Please forgive me for being confused about the state of our nation, about the actions of our president, and about the reaction to it.
See, a decade ago, Western state politicians — particularly conservative Republicans and, if you will, Sagebrush Rebels — were up in arms, sometimes literally, about something they called “federal overreach.” In most cases, it referred to actions by the Bureau of Land Management and U.S. Forest Service that ranged from closing roads or prohibiting motorized vehicles in sensitive areas to attempting to round up cattle that had been grazing illegally on public land to arresting suspected pothunters to enforcing laws on federal land.
When a herd of assault-weapon toting self-proclaimed militia showed up at Cliven Bundy’s Bunkerville ranch in 2014, they were resisting federal overreach; when Phil Lyman led a flock of ATV riders down Recapture Canyon in Utah, he was protesting federal overreach; when Ammon and Ryan Bundy led the siege of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, they were protesting federal overreach.
In 2014, congressional Republicans even held a hearing on what they called “Threats, Intimidation, and Bullying by Federal Land Managing Agencies.” In this case, according to witnesses, “bullying” included enforcing the Endangered Species Act and failing to coordinate with the local sheriff.
Indeed, in 2011 Dennis Spruell, then-sheriff of Montezuma County, Colorado, threatened to arrest land management officials who dared to close roads across federal lands. He continued: “The sheriff is the ultimate law enforcement authority. I have an obligation to protect my county from enemies, both foreign and domestic. So if the federal government comes in and violates the law, it’s my responsibility to make sure it stops.”
A couple of years later, 28 Utah sheriffs wrote a letter to President Obama threatening violent revolt if he were to enact gun control. “No federal official will be permitted to descend upon our constituents and take from them what the Bill of Rights — in particular Amendment II — has given them,” they wrote. “We, like you, swore a solemn oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and we are prepared to trade our lives for the preservation of its traditional interpretation.”
All of which is a very wordy lead in to a question: Where the hell is the concern about federal overreach now?
The Trump administration is figuratively shredding the U.S. Constitution on an almost daily basis; masked federal ICE agents are terrorizing immigrants and citizens, alike; the administration is forcing utilities to keep operating coal plants; and not only has it sent the National Guard and even the Marines into Democratic-led cities unbidden in clear violation of states rights, but Trump himself declared “war” on an American city in a social media post. This makes a bit of BLM “overreach” look like child’s play.
If anything would warrant a response from the so-called militia, or the folks who oppose gun control because it would hamper their ability to resist tyranny, it would be this. Or so it seems. After all, sending the Marines to Los Angeles appears to have violated the Posse Comitatus Act, which makes it illegal “to employ any part of the Army of the United States, as a posse comitatus, or otherwise, for the purpose of executing the laws.” This Reconstruction-era law is often used by “constitutional” sheriffs and federal overreach crowd to bolster their positions.
So where’s Ryan Bundy and his pocket Constitution? Where are Richard Mack and the “constitutional sheriffs” and the folks that used to rail about posse comitatus? Where’s Phil Lyman, who repeatedly called the Obama administration and the BLM “despotic” for daring to increase protections on public lands and for sending in law enforcement officers to arrest folks who violated the Antiquities Act?
They are, it turns out, nowhere to be found. The reason is obvious: All of the “federal overreach” grievance was performative. An act based not on principle, but on false victimhood, on a sense of entitlement, on a selfish desire the liberty to do what they please, not for Liberty as a principle or creed. So long as ICE doesn’t come after them, their cattle, their guns, they don’t have any beef with federal overreach, no matter how egregious or harmful — especially if it’s done in the name of retribution and “owning the libs.”
But there is an exception, and a surprising one to me. Ammon Bundy, who led the armed takeover of the wildlife refuge in Oregon, told Mother Jones’ Stephanie Mencimer that he actually finds the military occupation of cities “very concerning.” I’ll admit I didn’t catch Mencimer’s story, which was published a month ago, until I was writing this piece, and was looking for possible Bundy reactions. Ammon told her he has been relatively subdued (he hasn’t occupied any federal facilities yet) in response to Trump because he’s got enough legal troubles as it is 1.
While I’m no supporter of Ammon Bundy, you got to hand it to him for his consistency. He rightly considers the ICE raids as an affront to the founding principles of the United States. And he points out — apparently referring to his one-time allies — “It has been my sad experience that most people will set principles, justice, and good aside to spite those whom they despise.” You got that one right. [ed. emphasis mine]
Sage Brush Rebellion folks, Recapture Canyon, Utah Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson
Like millions of people from around the globe, I watched the images of coup-pawns invading the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 with shock, rage, and sadness. But, like many others, I wasn’t surprised. After all, almost exactly five years earlier we had been transfixed and alarmed by another violent attack on an American institution, the occupation of the Malheur…
1 *Ammon Bundy was one of the few people to speak out against the Trump administration and FBI head Kash Patel for honoring the FBI agents who shot and killed LaVoy Finicum amid the Malheur occupation, and for fabricating the circumstances surrounding the incident.
House passes a water and energy spending bill for fiscal year 2026 that boosts Army Corps construction budget.
White House uses an illegal maneuver to retract an additional $3.2 billion in foreign aid.
With Congress having returned from summer break, committees will hold hearings this week on water infrastructure, AI, energy efficiency, permitting reform, and the state of federal forests.
And lastly, NOAA expands a national flood mapping project..
“Energy strength is national strength – fueling jobs, innovation, and resilience in every community – and no longer will traditional energy sources be punished for being affordable and reliable.” – Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK) in a written statement after the House passed a fiscal year 2026 spending bill for water and energy agencies. Cole did not mention the failures of natural gas plants in the winter storm in 2021 that forced multi-day blackouts in Texas and led to a number of deaths. Nor that solar photovoltaic is the cheapest source of new electricity in the U.S.
By the Numbers
$3.2 Billion: Foreign aid spending retracted by Donald Trump using a “pocket rescission” that withholds spending late in the fiscal year. The retracted funds are from USAID’s development assistance program, which is meant for poverty reduction. But the administration opposes spending on things like climate adaptation abroad. The Government Accountability Office, an independent watchdog for Congress, calls the pocket rescission an illegal maneuver.
