink by 25%.

Political pressure is mounting on New Mexico’s lawmakers to tap into fracking wastewater as a new resource. Environmental groups, however, strongly oppose the idea, arguing that there is still no way to make the wastewater safe for off-field use. Year after year, the New Mexico Legislature finds itself at a crossroads.

“We are, as a state, very beholden to oil and gas,” said Carlos Matutes, the New Mexico director at the advocacy group GreenLatinos that’s part of the coalition opposing produced water reuse. Any bill that sanctions produced water, he said, “is almost guaranteed to come back.”

PRODUCED WATER is an existential dilemma for the oil and gas industry. Fracking involves blasting underground rock with water to free up trapped oil and gas, but when that water returns to the surface, it is laden with contaminants it picks up from the earth. Every barrel of hydrocarbons reaped also generates up to 10 barrels of contaminated water. In 2021 alone, New Mexico was spewing 147 million gallons of toxic wastewater daily.

Drilling companies usually dispose of wastewater in dedicated injection wells. Water, however, does what water always does: It flows where it wishes, heedless of human-drawn boundaries. And it can travel for miles underground, then burst forth from improperly sealed oil wells, as it did with Toyah. (So far, no company has claimed ownership of the well, though its use dates back to 1961.) Even wastewater that stays underground finds ways to revolt — by triggering earthquakes. As fracking operations have ramped up over the last decade, so too has the tally of tremors. In the past year alone, New Mexico experienced over 2,500 quakes, most of them concentrated in the southeastern corner of the state, where fracking is most flagrant. In comparison, only 45 tremors rumbled the state in 2017.

Currently, most of New Mexico’s produced water is either injected underground or transported across state lines for disposal elsewhere. By contrast, neighboring Texas permits repurposing treated wastewater for other uses or discharging it into the environment.

Produced water. Graphic credit: U.S. Department of Energy

In late 2023, New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham floated a strategic water supply proposal to follow in the footsteps of its neighbor. Initially, she proposed investing $500 million of state funds in treating produced water. But that measure dried up in legislative budget negotiations. In subsequent revisions, Lujan Grisham has watered down the funding allocation, from $250 million in 2024 to $75 millionin 2025. Each time, pushback from environmental groups helped flush produced water treatment from the proposals altogether.

Even if the plan had sailed through, though, it would not have recouped a significant amount of water, said Rachel Conn, the deputy director of the water conservation organization Amigos Bravos. Removing contaminants from fracking wastewater requires copious energy to boil off and squeeze fresh water from dissolved toxins. Her team estimates that it costs at least $2 to treat a barrel, twice as much as it costs to send it down an injection well. The total amount could easily top $1 billion a year. (In Texas, oil companies pay more, as much as $10 per barrel for treatment.) Given the high costs, Conn said that the amount of water the strategic water supply could afford to treat would meet no more than 1% of New Mexico’s water needs — a literal drop in the bucket.

Additionally, environmental organizations like Amigos Bravos have raised concerns about the safety of fracking wastewater, whether it’s treated or untreated. Radioactivity levels around several injection wells in Ohio and West Virginiaexceed the federal safety limit by several hundred-fold; and in one Pennsylvanian river, radium still persists among mussels even five years after the last discharge of produced water.

The complex cocktail of chemicals found in produced water makes it hard to characterize, said Bonnie McDevitt, a research physical scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey. Companies usually guard the chemical additives in their fracking fluid as a trade secret. Toxicity requirements cannot cover every contaminant present, essentially leaving some questionable compounds completely unregulated. That means that even if the treated wastewater technically meets drinking water standards, it may not necessarily be safe to drink. Environmental advocates are calling for testing limits on 600 compounds potentially found in fracking wastewater before it can be used off fracking fields.

But the fossil fuel industry insists that the treatment technology is ready; Ryan Hall, the director of technical operations at NGL Energy Partners, said, “We can treat to any spec.” As one of the nation’s largest handlers of the industry’s wastewater, his company manages 2.5 million barrels from the Permian Basin, mainly by disposing of it in injection wells. NGL Energy has also explored wastewater treatment in some states, and Hall said it is eager to start in New Mexico once authorities give the legislative greenlight.

The New Mexico Produced Water Research Consortium, which is partially funded by oil and gas companies, is currently leading the effort to develop purportedly safe and affordable treatment methods. The institute’s recent projects include advancing various separation technologies and studying the health impacts of produced water on indicator species, like aquatic microbes and plants. “I’m with the environmental groups,” said Pei Xu, the institute’s research director and an environmental engineer at New Mexico State University. “We also want this water to be very safe. I think we have made a lot of very good progress.”

THE BATTLE BETWEEN industry and environmental groups is heating up. In April, New Mexico’s Water Quality Control Commission announced that it would allow pilot treatment projects to discharge up to 84,000 gallons of wastewater into groundwater daily. Environmental groups filed court briefs and staged a protest outside the Capitol, and 27 state legislators wrote a letter to the commission urging it to reconsider. In a follow-up hearing on May 13, the commission rescinded its April decision and reinstituted the ban.

What environmental groups want, ideally, is to end fracking altogether. But that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon: New Mexico is economically dependent on oil and gas, ranking second in the nation’s top fossil fuel-producing states. Industry has a solid grip on politics here — roughly 60% of Lujan Grisham’s 2017-2022 campaign contributions came from the state’s largest oil corporations.

At the very least, environmental groups say, taxpayer dollars shouldn’t be used to solve a problem of the industry’s own making. “It should be the industry’s responsibility to clean up that produced water,” Conn said. Her suggestion: Reuse the wastewater for future fracking. About 60% of wastewater is recycled on oil fields; Conn says bumping the rate to 90% could save 4 billion gallons of fresh water — more than all the produced water that the strategic water supply proposal would treat.

Active Permian Basin pumpjack east of Andrews, Texas. By Zorin09 – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=14607474

Meanwhile, drilling shows no signs of slowing down. Across the Permian playa, pumpjacks rise like giant birds pecking at the ground. Strewn alongside these steel flocks are miles-deep injection wells, each designated by a comparatively squat wellhead that often comes in the shape of a cross — a headstone for an otherwise unmarked grave for the vast refuse that refuses to go quietly.

Environmental groups protest outside New Mexico’s Capitol after the state announced it would allow pilot treatment projects to discharge up to 84,000 gallons of wastewater into groundwater daily. Courtesy of New Energy Economy

#Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee pulls his public land sell-off bill after serious backlash — Jonathan P. Thompson (BlueSky)

Sen. Mike Lee pulls his public land sell-off bill after serious backlash. That's what happens when you try to hand Americans' land to developers.

— Jonathan Thompson at the Land Desk (@landdesk.bsky.social) 2025-06-29T04:23:31.940Z

‘Like taking Smokey Bear away from the Forest Service’: President Trump’s Administration proposes consolidating wildland firefighting into single agency — Summit Daily News

The Grizzly Creek Fire burning along the Colorado River on August 14, 2020. By White River National ForestU.S. Forest Service – https://www.facebook.com/GrizzlyCreekFireCO/posts/128313015469678, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=93777078

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily News website (Ryan Spencer). Here’s an excerpt:

June 26, 2025

[Colorado U.S.] Senator John Hickenlooper is looking into the proposal to create a U.S. Wildland Fire Service and what it could mean for wildfire response and resources

President Donald Trump’s 2026 budget proposal outlines plans to create a new U.S. Wildland Fire Service by combining the wildfire assets currently distributed between the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Park Service. The budget request states that the “dispersed nature” of the federal wildfire program “creates significant coordination and cost inefficiencies that result in sub-optimal performance.” It would house the U.S. Wildland Fire Service in the Department of Interior. But in a letter to the Senate earlier this month, a nonprofit group representing thousands of U.S. Forest Service retirees, including seven previous chiefs of the agency, raised concern that consolidating federal firefighting operations would be “a costly mistake.”

“Wildfire management is more than extinguishing fires,” National Association of Forest Service Retirees Chair Steve Ellis wrote in the letter. “The critical linkage between fire suppression and forest management, including fuels reduction and prescribed fire, must be maintained. Severing forest management and forest managers from fire suppression will make firefighting less safe and put communities at greater risk.”

In addition to relocating firefighting operations, Trump’s budget request for the Forest Service asks Congress to zero out millions of dollars of funding, including for forestry research and grants that support state, tribal and private forestry efforts. It also proposes cuts of $392 million to the Forest Service management budget and $391 million to forest operations…Ellis, who worked for the federal government for 38 years in both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, said “the fire program is integrated into almost everything the Forest Service does.” From forest thinning to prescribed burns, prevention and suppression, Ellis said strategies have to be integrated into the broader forest management goals. By removing firefighting operations from the Forest Service, the proposal could divorce firefighting from land management, he added…

When asked about the U.S. Wildland Fire Service proposal, White House Assistant Press Secretary Taylor Rogers pointed to the Los Angeles wildfires that killed 30 people, forced 200,000 to evacuate and burned 57,000 acres earlier this year…But Ellis questioned whether a consolidated federal firefighting agency like the U.S. Wildland Fire Service would have done anything to prevent or lessen the impacts of the Los Angeles fires. In his experience, Ellis said the fire program in the United States is “pretty seamless” with different agencies not only working with each other but also collaborating with state and local partners to combat wildfires.

Romancing the River: The Empire Strikes the Public Lands, Part 3 — George Sibley (SibleysRivers.com)

Credit: Sibley’s Rivers

Click the link to read the article on the Sibley’s Rivers website (George Sibley):

June 24, 2025

There it is again – the invocation for most of the 20th century. But – wait: aren’t we in the 21st century? Well, really – not yet in any way that matters. President Biden tried, through his big beautiful legislative acts (two of them), to nudge and cajole us into the early 21st century: beginning to commence to proceed to address the scientific reality of a climate that our created realities have been inadvertently changing for the worse, and the socioeconomic realities of an increasingly inequitable society that unbridled private capitalism has been advertently imposing on us all. But Biden’s acts no longer address our official realities.

The new official reality, which wants to take us back to the good old days of the mid-20th century, includes a full restitution of the fossil energies (including beautiful clean coal) that, a mere seven months ago, we were told we needed to stop using as soon as we possibly could for the sake of our continued existence on the planet. Trump may have missed a couple ‘first day’ promises – low grocery prices and peace in the Ukraine – but one first-day promise he did fulfill was issuing an executive order on January 20, 2025 for ‘Unleashing American Energy,’ colloquially known as ‘Drill, baby, drill.’

Therein, Trump explained that ‘in recent years, burdensome and ideologically motivated regulations have impeded the development of these (fossil) resources,’ inflicting ‘high energy costs upon our citizens … driving up the cost of transportation, heating, utilities, farming, and manufacturing, while weakening our national security.’ Trump proclaimed that this constituted a ‘National Energy Emergency’ caused by President Biden and other liberals obsessed by a ‘climate crisis’ that is now, almost magically, no longer an official part of American reality.

Biden-era policies, according to this MAGA narrative, kept energy development off of the public lands by ‘locking the lands up’ for conservation, preservation and recreation, making Biden’s administration responsible for our high gasoline and home-heating prices. And the Trump administration was going to reverse that by reopening the public lands for the O&G industry to drill new wells, increasing the supply of gas and oil to both bring down O&G costs and re-establish America’s global energy dominance – a dominance in O&G production that we already in fact have.

Trump’s Interior Secretary Doug Burgum followed this up February 3, 2025 with a seven-page order revoking all of President Biden’s energy-related executive orders dating back to 2021, and replacing them with orders specific to ‘drill, baby, drill.’

But there is a problem they are not acknowledging, however: is the O&G industry really going to get out there and ‘drill, baby, drill’? The truth, as usual with Trump, lies elsewhere….

Let’s take a look at how the leasing process goes, on our Bureau of Land Management lands (with similar rules on the National Forests):

  • First, someone from the public – usually someone from the O&G industry – expresses interest in a piece of land for oil or gas production. The BLM then has to prepare a lease sale for that land. Biden rules put in force last year (now rescinded) restricted this to lands with some probability of actual O&G resources in the land.
  • Once requested lands are mapped into lease units (maximum lease 2,560 acres in the lower 48 states, 5,760 acres in Alaska), the BLM holds quarterly auctions to lease the mapped units. The 2024 rules (now rescinded) raised the minimum bid from $2/acre to $10/acre, and also declined to sell the leases when there was no competitive bidding.
    The leases are for 10 years (renewable in some cases), with rental at $3/acre for the first two years, $5/acre for the next six years, and $15/acre for any year thereafter – obvious incentive to get a lease into production.
  • Before leaseholders can do anything on the land, they need to put up a bond to cover the cost of closing-off and site reclamation when they abandon the well (after 4 years with no action). The minimum bond was increased in 2024 from $10,000 to $150,000, making forfeiture painful (now rescinded).
  • When leaseholders are ready to ‘develop’ a lease, they apply for a drilling permit. If their drilling plan is approved by the BLM (more than 95 percent are), they pay a permitting fee (minimum $10,000) and can then ‘drill, baby, drill.’ Biden rules (now reduced again) charged a 16.67 percent royalty to the government on what they produce.
  • Oil wells can be operated as long as they are profitable, with lease extensions. When they are no longer producing enough to profitably cover lease rent plus operating expenses, the company owning the lease is responsible for closing down the well and restoring the land.

Did the ‘Biden-era’ government ‘shut down’ this leasing and permitting process, ‘locking out’ energy development, as the Trump administration and the O&G industry claim? Hardly; that’s just more Trumpty-Dumpty fake news. Anyone with a cultural memory that goes back further than 2025 will remember that environmental interests were constantly haranguing the Biden administration to stop the leasing on public lands, since it undermined the administration’s other efforts to address the climate crisis, which was then officially part of our reality, like it or not. It is also part of our reality, however, that our need for gasoline and natural gas has not diminished much, and Biden had to work for a balance no one liked. Anyone wanting to revisit the kind of pressure from both sides that Biden and his Interior Department encountered on such issues could look at this AP story about leases in Alaska’s far frozen north.

There’s a more important fact (remember ‘facts’?) to keep in mind about the leasing situation, however, and Trumpish complaints that the government is blocking our energy dominance on the planet: 25 million acres of public land are currently reserved in O&G leases, but at least a third of that, maybe more, is in leases that have not been developed. Let me say that again: the O&G industry already holds several thousand leases that it has not begun to bring into production.

Two questions rise: Why are they not developing these leases on which they are paying rent? And why are they agitating for even more leases?

The answer to the first question is the most obvious: they do not want to bring more wells into production because the price of a barrel of oil has been dropping below their industrial break-even price of around $65/barrel. Energy production is governed to some extent by a calculation called the ER:EI – ‘Energy Return on Energy Investment.’ In the good old days of 30-cents-a-gallon gasoline, oil was ‘gushing’ abundantly from wells. The ER:EI of oil then ranged from 20:1 upward, depending on how fast it flowed and how far it had to go to market – meaning 20 barrels were produced for every barrel-equivalent of energy invested.

The miracle of ‘fracking’ opened up vast new regions from which oil could be squeezed, but fracked oil does not gush; instead it has to be freed from rock formations with complex and expensive drilling and pumping procedures. The ER:EI of fracked petroleum and natural gas is 5:1 or often lower. The O&G frackers need barrel prices above $65 to even begin making a profit.

Recent rumors of war in the Mideast have pushed the price up to the $70-75/barrel range, but that is a fluctuating situation that will not be reflected at the gas pump. And that may be countered by the OPEC+ nations (all the Arabian nation-states plus Russia and a handful of other non-Arabian states), who just upped the ante. They still have oil they can access at an ER:EI significantly above that of the United States frackers – and they recently voted to increase their production June 1 by an additional 411,000 barrels a day, which pretty well insures that the global prices of a barrel will not go up to where United States frackers will want to start developing the thousands of leases they are paying rent on. Unless, perhaps, Trump decides to put a tariff on OPEC oil and gas, with all the political chaos that would create – including driving up the price of gasoline and heating gas here.

So therein lies the truth about who is responsible for persisting higher gas prices: it wasn’t the Biden administration shutting off opportunities; it was the O&G industries refusing to develop low-cost public-land opportunities they already owned – not wanting to produce oil and gas at a loss as a patriotic MAGA gesture. America has no more ‘cheap’ oil with the massive profitability of a high ER:EI.

But at any rate, if we do actually have a ‘national energy emergency,’ it is certainly not going to be resolved by putting a lot more public land up for leases to ‘unleash’ America’s fossil energy, with more than a third of the public land already leased but not developed due to low energy prices. A January lease offer – Biden’s last – in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge had no bidders.

So why the big push for more public lands leasing?

Well, in Trumpland it may not be about lower prices for consumers at all, but about industrial control in the public lands. An O&G lease, so long as the rent is paid – pocket change for the industry – amounts to a priority use on public lands managed for multiple uses. So long as a lease remains undeveloped, it can’t be fenced; it is open for grazing cattle, hikers, bikers and other ‘multiple-users’ to wander over. But the O&G company has the priority use on the land, and if it decides to develop the lease, the surface land needed for the drilling and pumping operations becomes single-use land, with a road leading into it – no longer really ‘public’ or ‘multiple use’ for so long as the well operates.

As noted in the leasing and permitting process outlined above, the drilling company has to put up a bond assuring that it will properly shut down and plug the well and reclaim the area when the well runs out. The historic $10,000 bond was so low that companies found it cheaper to just forfeit the bond and leave it leaking methane into the atmosphere, polluting the underground water table, and surrounded by the refuse from the fracking operation. The Biden administration raised the bond for a permit to drill to $150,000, about twice the current average reclamation cost, and enough to make some miners/drillers to think twice about just abandoning the well. Now, of course, that Biden-era move toward good sense is being rescinded.

Abandoned pumpjack.By Hillebrand Steve, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service – http://www.public-domain-image.com/public-domain-images-pictures-free-stock-photos/miscellaneous-public-domain-images-pictures/abandoned-gas-well-pump.jpg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24924881

How many ‘orphaned wells’ are there (abandoned with little or no reclamation)? No one seems to know for sure. The EPA estimates there are as many as four million abandoned wells nationwide, most plugged to some degree with known owners and operators; but some 100-150 thousand of the abandoned wells are orphaned – no financially solvent owner-operator can be found, and many of those are not plugged, and are emitting methane into the atmosphere and oil and toxic fracking fluids into water tables. Those numbers are more guesstimates than estimates, and no one really knows how many of the orphaned wells are on public lands, but we taxpayers will end up paying to plug, clean up and maintain the orphans, as (chronically inadequate) budgets allow (2024 information).

There may be another rationale behind the O&G industries’ desire for more leasing and permitting, when they aren’t developing a third of what they already have. There is a huge overlap between the 90 percent of BLM land that is open for O&G leasing at the request of the industry, and the BLM land that is suitable for the development of the massive solar, wind and geothermal renewable energy resources that will be needed when American reality again encompasses the climate crisis. Leasing processes have been worked out for renewable energy development – somewhat more rigorous than those for the O&G industry – and many of the suitable sites find an O&G lease right in the middle of them, with its undeveloped use priority. The developers of the renewables have to buy surface-use waivers from the O&G leaseholders – unless the O&G leaseholders don’t want to give up the chance to develop their non-renewables.

Well – enough said on this. I hope this disabuses you of the Trumpty-Burgumty nonsense about a ‘national energy emergency’ that can be resolved through a wide-open assault on our public lands. That’s the good news; the bad news is the fact that gasoline at the pump is probably never going to go down much, so long as a barrel of oil has to bring more than $70 to the fossil-fuel producer.

An intelligent and forward-looking society would be working to gently and fairly phase out the truculent O&G industries, and phase in the renewable energy resources with a lot of job creation – which the Biden administration, now seemingly maligned by everyone, was actually trying to do with the two big beautiful infrastructure acts that the Trumpty-Burgumties are trying to rescind as thoroughly as possible, for no discernible reasons other than their own ‘creative reality,’ and of course, with Trump, vengeance on his enemies.

The Trumpty-Burgumty teams have come up with some other plans for the public lands, including selling off some of them – a lemon from which it might actually be possible to squeeze some lemonade, depending on how it shakes out. More about that in the future, when we see if it stays in the Big Piggy Bill….

Next post – back to the Colorado River where, believe it or not, things are pretty much still where they were a year ago – which is to say ‘a standstill’ – at least in terms of a new management plan for the post-2026 era. Stay tuned.

Oil and gas infrastructure is seen on the Roan Plateau in far western Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)

The secret double life of america’s public lands: And why you should know about it if you drink water… —  John Zablocki (AmericanRiver.org)

Middle Fork Snoqualmie River, Washington | Monty Vanderbilt

Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (John Zablocki):

January 21, 2025

Public lands are the birthright of every American. One of the great privileges of living in this country is the ability to access hundreds of millions of acres to enjoy the great outdoors — all for free.

People care about and use public lands for many reasons. From hunters and anglers to miners and ranchers, hikers and mountain bikers—there is something for almost everyone on public lands. But what if you live in a city and never set foot on public lands?  Why care about them then?

Log Meadow, California | Maiya Greenwood

Not everyone hunts, fishes, mines, ranches, hikes, or bikes; but everyone, truly everyone, depends on clean water. The big secret about public lands is that they are arguably the country’s single biggest clean water provider. According to the US Forest Service, National Forests are the largest source of municipal water supply in the nation, serving over 60 million people in 3,400 communities across 33 states. Many of the country’s largest urban areas, including Los Angeles, Portland, Denver, and Atlanta receive a significant portion of their water supply from national forests.

Healthy forests and grasslands perform many of the functions of traditional water infrastructure. They store water, filter pollutants, and transport clean water to downstream communities. And they do it naturally — essentially for free. When rivers are damaged from land uses on public lands, we all pay the price — literally; we all pay more in taxes and utility bills to clean up the water.

What happens on the public’s land also happens to the public’s water. The importance of managing public lands for the benefit of public water is so fundamental, it has been a pillar of public lands management agencies’ missions since their inception over a century ago. For example, The Organic Act of 1897[1] that created the US Forest Service stated:

As Wyoming protests, public land sell-off ‘just getting started’: #Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee trims plans, calling targeted BLM land ‘unused,’ ‘mismanaged’ and ‘only appropriate for housing.’ — Angus M. Thuermer Jr. (WyoFile.com)

A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):

June 25, 2025

In the face of a backlash, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee has revamped his public land sell-off measure to target only Bureau of Land Management holdings while also declaring, “we’re just getting started.”

A reconciliation budget proposal revised by Lee’s Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee targets BLM land within five miles of undefined “population centers.” It puts checkerboard BLM holdings back on a priority list for his “mandatory disposal” measure and takes lands under permit for grazing off the auction block.

The revision would shift 15% of revenue to local governments and conservation. The bill would appropriate $5 million to carry out the mandatory sales, which are designed to be offered within 60 days of passage and regularly thereafter.

Lee has not said or mapped how much land must be sold, ostensibly for affordable housing.

“We haven’t put out maps because there are a whole bunch of criteria established by the legislation, and those criteria are very difficult to reduce to a map,” Lee told conservative radio host Charlie Kirk in a video posted on X.

But opposition to Lee’s measure comes from “all walks of life,” said Land Tawney, former president and CEO of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. That includes “Democrats, Independents, Republicans, hunters, anglers, bird watchers, kayakers, ranchers [and] loggers,” he said Wednesday at a roundtable hosted by Democratic U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico.

Heinrich excoriated Lee’s measure.

“Eighty-five percent of the money from these sales would go to pay for tax cuts,” Heinrich said. “That means that folks like Elon Musk, who already own[s] 4,400 acres of land in Texas [worth] some $3.4 billion, will make money off the public lands that should belong to the American people.

“That’s horseshit,” Heinrich said.

A spectrum of opposition

Lee’s plan to include U.S. Forest Service land in the “mandatory disposal” provision flunked a parliamentarian’s rules test that limits reconciliation budget measures to relevant budget matters. The revised provision must undergo the same scrutiny, Democrats say.

Heinrich poo-pooed the notion that Lee’s measure would result in affordable housing. “An out-of-town billionaire can show up, buy a 100-acre parcel and throw a trophy home on it,” he said.

Powell resident Mike Tracy criticized Lee’s linking of public land and affordable housing.

“If you put those two concepts in the same sentence,” he said of Lee’s proposal, “it makes them seem somehow related, maybe even somehow causal.

“It makes people not feel comfortable speaking out against it because who wants to be against affordable housing?” he said at the roundtable. “I don’t think it’s proper to say that they’re related.”

U.S. Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Democrat from Nevada, had a message for Lee. “Don’t come into our states and dictate what should be done.

“It is clear they’re trying to sell this public land to pay for this reconciliation package, which gives tax cuts to billionaires,” she said. “That’s what this is about.”

“Right now, we are pissed,” said hunting advocate Tawney, who represented American Hunters and Anglers. “They want to defund, dismantle and then divest,” he said of President Donald Trump’s administration.

Native American tribes are upset, too, said Hilary Tompkins, former solicitor for the Department of the Interior.

“The Southern Ute Indian tribe in southwestern Colorado is concerned because they have off-reservation hunting and fishing rights on an area that includes BLM lands,” she said. “They have not heard from anyone who is advocating for this proposal about the impact on those off-reservation treaty rights.”

Wyoming Gov. Mark Gordon sees opportunities to resolve the state’s challenges with the checkerboard land ownership pattern along the Union Pacific Railroad line, said Jess Johnson, government affairs director with the Wyoming Wildlife Federation.

“I want to figure out how we do this in a Wyoming way,” she said of the checkerboard conundrum. “This budget reconciliation is not it.”

Not sensitive lands?

Wyoming’s U.S. Sens. John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, Republicans who continue to support Trump’s agenda, did not respond Wednesday to requests for comment about the backlash. “It is clear that our congressional delegation isn’t in it for Wyoming,” the state’s Democratic Party chair, Lucas Fralick, said in a statement.

Lee, however, explained some of his thinking.

“I’m working closely with the Trump administration to ensure that any federal land sales serve the American people — not foreign governments, not the Chinese Communist Party, and not massive corporations looking to pad their portfolios,” he said in a post. “This land must go to American families. Period.”

In the radio interview, he said opposition was ginned up.

American Enterprise Institute’s proposed Freedom City sites on BLM land near Grand Junction, Colorado.

“The left is working overtime to dupe conservatives about my federal land sale bill,” he said. “This is just basically surplus land that’s suitable for housing because it’s right next to where people live.”

He characterized critics as having an agenda. “What I’ve heard is that people on the left generally want people moving from rural areas into urban areas, more suburban areas and from single-family housing into multi-family housing, higher density housing units,” he said. “They believe that that’s good for them, perhaps for Mother Earth, or whatever their reasons might be.

“These are not sensitive lands,” Lee said of the targeted BLM parcels. “They are not lands that are out there, that are part of an environment that’s appropriate for hunting, for hiking, for fishing, etc.”

Wyoming’s Johnson challenged that notion at the roundtable. She said she arrowed her first mule deer on public land near town.

“I was on this amazing parcel of public land — tiny,” she said. “It’s little. It’s one to three miles from Lander. It’s BLM. It’s really nothing special to look at, except it is everything to me.”

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

Tribal leaders rally support for Chaco Canyon, citing threats from President Trump’s energy policies — 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:

June 25, 2025

Key Points

  • The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution seeking new protections for Chaco Canyon in New Mexico.
  • The group says the Trump administration wants to rescind an administrative order that created a 10-mile buffer around Chaco Canyon, barring oil and gas drilling for 20 years.
  • The resolution has renewed a rift between other tribes and the Navajo Nation, which says the 10-mile buffer could cost local residents royalties from gas and mineral extraction.

The oldest and largest organization representing tribal governments is urging action to protect Chaco Canyon from oil and gas leasing, amid what its leaders say are growing threats from the Trump administration’s energy policies. The National Congress of American Indians passed a resolution urging action to restart efforts to protect Chaco Canyon and the public lands surrounding it, and to pass the Chaco Cultural Heritage Area Protection Act, which would create a permanent 10-mile buffer zone around the site restricting oil, gas and mineral extraction. Trump has ordered federal agencies to prioritize energy and mineral extraction on public lands. Supporters of the buffer say that a shift in policy risks damage to Chaco Canyon, but residents with land allotments in the region argue that the buffer could deprive them of an income. With the resolution, the NCAI joins other tribes, elected officials and environmental organizations opposing a proposal to revoke Public Land Order 7923, which withdraws approximately 336,404 acres of federal land from new oil and gas leasing within a 10-mile area around Chaco Canyon for 20 years…

On June 6, New Mexico’s senators and congressional delegation sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum expressing support for the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco Canyon. Sens. Martin Heinrich and Ben Ray Luján, along with Reps. Melanie Stansbury, Teresa Leger Fernández, and Gabe Vasquez, all Democrats, signed the letter, which voiced concern over the Interior Department’s move to begin revoking the public lands order…The letter said Interior has yet to adequately consult tribal nations on Chaco Canyon protections. A May 9 letter from the Bureau of Land Management, an Interior agency, announced a general tribal consultation for May 28, 2025, which gave less than 30 days’ notice and was short of the department’s own consultation standards. The letter also claimed that many affected Pueblos were not directly notified, and that BLM’s informal virtual presentation lacked the detail and structure needed for meaningful dialogue or informed tribal input According to the bureau’s own estimates, the 10-mile withdrawal area protects approximately 4,730 documented archaeological sites while oil and gas operators forgo development of only a few dozen wells, stated the letter.

The Navajo Nation is embroiled in a lawsuit against Haaland and the Interior Department, filed in a New Mexico federal court three days before President Donald Trump took office. The suit argues that Interior’s plan to withdraw land from new oil and gas leasing violated the law and could cost land allottees millions of dollars in royalties.

The official National Park Service map for Chaco Culture National Historic Park. By United States National Park Service – http://www.nps.gov/chcu/index.htm, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=111458973

BREAKING: #Utah Senator Mike MAGA Lee changes public land sell off bill — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Condors perched on steel girders some 450 feet above the Colorado River. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

June 24, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican and Trump sycophant, has slightly backed off on his proposal to sell-off public lands, but only slightly. 

Lee posted the following on X/Twitter at 5:42 a.m. today:

Big sigh of relief? Nope. Sure, it’s great he’s removing Forest Service land from the pool of land eligible for “disposal.” This means the Hidden Valley/Falls Creek areanear Durango is out of danger, as are parcels near Flagstaff and Boise and Santa Fe that could have ended up on the auction block under the original provision. The 5-mile limit from population centers will also take some remote BLM parcels out of consideration — parcels that wouldn’t have been prioritized, anyway. 

The change reduces the size of the pool of available land, and presumably also reduces the amount of land that would be sold to between 1.25 million and 1.9 million acres. That’s still a crap-ton of public lands that will be privatized, cluttered up with houses and roads and cul-de-sacs and power lines and so forth, and to which the public will lose access. If this goes forward, you can plan on houses popping up on some of your favorite hiking, trail-running, or biking areas. 

And it still includes places like:

  • Animas Mountain and upper Horse Gulch near Durango; 
  • swaths of BLM land near Naturita and Nucla, Colorado; 
  • BLM land, including wilderness study areas, near Moab (wilderness study areas and areas of critical environmental concern are not exempted from the sell off);
  • parcels that abut Zion National Park’s boundaries (within five miles of Springdale and Rockville);
  • the lower slopes of Jumbo Mountain near Paonia; 
  • parcels on Las Vegas’s fringe, along with tracts around Mesquite and Moapa that the Freedom Cities folks have their eyes on; 
  • other Freedom City-proposed parcels near Fruita and Grand Junction;
  • the list goes on and on. (To get an idea just check out the Wilderness Society map, ignore the green areas, and look for “population centers” around the brass-colored areas to see what might be eligible).

Freedom Cities are back! — Jonathan P. Thompson

Lee says he will protect ranchers, which may or may not mean his provision would again leave out land that is in active grazing allotments. He doesn’t explain what the hell he means by “FREEDOM ZONES,” except to imply that he wouldn’t let any foreigners buy the land(?). Lee once again doesn’t mention a damned thing about affordable housing, meaning he’s just fine with public lands being used for luxury developments or even multi-million dollar mansions. 

Oh, and then there’s that little aside about the Byrd Rule. Yeah, that might get in Lee’s way. See, the Senate parliamentarian ruled that the public land sell off provision, along with several other sections relating to energy development on public lands, were subject to a 60-vote threshold. This means they would likely be dropped from the reconciliation bill altogether, since leaving it in could sink the entire “Big Beautiful” whatever. Still, the GOP has a thing about ignoring the parliamentarian and the usual rules, and Lee indicated he would push on with this concept in one form or another. So now is not the time to back down. 

The public lands sell-off provision has generated a huge amount of outrage and public push back, which is clearly working (after all, why else would Lee make those changes?). But it’s not the only or even the worst thing the MAGA folks are inflicting on the American public’s lands. 

For example, yesterday Agriculture Secretary Brooke announced that the U.S. Forest Service plans to repeal the Clinton-era Roadless Rule, which blocks roadbuilding and other development on about 58 million acres of Forest Service land. If the rollback survives inevitable legal challenges, it will open up a lot of forest to logging.

Glen Canyon Dam, January 2022. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

To be a Colorado River watcher is to ride a slow-motion emotional roller coaster. We reached extreme highs during the late 1980s and into the 1990s, fell into a two-decade depression beginning in 2002 — with ebullient spikes in 2005, 2008, 2011, 2019 — and then the bountiful winter of 2023 came along and was followed up by a not-so-sad 2024.

It was enough to convince us we were recovering, and we could quit therapy, cut back on the meds, and stop worrying (all figuratively, of course). During this period of relative abundance, all of the studies about climate heating diminishing snowpacks and threatening the West’s lifeline seemed a bit abstract: Scary, sure, but we still had years and years before it manifested itself.

Yeah, no. It turns out that 2023 was just another manic and anomalous episode that falsely lulled us into complacency. And now that it has past, we’ve been sent spiraling back down into a deep aridification-sparked depression (somewhat figuratively speaking).

The snowpack-meagre 2025 winter delivered the first buzzkill to the Upper Colorado River Basin, followed by a warm and dry and dismal spring. Now, Lake Powell’s surface level is flatlining just as it should be shooting upward, an indicator that the river is back to its new normal. That is to say it is once again shrinking, and the gap between how much water has been allocated to the river’s users and what’s actually in there continues to grow. Which is to say, we’re still f&$#ed, and getting even more so with each passing year.

In fact, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s latest projection has Lake Powell possibly dropping below the minimum power pool, or the level at which hydropower production shuts down, as soon as the end of 2026. Mind you, that’s their worst case scenario, but these forecasts often lean towards optimism. Most notable is how dramatically the forecast has changed since April, a difference that is visible in the graph below.

Inside #Utah’s PR campaign to seize public lands: Utah used actors, AI, stagecraft and NDAs as it sought to sway public opinion and take control of 18.5 million acres of federal public land — Jimmy Tobias (High Country News)

Part of a promotional video the campaign ran last year. Stand For Our Land Utah/YouTube screenshot

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Jimmy Tobias):

June 17, 2025

This story was published in partnership with Public Domain.

Last year, as Utah prepared to file a federal lawsuit aiming to take control of millions of acres of federal public land within its borders, state officials sought help swaying public opinion in their favor. So they turned to a group of public relations professionals at Penna Powers, a media and branding firm based in Salt Lake City. 

Backed with a commitment of more than two million in tax-payer funds, the firm sprang into action. One of the early orders of business was studying the opposition. In June 2024, an assistant attorney general sent an email to numerous state government colleagues and Penna Powers staffers that contained a video from the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership (TRCP) in which the well-known hunter and media personality Randy Newberg described the dangers of transferring federal land to state control. “It doesn’t matter how many promises are made,” warned Newberg, “the financial realities would force states to sell off our public lands.” 

Noting that organizations like TRCP are good at connecting with “traditionally conservative” audiences, the Utah official told his colleagues that “our PR efforts will largely depend on how well we can anticipate and effectively respond to these expected criticisms.” 

“That definitely helps us know what we need to counter the opposition,” added Redge Johnson, director of Utah’s Public Lands Policy and Coordinating Office, or PLPCO, which has played a central role in organizing the state’s campaign to seize federal land.  

Throughout 2024, Penna Powers put together an elaborate PR and media campaign to do just that — counter the opposition and build support for Utah’s efforts. They churned out videos, newspaper ads, social media spots and more. They hired actors, ran focus groups and helped prominent Utah politicians write talking points. In at least one instance, Penna Powers relied on AI to help create voice-overs in videos. In another instance, PLPCO staffers warned Penna Powers not to use too much scenic imagery in the campaign for fear it might undermine their efforts. They called the campaign “Stand for Our Land,” and those who worked on it were required to sign non-disclosure agreements. “The Office of the Attorney General is taking this NDA extremely seriously,” wrote one government official. 

Hundreds of records reviewed by Public Domain shed light on the key players involved in this campaign and the strategies they used to persuade the public in their favor. Among other themes, their campaign relentlessly portrays the federal government as an absentee landlord that mismanages land and cuts off access to the public domain. Utah, on the other hand, is painted as a benevolent force working to ensure public land access. The campaign — like the lawsuit it was meant to support — seeks one principal outcome: federal land disposal. Utah has identified some 18.5 million acres of federal land within the state’s boundaries that are currently administered by the Bureau of Land Management on behalf of all Americans — and it wants those lands for itself.  

Penna Powers, meanwhile, landed a big pay day. The contract between the PR firm and PLPCO runs until 2029 for a total cost of some $2.6 million. 

In response to queries, PLPCO in a written statement said that,“Utah believes in protecting access to public lands for all users of all ages and abilities, and we are committed to actively managing these lands for generations to come. Utah is home to five national parks, several national monuments, and many other natural wonders. The state has always welcomed, and will continue to welcome visitors from around the world to visit and enjoy all that this great state has to offer.” Penna Powers did not respond to requests for comment. 

Meanwhile, critics of the Utah PR effort called it a “propaganda” campaign meant to mislead Utahns and the general public. 

“Penna Powers worked hand-in-hand with the state of Utah to craft a misleading message about the state’s land grab lawsuit,” said Kate Groetzinger, communications manager at the Center for Western Priorities, a conservation group. “They made it seem like forcibly taking ownership of public lands would help recreationists and ranchers, when the real goal of this lawsuit was to increase extraction and privatize national public lands in Utah. This campaign is the very definition of propaganda — misleading political messaging paid for by taxpayers.”

UTAH’S EFFORT TO take control of federal lands kicked off in earnest in 2012, when Utah’s then-Governor Gary Herbert signed into law the Utah Transfer of Public Lands Act, demanding state control of the majority of federal public land in Utah. “This is only the first step in a long process,” Herbert said at the time, “but it is a step we must take.” In 2018, Senator Mike Lee, a leading proponent of the land transfer movement, shared similar sentiments during a speech to the conservative Sutherland Institute in Salt Lake City. The campaign for land transfer, he said, “will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” Indeed, just last week, Lee put forward a proposal in the GOP’s massive reconciliation bill that would force the sell off of millions of acres of federal land in the Western U.S. 

Utah’s actions to seize control of federal land have only grown more aggressive as the years have progressed. In August last year, it filed a lawsuit directly with the Supreme Court seeking to strip federal ownership over some 18.5 million acres of BLM land within Utah. It claims these lands are “unappropriated,” a novel argument meant to create a legal distinction between national parks, forests and monuments, and large swaths of BLM land across the West. If successful, Utah’s lawsuit would deprive the vast majority of Americans of their ownership stake in such BLM lands. Tribal nations, meanwhile, have been staunch opponents of Utah’s lawsuit, which the Ute Indian Tribe described as an “existential threat” to the tribe and its reservation lands. 

In January this year, the Supreme Court declined to hear Utah’s case. It remains unclear whether Utah will refile its lawsuit in lower court, but its efforts to seize federal land are a generational project. 

Regardless, Utah, faces a major public opinion hurdle. A large majority of Western voters are opposed to the idea of state control over federal public lands, according to Colorado College’s annual polling. Even in Utah, some 57% of voters oppose public land transfers. That is where Penna Powers comes in. The firm worked to reshape public opinion in the state’s favor, with a focus on building support among Utah residents as well as key decision makers at the national level. 

“The Stand for Our Land public education campaign is informing Utahns about the management of public lands, and how federal agencies are restricting access to public lands and ignoring local concerns,” wrote PLPCO in a statement. “The Bureau of Land Management closed over 2,000 miles of Utah roads on public lands in the past two years.”

A centerpiece of Penna Powers’ effort has been glossy videos that portray federal land agencies as an exclusionary force bent on keeping people off the public domain. In one video, Penna Powers and PLPCO hired a voice actor to portray a  “disabled camper” in a wheelchair on a camping trip with her family. “Because of my disability I need to reach campsites in a motorized vehicle,” the actor said. “If I lose road access, I lose the ability to do something I love with my family. That’s why I think Utah should be managing Utah land.” The actor who was selected to voice the video does not appear to use a wheelchair or mobility aid in social media posts and other records reviewed by Public Domain. PLPCO appears to have had many of those involved in its video shoots also sign NDAs. A talent agent for the actor in question did not provide comment at the time of publication. 

Redge Johnson, the executive director of PLPCO, was particularly keen on the “disabled camper” storyline, among others. He asked about a video that combined the “disabled camper” story with one about an off-highway vehicles  business. “I really want that video in the folder, it tells a great story,” he wrote to Penna Powers staffer Allyse Christensen, who worked on the Stand for Our Land campaign. 

Others, like disability community advocate Syren Nagakyrie, said Utah’s use of a “disabled camper” storyline to promote its political agenda is “disingenuous.” 

WESTERN PUBLIC LANDS ARE HABITAT FOR ARIDLAND BIRDS This map shows the cumulative range for 30 aridland bird species in North America, with the vast majority of that range falling within the boundaries of federal and state public lands. Source: Aridland bird data from Bird Conservation Regions, Bird Studies Canada and NABCI. Public lands map from GISGeography.com.

Trump appointee, a Jackson Hole consultant, ID’d pitfalls of #Wyoming managing its federal land: Tapped for Bureau of Land Management post, Brenda Younkin will report directly to agency’s acting director, Jon Raby — Mike Koshmrl (WyoFile.com)

Brenda Younkin was tapped for a Bureau of Land Management post in the Trump administration. (photo illustration by Tennessee Watson/WyoFile)

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

June 20, 2025

Not unlike the current moment, roughly a decade ago a political push to do away with large swaths of federal lands in the West was gaining steam. 

Utah Republican U.S. Rep. Jason Chaffetz ran a bill at the time that would have transferred 3.3 million acres of the federal estate to state ownership. The bill was later pulled, and the representative resigned his congressional seat after the proposal whipped hunters and anglers into a fury. 

The movement crossed state lines into Wyoming. During state lawmakers’ 2015 general session in Cheyenne, a legislative committee drafted a bill that demanded the transfer of vast tracts of federal lands to Wyoming. Later, the measure was amended to require a study of Wyoming managing federal lands, not owning them.

The Wyoming Office of State Lands and Investments was ultimately given $75,000 for the study, and it picked Jackson-based Y2 Consultants to complete the analysis. When the 357-page study was completed the following fall, state land managers and lawmakers were warned that they lacked staff and resources to take over control of 25 million acres of Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Reclamation property that fell within state boundaries.

A two-track road cuts through Bureau of Land Management property west of Pinedale in April 2024. Such tracts of public land could be on the chopping block because of federal budget reconciliation text that seeks to sell between 2-3 million acres of the federal estate. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

“Ultimately, without significant changes to federal law, the greatest challenge would be that the state would be inheriting the same bureaucratic maze of overlapping, entwined, often conflicting federal mandates established in the labyrinth of laws and directives laid out by Congress,” the 2016 Y2 Consultants report stated. “The land management trials, conundrums, and conflicts encountered would largely be the same for the state that exist under present [federal] management.”

The first author listed on the report, a slot that typically denotes the lead, was Brenda Younkin, a natural resource specialist who co-founded Y2 Consultants with her husband, Zia Yasrobi. 

On Wednesday, Politico’s E&E News publicized that Younkin had been appointed by the Trump administration and had started working in a senior advisor post at the Bureau of Land Management, where she’d report to its acting director, Jon Raby. Trump’s first pick to lead the BLM, Colorado oil and gas advocate Kathleen Sgamma, withdrew her bid after it was revealed that she’d written a memo expressing “disgust” for “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited” the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. 

WyoFile was unable to reach Younkin for an interview Friday, but an auto-response from her Y2 Consultants email address confirmed a “leave of absence” because of a new gig with the U.S. Department of the Interior, the BLM’s government parent.

The Bureau of Land Management’s 245 million surface acres, depicted in yellow in this map, account for about 10% of the United States’ landmass. (Library of Congress)

According to her biography and past interviews, Younkin has worked in the public lands and ranching sphere her entire career. 

In statements made to the Cowboy State Daily, U.S. Sens. Cynthia Lummis and John Barrasso both lauded Younkin’s appointment. 

“The more Wyoming voices we can have in the room, the better off we will all be,” Barrasso told the outlet. 

Younkin joins a handful of other Wyoming residents who’ve gone to work for the Trump administration’s Interior Department via political appointments, or who have been nominated for positions. 

Wyoming Game and Fish Director Brian Nesvik speaks at a Game and Fish Commission meeting in Douglas in September 2024. (Mike Koshmrl/WyoFile)

In early February, former Wyoming Game and Fish Department Director Brian Nesvik was nominated to directthe U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, though four months later his appointment has still not cleared the Senate’s confirmation process. Cyrus Western, a former Republican statehouse representative, was picked to helm the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 8 office, based in Denver. Cheyenne attorney Karen Budd-Falen was also selected as the acting deputy secretary under Interior Secretary Doug Burgum. 

Last, southwestern Wyoming big game hunting advocate Josh Coursey was appointed to a Fish and Wildlife Service post, pulling him away from the Muley Fanatic Foundation, which he co-founded. That group has since gone on record opposing a provision expected to be yoked into the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” that would mandate the sale of an estimated 2-3 million acres of federal land in 11 western states. 

“Public lands need to stay in public hands and the Muley Fanatic Foundation opposes anything or anyone that threatens our lands that we hold dear for personal use,” President and CEO Joey Faigle told WyoFile in a written statement. “The public land sales being included in the reconciliation needs to stop now.”

If the public land sale mandates don’t stop, the amount of land that Younkin, the Jackson Hole consultant, will be tasked with overseeing at the Bureau of Land Management will shrink. 

The disposal language in the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources legislative text demands selling between 0.5% and 0.75% of the BLM and U.S. Forest Service’s 438 million surface acres within the next five years. Although just a fraction of the agencies’ overall holdings, it’d translate to doing away with public lands that collectively add up to an area no smaller than Yellowstone National Park.