News Briefs
2026 Budget The 2026 fiscal year is just over three weeks away, and Congress is making typical slow progress on the budget bills.
The bill increases the Army Corps construction budget by nearly 40 percent, to $2.55 billion. That is for waterway navigation, flood protection, and ecosystem restoration. It also adds 10 percent to the operations and maintenance budget.
Energy efficiency and renewable energy programs, however, were cut 47 percent.
The bill does not include the EPA, which is handled in a separate piece of legislation.
Not making the September 30 deadline and needing to pass a continuing resolution to keep the government running is the way Congress now works. According to Pew Research, the last year that a budget was completed on time was 1997.
Studies and Reports
Flood Maps Real-time and predictive flood maps from NOAA are now available for 60 percent of the U.S. population.
The mapping service provides a model-based picture of areas currently underwater from river flooding. It also forecasts the area that will be flooded in the upcoming five days.
Regions that are not yet depicted in the maps include the intermountain West and the northern Plains.
Irrigation Organizations The USDA’s Economic Research Service published a report on the structure of irrigation organizations in the country. These are a mix of Bureau of Indian Affairs projects, mutual companies, unincorporated mutuals, and special-purpose government units.
On the Radar
California Water Meeting On September 9, the Bureau of Reclamation will hold its quarterly public meeting to provide updates on the coordinated operation of the two big canals in the state: the State Water Project and the Central Valley Project.
The meeting will run from 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. Pacific. Join via Microsoft Teams using this link. The meeting ID is 262 767 956 444 and the passcode is f74jJg
House Hearings On September 9, a House Natural Resources subcommittee will hold a hearing on the nation’s federal forests.
Also on September 9, a House Energy and Commerce subcommittee will discuss energy efficiency standards for buildings. Republicans have criticized efficiency standards for both water and energy as a waste of money.
And also on September 10, a Transportation and Infrastructure subcommittee will hold a hearing on implementation of previous iterations of the Water Resources Development Act.
Senate Hearing On September 10, a Senate Commerce subcommittee will discuss the Trump administration’s AI plan. The witness is Michael Kratsios, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
Screenshot from Kestrel Kunz’s presentation at the CRWUA 2023 Annual Conference.
Can I just make a little confession: I don’t like constantly writing about the Republicans’ relentless attacks on Americans’ public lands, the agencies that oversee them, and the regulations designed to protect them. I’d much rather be delivering some good news, or pondering some historical mystery or old maps, or explaining the complicated workings of the Colorado River’s plumbing, the power grid, or oil and gas drilling.
And yet, the Trump administration and the GOP simply won’t let up, so neither can I. For those of you who come here for not-so-gloomy content, please stick around. The nightmare has to end sometime. Doesn’t it? (And just to be clear, much more heinous things are happening outside the public lands/environmental sphere like, you know, the loss of democracy and the rapid slide into authoritarianism — but this is the Land Desk, so I’ll stick to land coverage, mostly.)
The latest developments include:
In an unprecedented move, House Republicans this week voted to wield the Congressional Review Act to “disapprove” Bureau of Land Management Resource Management Plans in Alaska, Montana, and North Dakota. It is the first time the CRA — which allows Congress to revoke recently implemented administrative rules — has been used to eviscerate an RMP. That’s in part because RMPs are not considered “rules,” according to a January opinion by the Interior Department’s Solicitor. The Senate is expected to vote on the resolutions soon. These plans provide a framework for managing large swaths of land and authorize the BLM to permit mining, drilling, grazing, and other activities. They endeavor to balance the agency’s multiple-use mandate with environmental protections, guiding resource extraction and development away from sensitive areas and toward more appropriate ones, for example. They can take years to develop, and incorporate science, legal considerations, court orders, tribal consultation, and input from local officials and the general public.
Overturning the three RMPs in question would reopen: 2 million acres in Montana’s Miles City Field Office planning area to future coal leasing; 4 million acres to coal leasing and 213,000 acres to oil and gas leasing in North Dakota; and 13.3 million acres in Alaska’s Central Yukon planning area to oil and gas leasing and mining claims. The Alaska move would also revive the Ambler Access Project, a proposed 211-mile road through the Brooks Range foothills and the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve that would provide mining companies access to copper and zinc deposits.
But it also throws management of these planning areas, covering some 30 million acres, into question. While the Miles City resolution only targets a court-ordered, coal leasing-specific amendment to the RMP, the others include the entire RMPs, and don’t say anything about whether the agency is supposed to revert back to the older — sorely outdated (the 2024 Central Yukon RMP replaced a 1986 version) — RMPs, or simply try to manage the land without RMPs (which they are not authorized to do). The CRA not only revokes the “rules,” but also bans the agency from issuing a rule in “substantially the same form.” That will severely limit the BLM in efforts to replace the revoked RMPs, and could hinder it from issuing any permits or authorizations at all.
Using the CRA in this way (as if RMPs were “rules”) also blows a cloud of uncertainty over every other RMP implemented since 1996, when the CRA was passed. First off, it makes other Biden-era RMPs subject to being revoked by Congress. More broadly, if Resource Management Plans are deemed subject to the CRA, wrote Interior Solicitor Robert Anderson in January, it would create “uncertainty as to whether post-1996 RMPs have ever gone into effect, which also raises questions as to the validity of implementation decisions issued pursuant to these plans …”
Prior to the House vote, 31 law professors and public land experts called on Congress to refrain from using the CRA to revoke RMPs. “The resulting uncertainty could trigger an endless cycle of litigation,” they wrote, “effectively freezing the ability of the BLM and other agencies to manage public lands for years, if not decades to come.”
The Interior Department has been on a bit of a tear recently, especially when it comes to blocking solar and wind projects and encouraging fossil fuel extraction, especially coal. Over the last month, the department has:
Fast-tracked the environmental impact statement for Canyon Fuel Company’s application to expand the Skyline Mine in Utah via lease modifications.
Approved Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s bid to expand its Antelope Coal Mine in the Powder River Basin to an additional 857 federal acres.
Moved forward with coal lease sales in Utah (the Little Eccles tract as requested by Canyon Fuel Company) and Montana (at the Navajo Transitional Energy Company’s Spring Creek Mine).
The Trump administration is moving to rescind the 2001 Roadless Rule, which limits new roadbuilding in parts of the National Forest that are currently roadless. It would open up nearly 45 million acres of public land to new roadbuilding and, by extension, new logging, mining, and drilling, including in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska. Colorado’s and Idaho’s state-specific roadless rules would be spared from this move. At least for now.
It’s important to remember that this rule didn’t and doesn’t shut down roads — of which there are already far too many criss-crossing our public lands — it just keeps new ones from being built. That’s important because roads are, well, pretty darned bad for forests and deserts and everywhere else.
Roads fragment landscapes, they enhance erosion, and liberate dust to be carried away by the wind, degrading air quality. Vehicles traveling on the roads leak oil and other nasty fluids, while also spewing exhaust and disrupting the natural sounds of the wild. A study found that a toxicant used to protect car-tires is winding up in streams, killing salmon. Most problematic: a backcountry road serves as a giant hypodermic syringe, injecting humanity and accoutrements deep into the backcountry, where they can do more damage to otherwise difficult-to-access, sensitive areas.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum issued new restrictions on the Land and Water Conservation Fund yesterday, possibly hampering the program’s effectiveness.Still, it could have been worse.
Congress established the LWCF in 1964 to further conservation and enhance recreation by using offshore oil and gas drilling revenues to acquire private land in or near national parks, wilderness areas and forests, and then making it public. It has been popular with both parties, and in 2020, Congress passed the Great American Outdoors Act with bipartisan support, permanently funding the LWCF to the tune of $900 million annually and creating a separate account for national park and public lands maintenance. After the bill’s sponsor, Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., showed Trump a photo of a spectacular parcel acquired by the fund in Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, the president agreed to sign the bill into law.
Initially Trump and Burgum wanted to divert hundreds of millions of dollars from the fund and use it to maintain infrastructure in national parks and other public lands. But they backed off, perhaps because they knew congressional Republicans would bear the brunt of the backlash. Instead, Burgum tacked a bunch of restrictions on how the funds can be used, which could slow or nix proposed land acquisitions.
A while back I mentioned the new surfing wave on the Animas River in Farmington and how that has been rendered un-surfable by low streamflows. I don’t have any good news to report on that, but I do have a link to a live webcam of the surf wave, which is pretty cool and a good way to check in on the lower Animas River from anywhere at anytime!
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
Some readers have asked what they can do about data centers, AI, and their profligate energy and water use. There aren’t any easy answers. You can’t exactly boycott data centers unless you’re willing to remove yourself from the modern age. After all, virtually the entire digital world requires data centers to operate, including me sending you this newsletter. Abstaining from AI might be a little easier, except that you’re often using it without knowing, simply because the tech companies employ it as a default (try doing a Google search and you’ll see that the first result is usually an AI-generated answer; you can opt out by adding “-ai” after your search query, but you’re still using a data center).
I would recommend learning as much as you can about the technology and how much water and power each one uses. This piece from The Conversation provides a good breakdown of some of these things, and is a good place to start.
Here’s a crazy one: Texas firm BorderPlex Digital Assets is looking to build what they say will be a $165 billion data center complex in Doña Ana County, New Mexico. Holy frijole, that’s a lot of cash (all of the property in neighboring El Paso County is currently valued at $95 billion, according to El Paso Matters.
The developers are claiming Project Jupiter, as it’s called, would create 750 new jobs, use minimal amounts of water, and would be powered by a dedicated, on-site microgrid. But the details are sparse on exactly how they would cool the facilities (which is the where most of the water use comes from) and what their electricity generation sources would be. Solar? Natural gas? Nuclear?
Seems like these details should be made public before the county commissioners enter into a deal with the developers in which they would issue industrial revenue bonds and exempt the facility from property taxes in exchange for a $300 million payment. El Paso Matters has more on the plan.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
EPA withdraws a proposed rule to reduce wastewater pollution from slaughterhouses.
EPA will seek to cut federal protections for wetlands.
USDA will prepare an environmental impact statement for repealing the Roadless Rule that shields national forests and grasslands from logging and road building.
New Mexico and Texas agree to Rio Grande lawsuit settlement.
CBO reports on U.S. agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions.
EPA proposes allowing Wyoming to manage its own coal-waste program.
Interior Department completes work on soil burn severity assessment for a large fire north of the Grand Canyon.
And lastly, the Department of Energy supports a feasibility study for what would be one of the country’s largest pumped storage hydropower projects.
“The seven states need to recognize that there is pain and sacrifice all over the place and try and get past that visceral perception and figure out what they can do to work together to provide water reliability for the 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River.” – Scott Cameron, senior adviser to the interior secretary, speaking at a meeting of the Glen Canyon Dam Adaptive Management Work Group on August 20. Cameron, who said he is “cautiously optimistic” about a seven-state deal on managing the river before the current operating rules expire at the end of next year, said the basin needs to look for strategies to reduce consumption and “to facilitate transfers and exchanges.”
By the Numbers
10 Percent: Share of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions generated by agriculture, according to a Congressional Budget Office report. The main pollutants in this total are nitrous oxide, a byproduct of fertilizer, and methane, which comes from livestock manure and cow burps.
$21 Million: Research and development funding from the Department of Energy for hydropower projects. The largest portion ($7.1 million) is to investigate the feasibility of a massive pumped storage hydropower project proposed for Navajo Nation land. Pumped storage toggles water between a lower and upper reservoir, a system that functions like a battery. New Mexico State University is the co-investigator for Carrizo Four Corners, the 1,500-megawatt pumped storage project that could provide 70 hours of energy storage, far more than the several hours of storage provided by the largest lithium-ion batteries.