War, Inflation and Now #Drought Are Hitting Global Food Supplies: Staples including wheat, beef and coffee are all being affected by the lack of rainfall. In some cases, prices are climbing to record highs — The New York Times

Egeria Creek [May 2017] flows into the Yampa River. Photo/Allen Best

Click the link to read the article on The New York Times website (Somini Sengupta). Here’s an excerpt:

June 21, 2025

War, tariffs and inflation are not the only things driving up the price of food. Widespread drought is also looming over what people around the world eat. In Brazil, parched coffee farms have affected latte prices everywhere. In the Midwestern United States, years of poor rainshave led ranchers to cull cattle herds and have raised beef prices to their highest levels ever. In China, one of the nation’s key wheat-producing regions, the Yellow River Basin, is withering under unusually hot, dry conditions. Germany had its driest spring since 1931, though rains in recent weeks have allayed concerns about its wheat and barley crops. Ukraine and Russia, rivals on the battlefield, are also facing the threat of drought for their wheat crops. Both countries are breadbaskets for millions of people far and wide. Morocco, for instance, now in its sixth year of drought, has relied increasingly on wheat imports from Russia. Droughts are part of the natural weather cycle but are exacerbated in many parts of the world by the burning of fossil fuels, which is warming the world and exacerbating extreme weather. Droughts can be particularly risky as the production of important foods becomes increasingly concentrated. For example, much of the world’s coffee comes from Brazil, cacao from Ivory Coast and Ghana in West Africa, and corn from Brazil, China and the American Midwest…Around the world, most people get their calories from three staple grains — rice, wheat and corn — which means that weather hazards to places where they are produced can have big repercussions for food security. Bad weather in one or two of those regions can destabilize the global supply…

Sandwiches, instant noodles, rotis. Wheat, in all its forms, has become one of the world’s most commonly eaten grains, second only to rice. That makes it one of the most closely watched crops in the era of extreme weather. Wheat is also often closely guarded. Take India, for instance. Prompted by an intense heat wave in 2022, the Indian government banned wheat exports in order to stockpile it at home…

Summer barbecue season is approaching just as the price of beef has topped records. Ground beef in the United States is close to $6 per pound, and steak is nearly twice that…A few factors are driving the price rise, including soaring insurance costs for farmers and the abiding demand for beef. But central to the rising cost of beef is a drought that has stretched across the Midwestern United States over the past several years. The conditions have dried up a lot of grazing land. Cattle herd numbers are at their lowest in 70 years.

#Utah U.S. Senator Mike Lee revives public land sell-off bid: A parcel near you may one day be covered in houses — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Hidden Valley on National Forest land near Durango, Colorado. This is the type of parcel that could be on the auction block if Sen. Mike Lee gets his way. Photo credit: The Land Desk

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

June 13, 2025

It is not hyperbole to say we are living in dark times.

The U.S. President is about to hold a multi-million-dollar, taxpayer-funded, dictator-style military parade — for his frigging birthday. He activated the national guard and the marines to violently quell non-violent protests in Los Angeles. A U.S. senator was tackled, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed for deigning to ask a question of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a press conference in which she admitted that federal troops were in Los Angeles not to stop rioting, but to “liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country.” Oh …

American democracy, morality, empathy, civil liberties, and the rule of law are all under attack, and the assailants are none other than the President, his administration, and a vast majority of congressional Republicans.

So when Sen. Mike Lee, the Jello-slurping Utah MAGA-ite, proposed selling off a mere one half of one percent of the nation’s public land, it might not seem worth squandering whatever remains of one’s outrage on. But we — as in the American people — stand to lose a lot from this latest push to take public lands out of the public’s hands.

Lee installed his amendment into the Energy and Natural Resources section of the so-called “Big, Beautiful Bill,” which proposes to rescind environmental protections on millions of acres in Alaska, slash royalty rates for oil and gas, and revive noncompetitive leasing, among other mining- and drilling-friendly provisions.

Lee’s provision would require the Interior Secretary to “select for disposal not less than .50% and not more than .75% of Bureau of Management land, and shall dispose of all right, title, and interest of the United States in and to those tracts” and the Agriculture Secretary shall select for disposal .50% to .75% of National Forest System.” Lands in national parks, monuments, or conservation areas, wilderness, wildlife refuges, and other protected areas would not be eligible for disposal.

While that’s a tiny fraction of the nation’s public lands, it adds up to between 2 million and 3.2 million acres, which on the upper end is about equivalent to Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante national monuments combined. The amendment would apply to every Western state except Montana, which was probably exempted in the hopes of winning Rep. Ryan Zinke’s support.

While the amendment is purportedly to free up more land for affordable housing, there is nothing in the text restricting the end use of the land after it’s sold or transferred. It only requires someone nominating a parcel to specify what they plan to use land for and the extent to which development of the tract would address local housing needs (including housing supply and affordability).

It would prioritize tracts for disposal that are:

  • nominated by states or local governments
  • adjacent to existing developed areas
  • have access to existing infrastructure
  • suitable for residential housing
  • would reduce checkerboard land patterns
  • inefficient to manage.

At first glance, this appears relatively harmless: It would merely consolidate private holdings on the urban fringe, and ease the management nightmares of checkerboard land-ownership. But this is where I urge you to think about your favorite public land-adjacent community and consider what might parcels might be prioritized for disposal.

I went through this exercise somewhat inadvertently recently as I rode my bike on a trail through a place known as Hidden Valley on National Forest land north of town. The valley floor is nearly perfectly level, having been carved by a glacier many millennia ago, and bounded on two sides by bone-white sandstone cliffs. Up until the fifth century A.D., Pueblo people inhabited and farmed the valley, and the area continues to hold cultural and archaeological significance. Grass — green during this time of year — covers much of the valley. Cattails, nourished by the waters of Falls Creek, jut from the northern end.

Durango folks come up here to walk and seek solace from the din of humanity. They walk and bike and in the winter even ski and snowshoe here and coexist — sometimes uneasily — with bears and mountain lions and deer and elk and even rattlesnakes.

That this tract of public land would be sold off for development is almost unthinkable. And yet, it fits all of the criteria: It is just a few miles from town, is sandwiched between existing residential areas, is easily accessible and quite buildable, and infrastructure is already in place. Durango is grappling with a severe housing affordability crisis and Hidden Valley could theoretically support hundreds of housing units, alleviating some pressure on the real estate market. Unthinkable to you and I, yes. But keep in mind that it would be the Trump administration calling the shots on this one.

There are hundreds of other Hidden Valley-like tracts of land across the West, pieces of public land near communities that provide all kinds of benefits to wildlife and humans and the ecosystem and solitude. And if Mike Lee has his way, 3 million acres of these special places would go on the auction block, ultimately to be covered with homes, affordable or otherwise, and other development.

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

Spring #runoff peaks, winners announced: Also: About that energy dominance thing — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

San Juan Mountain foothills and sunset from the window of a plane. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

June 10, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

I’m calling it! Spring runoff appears to have peaked on most Western streams — and almost definitely has done so on the streams in this year’s Land Desk Super Predict the Peak Contest. 

The good news is, the runoff was later and bigger than a lot of folks — including myself — predicted it would be. The bad news is that the flows were still downright pathetic compared to other years, even though in most cases the peak snowmelt was supplemented by heavy rain, meaning the runoff numbers don’t necessarily reflect a healthy snow year. Which is to say: The megadrought persists across much of the Western United States, with extreme conditions in the Southwest. 

Here are the results:

Unfortunately, we had very few entries this year, possibly because these things are really hard to predict. That said, it looks like Andrew High has a winning formula, at least on a few of these stream segments. Here are the winners and their predictions:

  • Animas: Andrew High, 2,710 cfs on May 21.
  • North Fork: Andrew High, 1,260 cfs on June 7.
  • Rio Grande: Jim O’Donnell, 1,150 cfs on May 15. 
  • San Miguel: B Frank, 692 cfs on May 15. 
  • Colorado: Andrew High, 13,160 cfs on June 13.

Congratulations, winners! Andrew, B, and Jim, please send me your mailing address and t-shirt size at landdesk@substack.com and I’ll get your prizes in the mail ASAP. 

Now, on to the not so happy news. What a difference a year can make. Last year at this time, the West seemed to be on its way to being drought-free, with the exception of New Mexico. Now? Not so much. It’s looking downright grim for New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Nevada, even though the Las Vegas area received a healthy dose of rain in May.

Source: National Drought Monitor.

And, after a couple years of respite, it’s time once again to start worrying about Lake Powell — the barometer of the Colorado River’s health. Thus far this year, the volume of water flowing into the reservoir has been far lower than last year, which already was below normal. Judging by the runoff patterns so far, it appears as if June’s inflows may be even lower than May’s. If the rest of June is hot and dry, prompting greater evaporation from the reservoir, it could actually draw reservoir levels down this month during a time when water levels normally would rise.

The black bars show inflow volumes for the 2025 water year compared to the red bars for 2024. Source: USBR.
Normally Lake Powell’s surface level would jump substantially over the next month or so before dropping later in the summer after all of the mountain snowpack has completely melted. While reservoir levels are currently rising, it likely won’t continue for long. Source: Lake Powell Water-Data

But one of those truths about the West, is that aridification provides no buffer against flooding — especially flash-flooding. Some hikers found that out the hard way last week when a flash flood ripped down Big Horn Canyon in Utah, stranding them on the opposite side of the arroyo from their vehicle. They called for help and Bureau of Land Management rangers and Garfield County deputies responded and rescued the folks, according to the BLM’s Utah office. The Escalante River nearby jumped from 0 cfs to 1,200 cfs in just minutes around the same time. You can see some video of the flash flooding here: http://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1036784068519285

📈 Data Dump 📊

As long as we’re doing the graphs and charts thing, we might as well check in on that ol’ Trumpian “energy dominance” thing. The rig count — which is a snapshot of the number of rigs actively drilling at any given time — is the most accurate indicator of the oil and gas industry’s enthusiasm to extract the fossil fuels. And that verve appears to be waning under Trump. The number of rigs operating in the West has dropped since Trump took office, and is down significantly from the most recent peak in 2023 when, yes, Joe Biden was president and was supposedly waging a “war” on fossil fuels.

The red and blue shades indicate Republican and Democratic administrations, respectively. Source: Baker Hughes.

MAGA intensifies its assault on public lands — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Public lands in Bears Ears National Monument. The Trump administration has indicated it may attempt to shrink the monument’s boundaries once again, potentially removing this area near White Canyon from heightened protections. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

June 4, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Even before public lands lovers were still celebrating one small victory — i.e. killing a budget bill amendment that would have sold off a half-million acres of federal holdings in Nevada and Utah — the MAGA/Trump/GOP launched a multi-pronged assault on the places Americans hold dear.

The blows come from all three branches of the federal government and seem to be designed to unravel the nation’s framework of environmental protections that have been developed over the last 50 years and more. Meanwhile, the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget would gut the agencies that oversee public lands and the programs aimed at stewarding them. Here’s a breakdown of just some of the attacks:

Oak Flat, Arizona features groves of Emory oak trees, canyons, and springs. This is sacred land for the San Carlos Apache tribe. Resolution Copper (Rio Tinto subsidiary) lobbied politicians to deliver this National Forest land to the company with the intent to build a destructive copper mine. By SinaguaWiki – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=98967960
  • The Supreme Court rejected Apache Stronghold’s bid to block a land swap at Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, aka Oak Flat, in central Arizona, clearing the way for Resolution Copper’s massive mine on sacred ground.
  • SCOTUS also overturned a lower court’s decision to block federal approval of a proposed Utah railway that would ship Uinta Basin oil alongside the Colorado River and across multiple states to larger markets. More significantly, the ruling also limited the scope of federal environmental reviews to the direct impacts of a proposed project. This means the relevant federal agency need not consider effects of upstream oil and gas drilling facilitated by the railway, or those of processing and burning the oil downstream. The ruling will make it easier for corporations to build pipelines, highways, major oil and gas projects, and so forth.
Excerpt from the Supreme Court’s decision on SEVEN COUNTY INFRASTRUCTURE COALITION ET AL. v. EAGLE COUNTY, COLORADO, ET AL.
  • The U.S. Interior Department egregiously fast-tracked its approval of the Velvet-Wood Mine in Utah’s Lisbon Valley and promised to do the same for similar projects on federal lands to address a purported “energy emergency.”
  • Interior also expedited permitting for geothermal energy developments on federal lands, beginning with three projects in Nevada.
  • Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — whose original appointment was endorsed by none other than outdoor retailer REI (remorsefully, it turns out) — moved to roll back protections on 13 million acres of wilderness-quality lands on Alaska’s North Slope, reopening it to oil and gas drilling, mining, and other development.
  • Sen. Mike Lee, the Utah Republican who apparently still holds Jell-O socials in his office every Wednesday, said he plans to revive the public land sell-off provision in the budget bill. So much for dodging that bullet!
  • The Trump administration has granted FAST-41 status to Laramide Resources’ proposed La Jara Mesa and Crownpoint-Churchrock uranium mines in New Mexico. The designation is aimed at streamlining permitting for the contested projects in the Grants area. However, the FAST-41 program does not compress the environmental review or licensing process as radically as the BLM did for the Velvet-Wood mine. The Environmental Impact Statement likely won’t be completed until next November.

Public land sell-off amendment is a test — Jonathan P. Thompson

And then there’s the Trump administration’s proposed 2026 budget. A while back I gave a more general overview of the budget and the deep, deep cuts to almost everything except for defense, border security and Trump’s golf trips. Now we have more detail in the form of the Technical Supplement to the 2026 budget.

Just like the overview, it would would tear apart the nation’s social safety net, set back science, destroy America’s global standing, erode education, eviscerate the federal workforce, rob communities and low-income households of vital funding, gut dozens of federal agencies, generally weaken regulatory oversight, and even transfer some national park units to states. You can read my take on that one here.

The Trump Budget Blues — Jonathan P. Thompson

Yet the budget still increases the federal deficit — even Elon Musk calls it an “abomination” (harsh words coming from the guy who brought us the vehicular abomination known as the cybertruck) — because it would hike spending to more than $1 trillion for the military industrial complex and the Department of Homeland Security. It would slash funding for nuclear energy research, but spend an additional $11 billion annually to build more nuclear weapons.

This time, I’ll focus on public lands (and related bureaus under the Interior Department and the USFS) because we only have so much space in these emails, and I only have enough self-medication to handle so much outrage and anxiety. Comparisons are between the 2024 actual expenditures and proposed spending for 2026. This is merely a sampling of some items that really stood out.

Cuts for the Bureau of Land Management:

  • 1,157 full-time-equivalent staff positions (or about 20% of the entire full-time workforce)
  • – $216 million for personnel compensation
  • – $45 million for recreation management
  • – $17 million for energy and minerals
  • – $65 million for workforce and organizational support
  • – $30 million for aquatic resources management
  • – $114 million for wildlife habitat management
  • – $45 million for national monuments and national conservation areas

National Park Service

  • -$980 million (yes, you read that right: The agency that oversees America’s “Best Idea” is having its budget slashed by nearly a billion buckaroos …).
  • – 5,518 full-time-equivalent employees (… and the agency is losing over 40% of its full-time workforce).

U.S. Geological Survey

  • $563 million budget cut for the agency
  • – $281 million from ecosystems programs
  • – $46 million from natural hazards programs
  • – $74 million from water resources programs
  • – 2,067 full-time-equivalent employees (44% of the permanent workforce)

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

  • $149 million from the National Wildlife Refuge System
  • – $50 million from conservation and enforcement programs
  • – $16 million from habitat conservation
  • – $9 million from science support
  • – $33 million from state and tribal wildlife grants
  • – 1,785 full-time-equivalent employees (27% of the workforce

Bureau of Indian Affairs

  • $120 million from public safety and justice
  • – $625 million from gross outlays
  • – 282 full-time-equivalent employees

Bureau of Reclamation:

  • $253 million from water and energy management and development
  • – $51 million from fish and wildlife management and development

National Forest System

  • 4,636 full-time-equivalent employees (or 33% of the workforce)

Other notes

  • The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management would have its renewable energy program zeroed out, along with $51 million in cuts for its environmental programs. The Bureau would slash about 10% of its workforce.
  • The Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (which regulates offshore oil and gas operations on the Outer Continental Shelf) would see its budget cut by $150 million.
  • The Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement’s budget would be reduced by $15 million.

The strikes are coming so rapidly, and from so many different directions, that it has become difficult to keep track, let alone to fight back. That is by design, of course. Advocates can take to the courts to block some regulatory rollbacks, but they have little recourse against Supreme Court decisions. Citizens may be able to convince their congressional representatives to block public land sell-offs, but that draws attention away from lawmakers’ efforts to make it easier to drill and develop public lands.

The attacks will only intensify. The resistance must meet it with equal, opposing force.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

Sacred Datura in Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
Sacred Datura in Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

On May 29, the Supreme Court – minus Justice Neil Gorsuch, who recused himself – decided the case of Seven County Infrastructure Coalition v. Eagle County, #Colorado — Westword

A coal train travels along the Colorado River north of Gypsum in Eagle County on June 12, 2023. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)

Click the link to read the article on the Westword website (J.B. Ruhl). Here’s an excerpt:

June 8, 2025

Getting federal approval for permits to build bridges, wind farms, highways and other major infrastructure projects has long been a complicated and time-consuming process. Despite growing calls from both parties for Congress and federal agencies to reform that process, there had been few significant revisions – until now. In one fell swoop, the U.S. Supreme Court has changed a big part of the game. Whether the effects are good or bad depends on the viewer’s perspective. Either way, there is a new interpretation in place for the law that is the centerpiece of the debate about permitting: the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, known as NEPA…

Decades of litigation about the scope of indirect effects have widened the required evaluation. As I explain it to my students, that logical and legal progression is reminiscent of the popular children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, in which granting a request for a cookie triggers a seemingly endless series of further requests – for a glass of milk, a napkin and so on. For the highway example, the arguments went, even if the agency properly assessed the pollution from the cars, it also had to consider the new subdivisions, malls and jobs the new highway foreseeably could induce. The challenge for federal agencies was knowing how much of that potentially limitless series of indirect effects the courts would require them to evaluate.

The Uinta Basin is shown on this map, along with existing rail terminals in Carbon County, Utah, where limited amounts of the basin’s waxy crude is loaded into train cars. A proposal to create a direct rail link to the basin would provide shippers with enough transportation capacity to quadruple output.

Supreme Court puts Utah’s oil train back on the rails — Lisa Song (High Country News)

The proposed Uinta Basin Railway could traverse through part of the Ashley National Forest in Utah, seen from above.Ken Lund / CC via Flickr

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Lisa Song):

June 4, 2025

This article was originally published by Inside Climate News.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a controversial Utah railway project that critics say erodes the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), a bedrock of environmental law for the past half century.

The case centered on a proposed 88-mile railway that would connect the oil fields of northeastern Utah to a national rail network that runs along the Colorado River and on to refineries on the Gulf Coast.

The waxy crude oil is currently transported by truck over narrow mountain passes. Project proponents said shipping the fossil fuel by rail — as many as 10 trains daily — would be quicker and revitalize the local economy by quadrupling the Uinta Basin’s oil production, ICN previously reported, 

In 2020, the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition applied to the U.S. Surface Transportation  Board for approval of the railroad’s construction. Under NEPA, the board was required to conduct an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to evaluate possible harms from the project and consider how they could be mitigated.

Environmental groups and Eagle County, Colorado, opposed the railway project. They cited the potential for derailments and spills into the Colorado River, the drinking water supply for 40 million people. Opponents were also concerned about increased air pollution in the Uinta Basin, where oil fields emit high levels of methane, a potent planet-warming greenhouse gas, as well as volatile organic compounds, some of which have been linked to increased risks of cancer. 

Gulf Coast communities would also be harmed by air pollution when the crude oil was refined, opponents argued. The increased oil production and associated emissions would also drive climate change and its disastrous global effects: hurricanes, floods, droughts and extreme heat.

The Center for Biological Diversity, among the groups that had sued the Surface Transportation Board, said in a prepared statement that the ruling “relieves federal agencies of the obligation to review all foreseeable environmental harms and grants them more leeway to decide what potential environmental harms to analyze, despite what communities may think is important. It tells agencies that they can ignore certain foreseeable impacts just because they are too remote in time or space.”

In 2021, the board issued a 3,600-page EIS, which identified numerous “significant and adverse impacts that could occur as a result of the railroad line’s construction and operation— including disruptions to local wetlands, land use, and recreation,” according to court documents. 

The board nonetheless approved the railroad construction, concluding that the project’s transportation and economic benefits outweighed its environmental impacts.

Opponents, including EarthJustice and Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District Columbia. They argued the board’s environmental review excluded impacts of the project on people living near the oil fields, as well as Gulf Coast residents. 

The appellate court agreed. It ruled that the board’s EIS impermissibly limited the analysis of upstream and downstream projects.

“The appeals court had ruled that the federal agency that approved the railway failed in its obligations to consider the regional consequences of massively increased oil extraction on the Uinta Basin, the increased air pollution for the communities in Texas and Louisiana where the oil would be refined and the global climate consequences,” said Dr. Brian Moench, president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment. 

The Seven County Coalition and the railroad company then appealed to the Supreme Court.

“The Supreme Court’s ruling will allow all these consequences to unfold without meaningful restraint,” Moench said. “This court has made a name for itself making rulings that mock science and common sense and fail to protect the common good. This unfortunate ruling fits that same pattern.”

The Uinta Basin lies in the northeast corner of Utah and has seen oil and gas development since 1925. The proposed railway could take one of three potential routes – the favored of which would run through 390 acres of state lands and 401 acres of roadless U.S. Forest Service lands. James St. John/CC via Flickr

NEPA has been federal law since 1970. It doesn’t prescribe specific environmental decisions, but it does establish a process to ensure federal agencies follow proper procedure in permitting. It can be a laborious, time-consuming process, but requires an agency to be thorough in assessing potential environmental impacts while giving the public adequate opportunity to comment.

NEPA doesn’t necessarily halt projects but it can force project developers to pursue alternatives that protect environmentally sensitive areas and communities.

In his first term, Trump rolled back some aspects of NEPA, including weakening requirements to consider cumulative impacts of a project and the effects of climate change. Shortly after taking office this year, Trump signaled he plans to further streamline NEPA to expedite its approval process, especially for energy projects.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who was appointed by President Trump in his first term, wrote the opinion on behalf of four other members of the court. “NEPA has transformed from a modest procedural requirement into a blunt and haphazard tool employed by project opponents (who may not always be entirely motivated by concern for the environment) to try to stop or at least slow down new infrastructure and construction projects,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Courts should “afford substantial deference and should not micromanage those agency choices so long as they fall within a broad zone of reasonableness,” Kavanaugh wrote. “NEPA does not allow courts, under the guise of judicial review of agency compliance with NEPA, to delay or block agency projects based on the environmental effects of other projects separate from the project at hand.”

The 8-0 decision excluded Justice Neil Gorsuch, who recused himself because of his close connection to billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, who would economically benefit from the project.

In a concurring opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor differed with Kavanaugh on his rationale for the ruling, but agreed on the outcome. She wrote that NEPA didn’t require the board to consider the effects of oil drilling and refining because those activities were outside its authority. “Even a foreseeable environmental effect is outside of NEPA’s scope if the agency could not lawfully decide to modify or reject the proposed action on account of it.”

Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined Sotomayor in the concurrence.

The coalition was represented by Jay Johnson of Venable LLP, who said the ruling “restores much-needed balance to the federal environmental review process.” 

Keith Heaton, director of the Seven County Infrastructure Coalition, the project’s public partner, said the decision affirms the years of work and collaboration that have gone into making the Uinta Basin Railway a reality. “It represents a turning point for rural Utah—bringing safer, sustainable, more efficient transportation options and opening new doors for investment and economic stability.”

Wendy Park, a senior attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said despite the court’s ruling, “we’ll keep fighting to make sure this railway is never built.”

Uinta Basin Railway project proposed routes.Credit:Surface Transportation Board

US Supreme Court paves way for controversial Uinta Basin rail project that would haul crude oil along #ColoradoRiver: Unanimous ruling narrows the scope of a decades-old environmental review law — The Sky-Hi News #COriver

Uinta Basin Railway project proposed routes.Credit:Surface Transportation Board

Click the link to read the article on the Sky-Hi News website (Robert Tann). Here’s an excerpt:

May 30, 2025

In a 36-page ruling, Supreme Court justices said the Surface Transportation Board, a federal agency that oversees rail transit, had sufficiently considered the proposal’s environmental impacts when it approved the plan in 2021. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing the opinion for the other justices, said the board “identified and analyzed numerous ‘significant and adverse impacts that could occur as a result’ of the railroad line’s construction and operation — including disruptions to local wetlands, land use, and recreation.”