News Briefs
Slaughterhouse Waste The Environmental Protection Agency will not strengthen wastewater discharge rules for meat and poultry producers. The rules were proposed during the Biden administration.
To justify the action, the agency cited its desire to lower food prices and reduce industry operating costs.
The Biden-era rule intended to reduce the volume of pollutants that enter waterways from some 3,879 slaughterhouses nationally. Those pollutants include nitrogen, phosphorus, organic matter, fecal coliform, and grease. They contribute to harmful algal blooms and low-oxygen dead zones in rivers, lakes, and coastal ecosystems.
A Narrow Wetlands Definition The EPA is preparing to release a rule by the end of the year that would shrink the number of wetlands with federal protection under the Clean Water Act, E&E News reports.
According to a slide presentation seen by E&E, the agency “would regulate wetlands only if they meet a two-part test: They would need to contain surface water throughout the ‘wet season,’ and they would need to be abutting and touching a river, stream or other waterbody that also flows throughout the wet season.”
The changes are in response to a 2023 Supreme Court ruling that provided narrower, but undefined criteria for determining which water bodies have federal protection.
Rio Grande Settlement By signing a settlement agreement, New Mexico, Texas, and the Justice Department are closer to ending a long-running dispute over water rights from the Rio Grande and the groundwater pumping that affects river flows, Inside Climate News reports.
“The settlement package includes new formulas to calculate how much water each entity is owed; an agreement for New Mexico to reduce groundwater depletion, and changes to the operating manual for the Bureau of Reclamation’s Rio Grande Project.”
Roadless Rule The U.S. Department of Agriculture is pushing ahead with its attempt to undo a 24-year-old rule that prevents logging and road building in “roadless” areas of national forests and grasslands.
Rescinding the Roadless Rule, which was adopted in the last month of the Clinton administration, will affect more than 44 million acres, mostly in 10 western states.
The department will prepare an environmental impact statement for its intent to repeal the rule. It argues that more local control over land management decisions are needed.
Comments are due September 19. Submit them via http://www.regulations.gov using docket number FS-2025-0001.
Studies and Reports
Dragon Bravo Fire Burn Severity An Interior Department team completed an evaluation of the soil burn severity of the Dragon Bravo Fire, which has burned across more than 149,000 acres north of the Grand Canyon.
The fire severely burned the soils on just over 2 percent of the acres. Another 26 percent was moderately burned. The most severe burns cook the soil, which increases surface runoff after storms. Erosion and downstream floods can be the result.
Emergency Alert System Improvements The Federal Communication Commission is beginning the process to assess and potentially upgrade the nation’s emergency alert systems that local agencies use to inform residents about natural hazards like floods and fires.
The commission is taking public comments through September 25. Submit them hereusing docket number 25-224.
Wyoming Coal Waste The EPA wants to grant more states the authority to regulate waste products from burning coal for electricity. Wyoming is the latest state to seek this power, called primacy.
The agency is proposing to approve Wyoming’s bid to oversee its coal ash permitting program.
A public meeting will be held October 30. Public comments on the proposed approval are due November 3. Details are in the above link.
Three states currently have primacy. North Dakota’s application is being reviewed.
Federal Water Tap is a weekly digest spotting trends in U.S. government water policy. To get more water news, follow Circle of Blue on Twitter and sign up for our newsletter.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
August 26, 2025
🤖 Data Center Watch 👾
What I’m about to write is strange, even a little surreal, even to me. It seems over the top, hyperbolic, and alarmist, all things I try to avoid in my writing (unless I’m going for satire). But here it is: The Big Data Center Buildup is transforming the West (and other regions) as quickly and radically as the post-war Big Buildup of coal plants and other power infrastructure in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s.
See what I mean by hyperbolic? After all, data centers are just big box stores filled with walls of computer, processors, servers, and other equipment rather than cheap plastic items. How transformative could they really be?
Very, it turns out. As I’ve written here before, data centers use huge amounts of energy and water, and if they keep sprouting like weeds in business parks and rural areas, then they very well could not only hamper, but reverse the transition away from fossil fuels.
Tech bros will certainly say I’m being hysterical, and point to the latest estimates showing that each AI query uses a tiny fraction of the energy and water that a person consumes by doing other cyberspace activities or, for that matter, simply existing in modern times. Google, for example, says a “median” Gemini text query uses .24 watt-hours of electricity, which is about the same as watching 9 seconds of television, or microwaving for 1 second, or running a refrigerator for six seconds. And growing the beef for a single hamburger uses hundreds of times more water than hundreds of AI queries.
As far as I can tell, these figures are accurate. But what do they really tell us? I suppose we can feel a bit less guilty about succumbing to the temptation to use that iPhone AI thingy to identify something we photograph, or for asking ChatGPT to pen a song. It has no bearing, however, on what’s playing out on the ground, which is a sort of colonization of the power grid by larger and larger server farms.
I closely follow energy-related news as part of my job, and hardly a day goes by when I don’t encounter a story about the growing electricity demand from new data centers and utilities scrambling to keep up. Less than a decade ago, most Western utilities were expecting power consumption to plateau or even begin decreasing by now.
In 2018, for example, California utility regulators approved a plan to shutter Diablo Canyon’s two nuclear reactors in 2024 and 2025. Doing so would deprive the state’s grid of enough juice to power some 1.7 million homes. But Pacific Gas & Electric, the plant’s operator, figured it wouldn’t be a problem, since demand was expected to decline over time due to efficiency gains and more rooftop solar, and they could cover the rest with new renewables.
Instead, demand has increased substantially on PG&E’s grid since then, in large part due to new data centers in Silicon Valley, and it’s likely to continue to balloon over the next couple of decades. This forecast-blowing turnaround has prompted PG&E to toss out its old resource plans, work on acquiring more energy generation, and delay Diablo Canyon’s retirement for at least another five years. The pattern is being repeated all over the West with alarming regularity. It seems as if no place is safe from the invasion.