[…]

The plan had been on hold after a lower appeals court in 2023 ruled in favor of a lawsuit brought by Eagle County and five environmental groups that claimed the transportation board’s review had underestimated the railway’s environmental impact.  The lawsuit garnered support from a coalition of local governments, including Pitkin, Routt, Grand and Boulder counties, the cities of Basalt, Avon, Minturn, Red Cliff, Crested Butte, Glenwood Springs and Grand Junction, and the Northwest Colorado Council of Governments…

At the heart of the lawsuit and the question before the Supreme Court was whether the transportation board had sufficiently followed the National Environmental Policy Act, or NEPA,  when it approved the railway…The 55-year-old law requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of their decisions, and the transportation board issued a 3,600-page environmental analysis as part of that review. 

Energy dominance harms our public lands — Barbara Vasquez (Writers on the Range)

Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Barbara Vasquez):

May 26, 2025

I live in Jackson County, in northern Colorado, where hundreds of inactive and abandoned oil wells litter the landscape. Not only are they an ugly sight, they are also just a few of the estimated 2.6 million unplugged wells across the country that leak methane, benzene and other toxic substances. 

The reality is that long after I’m gone, most or all of those wells will remain unplugged. The companies and people who once owned them will have been allowed to walk away from their responsibility to clean up their mess.

Uncapped wells are what happens when the federal government enables the fossil-fuel industry to dominate energy policies, as is happening again now, both in the Interior Department and Congress. The policies emerging would allow companies, including many foreign ones, to profit from public lands and minerals that all Americans own. They would also leave taxpayers holding the bag for cleaning up leaking wells.

These abandoned wells already have consequences for wildlife, air, water and rural people. Kirk Panasuk, a rancher in Bainville, Montana, said: “I have personally experienced serious health scares after breathing toxic fumes from oil and gas wells near my property. And I’ve seen too many of my friends and neighbors in this part of the country have their water contaminated or their land destroyed by rushed and reckless industrial projects.”

Republicans and Democrats in previous administrations and Congresses took pains to reform this historically biased federal energy system because of the damage done to rural communities and American taxpayers. Now, the federal government is rolling back those reforms.

Recently, the Interior Department announced that “emergency permitting procedures” were necessary when carrying out NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act. Timelines for environmental assessments for fossil-fuel projects were changed from one year to 14 days, without requiring a public comment period. The timeline for more complicated environmental impact statements was cut from two years to 28 days, with only a 10-day public comment period.

In May, the House Natural Resources Committee unveiled its piece of the House budget bill, which enables the federal government to expedite oil, gas, coal and mineral development. It gives Americans basically no say on whether those projects should move ahead, while keeping taxpayers from receiving a fair return on the development of publicly owned lands and minerals. 

The administration’s justification for expediting permits is that we face “a national energy emergency.” No such emergency exists. The United States is currently the world’s biggest exporter of liquified natural gas and is producing more oil than any other country on Earth.

Both the House bill—just passed and now before the Senate—and the Interior Department’s policies, ignore the long-standing mandate to manage public lands for multiple uses. Instead, the new policies:

  • Drastically reduce the public’s role in the permitting process.
  • Allow large corporations to pay to evade environmental and judicial review.
  • Exempt millions of acres of private lands with federal minerals and thousands of wells on these lands from federal permitting and mitigation requirements.

The House bill would also slash the royalty rate for oil and gas production from 16.67% to 12.5%, depriving state and local governments of funding they depend on for schools, roads and other essential services. An analysis by Resources for the Future found that the proposed lower royalty rates would result in a loss of nearly $5 billion in revenue over the next decade. 

The Interior Department’s emergency permitting procedures and the House bill are assaults the federal government has waged on public lands since January. The public has been shoved to the side as oil and gas drillers enjoy their energy dominance throughout our public lands.

Barbara Vasquez. Photo credit: CWCB

Now, it’s up to the Senate to strip out these gifts to the fossil fuel industry, and it’s up to us tell our elected Senate representatives that these policies ignore the wishes of Westerners. We have told pollsters innumerable times that we support conservation, not exploitation of public lands for private interests. What’s happening now is radically wrong.

Barbara Vasquez is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. A retired PhD biomedical researcher and semiconductor engineer, she is board chair of the Western Organization of Resource Councils and a board member of the Western Colorado Alliance.

Romancing the River: The Empire Strikes the Public Lands, Part 1 — George Sibley (SibleysRivers.com)

Click the link to read the article on the Sibley’s Rivers website (George Sibley):

May 20, 2025

We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality…. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.’

That is indeed the way things seem to be sorting out today, in imperial America, under the imperious Trump, breakers of things. ‘The administration’ breaks a law in the process of creating Trump’s still vaguely formulated imperial reality. Citizen groups bring suit against his action, and the action is studied by judges in the context of the Constitutional rule-of-law, part of our existing (recently existing?) triumvirate reality of legislate-execute-evaluate, checks-and-balances, et cetera.

The judges tell Trump that he is exceeding his Constitutional authority, and he must undo most of what he has done. But by then he has distracted us from that by breaking something else in his chainsaw massacre of 250 years of American evolution, another action the judges must study and pass judgment on, thanks to suits brought by groups faithful to Constitutional reality.

But Trump ignores all of their judgments by appealing them, as he continues to commit actions reshaping reality and warranting further judicial study. And the Constituttional reality we’ve taken for granted for 250 years suddenly begins to seem somewhat less real than it was back in good old 2024. When we should have known better – but those damn grocery prices, and Trump promised that on day one…. Well, fool us once, shame on the fool; fool us twice (or fifty or a hundred times), shame on us.

So on to damage control. Today I want to look at the unfolding situation with the nation’s public lands – always a sore spot with many true conservative Republicans from western states as well as Trump’s Repugnicans. The map below shows the situation – more than 630 million acres of public land, most of it by far in the West: small dots and patches of it east of the Great Plains, but vast swaths west of the plains. This land is our land, as the song says, but how the composite ‘we the people’ can or should relate to and live with this land has been an ongoing debate at all levels of governance for more than 250 years.

You’ll quickly note from the map above that public land is almost half of what we call the ‘Intermountain West’ – the region between (and including) the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Sierra-Cascade ranges on the West. The importance of these particular public lands and their resources extends well beyond their actual geography. Most all of the water for the Colorado River, for example, starts on public lands in the green areas (National Forest lands) in the states of Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, and nurtures the entire River Basin and some out-of-basin extensions all the way to southern California. Coal trains continue to rumble eastward from Wyoming, Utah and Colorado carrying low-sulphur coal to the remaining back-east coal-fired power plants – and the Trumpsters want to make coal great again (‘clean, coal’ of course). Trucks roll down from the public’s mountain forests carrying 150-year-old spruce logs like we will not see again for four or five generations, if then, destined for suburban housing – and the Trumptsters want to increase logging from those lands by 25 percent.

But what I want to focus on today is the yellow land on the map, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land that makes up around half of the Intermountain West, and a large portion of the Colorado River Basin, mostly below 8,000 feet elevation. The BLM is a bureaucracy in the Interior Department, I’ll remind you, charged with managing all of the public lands that have not yet been designated for more specific uses, like National Forests or National Parks.

This gets the BLM nicknamed the ‘Bureau of Leftover Management,’ but that misses the real picture. The BLM lands do include a lot of brown or just barren land that makes one think nature is still trying to figure out what to do with it. But the BLM lands also include a very diverse and often spectacularly beautiful array of ecological landscapes from which areas are regularly designated (and sometimes undesignated then redesignated) as National Monuments (28 of them now on former BLM land), Wilderness Areas (221), and more than 600 others areas designated as part of the National Conservation Lands, including National Scenic Rivers, National Scenic and Historic Trails, and,refuges for various threatened and endangered species. There are treasures yet to be discovered, and either used or protected from use, in the BLM lands.

Significant segments of this land made the news recently when my congressman, Jeff Hurd of Colorado’s Third District (the West Slope, headwaters of the Colorado River), introduced a bill for a ‘Productive Public Lands Act.’ Rep. Hurd, I will note, occasionally behaves more like a true Republican than a Repugnican. He was one of the few Republican congressmen brave enough to voice disapproval of Trump’s pardon of all the January Sixth rebels. Most recently, he was the only Republican to vote against the suspicious sale of some BLM lands in the vicinity of ‘growth hot spots’ in Nevada and Utah. He has shown some spine in not drinking all of the Trump koolaid.

But the ‘Productive Public Lands Act’ bill, and the language used to sell it, are pure Trumpish bullshit. I will let Congressman Hurd speak first for it: ‘This bill would force the Bureau of Land Management to reissue nine Biden-era Resource Management Plans (RMPs) which locked up access to viable lands throughout Colorado and the West. A reissuance of [the Trump-era] RMPs will put us on a path to energy dominance allowing for a more secure and prosperous United States.’

A colleague in the Western Republican Caucus, California Congressman Doug LaMalfa, chimes in: ‘The Biden Administration was hell-bent on locking up public lands, threatening the prosperity of rural economies across the country…. Fortunately, a new era has dawned, and we have the opportunity to reverse these lockups and reinstate the multiple-use mandate on America’s public lands.’

That’s raw meat to the Trump base, but it’s also disinformation of the sort that sounds good to the uncommitted but under-informed – and most of us are somewhat under-informed on the public lands. ‘Multiple use’ – who can object to that? Especially if Joe Biden was trying to ‘lock up’ the pubic lands and threatening our rural prosperity!

But as usual the barefoot lie has legs and runs off in all directions while the truth is still pulling on its support hose. The nine Resource Management Plans in question were not created by President Biden and his ‘deep state’ cronies in Washington; they were created in accord with the rule of law, in this case, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act. (FLMPA), passed in 1976 in a couple of remarkable decades of what might be called ‘eco-populism’: a nation of people deeply concerned about the growing impacts of a century of unbridled industrial capitalism supercharged by fossil-fuel technology – acid rain killing the forests, industrial pollution killing the rivers, out-of-sight-out-of-mind buried barrels of unidentified stuff killing people drinking from aquifers. The people elected Congresses in the 1960s and 70s that – imagine this! – actually addressed the people’s concerns with legislation that began to change the game; tempering the enthusiastic power to change the planet with a growing sense of responsibility for the changes being wrought, and their consequences.

American Progress (1872) by John Gast is an allegorical representation of the modernization of the new west. Columbia, a personification of the United States, is shown leading civilization westward with the American settlers. She is shown bringing light from east to west, stringing telegraph wire, holding a book, and highlighting different stages of economic activity and evolving forms of transportation. By John Gast – This image is available from the United States Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID 09855.This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still required. See Commons:Licensing for more information., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=373152

Passage of the FLMPA in 1976 marked a major step in the evolution of public land management – which did not even exist overall until after World War II. From the 1780s until 1946, all of the new nation’s undesignated lands were under the U.S. General Land Office, which essentially had one purpose: to get as much of that land as possible into private hands as soon as possible, through vehicles like the 1864 Homestead Act, the 1872 General Mining Act, and others going back the 1787 Northwest Ordinance. The American expansionist vision was a land full of rugged American individuals, farming, mining, logging, stockgrowing, all with their own piece of land, and all living in modest decentralized self-sufficient communities that would be the safely dispersed foundation of American democracy.

But by 1900 we were beginning to take ever-larger segments of the public lands out of Land Office control, realizing that cheap land was often getting treated cheaply. Congress began setting aside National Parks and Monuments, beginning with Yellowstone in 1872. In the 1890s presidents began establishing ‘Forest Reserves’ to protect valuable forest land from ‘timber miners’; early in the 20th century these became National Forests, and were moved administratively to the Department of Agriculture, with rangers to protect them and set up grazing fees and timber sales.

Charging for uses on the unclaimed public lands that had basically been used free was not popular (still isn’t), but there was a grudging acknowledgment that management was probably necessary. This was affirmed in the 1930s when a group of Colorado ranchers worked with their congressman Edward Taylor to create the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act, and 80 million acres were withdrawn from General Land Office disposition to be managed by a new Grazing Service – with fees for users.

That paralleled another big cultural change happening in America through the first half of the 20th century: rural Americans were moving to the cities; around 1920 the growing urban population passed the declining rural population, and while the nation still paid lip service to the ‘family farm,’ there were few people going out to homestead on the public lands. Instead, an increasingly well-off and mobile urban ‘middle class,’ with two-week paid vacations, rediscovered the public lands as a resource for recreation, relaxation and renewal; they wanted the public lands to stay forever beautiful, spectacular, adventuresome – and accessible.

These two changes led to the Grazing Service and the General Land Office being quietly combined in 1946 into the Bureau of Land Management – with the Land Office gradually fading into irrelevance: the United States were no longer in the business of selling off national treasures cheap.

What we see in this evolution is a nation of people gradually waking up to the reality of needing to begin taking responsibility for the consequences of a century of enthusiastic exploitation. The final step came 30 years later with the Federal Land Management and Planning Act in 1976 noted earlier – following the foundational National Environmental Policy Act of 1970. NEPA mandated that any project involving federal funding would be preceded by a full environmental impact analysis: we will look before we leap. And if it involved public land, it would have to fit in with developed Resource Management Plans, and some larger projects would have to do their own RMP. This was tedious, difficult, often contentious work – but essential to serious democratic governance. Impatience with this hard work is the first seed of submission to tyranny.

The Resource Management Plans for public lands are all required to have two components. One is planning for multiple uses – all the uses practiced or potentially practiced on the land in question had to be fit into the overall purposes of each plan. The other requirement is public participation at every stage of the process, from all groups with a practical or potential use interest in that land.

‘Multiple use’ does not mean ‘everything going on everywhere’; it means determining how much of every use represented at the table can go on with reasonable accommodation to every other use, and where in the planning area it should happen. There are land and resource uses that are compatible with other uses, and there are uses destined to be the only thing happening in specific places. Mining/drilling, logging, and intensive farming are obviously single uses on any given piece of land, while grazing and hiking and some conservation uses can all go on in the same area, with reasonable accommodations to each other. And the ‘mandated’ public participation means that all would-be users will be heard from in the planning process – participate or shut up.

A Gunnison sage-grouse hen leads her chicks in the Gunnison basin during the summer of 2019. Some private landowners have undertaken habitat restoration projects on placed conservation easements on their property in an effort to protect the bird. Photo credit: Greg Petersen via Aspen Journalism

I can’t speak to all nine of the Resource Management Plans that Hurd and LaMalfa want to repeal, but I am quite familiar with one of them: ‘The Gunnison Sage-Grouse Record of Decision and Approved Resource Management Plan Amendment, dated October 2024.’ This is a RMP to try to save a species of Sage Grouse that has been listed as ‘Threatened’ by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, under the Endangered Species Act. Without going into the multiple decades of detail, this plan was worked out among ranchers, outdoor recreational users (both motorized and unmotorized), fishermen, environmental organizations, scientists, local government representatives, state and federal agencies, industrial reps when relevant, and citizens just interested.

There are places in the basin where some of the single-use land users are indeed ‘locked out’ for restoration needs, but this is not ‘Joe Biden locking them out’; this is the people establishing priorities based on difficult efforts to balance economic and ecological needs, in places at least as dependent on recreational uses as extractive uses. Biden’s only relationship with the whole process was to give the rule of law (FLMPA/NEPA) his blessing, and the time and space it warrants to get it hashed out down on the ground where the problem shapes lives.

To hammer the point home, in case you don’t get it – This is not an absence of ‘multiple use planning’; it is a stellar example of it. The RMP has been worked out over the past two decades by multiple users of landscapes shared with a threatened species who are all willing to try to live with the plan – the kind of local governance that was once celebrated by ‘Main Street Republicans’ (as opposed to ‘Wall Street Republicans’). I expect the other eight plans have somewhat the same rooted authenticity.

So long as we have the legal mandate to do this, and the local patience and will to work it out in our down-on-the-ground reality, we have not yet fully succumbed to the imperial ‘created reality’ that Trump and our local Congressman want to impose on us.

The next logical step here is to ask whether the poor oppressed oil and gas industry, which the Repugnicans want to ‘liberate’ through the Productive Public Lands Bill, really needs liberating – which requires looking at what they can and cannot do now, and whose fault that is or isn’t. But I’ve taken so long here in providing some background for that discussion that it’s time to give you a breather. I’ll be back with the rest of the story in a couple weeks. Stay tuned.

Meanwhile, I’ll leave you with this irrelevant reflection on Trump’s rejection of the low-flow showerhead:

An anti-BLM sticker (referring, presumably, to the federal land agency, not the Black Lives Matter movement) at another Phil Lyman rally against “federal overreach” and motorized travel closures in southeastern Utah back in 2014. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

Public land sell-off amendment is a test: Will the GOP stand on principle, or bow to President Trump? — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

La Sal Sunrise. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

May 9, 2025

It appears that Republicans are actually serious about taking America’s public lands out of the public’s hands.

During a late night-early morning move this week, Republican Reps. Mark Amodei of Nevada and Celeste Maloy of Utah sneakily added an amendment to the House reconciliation bill that would open the door to selling off thousands of acres of Bureau of Land Management parcels (and some U.S. Forest Service land) in Utah and Nevada. Revenues would be used to help offset proposed tax cuts for the wealthy. The bill passed through committee, despite strong opposition from Democrats, but has not been voted on by the whole House yet.

The amendment will serve as an important test for Republicans who have condemned or remained ambivalent about public land transfers in the past. Rep. Ryan Zinke, the Montana Republican and Interior Secretary under Trump I, has said public land sales are his “red line” he refuses to cross, which makes sense since his constituents — and the general public — tend to be opposed to this sort of transfer1. We’ll see. The question is whether the GOP’s urge to pass a “big, beautiful bill” for Trump will erase that line for him and others. And if the amendment does pass, it may break the seal, so to speak, and open the door to much larger land transfers.

The whole deal has been wrapped in confusion, due to the rush of adding the amendment and lack of transparency around it, along with its vague language, which points to parcels on maps that are also a bit unclear. But it appears that it includes about 11,000 acres of BLM land in Utah and 200,000 acres or more in Nevada.

At least some of the land earmarked for “disposal” (bureaucratese for selling, giving away, or transferring public land) ostensibly would be used for housing. The amendment specifies that parcels in southern Nevada and in Washoe County be made “available at less than fair market value for affordable housing.” And parcels marked for disposal near Mesquite and Mormon Mesa in Nevada overlap with the American Enterprise Institute’s target areas for its Homesteading 2.0 and Freedom Cities initiatives. The Utah land is all in Washington and Beaver counties, the former of which is one of the nation’s fastest growing areas. The land is all on the urban fringe, meaning developing it would lead to more sprawl.

Freedom Cities are back! Jonathan P. Thompson: Read full story

The Great Basin Water Network notes that some of the Washington County parcels also follow the path of the proposed $2 billion Lake Powell Pipeline, which would pull up to 28 billion gallons of water from the reservoir, use huge amounts of power to pump it across 141 miles of mesas and valleys to southwestern Utah, where it would water lawns and golf courses and irrigate alfalfa. Other parcels are long skinny segments that follow roads.

While some news reports and environmental groups have suggested that the proposed transfer is aimed at facilitating oil and gas drilling, it’s highly unlikely, as none of the parcels are in oil and gas-rich areas.

I did a mashup of the various maps for the Washington County, Utah, parcels, with the maroon and fuchsia indicating transfers requested by Washington County and St. George, and the dark blue by the water conservancy district. (To see a larger version click on it and go to the Land Desk website).

The fuchsia parcels were apparently requested by Washington County, and include the proposed path of the Lake Powell pipeline as well as what look to be parcels intended for housing or commercial development, including one on the border of Zion National Park.
The pink indicates BLM parcels that would be disposed of under the amendment and total about 65,000 acres. If the land were transferred, it would allow for a major expansion of Searchlight, a small former mining town, and Mesquite. It would provide enough acreage for a whole new sprawling city in the Moapa Valley.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

There’s really no avoiding it now: This year’s spring runoff is going to be pretty piddly (in some cases this is in the past tense, since peak runoff has already come and gone). The winter started out pretty strong, and for some areas continued to be average into early spring, but then it all went to hell in a handbasket, despite early May storms.

Hopes for a continued recovery of Lake Powell levels this year are pretty much dashed. The Bureau of Reclamation’s latest 2025 water year unregulated inflow forecast for the reservoir is a meagre 6.78 million acre-feet, or 71% of normal. That would mean Lake Powell will continue to shrink over the next 12 months.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

I browse through old newspapers quite often to research the history of things. And lately, when I was looking into wolves in Colorado and Utah, I stumbled across a bunch of ads with a similar theme. And I couldn’t help but be reminded of some of the crazy spam that clogs up my email and social media feeds. These are from the late 1800s and early 1900s, and here merely for your amusement.

1 Let’s just be clear about something here: Zinke and others may express opposition to full-on land transfers, but they strongly support de facto land transfers, i.e. oil and gas and coal leases and mining claims. While they don’t transfer title of the land to the lessee or claimant, they do transfer the American public’s minerals and hydrocarbons to the corporations for little or no cost. And access can be cut off from the land while it’s being drilled or mined, and those activities can not only wreck the land, but also preclude future uses even after mining and drilling has ceased.

#Colorado governor visits Dillon Reservoir to sign package of bills meant to bolster state’s water security: Legislation focuses on improved #snowpack data collection, increased funding for water projects — #Aspen Times 

Colorado Governor Jared Polis

Click the link to read the article on the Aspen Times website (Robert Tann). Here’s an excerpt:

Perched above the Dillon Reservoir on the side of a mountain road in Summit County, Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday signed into law three bills aimed at bolstering the state’s water infrastructure.  The measures come amid the backdrop of chronic drought and increased water demand in the West which have made finding a path towards water sustainability more urgent. Speaking amid on-and-off snow flurries and bouts of sunshine, Polis said the bills signed on Thursday will help “build a sustainable, livable future” by “securing our water for the state of Colorado.”

Here’s what the new laws do: 

Better snowpack mapping 

To better measure Colorado’s primary source of water supply, House Bill 1115 establishes a new statewide program for tracking snowpack…HB 1115 charges the Colorado Water Conservation Board with deploying newer methods such as light detection and ranging technology, also known as LiDAR…The technology has already been used by entities like Denver Water, Northern Water and the Colorado River Water Conservation District in recent years…The law directs roughly $250,000 from an existing cash fund over the next two years to help the program establish initial staffing and data systems. Lawmakers have acknowledged there will likely need to be additional rounds of funding in future years…

More money for water projects 

State voters’ decision to approve a tax on sports betting in 2019 has provided a critical funding source for water projects, delivering as much as $30 million a year for infrastructure and conservation efforts.  House Bill 1311 takes that a step further by eliminating a tax exemption for revenue generated from free sports bets…

A view of the popular Pumphouse campground, boat put-in and the upper Colorado River. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

Finding solutions to funding woes

While taxes on sports betting have helped shore up state spending on water projects, its other key funding stream risks running dry…Under Senate Bill 40, the state will commission a nine-member task force within the Department of Natural Resources to study the future of severance tax revenue and come up with solutions to better fund the state’s water needs. The task force will be required to submit a final report to the legislature in July 2026, with lawmakers hoping to turn those ideas into policy. 

Grays and Torreys, Dillon Reservoir May 2017. Photo credit Greg Hobbs.

#Boulder/Boulder County #ClimateChange lawsuit gets green light: #Colorado Supreme Court says Boulder/Boulder County lawsuit can be heard by a state court and is not pre-empted by federal laws. But, there was dissent — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

Boulder. Photo credit: Allen Best

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

May 13, 2025

By a Colorado Supreme Court vote of 5 to 2, Boulder and Boulder County won the right to move forward with their lawsuit against two fossil fuel companies. their climate change lawsuit on Monday in the Colorado Supreme Court.

But if the vigor of the writing were the deciding factor, the dissent authored by Justice Carlos Samour Jr. with concurrence of Justice Boatright would carry the day.

That’s not how the law works, of course. The written opinion – echoing what was verbally decided several weeks ago – found that federal law did not preempt Boulder’s claims under state law in this case. In other words, the argument by the city and county against Exxon Mobil and Colorado Suncor can be heard in a Colorado district court.

“We express no opinion on the ultimate viability of the merits of Boulder’s claims,” said the majority in an opinion written by Justice Richard J. Gabriel.