Some recent examples:
In late July, PG&E said it expects 10 gigawatts of new data center capacity to connect to its grid over the next ten years. Ten gigawatts, or 10,000 megawatts, is about one-fourth of the total demand on the California grid on a hot summer’s day, or equivalent to about five Diablo Canyons. It’s a crapload of power, in other words, and there’s no way they’re going to serve that kind of demand growth with just solar and wind, especially since a certain administration is doing all it can to stop all solar and wind from being built. It’s also notable because it’s a 20% increase in projected data center capacity since May.
NorthWestern Energy signed on to provide up to 1,000 MW of power — or nearly all of the utility’s generating capacity — to Quantica Infrastructure’s AI data center under development in Montana’s Yellowstone County. This would require the utility to either construct or purchase additional power, which could lead to higher rates for their existing customers. Now NorthWestern is proposing to merge with Black Hills Corp., another electricity and gas utility, saying the combined utility would be better positioned to meet rising power demand from, you guessed it, new data centers.
Xcel Energy expects to spend about $22 billion in the next 15 years to meet new data centers’ projected power demand in Colorado, potentially doubling or even tripling legacy customers’ rates. Also of concern: If the projections are overblown, Xcel could end up building a bunch of new generation that’s not needed, leaving the utility and its customers with a bunch of stranded assets.
Wyoming officials have worked to lure data centers and cryptocurrency firms to the state, and it seems to be working. Earlier this month energy firm Tallgrass proposed building an 1,800 MW data center, along with dedicated gas-fired and renewable power facilities, near Cheyenne. That adds to Meta’s facility in Cheyenne and the 1,200 MW natural gas-powered Prometheus Hyperscale data center under development in Evanston. Observers say electricity demand from these centers could transform the physical and regulatory utility landscape and potentially drive up costs for “legacy” customers.
New Mexico utilities are struggling to meet growing demand from an increasing number of data centers, while also complying with the state’s Energy Transition Act’s requirements for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.
Numerous companies are eyeing Delta, Utah, as a site for new data centers. This is in part because land is cheap there. But also because it is home to the Intermountain Power Project, a massive coal plant built during the Big Buildup. The plant is scheduled to be converted to run off natural gas and, ultimately, hydrogen, but Utah lawmakers want at least one of its units to continue to burn coal. They just need a buyer for the dirty power: Enter data centers. Fibernet MercuryDelta is looking to construct the 20-million-square-foot Delta Gigasite there; and Creekstone Energy plans to manage 10 gigawatts of capacity there, with power coming from coal, solar, and natural gas.
And Arizona’s largest utilities say demand from planned new data centers could increase total power load by 300% over current levels. Recently, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep burning coal at Four Corners Power Plant beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement to help meet this growing demand.
Sometimes the tech firms will purchase renewable power or build their own solar, wind, or geothermal facilities. But in most cases, they rely partly or wholly on fossil fuel generation, whether it’s from the grid — which is still largely dominated by natural gas and coal in many places — or from dedicated generators. While a lot of solar is still being added to the grid, it isn’t enough to keep up with rapidly growing demand. Plus, it may not last. The GOP phased out federal tax credits for wind and solar. And the Trump administration killed the Solar for All program that funded rooftop solar for lower-income households, and crippled the REAP program, which helps farmers install solar panels. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has vowed to make it as difficult as possible to develop solar and wind on federal lands.
What that means is that we’re likely to see another Big Buildup for the cyber age. It will include single new data centers that span nearly 500 acres and consume more power than all of the homes of Montana and Wyoming combined. And it will include the generating facilities to run the servers and to keep them cool. In the absence of policies limiting fossil fuel burning and preventing cost shifts to existing customers, we’re all going to pay the price.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
Bullfrog Creek and the Little Rockies, Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
When I was a kid, I collected pinback buttons, political and otherwise. Most of you probably know what that is, but for the youngs out there, it’s basically an analog meme you pin to your clothing to let folks know which political candidate or other cause you might support.
I’m pretty sure I had a “John Anderson for President” button. My parents supported the Independent candidate in the 1980 election because he had been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Jimmy Carter, while championing environmental preservation, had supercharged the fossil fuel industries in the West, which ravaged landscapes and economies, losing their support. I had a couple of buttons from the early Snowdown celebrations in Durango, and one from Wolverton Mountain Days, a funky event held at the Durango nordic center whose motto was: “Track, Telly, Twinkie,” or something along those lines. Maybe the little collection included a “Gilbert Slade for County Commissioner,” that I would have picked up at one of Slade’s Democratic Party goat roasts out on the Dryside.
But perhaps the most intriguing one was small, dark blue or black, with a bold white typeface declaring: “Fight Blight / Burn a Billboard Tonight.” I probably had to ask an adult what blight meant, though the second part I understood. It was, perhaps, my first encounter with the concept of monkey-wrenching, or sabotaging equipment or structures or billboards as a form of protest, usually with environmental motivations.
This would have been shortly after Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published (50 years ago this month), in which Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug did some billboard burning of their own before joining up with Seldom Seen and George Hayduke and moving on to bigger acts of sabotage. But the button’s text preceded the novel. The slogan was a favorite of David Brower, according to John McPhee’s “Encounters of the Archdruid,” which ran in the New Yorker in 1971.
Though I wouldn’t find out until much later, it turns out my father lived out the slogan during his younger days in Silverton, Colorado.
***
Up until the 1950s, Silverton was a full-on mining town, with a little bit of tourism on top. Following World War II, however, the last big mine, the Shenandoah-Dives, shut down. The local economy, sputtered and gasped, ushering in what Silvertonians would come to call the “Black Decade.”
Desperate, the townsfolk turned to tourism, capitalizing on a Hollywood-fueled, global fascination with the Wild West of American mythology. The Durango-to-Silverton stretch of railroad switched from hauling ore to carrying sightseers, and almost overnight Silverton morphed from mining town to a facsimile of a Hollywood version of a place that never existed. In order to lure motorists, some local businesses installed billboards along Highway 550 as it dropped into town from Molas Pass.
My parents arrived in Silverton in the 1960s. Mining had come back in force, with Standard Metals’ American Tunnel facilitating the re-opening of the fabled Sunnyside Mine. Yet the tourism industry and its cheesy theatrics persisted, much to the disgust of my parents and their peers, who were members of a sort of rural Western intelligentsia, drawn there by the mountains, the wildness, the culture, the history, and perhaps most of all, the authenticity of the community. They saw the tchotchke-peddling economy as the antithesis of the richer, more real mining culture.
In July 1963, Terry Marshall summed up the sentiment in a Silverton Standard editorial on the surreal scene that unfolded every day at “train time.”
Ultimately, the town would pass statutes and rules that reined in the carnival atmosphere. Yet the billboards on 550 remained and fell into disrepair, and efforts to have the highway department take them down apparently went nowhere. One day in the late 1960s — the story goes 1 — my father was telling his cousin about his frustration with the situation, not just at how ugly the billboards were, but at the powerlessness to do anything about it. This relative (who will remain nameless), suggested in his sanguine way: “Let’s just burn it.”
And so, on one dark night, that’s exactly what they did, with my mother possibly driving the get-away car, nearly a decade before the fictional George Hayduke sabotaged the equipment building the road through Comb Ridge. My father and accomplices were never caught. Indeed, the billboard was so damned ugly that maybe nobody cared.
***
People who knew or knew of my father might find it incredible that he would go to this extreme. He was a diplomat and uniter, someone who could bring together disparate factions to benefit the community. He also had a strong moral compass and cared deeply about this land and its communities, and would do what he could to defend it — within reason — even if it may have skirted the law just a little bit.
I know this because when I was maybe 12 or 13, I went camping with my dad and his friend and the friend’s kid. It was way up near Raplee Ridge, in southeastern Utah, looking down into the San Juan River, on a dusty two-track. On the way to the campsite, we noticed some survey flags sticking up from the sparse and rocky earth.
This would have been the early 1980s, when the Carter-era quest for “energy independence” was still in full-force, and miners and drillers were ripping apart the Western landscape for whatever uranium, coal, oil and gas, or oil shale they could find. My young heart ached at the realization that the stakes marked a future extraction site, that soon the bulldozers and the drill rigs would show up and tear the earth apart and suck out whatever minerals dwelled down there.
On the way back, the adults stopped the car near the site, told us kids to stay put, got out, walked over to the stakes, methodically pulled them out of the ground, and threw them over the edge of the cliff. Then they got back in and we drove away, without saying anything else about it. It was a soothing site to witness, even from the remove of the old car.
The site was never developed or drilled or mined, though I’m guessing that had less to do with this little act of sabotage than with the fact that the energy booms all faded shortly thereafter. For them, however, it was a significant act of resistance, and perhaps of love for the Place. Maybe just as importantly, they were defying the powerlessness we feel in the face of the churning gears of progress and greed, apathy and cruelty.
***
The Monkey Wrench Gang is often considered monkey-wrenching’s literary debut. It’s not. Two years before Abbey published his book, there was Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die, which followed a trio on a Florida-to-Idaho road trip in a quest to blow up a dam.
Harrison’s protagonist is named Tim, a Hayduke-esque guy just back from a couple tours in Vietnam, scarred in more ways than one and with a hankering for booze and pills to ease the pain. The story’s narrator, a bit of a cad with relationship issues, is on a fishing trip and escapist odyssey in Florida’s Keys when he encounters Tim. During a drinking session, the narrator tells Tim offhandedly that there’s a dam in the Grand Canyon, or at least they are planning one, pushing Tim into a melancholic slump. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “it will fill up with water.”
Tim is immediately fixated by the idea, noting that he has never seen the Grand Canyon. The narrator “had seen Glen Canyon years ago before it was literally drowned and liked it better but any comparison was absurd with such splendors.” After a little more thought, he notes, casually: “We probably ought to blow up the goddamn thing.”
Tim takes the idea and runs with it, though it isn’t entirely clear what his motives are. Is he truly looking to defend the environment and free the Colorado River? Is he seeking to punish those who deigned dam up something as sacred as the Grand Canyon? Or is he merely lashing out at the general injustice of the world, hoping to be heard among all the cruel noise?
Whatever it is, the narrator gets caught up in it, too, maybe just to have a bit of purpose beyond baking in the sun and waiting for the fish to bite. When Tim suggests a trip West, the narrator hesitates and says only if they return quickly. But as the story progresses he becomes more invested in the act, even if it is only a means for pursuing the alluring Sylvia, Tim’s on-again-off-again girlfriend.
When they discover there is no dam in the Grand Canyon, the narrator refuses to abandon the mission, and suggests they instead decommission an earthen dam on a tributary of the Clearwater in Idaho, “where a wealthy rancher ruined a good steelhead stream … out of greed and contempt for the natural world.” Once the new target is picked, the narrator feels “strong and clean and very moral. Heroic, in fact.” 2
***
A Good Day to Die may have preceded and even inspired the Monkey Wrench Gang, but the latter was far more widely read and influential. Abbey’s classic was published 50 years ago this month, inspiring many acts of low- and high-level eco-sabotage in the decades that followed. And in 1985, Bill Haywood and Dave Foreman published a manual for Abbey’s acolytes called Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.
Monkeywrenchers pulled up survey stakes by the dozen, spiked trees to halt logging projects, cut commercial fishing drift nets, dumped sand and corn syrup into bulldozers’ gas tanks and crankcases, vandalized ski-lift supports, cut power to uranium mines, and plotted to topple transmission towers carrying electricity from nuclear plants. Some were caught. Others were not.
In the late 1990s, factions of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front took it up a notch by torching a Bureau of Land Management wild horse captivity facility in Burns, Oregon. Then, in 1998, they burned down several structures at the Vail Ski Resort in an effort to block the ski area expansion and its deleterious effects on lynx habitat.
The ski area recovered and expanded, despite an estimated $24 million worth of damage. Direct environmental action, however, took a hit as federal law enforcement (and corporate interests) began throwing around the term “eco-terrorist,” the connotations of which became far more grim after 9/11 3. The FBI then declared monkeywrenching to be one of the nation’s leading domestic terror threats, surpassing even right-wing militia groups, despite the fact that the saboteurs only damage property and make a point of not harming humans or other living beings.