Many similar lawsuits have been filed in the United States by local jurisdictions, and this is only the second one, after a Hawaii Supreme Court decision in 2023 – that has been deemed to move forward. In New York, justices ruled against a similar climate change lawsuit.

Boulder and Boulder County along with San Miguel County originally sued Suncor and Exxon in April 2018. They allege they have and will continue to incur costs and losses as a result of climate harms, such as increased costs for wildfire abatement, and for decades of misinformation.

A state district court rejected the attempt by the two companies to have the lawsuit dismissed. Exxon then directly petitioned the Colorado Supreme Court to overturn the result.

San Miguel County’s case in Denver District Court has been on hold, although this decision sets a precedent for it.

The lawsuit pivots upon several arguments, most notably the federal Clean Air Act, the law passed by Congress in 1970. In dispute was whether this law precludes efforts in Colorado to seek claims from the fossil fuel companies.

Boulder alleges that it has incurred and will continue to incur millions of dollars in costs to protect its property and residents from the impacts of climate change.

Along with the county, it asserts that the fossil fuel companies, “because they knowingly caused and contributed to the alteration of the climate by producing, promoting, refining, marketing and selling fossil fuels at levels that have caused and continue to cause climate change,” should be forced to share the costs.

They also accuse the two companies of “concealing and/or misrepresenting the dangers associated with fossil fuels’ intended use.”

The local jurisdictions also have various public nuisance, private nuisance and trespass claims. Under the latter heading is the “invasions of its property in the form of floodwaters, fires, hail, rain, snow, wind and invasive species.”

But again, this case did not decide the merits of those complaints. It was to decide whether a district court in Colorado had standing to hear the case. The oil companies argued that the Clean Air Act preempted state authority in the matter.

As in other cases heard in other states, the district court judge in Colorado found no language in the Clean Air Act that expressly pre-empted state common law tort claims. Nor, said the justice, did that federal law completely occupy the field of greenhouse gas emissions.

The Suncor refinery lies northeast of downtown Denver. Photo/Allen Best

Congress has the power to preempt state law — on that the two factions of the Colorado Supreme Court agree. Their disagreement come down to whether the Clean Air Act expressly allowed for state authority in this area of pollution — or even whether it needed to offer a green light. Indeed, according to the majority opinion, the federal law itself makes clear that “air pollution prevention … and air pollution control at its source is (sic) the primary responsibility of states and local governments.”

The majority opinion goes on for nearly three-dozen pages, so you might want to read it yourself. Here’s a key passage:

“At root, defendants appear to be arguing that a vague federal interest over interstate pollution, climate change, and energy policy must preempt Boulder’s claims,” it said. But a 2019 U.S. Supreme Court opinion had held that “invoking some brooding federal interest or appealing to a judicial policy preference should never be enough to win preemption of a state law; a litigant must point specifically to ‘a constitutional text or federal statute’ that does the displacing or conflicts with state law.”

Did the oil companies point to a federal state or constitutional text that preempts Boulder’s claims? No, said the state justices.

True, in New York’s Second Circuit ruled otherwise. But that court had engaged in backwards reasoning, said the Colorado state justices.

The arguments also involved whether Boulder and Boulder County are trying to set foreign policy, which is a no-no. Again, the majority of the justices found that the arguments of the oil companies fell short.

In his dissent, Justice Samour, who was joined by Justice Boatright, came to different conclusions in almost every point.

“We are but one individual nation. Yet, the majority in this case gives Boulder, Colorado, the green light to act as its own republic,” he wrote in a nod to a colloquial reference to Boulder. “More specifically, the majority concludes that Boulder may prosecute state-law claims that both effectively regulate interstate air pollution and have more than an incidental effect on foreign affairs. And, alarmingly, the majority’s decision isn’t cabined to Boulder – all other Colorado municipalities may bring such claims. Indeed, at least one (San Miguel County) already has.”

Added Samour in a later section. “I am concerned that permitting Boulder to proceed with its claims will interfere with both our federal government’s regulation of interstate air pollution and our federal government’s foreign policies regarding air pollution.” This has produced a worry that “we are headed for regulatory chaos.”

Samour’s dissent is fun to read as he talks about Bolder whistling past the federal-common-law graveyard, or the attempt by the Boulder jurisdictions to “treat federal common law as chopped liver.”

His bottom line is that the question is not whether   the Clean Air Act expressly allowed states to have authority in this area. It did not, he says. It’s a flip side of the coin of the majority opinion.

In a footnote, he says that he would not rule out the possibility that Boulder could bring suit under Colorado law to recover damages allegedly caused by emissions resulting from the energy companies’ activities within Colorado. “But that’s a far, far cry from what Boulder is seeking to do here – with the majority’s blessing, no less.”

Again, it comes back to the Clean Air Act. It does not, he says, gives states authority to independently regulate or otherwise control out-of-state sources of pollution.”

Going electric with Fred and Wilma — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #ActOnClimate

The shiny new cold-weather air source heat pump installed during summer 2023 at Coyote Gulch Manor.

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

May 12, 2025

A Boulder County couple — we’ll call them Fred and Wilma — decided to live their values and reduce the carbon footprint of their house. This is what they did.

This was originally published in the Boulder Weekly on April 16.

Fred and Wilma (not their real names) take climate change very seriously. For the last several years, they have been members of Citizens’ Climate Lobby, an organization that advocates for a tax on greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet like most of us, they were burning natural gas to heat the space and water in their 2,800-square-foot house near Niwot. Last year, they decided to live their values. They set out to go nearly all electric.

You, too, can be like Fred and Wilma. Here’s how.

Step 1: Assess

Energy audits provide great value in guiding investment choices. They can be had for $190 after rebates.

Even more valuable are blow-door tests. Most effective in cold weather, they provide visual images of heat escaping a house. Many Boulder residents can expect to pay $60 to $150 for a conventional blow-door test. In other jurisdictions, these advanced tests typically run $200 to $450.

EnergySmart

For Boulder County residents, EnergySmart is an excellent place to start on this journey. It’s a partnership of Boulder County, Boulder and Longmont with Xcel Energy and Platte River Power Authority.

Advisors can address everything from building insulation to solar panels to the needs of electric vehicles.

Efficiency Works (Longmont Power)

An Efficiency Works assessment will cost Longmont residents $60. While funds last, assessments are free of charge for rental properties in 2025.

Xcel Energy 

The state’s largest utility provider currently offers two options for audits:

Stuart Cummings, a former pilot, and others created Go Electric Colorado with a goal of sharing their knowledge with homeowners who wanted to figure out ways to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with their homes. Here Stuart Cummings explains heat pumps to an audience in East December. Photo/Allen Best

Go Electric Colorado coalesced in 2023 after Stuart Cummings, Julia Moravcsik and Nick Stevens met and realized how many people were interested in electric cars but remained fearful about ranges and reliability. They suspected the same was true about suppressing emissions in buildings.

Abundant information about home electrification can be found on the internet. But, as Moravcsik points out, “people kind of don’t know what they don’t know.”

“Even in Boulder, where people know a lot about this kind of stuff, most people knew nothing or next to nothing about home electrification,” she says.

Go Electric Colorado’s volunteer counselors have now provided nearly 400 consultations, about half in Boulder County, with others ranging from the eastern plains to the desert valleys of the Western Slope.

Step 2: Getting started

Insulation: Fred, who recently retired after several decades as a home remodeler, knew insulation was the most important thing in reducing energy use, no matter the fuel source. He and Wilma hired Net Zero Insulation to boost the attic insulation to R-60, the gold standard. (The R-value is the capacity of an insulating material to resist heat flow. The higher the R-value, the greater the insulating power.)

It cost $3,200, and the impact was immediate. The house stayed warmer in winter, cooler in summer — and lowered their utility bills.

Windows and doors: Many older houses have single-pane windows, which have an R-value of 1. Replacing them with double-pane windows can cost $10,000 to $20,000 depending upon the house size and number of windows. Some newer homes have triple-pane windows. Windows produced by Alpen High Performance at its Louisville factory can get up to R-11. They are also far more pricey.

The federal Energy Star program allows you to claim 30% of product cost up to a maximum of $600.

In the basement of their 1967 home, Fred installed six small double-paned windows at a cost of $2,000. Upgrading a single-paned patio door cost $3,200.

Go Electric Colorado’s Paul Bousquet counsels caution before upgrading from double to triple-pane windows. He instead advises having an energy auditor use an infrared camera to find imperfections in seals around windows.

Heat pumps: Heat pumps can replace gas-burning furnaces. Using electricity, they milk the heat from outdoor air then feed it into the building’s interior. During summer, the reverse process can replace air conditioners and swamp coolers. Heat pumps can also use the same process to produce hot water in lieu of natural gas.

Metro Denver-Boulder has several companies that specialize in heat pump installation. Xcel Energy has a list of contractors registered with the company. So does Energy Smart. Go Electric Colorado endorses a handful of contractors; Bousquet advises getting at least three bids.

Fred and Wilma used Elephant Energy for the air-source heat pump to warm and cool their house and heat their 50-gallon water heater. The $22,000 cost (after rebates) included an electrical upgrade. The Flintstone house stayed comfortable in January even when the temperature dipped to 9 below. Fred strongly advises finding a company that knows all the rebates.

(For example, Superior has a host of rebates for projects that serve up to four residential units, everything from insulation to electric induction cookstoves).

Kitchen stoves: Going electric also means replacing the kitchen gas-burning stove with an electric model. Plus, studies have shown that gas fumes while cooking the tamales can be unhealthy to cooks and others.

Boulder County offers an induction cook-top lending program for people who are curious about switching to an electric range: rebuildingbetter.org/induction-resources.

While roof-top solar is abundant in this Jefferson County housing development along Highway 93 between Golden and Arvada, Go Electric Colorado counselors say it should not be the first, second or even third investment for homeowners wanting to shrink the carbon footprint of their buildings. Photo/Allen Best

Solar: Going all-electric in your house may not get you 100% clean of fossil fuels. You might achieve that by investing in solar and battery storage, a path that Go Electric Colorado can also help with.

Locally, Boulder-based Namaste Solar — an employee-owned co-op — offers free quotes. Federal tax incentives can cover up to 30% of the cost of solar panels and battery storage.

Fred and Wilma, however, decided against going with rooftop solar. Solar farms can generate electricity at scale, and roof-top solar is a long-term investment.

That has also been the advice of Go Electric Colorado. Nice, they say, but it’s not the first, second or even third priority.

Getting electricity from the utilities will include some fossil fuel. But that should diminish to near zero during the next 15 to 25 years.

Fred says that upgrading their house was a reflection of their resolve to be a part, if a small one, of the climate solution. “You can tell how much people care by what they do,” he says.

Friday Fast Takes: Dust on snow, too many houses?, Trump ticker, more…: Dust is melting #ColoradoRiver snows — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org) #COriver #aridification

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

May 2, 2025

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

A new study finds that airborne dust deposited on snow in the Upper Colorado River Basin speeds up spring snowmelt. Regular readers of the Land Desk won’t be surprised by this conclusion, as there are regular mentions here regarding the effects of dust-on-snow in the San Juan Mountains. This study, however, is the first to quantify the effects across the entire Colorado River Basin.

When dust, lifted up from the lowlands by spring winds, falls on mountain snow, it decreases the snow’s albedo — the measure of a surface’s reflectivity — causing the snow to melt faster. That adds another variable into the water forecasting mix, since about 85% of the Colorado’s flow comes from snowmelt.

Dust events have been occurring for thousands of years on the Colorado Plateau and in the San Juan Mountains, but picked up significantly following the white settler-colonist influx of the mid-1800s, and peaking in the first few decades of the twentieth century, when volumes of dust were five times higher than they were prior to colonization.

The new study, “Dust on Snow Radiative Forcing and Contribution to Melt in the Colorado River Basin,” by Patrick Naple, S. McKenzie Skiles, et al, used daily remotely sensed images (MODIS) from 2001 to 2023 to observe dust-on-snow impacts. Findings include:

  • The lowest dust-on-snow impacts occurred in the northern Uinta in Utah and the Wind River Range in Wyoming, while higher and more persistent effects were seen in the central and southern Rockies.
  • Dust impacts tend to be largest in the lower alpine elevations (8,000 – 10,000 feet).
  • The researchers observed greater dust effects in the first part of the observation period (2001 to 2014) and lesser after that, “producing a slight but statistically significant decreasing trend over the record.” And the patterns don’t necessarily align with drought intensity, “indicating that there is not a straightforward relationship between aridity and dust.”
  • The reason for the decreasing trend aren’t clear, but researchers hypothesize that it relates to a combination of increasing surface roughness (vegetation) and decreasing wind speeds related to climate variability.

The good news for the San Juans is that dust events have been relatively mild this spring, according to the Center for Snow and Avalanche Studies’ April 29 report, which has helped keep the meagre snowpack around a while longer. At least for now: A storm is forecast to move into the San Juans this weekend and early next week, likely bringing both dust and snow to the high country, which could throw off some of our Predict the Peak guesses, for sure.

***

Fire season has arrived in the Southwest. It feels early, but then, who the hell knows anymore? Maybe last year’s fire season is simply continuing on. The Stronghold Fire has scorched a little over 2,000 acres in the east edge of the Dragoon Mountains in southern Arizona, forcing evacuations in the rural sprawl. As of May 1, it was 62% contained and fire activity had ebbed. And the Otero Fire burned through 494 acres of the Rio Grande Bosque adjacent to Socorro, New Mexico.

The outlook is for a hot, dry, maybe smoky summer for a good swath of the West:

🏠 Random Real Estate Room 🤑

I stumbled upon an unexpected headline in the Las Vegas Review-Journal today: “Inventory flooding Las Vegas Valley’s home market with no buyers in sight: Zillow.” Say what? For I don’t know how long, we’ve been hearing that Las Vegas was suffering a severe housing shortage — i.e. demand was far outstripping supply — and that the only solution was to sacrifice surrounding public lands to housing developers.

Yet now Zillow is saying there are too many houses for sale? And what’s also interesting is that home prices continue to rise alongside inventory. That’s right: There are more homes available for sale, and yet the median sales price continues to increase, showing that the laws of supply and demand don’t always apply to housing (and showing that the push to bulldoze federal land for affordable housing is a sham).

I checked out Zillow for myself and found about 1,600 homes listed for less than $300,000 for sale in the greater Las Vegas area. I decided to look around the region a bit, too, and it actually seems like there are more sub-$300k homes/condos available now than during my previous scans over the past four years. Oh, and I found this tiny home in the sprawling metropolis of Ticaboo, Utah. A little overpriced, but the location? Heck yeah!

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

Sigh. That guy is still president, and continues to do his darnedest to wreck everything that makes America great. Wes Siler’s Newsletter is reporting that the National Park Service plans to fire another 1,500 employees in coming days, bringing total Park Service staffing losses through resignations, firings, and layoffs to 5,000 under Trump. Meanwhile, year-to-date visitation at Zion National Park is at near-record levels. The combination of more visitors and fewer staff could get messy.

And all Interior Department employees (which includes the Park Service, BLM, and so forth), have been ordered to submit their resumes — i.e. reapply for their existing jobs — in preparation for significant job cuts and an expected complete overhaul of the department and its agencies.

Firing thousands of people from what seemed like secure jobs will not be good for the economy, which is already struggling mightily due to Trump’s policies. And on that note, if you’re interested in tariffs and how they might affect things, I’d urge you to read this smart take from Aaron Smith at his Ag Data News:

📈 Data Dump 📊

WildEarth Guardians just released their first quarter “Oil & Gas Waste Watch” report tallying up industry and regulatory failures in New Mexico. Findings include:

  • 307/330 The number of oil and gas facility incidents/spills reported during the first three months of the year in New Mexico.
  • 78,858 barrels Volume of liquid, including 22,927 barrels of wastewater in addition to crude oil, condensates, and other materials, spilled in those incidents. Some of the material was recovered.
  • 118 Number of spills involving crude oil or condensates.
  • 292/36 Number of spills in the Permian Basin/San Juan Basin, respectively.
📖 Reading Room 🧐

Shaun Griswold has a great essay about the Cybertruck in the latest High Country News and on the website. Here’s a little outtake, but do go read the whole thing. You won’t regret it.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

… a little reminder that I was knocking on Cybertrucks before it was cool!

The Silver Bullet goes head to head with a toaster … er, Cybertruck. Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson

Real #Climate Solutions Are Beneath Us: It’s time to accept that durable subsurface carbon storage, along with emissions reductions, must be part of the plan to mitigate the effects of #ClimateChange—and geoscience must play a central role — EOS #ActOnClimate

Calcite precipitated in basaltic bedrock, as seen here in Fort George Canyon, British Columbia, stores carbon durably. Credit: Peter Reiners

Click the link to read the article on the EOS website (Peter Reiners). Here’s an excerpt:

May 2, 2025

As the world blows past 1.5°C of anthropogenic warming and looks increasingly likely to hit 2.6°C–3.1°C by the end of the century, plenty of controversy still exists, even among geoscientists, about how to slow, stop, or reverse the rapid climate change we are causing. As so many studies have documented, such warming will cause inundation of many coastal cities, trillions of dollars in damage from extreme weather, widespread species extinctions, and unrelenting heat waves. It will also fundamentally threaten financial sectors and economies at all scales. One thing is clear: To mitigate these outcomes, humanity’s first priority should be to drastically reduce its annual emissions of roughly 40 gigatons (billion metric tons) of carbon dioxide (CO2), the greenhouse gas most responsible for driving warming. Without this reduction, other measures will be only modestly effective at best. But unfortunately, at this point, the scale of mitigation needed to keep warming to below 2°C–3°C goes beyond reducing annual emissions. We must also remove and store carbon that has accumulated in the atmosphere…

Not only has focusing on annual emissions over the past few decades failed to reduce them, but it’s also not our annual emissions today (and into the future) that are causing the 1.55°C of warming we’re witnessing. It’s how much CO2 we have already emitted. Our cumulative emissions of 1.8 trillion tons (1,800 gigatons) of CO2 from energy and industry—heavier than the combined mass of all living things on Earth—taken from geologic reservoirs and dumped into the atmosphere, will stay there (and in the ocean) for thousands of years. Even on that happy day when we finally start reducing emissions, we will be the farthest we have ever been from solving the problem, and in fact, we will still be adding to it…

The biggest opportunity—and perhaps the biggest responsibility—for geoscientists to contribute to mitigation is through facilitating durable carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Concerns are sometimes raised about CDR as a form of climate intervention, or geoengineering, yet it is far less risky than the centuries-long geoengineering experiment of using the atmosphere as a sewer. Indeed, removing gigatons of CO2 per year is essential to net zero strategies and avoiding disastrous amounts of warming, as unequivocally stated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Energy Transitions Commission, and American Physical Society. Three principles are generally considered fundamental to CDR. First, CO2 already in the atmosphere must be taken out. This principle distinguishes it from point source carbon capture and storage (CCS), which simply reduces new CO2 emissions from fossil fuel energy and industry sources while competing with clean energy…Many approaches to CDR exist. Direct air capture (DAC), for example, is a rapidly growing method in which CO2 is pulled straight from the atmosphere. Biomass carbon removal and storage (BiCRS) methods capture a fraction of the 480 gigatons of CO2 that plants naturally absorb each year and prevent it from cycling back to the atmosphere by converting biomass to forms that can be isolated and stored. Other CDR approaches focus on managing ecosystems to stimulate more CO2 removal than would occur naturally, the second of the three principles of CDR. Examples include various strategies for enhanced rock weathering in croplands or forests and for marine CDR, such as using nutrients to promote biomass growth and raising the alkalinity of seawater so it pulls more CO2 from the air. Third, and most important, is the fact that however CO2 is removed, it must be stored durably, with minimal likelihood it can return to the atmosphere for a long time. Using captured carbon to create marketable stuff like fertilizer and chemicals may seem economically savvy, but it’s not a durable approach. The entire global industrial demand for CO2 is less than 1% of our annual emissions, and much of this carbon goes right back to the atmosphere or is used for enhanced oil recovery (EOR) to extract more petroleum.

The Mammoth direct air capture facility in Iceland, operated by Climeworks, began pulling carbon dioxide from the air in 2024. Credit: ©Climeworks

Interior eviscerates public land protections, fast-tracks mining, drilling: Plus: National monument shrinkage appears imminent — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

An oil and gas drilling operation in the Chaco region checkerboard of northwestern New Mexico. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

April 25, 2025

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

For the past three months and change, the Trump administration, in a series of executive orders, has been working to dismantle the administrative state, or the framework of agencies, rules, and regulations designed to protect the nation and its citizens. For the most part, however, the Interior Department — the sprawling agency that oversees much of the nation’s public lands — has been relatively (and suspiciously) quiet, refraining from big actions beyond merely repeating some of Trump’s orders.

That has rapidly changed in recent days as Interior Secretary Doug Burgum — or perhaps Tyler Hassan, the DOGE minion Elon Musk appointed to reorganize Interior — set off a figurative bomb that could demolish protections for public lands.

The most alarming move, so far, is the department’s implementation of “emergency permitting procedures” for oil and gas, uranium, coal, biofuels, and critical mineral projects on federal lands. Under this order, the department will compress the entire environmental review for these projects down to 28 days or less — even for a full environmental impact statement.

“By reducing a multi-year permitting process down to just 28 days,” Burgum said in a press release, “the Department will lead with urgency, resolve, and a clear focus on strengthening the nation’s energy independence.”

If you’ve ever skimmed through an EIS, you know how insane this concept is.

The Bureau of Land Management will be packing the entire process mandated by the National Environmental Policy Act, Endangered Species Act, National Historic Preservation Act, and other rules and regulations into an impossibly short timeframe.

By impossibly short, I mean that it is virtually impossible to comply with these laws and requirements — which include tribal consultation, archaeological surveys and mitigation, environmental and endangered species reviews, socioeconomic impact analyses, and public comment periods — in four weeks or less. So by radically compressing the timeline, Burgum is essentially telling his staff to skirt the requirements, i.e. violate the law.

Burgum uses President Trump’s claim that the U.S. is experiencing an “energy emergency,” to justify the destructive rubber-stamping, and says fast-tracking project approvals is necessary to address that emergency.

I’ve said it many times, but I will say it again: There is no energy emergency. The U.S. is pumping more crude oil than ever before from the Permian Basin and other fields, it is the largest petroleum producer in the world, it is a net exporter of petroleum products, and liquefied natural gas exports are at an all-time high. The U.S. market is glutted with natural gas and the coal supply has been outpacing demand for nearly two decades. Lithium — for electric vehicle batteries and grid-scale energy storage — is so plentiful that prices have plummeted nearly 90% since 2022. Uranium shortage? Nope.

One could certainly argue that the power grid in the West is outdated, its operation balkanized, and that it is not up to the challenges posed by growing data center electricity demand. But aside from geothermal and hydropower (solar, wind, and transmission projects are not included), none of the categories of projects on the fast-track list would do anything to fix the grid. Even if they were, it would not justify truncating environmental reviews so severely — or at all.

Environmental reviews can take a maddeningly long time, especially for big projects. But the way to speed things up is not to throw the laws and protections in the the trash bin. That will only lead to lawsuits, which likely will delay the projects even more. The only way to truly streamline permitting, while still safeguarding human health and the environment, is to beef up staffing, resources, and expertise. And that’s exactly the opposite of what Trump and Musk and Burgum are doing.

Pages from the Interior Department’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan Draft Framework acquired and published by Public Domain. Note that one objective is to “release federal holdings” for housing. And that in the top one they want to “reduce the costs for grazing” on public land (can it go any lower?), while in the bottom one they want to “increase revenues from grazing … .” Uh … okay?

But wait. It gets worse.

We might take some comfort in the fact that national monuments are off-limits to the extractive industries and Trump’s energy dominance agenda, right? Maybe not for long.

Earlier this week, the folks at Public Domain acquired a copy of the Interior Department’s 2026-2030 Strategic Plan Draft Framework. The plan aims to, among other things: “restore American prosperity,” “assess and right-size monuments,” and “return heritage lands and sites to the states.”