This put quite a damper on environmental direct action, since even pulling up a few survey stakes might get you labeled a terrorist and tossed in the clink — or even Guantanamo Bay — for years. Monkeywrenching, however, did not die. In 2016, for example, a crew of “Valve Turners” managed to shut down several major oil pipelines in an attempt to slow fossil fuel burning and bring attention to the climate crisis (Michelle Nijhuis wrote a terrific piece on this in 2018). Otherwise there have been very few high-profile direct-action eco-sabotage cases, at least from what I can gather.
***
Monkeywrenching is on my mind not because it’s MWG’s half-century birthday or even because the White House, Congress, and the courts have been occupied by authoritarians, oligarchs, and their enablers, who value profit over everything else, especially the environment. I’ve actually been pondering it for several months, since long before Trump was elected.
A couple of things sparked this line of thought. First, it seems as if there’s a bit of a literary revival of monkeywrenching. It’s one of the methods employed by climate activists in Stephen Markey’s excellent novel The Deluge. And it is the main theme of the film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is a fictional rendering of Andreas Malm’s non-fiction treatise of the same name.
I began to write that these books and films are Monkey Wrench Gangs for the global warming age. But I don’t think that’s quite right. The tone of the newer book and film is far different — more urgent and somber — than MWG or a Good Day to Die. And the motives of the protagonists are also more serious and deep, if you will. Pipeline’s characters, for example, mostly were direct victims of the fossil fuel industry, making their sabotage a form of self-defense, while the Deluge’s eco-saboteurs see themselves as warriors fighting for the planet’s very survival.
It’s not surprising that eco-sabotage is experiencing a revival, even if it’s only fictional. The urgency of a warming climate is becoming acute, and yet the powers that be are diddling their thumbs. More and more people are frustrated and fed up with the lugubrious process of fighting climate change and environmental destruction in legal and legitimate ways. Even when the Democrats control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, they rarely are able to take more than a half-step forward policy-wise, only to see their incremental progress obliterated by Trump, the MAGA-dominated Congress, and a runaway Supreme Court within weeks after taking power.
Now the Trump administration is even precluding public input for major mines, oil and gas drilling, and other developments on public lands, all in the name of a bogus “energy emergency.” They are literally blocking the public’s legal avenues for making a difference, leaving concerned citizens with little choice but to take more direct action.
What is surprising to me is that a new wave of eco-sabotage has not made it from the screen and page to real life. 4 Instead, climate activists are throwing soup, paint, and other stuff at prominent artworks, hoping to bring attention to their cause. They are gluing themselves to the road and disrupting bicycle races, from the World Championships in Scotland to the Tour de France, and Just Stop Oil even defaced Charles Darwin’s graves.
The activists and their supporters claim that these actions raise public awareness. That may be so, but awareness of what, exactly? How does disrupting a bike race, of all things, reduce fossil fuel combustion? How does defacing a painting — even if only “symbolically” — relate to environmental destruction? And what’s with targeting Darwin’s grave? While I appreciate the zeal, I can’t help but wonder: If you’re going to vandalize something and risk jail time, why not do something that makes a direct and immediate difference — even if only temporarily?
When the narrator in a Good Day to Die decides to get rid of the dam in Idaho, he is hit with a moment of moral clarity. I suspect it has to do with the directness of his planned action. He sees a problem, a fish-harming dam, and sets about to solve it in the most logical and direct way possible: blowing it up — preferably without harming anybody. He’s not looking to send a message, to make a symbolic gesture, or raise awareness. He’s just trying to fix something that’s wrong, not unlike burning an atrocious billboard or surreptitiously removing some survey stakes from a remote area or destroying a pipeline that defiles the land and carries planet-killing fossil fuels.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that anyone go out and do anything illegal. I’m just saying that when a person’s home — whether that’s a house, a community, a Place, or the entire planet — comes under attack, it shouldn’t be surprising that they would go to extreme lengths to defend it.
Four Corners Power Plant. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
For the last several years, the coal industry in the Western U.S. has been suffering from what I call the Big Breakdown — as opposed to the Big Buildup of the 1960s and 1970s, when coal power plants and mines popped up all over the Colorado Plateau and beyond. Now, it appears that the proliferation of energy-intensive data centers is stalling the Breakdown, maybe even reversing it. Last week, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico running — and polluting — for another seven years beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement.
The coal-burning extension is part of the state’s largest utility’s plan to shift its climate goal from becoming zero carbon by 2050 to carbon neutral. While that sounds like a mere semantic switch, its on-the-ground effects will be significant. Along with the coal plant news, APS and the state’s other largest utilities are going in on a new natural gas pipeline from the Permian Basin so it can increase fossil fuel generation rather than pivoting entirely to solar, wind, battery energy storage, and other carbon-free sources.
APS officials say the shift is necessary to meet growing power demand. While population growth and increasingly hot temperatures play a role in the ever-larger load on the grid, the crop of new energy-intensive data centers sprouting in the Phoenix area is a principle driver. The utility is also likely reacting to the Trump administration’s fondness for fossil fuels and disdain for renewables.
The Four Corners plant and its accompanying Navajo Mine were constructed about 15 miles west of Farmington in the early 1960s by a consortium of utilities led by APS and Utah Construction & Mining Co, a subsidiary of Kennecott, a global mining firm. It was the flagship of a much larger fleet that would include the San Juan, Navajo, Mojave, Cholla, Coronado, and Escalante plants. Mojave was shuttered in 2005, with the other big plants closing down more recently (Coronado will be converted to natural gas). That leaves just Four Corners, which was supposed to be shuttered in 2031, or even sooner, if Public Service Company of New Mexico were able to get out of its 13% stake before then.
But over the last few years, utilities have been second-guessing plans to decommission the aging behemoths as data centers have sprouted across the region, significantly increasing demand on the power grid. Over the last week, both Salt River Project and APS have set new peak power demand records as both residents and data centers crank up the coolers to offset extreme heat. Demand is projected to grow significantly over the next decade, mostly due to new data centers. It’s the Big Buildup all over again, only this time it’s high-tech server farms sprouting all over the place, with power generating sources struggling to keep up.