The Washington Post, however, is reporting that Burgum is not necessarily waiting until next year to “right-size,” or shrink, national monuments. From the Post:

If they go through with the shrinkage of any or all of these national monuments, it would open up additional lands to oil and gas leasing and new mining claims, which would then be subject to the fast-tracked permitting.

Baaj Nwaavjo I’tah Kukveni-Ancestral Footprints of the Grand Canyon is especially rich in high-grade uranium deposits, and the White Canyon area in Bears Ears might also be targeted for uranium if the monument were shrunk. Grand Staircase-Escalante includes a large coal deposit on the Kaipairowitz Plateau, but it’s exceedingly unlikely that anyone would be interested in mining it given the faulty economics of coal.

One thing you can be sure of is that none of this will go unchallenged. The tribal nations that proposed the designation of Bears Ears and other national monuments will sue to keep them intact, and advocacy groups and land and water protectors will support them and take the administration to court over its flouting of environmental laws.

A look across Glen Canyon National Recreation Area and into Bears Ears National Monument from the Little Rockies. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

For many people, the mention of Glen Canyon National Recreation Area evokes images of Lake Powell and all that entails: boats plying the blue-sky-reflecting waters and the sandstone cliffs and formations that rise up from the murky depths. That makes sense, given that the national park unit was established because the reservoir was there in 1972.

Yet the reservoir makes up just 13% of the 1.25 million-acre recreation area. The remaining 87% contains some of the more remote and spectacular country in the lower 48, shares borders with a half-dozen other national parks and monuments, and makes up the core of the Moab to Mojave Conservation Corridor.

So, the manner in which the area is managed matters — a lot. And for five decades after the recreation area’s establishment, off-road vehicle travel went virtually unmanaged, allowing for a destructive free-for-all along shorelines and in remote parts of the recreation area. In 2018, the Park Service released a plan that more or less codified the pre-plan anarchy. Environmentalists sued and forced the Park Service back to the drawing board.

This January the Park Service finally issued an amended rule celebrated by conservationists for adding protections to some of GCNRA’s more sensitive areas from motorized vehicle travel (this does not affect boating, by the way). It bars OHV-riding yahoos from roaring around the lake’s shore unheeded, and restricts motorized travel in the Orange Cliffs area on the north end of the recreation area adjacent to the Maze in Canyonlands.

The off-road vehicle lobby, however, was unhappy with the added restrictions, and they took their victim-complex grievances to the Utah congressional delegation, all of whom appear to have a fetish for fossil-fueled combustion-engines. Now the plan and the recreation area are being put in jeopardy by — you guessed it — those same Utah politicians. Sens. John Curtis and Mike Lee, along with Rep. Celeste Maloy, are asking Congress to revoke the rule under the Congressional Review Act and to prohibit the Park Service from implementing similar protections in the future.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

The National Parks Conservation Association created a nifty map showing active mining claims and mines near national parks and national monuments. It gives a good sense of how vulnerable some areas might be to new mining claims and projects if the Trump administration goes ahead with shrinking the aforementioned national monuments. You can look at the interactive version here.

One note of caution: An active mining claim ≠ a valid mining claim. An active claim simply means it has been located and filed, and that the claimant has paid their annual maintenance fee. The validity of a claim, on the other hand, depends on the discovery of a valuable mineral deposit there, which must be demonstrated. Rights to mine are only attached to valid claims.

Parting Poem

Here’s another one from Richard Shelton’s Selected Poems, 1969-1981.

A Grim Signal: Atmospheric CO2 Soared in 2024 — Bob Berwyn (InsideClimateNews.org)

Jänschwalde Power Station in 2004. Note two 300 meter chimneys, which have since been demolished. By Ra Boe – Own work DigiCam C2100UZ, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=307842

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Bob Berwyn):

April 24, 2025

Scientists are worried because they can’t fully explain the big jump, but they think it might mean that carbon absorption by forests, fields and wetlands is slowing down—a major problem for the world.

The latest anomaly in the climate system that can’t be fully explained by researchers is a record annual jump in the global mean concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere measured in 2024.

The concentration, measured in parts per million, has been increasing rapidly since human civilizations started burning coal and oil in the mid-1800s from the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm. 

In recent decades, the increase has often been in annual increments of 1 to 2 ppm. But last year, the increase measured by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Global Monitoring Laboratory was 3.75 ppm, according to the lab’s early April update of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations.

That brings the annual mean global concentration close to 430 ppm, about 40 percent more than the pre-industrial level, and enough to heat the planet by about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius). Climate researchers have noted that the continuing increase of global CO2 emissions means the world will probably not be able to reach the Paris Agreement target of limiting warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above the pre-industrial level.

“It’s definitely worrying to see such a large jump in 2024,” said Berkeley Earth climate researcher Zeke Hausfather. “While it’s not surprising to set new records given global emissions have yet to peak, and there are generally higher ppm increases in El Niño years, 2024 was still anomalous for just how large it was.”

El Niño refers to the warm phase of a tropical Pacific Ocean cycle that’s formally called the El Niño Southern Oscillation. During other recent El Niño phases, like in 1998 and 2016, the annual CO2 increase was about 3 ppm, Hausfather said.

“Because we know the magnitude of emissions and the ocean sink does not vary that much year to year, this has to reflect a weakening of the land sink,” he said, referring to the amount of carbon absorbed by terrestrial ecosystems like forests and wetlands. Those ecosystems did still take up some carbon last year, he noted, but the land sink was the weakest since 1998, when it touched zero, and 1987, when it was a net emitter of CO2.

Even if the growth rate slows again in 2025, he said, “the worry is that this year’s jump might include [non-El Niño] factors like temperature responses from soils and vegetation that might persist or intensify as the Earth warms.”

The unprecedented increase of atmospheric CO2 is just one of several red lights flashing on the climate dashboard. 

This graph shows the annual mean growth rates of carbon dioxide, with decadal averages shown as horizontal lines across the bars. The largest spike shown in 2024, represents an annual increase of 3.75 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the air. It is the largest yearly increase since measurements started in the 1950s. Credit: NOAA

Others include the 2023-2024 spike of the global average surface temperature, which has also not been fully explained, and the fact that Earth’s average temperature has stayed above a 2.7 degree Fahrenheit temperature target set by the Paris Agreement for 20 of the last 21 months. Additionally, the combined sea ice extent in both polar regions has dropped to record or near-record lows the last few years, which means Earth is losing some of its biggest heat shields.

In recent years, NOAA publicized the annual updates to the global greenhouse gas index with press releases and explanatory articles on its website, and the agency was set to do the same this year, said Tom Di Liberto, a former NOAA public affairs specialist who was fired by the Trump administration in late February along with hundreds of other NOAA staffers.

“That article was written, and then it was taken down by the current political communications leader of NOAA because it would not make the administration happy,” he said. “NOAA is likely to still be doing the work internally, but it’s very unlikely you will see stuff coming out of NOAA like you had in the past.”

NOAA did not provide answers to Inside Climate News’ questions about this year’s increase.

Climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Center for Science, Sustainability & the Media at the University of Pennsylvania, said the CO2 spike may reflect the post-COVID emissions bounce as economies restarted after lockdowns, but he said the general expectation is that emissions will start to plateau this year, largely driven by decarbonization by China and other countries. 

“I’ve seen the claim made that decreased uptake by natural sinks and wildfire emissions might have played a role,” he said. “But my view is that this may be a misinterpretation of the fleeting impacts of extended, major El Niño events like 2023-2024.”

James Hansen, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and director of the Program on Climate Science, Awareness and Solutions, said the 2024 CO2 increase is not surprising, given continued record-high emissions from fossil fuels, as well as the record-warm oceans.

“Similar increases have occurred with lesser emissions, but stronger El Niños,” he said. “It’s not all gloom and doom. The airborne fraction of emissions has actually trended downward over the past several decades, so once we begin to reduce emissions, we should be able to get the growth rate of CO2 to decline.”

As President Trump pushes public land sales, advocates rally: Broad support for public lands in the West is forcing some Republicans to break with the White House — Zoë Rom (High Country News)

Juan Bautista de Anza National Historic Trail goes through lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management in Arizona. Bob Wick/BLM

Click the link to read the article on the High Country News website (Zoë Rom):

April 23, 2025

Selling off federal public lands, once a fringe idea, is now gaining traction among Republicans in Congress, the courts and in the White House. President Donald Trump has proposed using the money from such sales to offset the cost of extending his 2017 tax cuts, which would massively increase the federal budget.

In March, the U.S. Senate narrowly voted down an amendment that would have banned selling public land to balance the federal budget. Around the same time, the House adopted new rules that, opponents say, quietly lowered the bar for disposing of such lands.

“Republicans’ plans to sell off our public lands to pay for tax handouts for their billionaire donors is an outrageous slap in the face to all of us,” New Mexico Sen. Martin Heinrich, D, who sponsored the amendment blocking those sales, told High Country News in a statement.

Under the revised rules, legislation authorizing the sale of land managed by agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management and National Park Service would no longer require assigning a dollar value to the property first — a change that would make it much easier for lawmakers to introduce and pass such bills without triggering fiscal scrutiny. All this comes at a time when recent mass layoffs have further destabilized the agencies tasked with managing public lands.

“The threats have never been higher,” said Land Tawney, executive director of American Hunters and Anglers, a nonpartisan network of public-lands advocates. “Politicians are saying things out loud about divesting our public lands with more vigor and publicly. The threats are real.”

Canyons surrounding the Owyhee River, Oregon, on BLM land. Bob Wick/BLM

But even as these ideas gain traction in the GOP, most Americans, regardless of their political belief remain largely united in their love for the nation’s public lands, especially in the Western U.S. This has forced some Republicans to break with the national party on the issue, setting the stage for what could become an unusual political alliance.

THE ATTACKS ON public lands began immediately after Trump took office in January. Staffing cuts implemented by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have disproportionately impacted land-management agencies. Critics say these staffing reductions are part of a deliberate strategy to undermine the agencies’ ability to manage their lands effectively, thereby paving the way for privatization.

“I’m really concerned about what I see as a deliberate effort to set federal land management agencies up to fail. Once they fail, it’s not such a stretch to say, ‘Well, someone else could do a better job,’” said Susan Brown, a lawyer at Silvix Resources, a nonprofit legal group that focuses on public lands and environmental governance. [ed. emphasis mine]

The Trump administration — working with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner — has launched a joint task force to identify “underutilized” federal lands suitable for residential development, arguing that selling off these acres could help solve the nationwide housing shortage.

Critics argue that this idea is simply an excuse to open the door to privatization, as well as being a poor solution to the housing crisis. A new report from the Center for American Progress found that in the 10 Western states with the most BLM-managed land, less than 1% of that land is located within 10 miles of a population center, and much of it is unlikely to be suitable for sale or development.

Opponents also note that the Republican-led efforts risk alienating a bipartisan base that supports public lands. Recent polling from Colorado College shows that 72% of Westerners prioritize conservation over development regardless of political affiliation. Public opinion has been consistent on this for years.

Over 70% of Republicans and more than 90% of Democrats agree that public lands are essential for their state’s economy, according to the same poll. Even in conservative-leaning states like Wyoming and Utah, strong majorities oppose the idea of selling public lands or reducing their protections. Another recent poll, this one from YouGov, found that 74% of Americans oppose the sale of public lands, including 61% of the Trump voters polled.

Portrait of Congressman Mike Simpson. By Mike Simpson U.S. House Office – Public Domain

The knowledge that so many of their constituents favor keeping public lands public has put Western Republicans at odds with the administration and the national party. In March, Montana’s Republican Sens. Steve Daines and Tim Sheehy voted with the Democratic minority in the unsuccessful attempt to block sales of federal land. Around the same time, Idaho Rep. Mike Simpson, a Republican, introduced the Public Lands in Public Hands Act, a bill that would prevent the Department of the Interior from selling or transferring public lands. His co-sponsors included Montana Republican Ryan Zinke as well as New Mexico Democrat Gabe Vasquez​.

This isn’t Zinke’s first defection on the issue. In 2016, the former Interior secretary withdrew as a delegate to the Republican National Convention, citing his objection to the party’s platform, which proposed transferring federal public lands to state control.

Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert of Colorado told HCN that she is trying to strike a balance on the issue. “I stand with the far majority of Coloradans who see and believe in the value of protecting our public lands,” she said in a statement provided by her office. At the same time, Boebert added that she rejected “the idea that these public lands must be completely locked up from reasonable economic development and responsible energy exploration.” Utah Sen. Mike Lee, chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee, did not respond to HCN’s requests for comment.

Across the West, Democrats and conservation advocates have used the threat of public land transfers to galvanize support. Protests against potential sales have erupted in various state capitols, including Idaho and Colorado, as well as at Arches National Park. Meanwhile, major outdoor brands are trying to rally recreationists around the issue. Earlier this month, more than 70 businesses launched an initiative called Brands for Public Lands, headlined by Patagonia and Black Diamond. The group is helping people contact their congressional representatives and urge them to oppose public land sales.

“The overwhelming majority (of Americans) want to keep public lands in public hands. It’s where we hunt, fish, gather berries, mountain bike, hike, float and just go escape,” said Tawney. “It’s all of our backyards, and I have confidence that the people will stand united.”​

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

Despite DOGE at Interior, Yellowstone staffing ‘higher than last year’ — Angus M. Thuermer Jr. (WyoFile.com)

Yellowstone park workers help search for a lost hiker on Eagle Peak in 2024. (Cam Sholly/Yellowstone National Park)

Click the link to read the article on the WyoFile.com website (Angus M. Thuermer Jr.):

April 22, 2025

Oilfield executive takes charge of consolidating workforce of 70,000 at national parks, BLM, Fish and Wildlife Service.

Five days into the Trump administration’s DOGE takeover of the Department of Interior’s policy, management and budget, Yellowstone National Park staffing is “higher than last year,” an Interior Department spokesperson in Washington, D.C. said Monday.

​​Yellowstone Park confirmed the increase. “Going into this year, we should have a total of 769 NPS employees,” park spokeswoman Linda Veress said in an email, up from 748 last year. During the park’s record year for visitation in 2021, the park’s workforce numbered 693 permanent and seasonal workers.

“We had an outstanding opening weekend, and it was great to see everyone enjoying the park,” Yellowstone Park Superintendent Cam Sholly said in an email Monday. “The plow crews are working hard to clear the remainder of the park’s roads from snow, and we are on schedule for our normal sequenced opening in the upcoming weeks, including the Beartooth Highway.”

After personally greeting the season’s first visitors at the West Entrance on Friday, Sholly reported the opening weekend drew 8,324 vehicles from there and the North Entrance at Mammoth, the only two entrances that have opened so far. That’s an increase of more than 11% from last year and put the weekend rush, unofficially Sholly said, at 21,642.

The staffing and opening weekend updates came as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum put an oilfield executive in charge of “consolidation, unification and optimization of administrative functions” at the 70,000-person agency last week. Burgum, earlier this year, named Tyler Hassen as assistant secretary for policy, management and budget. Now Hassen will oversee Burgum’s consolidation order as the Trump administration’s DOGE plan to shrink the size of the federal government advances.

Burgum’s appointment of Hassen and the consolidation order sparked worries in the conservation community, including at the Center for Western Priorities. The Denver-based nonpartisan conservation and advocacy organization accused the secretary of abdicating his responsibilities by not reserving any authority over firings or requiring any reporting by Hassen.

“If Doug Burgum doesn’t want this job, he should quit now,” said Jennifer Rokala, executive director of Western Priorities. “Instead, it looks like Burgum plans to sit by the fire eating warm cookies while Elon Musk’s lackeys dismantle our national parks and public lands,” she said in a statement.

“Warm cookies” refers to a report in The Atlantic that Burgum’s chief of staff told political appointees to learn to bake cookies for their boss.

But potential visitors to the world’s first national park need not worry, said J. Elizabeth Peace, a spokesperson at Burgum’s office.

“Visitors can expect the same great service they had in years past,” Peace wrote in an email Monday. “[I]n some National Parks, like at Yellowstone National Park, staffing numbers are higher than last year.”

Peace made her reassurances as regional business owners fret over the upcoming tourism season in Yellowstone, at neighboring Grand Teton and across Wyoming. Overseas traveler numbers to the U.S. dropped 11.6% in March after Trump tariffs, tariff threats, indiscriminate DOGE firings, resignations and economic turmoil battered expectations.

Oilman

The order Burgum issued Thursday gives Hassen, now an assistant secretary, authority over the department’s Working Capital Fund, an office that in 2023 provided $119 million for department functions. Hassen will be able to rewrite manuals outlining employee responsibilities and may transfer funds, programs, records and property, according to the order.

Burgum’s order described his actions as furthering Trump’s February initiative for “implementing the president’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ workforce optimization.”

In addition to great service at national parks, Bureau of Land Management lands in Wyoming remain welcoming, Peace wrote. “Visitors to BLM-managed public lands can expect continued access and service across recreation sites, trails and campgrounds,” her email reads. “We are implementing necessary reforms to ensure fiscal responsibility, operational efficiency and government accountability.”

Burgum and DOGE’s “unification effort” will accelerate technology, enhance the mission to preserve parks and historic sites, serve Native American tribes and manage department holdings in Wyoming, Burgum’s order states. All told, the Department of the Interior manages 2.34 million acres of national park system lands, 18.4 million acres of BLM property and 70,000 acres of Fish and Wildlife Service reserves in the state. 

In Wyoming, Interior-managed land accounts for a third of the state’s area or about 21 million acres.

Hassen, a Deerfield Academy prep and Princeton grad, was CEO of Basin Energy, a Houston-based international oilfield services company, according to his LinkedIn profile. Before that, he worked for Wenzel Downhole Tools, Basin Power, and served as chairman of the associate board of the nonprofit Cancer Research Institute in New York. He was an associate involved in global energy investment banking at Morgan Stanley in New York and London from 2005-2008, according to his profile.

He emerged on the DOGE scene after the Los Angeles fires in January when President Trump said California Gov. Gavin Newsom compounded the firefighting problem by not diverting water to southern California. Critics said DOGE conflated agricultural diversions, needs of the endangered Sacramento-San Joaquin Estuary delta smelt and firefighting. 

Unqualified?

Western Priorities said DOGE efforts assign inexpert people to inappropriate positions.

“Since Elon Musk is now effectively in charge of America’s public lands, it’s up to Congress and the American people to stand up and demand oversight,” Rokala’s statement reads. “DOGE’s unelected bureaucrats in Washington have no idea how to staff a park, a wildlife refuge, or a campground. They have no idea how to manage a forest or prepare for fires in the wildland-urban interface. But Doug Burgum just gave DOGE free rein over all of that.”

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

With future funding of #Colorado’s water projects uncertain, lawmakers begin to hunt for solutions — The #GlenwoodSprings Post Independent

A view of the popular Pumphouse campground, boat put-in and the upper Colorado River. Photo credit: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism

Click the link to read the article on the Glenwood Springs Post Independent website (Robert Tann). Here’s an excerpt:

April 21, 2025

With a critical source of funding for Colorado’s water projects facing an uncertain future, lawmakers want to task a group of experts with providing recommendations for solutions.  Severance taxes, which are imposed on nonrenewable energy extraction like oil drilling and coal mining, have long served as a key source of revenue for water-related initiatives. The funding stream, however, is also one of the state’s most volatile due to extreme swings in the energy market. Over the past two decades, tax revenue has gone from skyrocketing one year to plummeting the next. The issue has compounded in recent years due to state budget writers siphoning some of the money to help balance the state’s spending plan. In response, a bipartisan group of lawmakers is advancing legislation that would commission a study on the future of severance tax revenue and ways the state can better fund its water needs. Senate Bill 40 [SB25-040] would create a nine-member task force within the Department of Natural Resources to find answers to the question. The measure is sponsored by Sens. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, and Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, as well as Reps. Karen McCormick, D-Longmont, and Matthew Martinez, D-Monte Vista. Roberts said the group will consider any and all ideas, not just around severance taxes, for how to make Colorado’s water funding more stable. The task force would then submit a final report in July 2026 to help create potential bills or recommendations for the Joint Budget Committee in future legislative sessions. 

President Trump looks to make the BLM the Bureau of Livestock and Mining Again: Plus: Clearing up confusion over oil and gas lease reviews — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Located in a remote area of the Vermilion Cliffs National Monument (Arizona), White Pocket area is a hidden treasure of swirling, twisting Navajo sandstone. Photo credit: Department of Interior Facebook page

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

April 18, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

In what came as no surprise to just about anyone, the Trump administration moved this week to rescind the Bureau of Land Management’s Conservation & Landscape Health Rule. The Public Lands Rule, as it is commonly known, was implemented last year by the Biden administration to put conservation on a par with other federal land uses, such as energy development, grazing, and mining.

The administration announced the intention to revoke the rule quietly at reginfo.gov rather than, as is its wont, with some inanely named executive order, and it doesn’t give any specifics as to how or under what authority it would eliminate the rule. Yet if Trump were to issue a specific order, it might be titled: “MAKING THE BLM THE BUREAU OF LIVESTOCK AND MINING AGAIN!”

Yet it is not at all clear what effect the rollback might have on the ground, chiefly because the impacts of the rule, itself, remain unclear since there hasn’t even been time to truly implement it yet.

When the rule was first proposed in 2023, it was met with mixed reactions from the environmental community, some of who saw it as largely ineffective, and harsh rebukes from the livestock and energy industries and their political enablers.

The National Cattlemen’s Beef Association called the rule a “capitulation to the extremist environmental groups who want to eradicate grazing from the landscape,” and Sen. John Barrasso, the Wyoming Republican, compared the bureaucrats who wrote the “decree” to the tree-spiking eco-warriors of the 1980s.

Yet it is hardly radical. In essence, the rule simply reiterates and reminds us of what Congress intended when it included the multiple-use mandate in the Federal Land Policy Management Act of 1976, the law that created the modern framework for modern public land oversight (and that endeavored to rid the BLM of the “livestock and mining” monicker).

Multiple use, according to the law, is public lands management that “will best meet the present and future needs of the American people” and allows for “a combination of balanced and diverse resource uses that takes into account the long-term needs of future generations … including … recreation, range, timber, minerals, watershed, wildlife and fish, and natural scenic, scientific and historical values.”

So, yes, the BLM is required to accommodate recreation, grazing, and mining, but also, must manage the land for the sake of watersheds, wildlife, and natural values — i.e. conservation.

The rule aims to carry out this mandate by:

  • directing the agency to prioritize landscape health in all decision making, which is what it’s already supposed to do when assessing grazing allotments;
  • creating a mechanism for outside entities — states, tribes, or nonprofits — to lease public land for restoration projects, much as a rancher or oil and gas company might lease BLM land (but only on parcels that aren’t already leased/claimed for other uses);
  • allowing firms to lease land for mitigation work to offset impacts from development elsewhere (again, these would not override existing, valid rights);
  • clarifying the designation process for areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where land managers can add extra regulations to protect cultural or natural resources; and,
  • directing the agency to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into decision-making, particularly when considering ACECs.

Really it is more of a tool than a rule. That is, it gives third parties and agency state and field office staffers a mechanism to step up conservation on some lands, but does not create any new restrictions that would interfere with other uses. And there’s simply no way this tool could be used to “eradicate” grazing or drilling or any other use, as the hyperbolists claim, even if BLM personnel wanted to — and history shows they do not. In fact, the mitigation leases could be used to facilitate other development by allowing, say, solar or oil and gas companies to “offset” the damage inflicted by utility-scale arrays or drilling projects.

So rescinding the rule really amounts to tossing a brand new tool out the window before it even got used. On the one hand, we’re not necessarily going to miss the tool. But simply discarding it is also totally senseless and a waste that benefits no one, even Trump’s oil and gas executive buddies. But as we’ve pointed out before, Trump’s haphazard policymaking is more about spite, vindictiveness, and cruelty than common sense. [ed. emphasis mine]

***

Drill rig and Raplee Ridge. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Last week, a friend sent me an email with the subject line: “not a fan of bureaucracy, but this is not good.” In the message, she had cut and pasted this headline from National Parks Traveler:

Yes, it is bad. No, it’s not as bad as the headline makes it sound (though the confusion is understandable).

The story came from a brief Interior Department press release announcing it “will no longer pursue lengthy analysis for oil and gas leasing decisions in seven states.” That sure sounds like they are dropping environmental reviews for all oil and gas leases in the West. And plenty of news outlets and social media posters interpreted it as such.

That’s not the case. At least not yet.

The press release was referring to the revocation of a specific environmental review for 3,244 oil and gas leases that date as far back as the Obama-era. The leases were issued as the result of 74 lease sale decisions between 2015 and 2020. Environmental groups filed multiple lawsuits, saying the original environmental reviews were inadequate. The courts agreed, remanding the decisions back to the BLM for more thorough reviews that included analysis of greenhouse gas emissions, social cost of carbon, and other impacts. .

In January the Biden administration decided to lump all of the leases together and prepare a new, comprehensive environmental impact statement for the whole lot that would incorporate current science and public input.

Trump’s Interior Department decided the review went against the administration’s “energy dominance” agenda and related executive orders, so it cancelled the EIS. According to the press release, the BLM is now “evaluating options for compliance with the National Environmental Policy Act for these oil and gas leasing decisions.” What that means isn’t clear, even to BLM officials, and the industry is confused as well.

If the agency issues the leases without further review, you can bet the same groups that sued — and won — the first time will go for a repeat performance. Meanwhile, environmental analyses are ongoing for future oil and gas lease sales (I checked). That’s not to say that they will be adequate, however.

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

The Center for American Progress has put together a nice, but disturbing, interactive map illustrating the myriad ways DOGE is slashing federal spending and harming communities across the nation. You can click on a congressional district and get a list of specific grants that have been revoked and leases that have been cancelled.

🤣🙄🤔🤪

I went down the oddest wormhole the other day when I stumbled upon the Google reviews for none other than the Cholla coal power plant near Joseph City, Arizona. That an industrial facility even has starred reviews is weird enough, and possibly yet another sign of the apocalypse. But this one, I happened to notice in passing, has 138 reviews with an average four star rating. Obviously I had to check them out.

And let me tell you, they are something. Each and every one is really special. I have no idea which ones are sincere and which ones ironic. All I know is that read together, it is an epic poem. You should look at them all, but for now I’ll share some of my favorites.

Data Dump: Making coal “beautiful” again: President Trump’s efforts to restart the dirty and declining industry won’t work again — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Dragline at the Navajo Mine in New Mexico. The Navajo Nation-owned Navajo Transitional Energy Company owns the mine along with two mines in the Powder River Basin. Navajo Nation Buu Nygren was on hand to cheer on Trump as he signed the pro-coal executive orders. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

April 11, 2025

The News: This week, President Donald Trump signed a slew of executive orders that wipe away environmental protections in the name of saving “beautiful, clean” coal from what Trump and his minions call a regulatory “war on energy.” The purpose, he says, is to make the grid more reliable and to ensure there is adequate generating capacity to meet AI-powering and cryptocurrency mining data centers’ burgeoning power demand.

The orders:

  • Designate coal as a “mineral” so that it qualifies for regulatory relief under Trump’s pro-mining executive order, and suggest designating coal as a “critical material” due to its use in steel making. (As if that’s going to do anything?)
  • Orders the secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, and Energy to identify coal resources on federal lands and any impediments to extracting them, and propose “policies to address such impediments and ultimately enable the mining of such coal resources by either private or public actors.” (Public actors? Does this mean what I think it means: The feds are going to start coal mining? Maybe they’ll just nationalize the industry — Hello comrade Trump! — to wipe away all so-called impediments, of which there are very few, by the way.)
  • Orders the Interior Secretary to lift barriers to mining coal on federal lands, including definitively ending an Obama-era moratorium on new coal leasing and the Biden-era halting of new leases in the Powder River Basin. (These are only speculative “barriers” because existing leases hold enough coal to meet current levels of demand for another 40 years — and demand is likely to keep dropping, meaning coal companies probably would never be affected by the leasing freeze).
  • Encourages coal exports. (Umm, yeah, you should have thought about that before all of this tariff talk, dude.)
  • Looks to identify regions where “coal-powered infrastructure is available and suitable for supporting AI data centers and assess … the potential for expanding coal-based infrastructure to power data centers … .”
  • Exempts some coal power plants from Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for two years.
  • Looks to prevent large power sources “from leaving the bulk-power system or converting the source of fuel of such generation resource if such conversion would result in a net reduction in accredited generating capacity.” (He wants to block utilities from retiring or converting or old coal plants to run on cheaper, cleaner fuels.)

The Context: Let’s just get a couple things straight right off the bat. First, there are no significant regulatory barriers to mining coal. Arch, Peabody, Navajo Transitional Energy Company, and a handful of other companies have leases on and essentially unfettered access to billions of tons of coal at their gargantuan Powder River Basin mines. They could continue tearing apart the earth for decades before needing to lease more land, making Biden’s freeze on future leasing — and Trump’s unfreezing of it — speculative and symbolic.

In Biden’s case, it symbolized his desire to do something about the climate crisis and to cement a legacy as an environmentally minded president; for Trump it’s all about fossil fuel fetishization.

Coal mine production has been dropping due to declining demand: Utilities simply aren’t burning as much coal as they used to, in part because it’s dirty, but mostly because the shale revolution — i.e. “fracking” — has resulted in a natural gas supply glut, bringing the cost of the slightly cleaner-burning fuel below that of coal. More recently, increasingly affordable wind and solar power have also been displacing coal — and gas — generation from the grid.

So rolling back regulations on mining is useless if you’re trying to spur production. The only way to do that is get utilities to go against their own financial interests and burn more coal.

That’s where some of the other provisions in the orders come in. By exempting coal plants from the MATS rule for two years, Trump is opening the door for facilities such as the Colstrip coal plant in Montana to continue to operate without expensive new pollution control equipment. Colstrip is considered one of the dirtiest facilities in the nation, spewing harmful emissions from its smokestack and in the form of coal combustion waste.

The Cholla coal plant near Joseph City, Arizona. Trump said his executive order would save it from destruction. But its operator has already shut it down and shows no interest in burning coal there. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Trump mentioned the Cholla coal plant near Holbrook, Arizona, as one that he would “save” from “destruction,” adding, “We’re going to have that plant opening and burning the clean coal, beautiful clean coal, in a very short period of time.” But its operator, Arizona Public Service, said it has already procured cleaner, cheaper replacement generation for the plant, and indicated it has no desire to keep burning coal there. Meanwhile, even before the orders, PacifiCorp backed off on plans to retire some of its coal plants in the next several years, citing projected increased demand and easing regulations.

The big question mark is how the provision aiming to prevent coal plants from shutting down will play out. It seems illegal to force a utility to keep a power plant running, but then that hasn’t gotten in Trump’s way before. Still, the most all of these efforts can hope to achieve is to slow the decline of the coal industry for a few years. It’s certainly not going to bring back the Navajo Generating Sation, the Nucla Station, the San Juan Generating Station, the Escalante coal plant, or the Mohave plant from the dead.

Now for the data! Click on the images to see a larger version.

The rise and fall of the U.S. thermal coal industry. For five decades, coal consumption was directly tied to electricity generation, with both peaking in 2007. But the financial crisis slowed electricity demand, and opened the door for burgeoning new supplies of increasingly affordable natural gas to dethrone King Coal from the energy mix, decoupling coal consumption from electricity demand, and it’s been downhill for the industry ever since, with the steepest declines coming during the first Trump administration. Data source: Energy Information Administration. Graphic: Land Desk.
Coal fueled the colonization and industrialization of the Western U.S., but by the 1950s it was in serious trouble as locomotives switched to diesel, homes and businesses chose to cook and heat with natural gas, and utilities opted for hydropower. Government intervention helped spur coal’s revival (see next graph for Wyoming figures and annotations). Source: USGS and EIA. Graphic: Land Desk.
One of the reasons folks like coal is because it’s labor intensive and offers relatively stable, high-wage employment to a lot of people in rural areas without too many other opportunities. But coal industry employment doesn’t always match up with production thanks to automation and efficiency upgrades. Annotations are below. Data Sources: Wyoming State Geological Survey, EIA, Wyoming Workforce Services. Graph: Land Desk.
  1. 1920: Wyoming coal industry hits peak employment, with 9,000 employees working in coal mines during a time when less than 200,000 people lived in the state. A few years later, a Wyoming newspaper noted: “Next to food, coal and iron are of first importance to mankind.”
  2. Drilling for natural gas gets underway in New Mexico and Texas, and the gas is piped into towns for heating and cooking, displacing coal. A 1927 Steamboat Pilot headline about a gas pipeline from Texas to Denver, Colorado, read: “Natural gas would injure coal industry.”
  3. 1940: Electro Motive Division of General Motors unveils a diesel freight locomotive, but it is slow to catch on and in 1944 the steam engine still dominated, with the railroad industry consuming 152 million tons of coal per year.
  4. Heightened industrial activity during World War II briefly drove up coal consumption and production.
  5. Late 1940s: Development of high-voltage transmission lines that can carry electricity long distances, which will ultimately be a boon for coal power.
  6. 1950s: Coal consumption in the West plummets by 40 percent as highways replace rails, and diesel locomotives replace coal-fired ones. More long-distance gas pipelines are built from Texas and New Mexico oil fields to population centers, making it easier for residents and institutions to ditch coal for heating and cooking. More than half of the West’s electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams, with coal only providing 10%. The coal industry had made a lot of cash and built up a lot of political power over the years, however, which they used to lean on government to look for new markets for their product.
  7. 1952: Bureau of Reclamation releases A Study Of Future Power Transmission in the West, calling for the buildup of large coal-fired power plants in the Interior West, which would then send electricity to faraway population centers. It said, “… the growth of power in the West will be so great that increasing dependence on its main fuel resource, coal, is inevitable.”
  8. 1960: Congress establishes the Office of Coal Research “to encourage and stimulate the production and conservation of coal in the United States…” and to “maximize the contribution of coal to the overall energy market.”
  9. Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups join with the coal industry and coal-state leaders in opposition to new hydroelectric dams. The Sierra Club actively supports the construction of Navajo Generating Station as a preferable alternative to a new dam in the Grand Canyon. Several other coal-fired plants are built across the West.
  10. The Clean Air Act is passed, actually helping Western coal because it’s low in sulfur, and therefore emits less sulfur dioxide when burned.
  11. Energy Crises erupt, spurring calls for “energy independence.” This includes mining for coal and government subsidies to develop synfuels, or gasoline or diesel from coal and other materials, like oil shale.
  12. 1977: ARCO opens Black Thunder mine in the Powder River Basin. It will become the largest coal mine in the world and the first to transport 1 billion tons of coal.
  13. 1978 Industrial Fuels Power Act more or less kills the construction of new natural gas power plants, locking in coal as the fuel of choice for electricity generation for the long-term.
  14. Even as coal production climbs, the number of employees in the industry drops due to mechanization and the migration of coal-mining from more labor-intensive underground mines to larger, surface strip mines such as those in the Powder River Basin.
  15. Reagan opens up foreign markets, kills subsidies, stops price controls and government prop-ups. Oil, natural gas, and uranium development crash, spreading economic malaise across the West. Coal falters in many parts of the West, including Wyoming, but the mines of the Powder River Basin continue to produce steadily.
  16. 1987: The Industrial Fuels Act is repealed, allowing for the buildup of natural gas plants. This doesn’t have an immediate effect on coal because natural gas is still far more expensive, but it sets the stage for utilities to switch fuels in the decades to come.
  17. Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which limit emissions of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide, give a big boost to Western coal because of its relatively low sulfur content. Wyoming surpasses Appalachia as the nation’s number one coal producer.
  18. 2001: Demand for electricity, and therefore for coal, climbed steadily nationwide for 50 years, experiencing just a few small hiccups in 1982, 1986 and, most dramatically, in 2001, due to a national recession. But it quickly recovered.
  19. 2008: The national financial crisis hits, putting a huge dent in consumption of both electricity and coal. At the same time, the price of natural gas plummets when the market is glutted with newly accessed gas from shale formations in Texas, North Dakota and the East.
  20. 2011: Wyoming hits peak coal-mine employment, even though electricity demand and coal consumption has yet to rebound.
  21. 2012-2016: Although electricity demand has plateaued, coal production goes into freefall as utilities start getting more and more power from natural gas plants and solar and wind. Mass layoffs hit Wyoming’s coal industry, including in the Powder River Basin.
  22. 2018: U.S. electricity demand finally bounces back to pre-2008 levels. It doesn’t help coal at all.
  23. 2017-2024: Despite the efforts of the Trump administration to prop up the coal industry by meddling in markets and rolling back environmental, public health and worker safety regulations, coal consumption, production and employment continue to fall. Biden’s “war on coal” doesn’t affect the slide.
Wyoming leaders cheered Trump’s pro-coal executive orders, in part because the industry plays such a large role in its economy. But things are changing, even in the Cowboy State. Construction, retail trade, health care, government work, and leisure and hospitality all outpace mining and drilling in terms of employment numbers. Graphic credit: The Land Desk

🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡

Yesterday, Kathleen Sgamma withdrew her name from consideration to run the Bureau of Land Management. Was it because the oil and gas lobbyist and advocate had a conflict of interest? Nope. Was it because she has spent much of her career battling the very agency she was chosen to helm? Nope.

Sgamma resigned because a watchdog group scandalously revealed that she actually has an inkling of morality. 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.” She was hoping for a “resurgence of sanity.” That right there is enough to disqualify you from serving in this administration.

I’m anxiously awaiting to see whom Trump picks now.

Federal Water Tap, April 14, 2025: President Trump Signs Barrage of Water, Energy Executive Orders — Brett Walton (circleofblue.org)

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

April 14, 2025

The Rundown

  • White House moves to cut funding for keystone federal climate change report and targets “unlawful” regulations.
  • President Trump signs an order to relax showerhead water efficiency standards.
  • Another order opposes state laws that impede his “energy dominance” vision and seeks to invalidate them.
  • Yet another order requires agencies to put maximum 5-year expiration dates into existing energy and environmental laws.
  • EPA says it will review new studies of health outcomes from fluoridated drinking water.
  • Mexico says it will immediately release some water in the Rio Grande basin.
April 1, 2025 seasonal water supply forecast summary. Credit: Colorado Basin River Forecast Center

And lastly, federal forecasts indicate a down year for Colorado River runoff and the river’s already depleted reservoirs.

“These State laws and policies are fundamentally irreconcilable with my Administration’s objective to unleash American energy. They should not stand.” – Executive order from President Donald Trump that takes aim at state climate change laws that limit carbon-emitting energy production. The order instructs the attorney general to identify state laws and policies that the Justice Department believes illegally impede energy projects, and then attempt to halt implementation of the laws. The order mentions nearly every type of energy source except solar and wind.

“The attorney general will prioritize investigating state laws that mention one of the administration’s many ideological bugbears: climate change; environmental, social, and governance initiatives; environmental justice; greenhouse gas emissions; and carbon taxes.:

Any merit to all this? No, says Ted Lamm of UC Berkeley School of Law. Accusations of state overreach in this arena are a “mirage.”

By the Numbers

  • 67 Percent of Average: Most probable runoff into Lake Powell this year from the Colorado River, according to a federal forecast. The report covers the April-July period. The down year is not good news for Lake Powell (33 percent full) or Lake Mead (34 percent).
  • 4.1 Million Barrels Per Day: U.S. crude oil exports in 2024, a new annual record. Europe is now the biggest export market, after its decision in 2022 to ban Russian imports.

News Briefs

Rio Grande Water Negotiations
President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico would carry out “immediate delivery” of some water to the Rio Grande basin, an instance of trade politics influencing water policy, The Hill reports.

Under a 1944 treaty, Mexico is required over five years to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet from its side of the basin. It is far behind in the current cycle, even as deliveries have picked up this year in response to political pressure.

As of April 5, Mexico had delivered 512,604 acre-feet in this cycle.

Eliminating “Unlawful” Regulations
Recent Supreme Court decisions – Sackett (wetlands), Ohio (air emissions), Loper Bright Enterprises (deference to agency expertise), among others – have curtailed the executive branch’s regulatory powers. The White House now wants to institutionalize those rulings.

It will be action by subtraction, quickly.

Trump signed an executive order giving agencies 60 days to draw up a list of current “unlawful and potentially unlawful” regulations and devise a plan to repeal them.

The order directs agencies to repeal these rules without public notice and comment periods, which are generally required by law. The order claims that because these unnamed rules are unlawful, getting rid of them merits an exemption from notice and comment.

Pressure Politics
Ticking a favored topic, Trump also signed an order to rescind Biden-era water conservation regulations for certain high-end showerheads.

The rule restricted multi-nozzle showerheads to a total flow rate of 2.5 gallons per minute, which has been the federal standard for showerheads since 1992. The flow rate could not apply to each nozzle individually, which would multiply water use.

The Trump administration’s previous attempt to allow multi-nozzle showerheads to flow at higher rates was criticized by the plumbing industry. IAPMO, a trade group, argued that plumbing systems in new buildings, which are built for conservation, could be undersized if higher water volumes are allowed.

Sunset Provisions
Another order seeks to cut existing and future regulations in a different way: by adding “sunset provisions” that set an expiration date.

The order directs agencies to insert sunset provisions into bedrock environmental and energy laws such as the Energy Policy Act, Mining Act, Federal Power Act, and Endangered Species Act. The sunset dates are to be between one and five years after the provision is finalized. Regulations can be renewed “as many times as is appropriate, but never to a date more than 5 years in the future” if they are deemed worthy.

Studies and Reports

Cutting Climate Research Funding
The Trump administration is cutting funding for the federal government’s keystone report on climate change in the United States and its impacts, Politico reports.

The White House is cancelling a contract with the firm that oversees the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which conducts the National Climate Assessment. Ending the contract “forever severed” interagency climate change work, one senior official told Politico.

The National Climate Assessment is mandated by Congress, written by hundreds of academic and federal researchers, and summarizes the most recent science on climate change and its consequences for the country.

Coal Executive Order
To assist the dying U.S. coal industry, Trump signed a proclamation that gives coal-fired power plants a two-year reprieve from stricter air pollution standards.

U.S. coal production has fallen off a cliff, down more than half from its peak in 2008, according to government data. The reasons are structural and interrelated: higher production costs, stricter environmental controls, and cheaper competitors.

On the Radar

Fluoride
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency will review scientific information about the health effects of fluoride as it considers potential regulatory action under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The agency will produce “an updated health effects assessment for fluoride.”

A federal judge ruled last year that the agency must update its fluoride regulations due to new research into health risks.

Cybersecurity Drill
The EPA will host a nationwide drill next month to prepare drinking water utilities for a cyberattack.

Sign up for the May 27 drill here.

Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.

Back to Romancing the River: What’s Your Reality? — George Sibley (SibleysRiver.com) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

Credit: USGS

Click the link to read the article on the Sibleys Rivers website (George Sibley):

April 2, 2025

I was chastised by a couple readers after the last post: you’re just giving the Trumpty-Mumpty dynamic duo what it wants by focusing on what it is doing. What we want to know is what this is going to mean for us out here in the arid lands, and thoughts on what we should be doing about that. What does it mean here in the Colorado River region?

This led me to wonder: is focusing too much on what nasty people are doing just another form of surrendering to them? In chess, and probably all other competitive sports, there’s the matter of the ‘impetus’: one player or team of players will achieve the point in a game where they are ‘calling the shots,’ forcing the other player(s) to react to their strategies rather than pursuing the others’ own game plan. Players with that impetus will usually win, so long as they don’t lose that impetus through some misplay of their own.

The Trumpty-Mumpties have certainly seized the impetus in America’s 250-year ‘game’ of trying to work out a collaborative governance for the American nation-state; and our response so far has been railing editorially at them, or suing them, or just kind of watching in shocked silence as they break things. ‘Roll over and play dead,’ was the recommendation of one prominent Democrat for his party; let the Repugnicans dig themselves into a hole they can’t get out of, then get up and kick the debris in on top of them. The trouble with that is the fact that the debris will be our dismantled constitutional government, and as was the case when Humpty-Dumpty had his great fall, all of us (and our horsepower) may not be able to put it back together again. When one of Mumpty’s ‘Space X’ rockets blew up shortly after blastoff a few weeks ago, his company described it as a ‘rapid unplanned disassembly,’ a wonderful bit of euphemistic language. What we are watching happen in our government is a ‘rapid barely planned disassembly,’ giving a little credit to the ‘Project 2025’ planners who knew their Repugnican wet dreams only stood a chance if they hit the ground running and ‘flooded the zone.’

So what can we do besides watch it happen, and express our dismay and horror? While we still can?

One thing we ought to do is to confront our own complicity in what is happening to us. American historian and philosopher Heather Cox Richardson started one of her daily columns (3/21/25) with the recollection of a really interesting commentary on our times reported twenty years ago by journalist Ron Suskind. A commentary that many of us may have encountered before, but it is really worth revisiting in the murky light of what’s happening today – here’s the paragraph from her column:

This is something for us to ‘study,’ the 35-40 million of us who depend to some extent on the water of the Colorado River – First River of the Anthropocene Epoch. Suskind’s unnamed presidential advisor basically articulated the attitude that drove the first century of the Early American Anthropocene – and the development of the Colorado River, one of several places where the imperial business of ‘creating a new reality’ overriding the existing ‘discernible reality’ began. (The Panama Canal and the Columbia River being two other sites for the ‘Early American Anthropocene.’)

The history of the development of the Colorado River in the first two-thirds of the 20th century is the story of how we began to ‘create our own reality,’ and that story is told in the evolution of the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau came into being as the ‘Reclamation Service’ as part of  the ‘Newlands Act’ of 1902. The Service had a modest mission, working with communities of desert homesteaders to develop the irrigation systems that would make their land arable.

The Reclamation Service came into being as part of the United States Geological Survey – very much what Bush’s advisor called a ‘reality-based’ organization, grounded in the scientific belief that ‘people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality.’ The USGS had essentially been given its operating ethos by John Wesley Powell, a consummate scientist whose observations and careful study of the arid lands led him to make policy recommendations as director of the USGS that fell afoul of the West’s industrial movers and shakers, and got him fired from that agency.

The scientists who had escaped the Powell purge, however, continued the ‘reality-based’ scientific discipline Powell had established for the USGS, and that was the science-based agency into which the Reclamation Service was placed in 1902. But the mission of the Reclamation Service was to help farming communities develop irrigation systems – essentially an engineering assignment.

The challenge in the Lower Colorado River deserts, for both the scientists and the engineers in the USGS, was learning to live with a water supply that ran in a flood for two or three months of the late spring and early summer, then became a comparative trickle the rest of year. The scientists and the engineers responded to that challenge in different ways. For the scientist, it was a challenge of adapting crops and plantings to what would grow in flood-mud, and spreading the muddy flood out accordingly. For the engineer, the challenge was to change the water supply, storing it to release it in more manageable full-season flows for growing whatever the farmers wanted to grow.

In short, the challenge was perceived to be either using science to adapt the human culture to whatever nature provided (however erratically), or using engineering and other related skill sets to adapt nature to provide whatever the culture needed or wanted. And in the early 20th century, with America just really learning how to use fossil fuels to construct an industrial civilization like the world had never seen….  We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality….

Perceiving that choice, the Bureau quickly grew impatient with trying to adapt local community irrigation systems to the wild Colorado River. By 1905 they and their emerging technology were ready to spread their wings, take on the imperial challenge of changing the river. In 1905 they stretched their legislated local charge by taking on three projects with a regional scale: a large (for its day) masonry dam on the Salt River to control flooding and store irrigation water for growth in the Phoenix area; an irrigation weir almost a mile wide across the Colorado mainstem above Yuma, Arizona, to keep water levels up for late-season irrigation water; and a five-mile transbasin tunnel in the upper reaches of the river, carrying water from the Gunnison River to the Uncompahgre River valley.

In 1907, halfway through those larger, more regional projects, the Reclamation Service left the Geological Survey, and became the Bureau of Reclamation, an independent agency in the Interior Department. Basically, the engineers left the scientists to their methodological study of ‘discernible reality’; they were ready to roll their own realities. They dreamed of the structures that would break the Colorado River to harness, and the other really big projects that would put the river to work making the desert bloom.

Eugene Clyde LaRue measuring the flow in Nankoweap Creek, 1923. Photo credit: USGS

This never really became a declared war between the scientists and the engineers, but there was a distinct tension. When the seven Colorado River Basin states sat down in 1922 to divide the use of the river’s waters among themselves, they found conflicting opinions on how much water actually flowed in the river on average. Bureau engineers, including Reclamation Commissioner Arthur Powell Davis, were a frequent presence at the Compact Commission meetings; they had a 25-year record of flows at Yuma going back to 1896, showing an average annual flow of just under 18 million acre-feet for that short period. Meanwhile, E.C. LaRue, a USGS hydrologist and geologist, had been working on that flow problem for years, and had done some early work on tree rings and desert evaporation, leading him to believe that flows between 12 and 14 million acre-feet of usable water were a reasonable long range expectation for the river.

LaRue volunteered his assistance to the Compact Commission, but Commission Chair Herbert Hoover (the federal representative on the Commission, and himself an engineer) thought that would be unnecessary, and the Colorado River Compact used Bureau numbers – and within a decade, certainly within the century, the willful river had demonstrated that scientist LaRue’s stodgy old researched numbers were much closer to the real river we have contended with down to the present. River ‘elder’ Eric Kuhn and journalist-historian John Fleck wrote a book, Science Be Dammed, exploring this tension between the scientists and the engineers in creating the Compact, for those interested in a more detailed account of that.

But for my story here – the Bureau did go on to ‘create its new reality.’ The 1928 Boulder Canyon Act, as it unfolded, became a lamp in the darkness of the Great Depression. Private capitalism – probably our least democratic economic engine – had failed utterly to deal with the Depression, but federal funding coupled with private initiative under the direction of the Bureau put thousands of people to work, building not one but three big structures on the Colorado River mainstem: Hoover Dam capable of storing two year’s flow of the river, Parker Dam to provide water for a huge aqueduct to the Los Angeles-San Diego metropolis, and the Imperial Weir Dam and All-American Canal to carry water to the vast reaches of the Imperial Valley – and every drop of water through the dams generating electric power for the Southwest. The desert reality was transformed for – well, maybe not forever, but for the life of the dams, ultimately proscribed by the inflow of mud as the busy river continued its mindlesstask of reducing the Southern Rockies and the Colorado Plateau to sea level peneplains.

But the Bureau did not stop there. After the second World War, under the aegis of the Colorado River Storage Project, the Bureau continued to build big storage dams with canals to carry water out into the high orographic deserts above the canyons and the hot subtropical deserts below the canyons, remaking most of the river – mountain tributaries collected the melted snowpack into rivers, as with all rivers – but then it went into desert ‘distributaries’ distributing the water to vast farms and rapidly growing cities in regions called ‘Death Marches’ by early explorers. That very little freshwater was left to ‘waste’ into the salty ocean was regarded as a victory – until it wasn’t. Another story there.

What we have to confront today, in the Colorado River region (natural basin plus out-of-basin areas served), is the extent to which the engineered new reality is ultimately dragged down and even stalled by the scientist’s dour desert realities the engineers thought could be transcended. It is unfair to blame the Bureau for the apparently unlimited growth of people moving into the river’s region, but the engineer’s ‘Can Do!’ attitude toward that growth has done little until very recently to bring us to confronting the unavoidable collision of unlimited demand on a limited resource – and now, a shrinking resource, given new concerns raised by those relentlessly reality-based scientists.

The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry. Left to right: Leigh Lint, boatman; H.E. Blake, boatman; Frank Word, cook; C.H. Birdseye, expedition leader; R.C. Moore, geologist; R.W. Burchard, topographer; E.C. LaRue, hydraulic engineer; Lewis Freeman, boatman, and Emery Kolb, head boatman. Boatman Leigh Lint, “a beefy athlete who could tear the rowlocks off a boat…absolutely fearless,” later went to college and became an engineer for the USGS. The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry in 1923. (Public domain.)

E.C. LaRue of the USGS warned us back in 1922 that storing the river’s water in big open reservoirs would reduce the supply of available water due to evaporation and bank-storage losses, but that seemed like a reasonable trade for water availability year-round over a river whose three-month flood was mostly lost to the sea anyway. The loss could be written off as ‘surplus’ – until the relentless demand ate up the fictional ‘surplus.’ Now it is suddenly necessary for the Lower Basin to count the ~800,000 acre-feet of evaporation from the Lower Basin reservoirs, canals and fields, as well as their half of the Mexican decree, against their Compact decreed 7.5 million acre-feet. Which they have reluctantly agreed to do – so long as the federal government pays them for not using what was not theirs to use anyway. (money that may be threatened by Mumpty’s DOGE).

And on top of that, there is gradual, general, reluctant acceptance of the fact that the burning of fossil fuels that powers nearly all of our civilization, plus the vast tonnage of cooling concrete that has gone into our great works, plus the gases from an increasingly vicious cycle of expanding wildfires and melting permafrost, are adding gases and heat to our atmosphere that are raising temperatures around the planet and causing changes in the global climate – oops.

I forgot; ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have been officially eradicated from the public discourse. We are  creating another new reality to pile on top of the old new realities we’ve created over the past century plus: We have grown so accustomed to thinking like George Bush’s advisors that we don’t really notice that our newest new reality is just the child’s belief that putting our hands over our eyes will make the real world go away.

So I think that’s what we can do, at least in the Colorado River region: uncover our eyes, and start adjusting our new realities (which are not entirely bad) with the natural realities that still constrain the engineers – as even most of the engineers seem willing to acknowledge. We need to acknowledge that Becky Mitchell’s advice is now counterrevolutionary – ‘We must learn to plan for the river we have, not the river we wish we had.’ To the Trumpty-Mumpties, that’s almost Unamerican, saints be praised.

Whatever we do along those lines, however, it seems necessary that the scientists and engineers work together on it: both acknowledging the wisdom in the scientist looking carefully before the engineers leap – but both also acknowledging that some leaps will be needed….

***

Margaret Chase Smith in 1950:

President Trump’s administration thaws frozen IRA money: But will #Colorado’s electric cooperatives get all the money they were promised? The answer remains unclear — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

The main street in Nucla, located in western Montrose County. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

March 28, 2025

Electrical cooperatives in Colorado were informed before Joe Biden left the White House that they would be getting about $3.5 billion from the federal government via programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Will they? U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced Tuesday that her department was releasing funds previously committed but also described a “course correction.” Just what constitutes a “course correction” will likely not become fully apparent for weeks, perhaps months.

The release said that electrical cooperatives must first revise their project plans to “remove harmful DEIA and far-left climate features.” DEIA stands for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

The announcement by the USDA —the department houses the Rural Utility Services, the agency that works with cooperatives — also said electrical cooperatives would be asked several questions and would need to provide a short narrative description of any proposed changes in their projects.

The revised projects must also align with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 called “Unleashing American Energy.” Just exactly what those revisions need to look like remains unclear. In that executive order Trump rescinded a long list of executive orders issued by former President Joe Biden, including 10 that had to do with climate change.

Trump’s order made no mention of renewable energy but did order agency heads to identify actions that “impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources – with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources…”

“We are as interested to find out as you are,” replied Alex Shelley, who has the public information job at San Miguel Power Association, when I called him Wednesday afternoon. San Miguel expected to get a $9.8 million grant from the New ERA program to construct a 20-megawatt solar project in western Montrose County. That area of Montrose County includes Nucla, Naturita, and Uravan. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association operated Nucla Station, a coal burning plant, until 2019.

In a statement posted on Jan. 23, Brad Zaporski, the chief executive of San Miguel Power, called the project a “shining example of partnership in action to help bolster our rural communities.”

The project, said Shelley, is to be on private land that is not useful for agriculture or anything other than light industry.

Brighton-based United Power was to get $262 million for six solar projects in its service territory in northern Colorado and one other project involving hydroelectricity. About 40% of the service territory is in Wattenberg Field, Colorado’s primary oil and gas producing area.

“I think the story is that the RUS wants to get the money moving to help rural communities,” said Mark Gabriel, the chief executive. “We were given the opportunity to make any edits or resubmit, and we chose not to (make changes to our application).”

The original application, he added, made no mention of diversity or inclusion. It asserted the desire to make United’s members more reliant on local resources and with lower-cost electricity.

Tri-State G&T has the most skin in this game. It provides wholesale electricity for 40 electric cooperatives in a four-state area, including 15 in Colorado. Tri-State in 2024 said it was getting a financial package worth $2.5 billion, most of that in loans of less than 2%. Those low-interest loans will allow it to get out from under higher-interest financing as it prepares to close its coal units in Colorado and Arizona during coming years.

In an October announcement, Tri-State said New ERA funding would support financing for 1,280 megawatts of energy from solar, wind and wind-storage projects, and more than 100 megawatts of stand-alone energy storage.

The company also plans a natural gas plant, preferably in northwest Colorado or conceivably southwest Wyoming.

Tri State expects to reach 70% clean energy by 2030. Within Colorado, this will be an 89% reduction as compared to a 2005 baseline.

“We appreciate the work of Secretary Rollins and her team to advance the program, and we will be reviewing the USDA’s guidance and look forward to continuing our work through their process,” said Tri-State CEO Duane Highley in a statement posted on Wednesday.

In Fort Collins, Jeff Wadsworth was cautious about what the final tally will look like. He’s the chief executive of Poudre Valley REA, which is in line to get $9 million to help pay for two solar-and-storage projects. The grant was through Powering Affordable Clean Energy, or PACE, another program funded by the IRA.

“We are thrilled about this development and look forward to collaborating with the dedicated team at the USDA,” he said initially when asked for a response. In a telephone conversation the next day, however, he said that the full story remains to be written.

Wadsworth is optimistic that Poudre Valley will get its money. Demand for electricity has continued to grow for multiple reasons, and these projects will help Poudre Valley meet that demand. But this grant is not the end-all, be-all for Poudre Valley as it moves forward, he said.

“It helps our ratepayers, who are part of rural Colorado, We are excited about that,” said Wadsworth. “But our path is pretty clear as we move forward.”

Still another perspective comes from Eric Frankowski, the executive director of the Western Clean Energy Campaign.  He believes that despite the “problematic” language of the announcement, the guidance that RUS has issued for the cooperatives has eased a lot of concerns.

“It appears that the process is completely voluntary and that co-ops do not need to do anything. The language says that RUS will NOT approve proposed modifications ‘that affect the scoring of projects that were competitively scored.’ Since community benefits, decarbonization and lowering rates were all integral to how proposals were evaluated, I think we can take that as a good sign,” he wrote in an e-mail.

That guidance can be found here.

“The guidance also says that if awardees do not respond within 30 days requesting a revision, ‘it will be considered that they do not wish to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after the 30 days.’ (emphasis added) It also says that awardees can respond that they are not changing their proposal and processing of payments will begin immediately. Also good signs,” said Frankowski.

“There doesn’t seem to be a pathway where co-ops are punished for staying the course on their clean energy plans,” he added. “Who knows what happens after the 30-day window, but things seem good for now.”

Granby-based Mountain Parks Electric in January announced that it had executed a letter of commitment with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a grant prog ram of $100 million across the next 20 years. The announcement said that the money will be used to help procure power through power-purchase agreements and to advance and promote scholarships and apprenticeship programs. The announcement was made two weeks before Mountain Parks left Tri-State and began getting its wholesale power from Guzman Energy in a 20-year agreement.

Sedalia-based CORE Electric Cooperative hopes for $225 million and Steamboat Springs-based Yampa Valley Electric $50 million. Grand Junction-based Grand Valley Power Lines also expected to get federal funds.

In his statement, Highley credited the work of U.S. Representatives Jeff Hurd, Gabe Evans, Lauren Boebert, all from Colorado, and Gabe Vasquez, of New Mexico, as well as Colorado Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet. Bennet, in particular, had gone to bat for the New ERA provision for cooperatives in the IRA. He spoke in October at Tri-State’s headquarters when a finalized announcement was made.

President Trump’s U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright during #Golden lab visit doubles down on minimizing #ClimateChange — Lindsey Toomer (ColoradoNewsline.com)

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright talks to reporters on April 3, 2025, at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. (Lindsey Toomer/Colorado Newsline)

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Lindsey Toomer):

April 3, 2025

Chris Wright said blaming Marshall Fire on climate change is ‘simply to not look at the data’

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, returning to the Denver area Thursday after he was confirmed as a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, repeatedly minimized the consequences of climate change when speaking to reporters during a press conference. 

Wright, founder of Denver-based fracking services company Liberty Energy, spoke to employees at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden for less than 10 minutes, touching on powering artificial intelligence, electricity production and growth, and supporting national labs. 

Talking to reporters after he spoke to staff, Wright said “emotional, not-fact-based stuff” like targeting hydrocarbons — the main components of climate change-causing fossil fuels — for reductions is “disruptive” and led to higher electricity and energy prices during the Biden administration. 

Wright said that attributing the Marshall Fire — which in 2021 destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County, burned over 6,000 acres, caused more than $2 billion in property damage and killed two people — to climate change is “simply to not look at the data.” He said wildfires “peaked over 100 years ago” and that the U.S. government could better manage wildfire devastation through forest management to control wood fuels. 

“Calling climate change a crisis is just to say ‘I’m not going to look at the science, I’m not going to look at the economics, I’m just going to run with the politics,’” Wright said. 

Drier and hotter conditions in Colorado are widely viewed as having contributed to the severity of the Marshall Fire, making the potential for loss greater. Investigators said one of the fire’s origins was a spark from an Xcel Energy power line, and the utility company has since faced several lawsuits.

Wright has previously expressed deep skepticism of the scientific consensus that climate change is a global crisis.

Department layoffs

The Department of Energy, along with many other federal agencies, laid off probationary staff members, and a judge then ordered the department reinstate them. The Trump administration asked all department heads to plan for additional cuts through a “reduction in force” process. 

Wright did not say how many more employees within his department could expect to lose their jobs, but he said downsizing is an “ongoing process” and that “it would be downright irresponsible if we weren’t doing this.” He said department staff grew by 20% over the four years before he took over, and “what we got out of it was a little bit more restrictions in energy production around the country.” 

Energy Department leadership told workers this week it will undergo “restructuring.” Wright said each department will undergo “a very detailed organization, bottom up.” 

“Every part of the government, we have to look at, how can we make government services as good as they are today or better, but at lower cost,” Wright said. “Like I do with my business, we have to look carefully at the business of where we are today and how can we deliver services at least as good as we are today at lower cost.”

In Wright’s talk to staff at the NREL, he applauded the work and dedication of the employees he spoke with and said their work is “critical.”

“The range of stuff I saw today, different people that spoke on different technologies, incredibly impressive, passionate, smart people that you can see from their heart that believe in what they’re doing, that love what they’re doing,” Wright said. 

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, right, talks to reporters alongside National Renewable Energy Laboratory Director Martin Keller on April 3, 2025, at the NREL campus in Golden. (Lindsey Toomer/Colorado Newsline)

After he was appointed, Wright said one of his first moves was to bring together leaders of the national labs from around the country to ask what they needed to make their work more efficient. Last week, he issued a secretarial order making changes he said resulted from those conversations. 

Artificial intelligence is “the next energy-intensive manufacturing industry,” Wright said in Golden, and the U.S. should not outsource that energy production to other countries. He said he issued a request for information Thursday to gauge developer interest in building on DOE land around the country to power AI.  

“We have land at all of our national labs and DOE sites around the country — who wants to come build a data center, build (a) nearby energy system, use the technology and smarts we got at the national lab … Maybe donate some computing power to us, or some lease money for the lands that’ll help fund our research,” Wright said. “We’re trying to find different ways to make the labs faster, smarter, better and more self-sufficient, more funding from other sources as well.” 

Wright said he would make “a commercial arrangement” with private data center companies that want to use federal land, because “that’s where the capital is.” 

NREL is responsible for researching and developing renewable energy systems and improving energy efficiency in the U.S. It has another campus in Arvada, as well as one in Alaska and in Washington, D.C., with 3,675 employees across the four locations.

10,000 years of CO2, during the time that human civilization arose. Credit: https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/

On President Trump & tirades; April 1 #snowpack update; Also, Oil executives blast White House econ policies — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Horse near Aneth. Photo illustration by Jonathan P. Thompson

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

April 1, 2025

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

Last week, one of the Land Desk’s more conservative readers cancelled his paid subscription. He wrote that he appreciated my passion for public lands, but was no longer interested in reading what he called a “tirade against Trump.”

This type of thing happens all the time in this business, and, unlike Elon Musk, I’m not looking for your pity. But I was a bit saddened, given that this person had been a paid subscriber since the Land Desk was launched, and because I really do appreciate having readers and commenters from across the political spectrum.

Besides, while I’m prone to a rant now and then, I do think “tirade” is taking it a little too far. Anyway, my point in telling y’all this is to let you know that writing about Trump’s shenanigans every dispatch is just about the last thing I want to be doing with my time. I’d much rather be delving into old maps, getting into the nuances of Western water, exploring the history of floods and droughts and wildfires, taking contrarian views on the housing crisis, or dissecting the contradictions of oil and gas markets. And I will continue to do all of that.

At the same time, it’s impossible for me to ignore the barrage of destruction, corruption, chaos, authoritarianism, and incompetence emanating from the White House. My passion for public lands — and for justice, truth, reason, morality, decency, intelligence, and kindness — demands that I document these egregious acts, and do my part to resist them, even if it is just by informing my readership about what’s happening.

I am not impartial, not by any means. I am partial to the planet and its survival, toward my fellow human beings, toward peace and justice and compassion and truth. [ed. emphasis mine] I am not, however, partisan: I will scrutinize Democrats and Republicans equally, fact-check the left and the right, and give credit where credit is due — even to Donald Trump.

***

Hopi tribal members cross Havasu Creek. Photo credit: From the Earth Studio

And on that note: The Trump administration appears to have unfrozen nearly $4.2 million in federal funding to help the Hopi Tribe build a solar-powered microgrid to run two remote wells and associated infrastructure that will provide water to Upper and Lower Moenkopi. The funding was approved by the Biden Energy Department, Trump froze it as part of a larger stop on Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction law money, but now it has been released. So good on you, Donny!

Now, how about you direct your Environmental Protection Agency to release funding for the Walker River Paiute Tribe to expand access to clean water and electric power infrastructure, and for Navajo Power’s program to bring solar to off-grid homes.

***

Though it may be inadvertent, Trump’s economic policies may ultimately benefit the environment in some ways. The haphazard, on-again, off-again tariffs, for example, along with the gutting of the federal government’s workforce, have sent the stock market into a tailspin. Meanwhile, the tariffs — along with reciprocal tariffs levied by the U.S.’s trading partners — will increase prices on most consumer goods. People will buy less, travel less, which will mean less pollution and environmental impacts.

***

And yet more kudos for Trump! Seriously. Despite all of his bluster, Trump has managed to really piss off oil and gas executives — the same ones that were throwing money at his campaign just a few months ago — and possibly dampen drilling on public lands.

See, the thing about tariffs is that they very well may raise the price you pay for gasoline (depending on where your local refinery gets its crude oil), but the economy-dampening part of tariffs actually brings down the price of oil, while also raising the cost of steel pipes and other supplies. That’s no bueno for petroleum companies, whose profit margins are directly proportional to the price of crude.

Many of these folks won’t criticize Trump in public, given his vindictive and authoritarian leanings, but give them the cover of anonymity, as a Dallas Federal Reserve survey did, and they go off on the White House’s herky-jerky non-policies. Here’s a sampling:

There was only one mention of regulations getting in the way of the oil business, and that wasn’t federal rules, but state ones:

Well, there you have it, folks.

***

Oh, and these oil companies might also be angry that the MAGAs are all buying Teslas — or at least pretending to — in order to “own the libs.” Which is pretty funny, given the amount of gibberish Trump devoted to dissing electric vehicles during his campaign rallies. Tesla also stands to benefit the most from Trump’s tariffs, another dig at the internal combustion fans.

***

Maybe the national parks will be a bit less crowded this summer, as well, as international travel ebbs.

Anyone who’s traveled the Western national park service knows that they are popular with overseas visitors. On a single grocery run at the Page, Arizona, Safeway recently, I heard no fewer than three different languages spoken, in addition to Navajo and English, and that was in the off-season. In 2018 (the last year that data is available), more than 14 million international travelers visited U.S. national parks and monuments. About 14% of the Grand Canyon National Parks’ visitors were from overseas, with about 6% of Zion’s visitation from overseas.

Tourism Economics is predicting that international travel to the U.S. will be down significantly this year, thanks not only to the administration’s hostile economic moves, but also “polarizing Trump administration policies and rhetoric.” Also, there’s that thing where travelers have been detained at the border, even thrown in jail, simply for trying to get a visa. This decline undoubtedly will impact Western U.S. tourism and national park and monument visitation numbers. Not good for the tourism economy, but it might give the parks a much needed rest.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

It’s first-of-the-month snowpack update time again, and this will likely be the last of the season barring some freak climatic shift over the next several weeks. Snowpack levels typically peak in mid-elevation areas in mid- to late-March, and in the high country in mid- to late-April, meaning we are now headed into spring runoff season.

Generally speaking, it’s looking like runoff will be average to paltry, depending on which side of the snow-divide your watershed falls. It is a very jagged line, by the way, with places in the west and north having average to above average snowpack, while the southern-Interior West generally had a super dry winter. But even within those areas there are sort of outliers: The Grand Traverse ski race between Aspen and Crested Butte was canceled due to lack of snow for the first time in its 26-year history.

And there’s big variations over short distances. Red Mountain Pass is still just below median, for example, while the southern San Juan Mountains, just a few dozen miles away, are experiencing a severely dry winter.

Before I get to the graphics, however, a quick note. The snowpack and precipitation plots I run here come from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. It’s just one of the valuable services they provide. I haven’t found any stats on whether DOGE has gone after NRCS’s staff, yet. But the DOGE website says it has or will cancel the leases for the following NRCS offices. Whether they and their staffs will simply go away, be absorbed into another facility, or what, isn’t disclosed.

  • Natural Resource Conservation Service offices slated for lease cancellations: Missoula, Montana; Wasilla and Fairbanks, Alaska; Logan, Utah; Gallup and Raton, New Mexico; Yuma, Arizona; Dayton, Puyallup, and Renton, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Woodland, Yreka, Salinas, Oxnard, and Blythe, California.

Hopefully the staff of these offices and services they provide will endure.

Now to the snowpack plots. I included the plots for 2021 and 2023 because those were the most recent big and crappy years for snowpack.

The watersheds that feed Lake Powell are not in terrible shape, sitting at 88% of the median just six days before the typical peak. However, levels are lower than they were in 2021 at this time, and 2021 was not a good year for the Colorado River. Source: NRCS.
The North Fork of the Gunnison has followed a snow accumulation pattern similar to the Upper Colorado River’s.
Red Mountain Pass is one of the few bright spots in the Four Corners region. Snow levels have tracked right around normal for most of the winter. Though it’s now down to 90% of median, there are potentially still over three weeks left in the snow accumulation season, meaning an above-average season is still possible; snow is forecast for much of this week there.
This SNOTEL site, in the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, is the comeback story of the year, rebounding from ultra-dry to average over the course of several weeks. It’s one of the only sites in Arizona that received measurable snow accumulation this season.
The drought has spread and intensified over the last year.
And it doesn’t look like it will get better anytime soon …

If you want to know more about the drought and the Colorado River basin, I’d suggest checking out the Wright-Ingraham Institute’s interactive Drought Interfaces app. It’s super cool and informative.