1 *I didn’t hear this story until after my father died, so this is all second-hand and the details may be a bit off.
2 I won’t tell you what happens. If you read the book, you should be warned that reviewers of the time sneered at it for being too macho, too crude, having too much drug and alcohol use, “adolescent,” and so forth. Maybe that’s all true, but I liked it the first time I read it decades ago, and I still liked it when I read it again recently.
3 * The term was apparently coined in the 1980s by Ron Arnold, the founder of the anti-environment Wise Use Movement.
4** Right-wing nationalist attacks on the power grid are not, in my mind, a form of monkeywrenching. Their goal is to disrupt and harm society, including humans, not to stop environmental damage or even make a political protest.
Jeff Hurd, the U.S. representative from western Colorado, met this week with first responders and residents from a region where multiple wildfires are raging. The Lee Fire had become the fifth-largest wildfire in state history and was threatening the town of Rifle, where officials had to evacuate a state prison in the fire’s potential path.
In a social media post about the visits, Hurd thanked local authorities and community members for their response to the fires tearing across his district, and he vowed to “be here for the long haul to help recover.”
But nowhere did he offer the most appropriate gesture: an apology.
Hurd, along with the other three Republican members of Colorado’s U.S. House delegation, has promoted drill-baby-drill policies as part of a Trumpist “energy dominance” agenda, even though those policies crank up the greenhouse gas emissions that guarantee more megafires in Colorado. The only posture truly available to Hurd when he meets constituents is contrition. The only plausible message is, “I was wrong.”
Rising global temperatures are increasing the risk and frequency of extreme weather across the globe. The Southwest is being transformed by aridification amid the worst drought in 1,200 years. There is no scientific doubt that the primary cause of climate change is the combustion of fossil fuels.
In Colorado, this means bigger, fiercer wildfires and a fire season that no longer respects warm-month limits. The most destructive wildfire in state history, the Marshall Fire in 2021 in Boulder County, occurred five days after Christmas. The state’s 20 biggest fires have all occurred since the turn of the century. The three biggest came in 2020, when one of them, East Troublesome, grew so ferocious it leapt over the Continental Divide. A 2021 study found that hotter, drier conditions in the American West are causing fires, such as East Troublesome, to reach high elevations that were previously too wet to burn.
“And they are burning at rates unprecedented in recent fire history,” the authors wrote. “While historical fire suppression and other forest management practices play a role in the West’s worsening fire problem, the high-elevation forests we studied have had little human intervention. The results provide a clear indication that climate change is enabling these normally wet forests to burn.”
Colorado is especially exposed. A huge part of the state is the site of one of the largest areas of the highest temperature spikes in the lower 48 states. It covers Hurd’s hometown of Grand Junction and much of his district. Either Hurd is oblivious to the science or he’s cynically chosen to side with oil and gas industry interests.
During the freshman Hurd’s campaign last year, he sometimes seemed to align with an “all of the above” energy policy, which at least purports to include renewables, but he also signaled a strong preference for fossil fuel extraction over wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. He even champions coal, the most damaging of fossil fuels, a position he’s reinforced as recently as April.
Hurd found himself in an awkward spot once he was in the House as MAGA extremism sought to demolish the all-of-the-above plank and demonize renewables. He and U.S. Rep. Gabe Evans of Fort Lupton were among 21 Republicans who urged colleagues not to eliminate energy tax credits, which support wind and solar jobs and development in Colorado. (The other two House members from Colorado, Lauren Boebert and Jeff Crank, left their names off the letter.) But they both voted to pass the recent Trump megabill, which eliminated the credits.
Hurd insists he believes climate change is real. But this just makes his approach all the more hypocritical. For example, he repeats the pro-carbon talking point that since fossil fuel in other countries is dirtier than America’s the U.S. should maximize production.
“If you genuinely care about reducing global greenhouse gas emissions, then you ought to support getting as much energy out of Colorado as possible. That includes not only the clean coal that we have, but also natural gas,” he told CPR in September.
But that’s like saying that since people are going to abuse fentanyl even though it’s deadly, America should manufacture a superior product to preempt China’s more dangerous supply. An immoral practice should be avoided because it’s immoral, not pursued with improvements.
If he has any doubt that prioritizing carbon-based energy is immoral, Hurd should take a closer look at the environmental catastrophe unfolding in his own district. He often cites the jobs at risk in the transition to renewable energy, but this short-sighted perspective ignores substantial state greening efforts to responsibly transition local economies, and it misses the larger risk that whole regions of a cooked Earth will be uninhabitable.
The megafires in Hurd’s district are exposing “energy dominance” as disastrously self-defeating.
During both the Obama and Biden presidencies, Republicans and the fossil fuel industry often accused the administration of waging a “war on energy.” It was a demonstrably false allegation. The most either of the Democrats did to attack the energy industry was to incrementally increase common sense regulations and environmental protections, which apparently did little to hamper energy development. The so-called shale revolution, when “fracking” opened up huge new reserves of tight oil and gas, began under Obama, and truly came to fruition under Biden, when domestic oil and gas production reached new record highs. Meanwhile, Biden’s Interior Department approved dozens of utility-scale solar and wind and long-delayed transmission projects on public lands.
But now the Trump administration is, in fact, waging a very real war on energy — renewable energy, that is, namely wind and solar power. They’ve frozen and even clawed back funds for projects, killed federal clean energy tax credits, subjected wind and solar projects on public lands to heightened reviews, and eliminated wind energy leasing areas off Oregon’s coast. And they’ve done it all as America is supposedly gripped by an “energy emergency.”
Now, the Interior Department has gone even further with a new order that threatens to kill all new renewable power development on federal lands. I know there are some readers out there who might applaud this, since so many of our public lands are not suited for sprawling utility-scale solar or wind developments. But this order — deceptively and cynically titled, “Managing Federal Energy Resources and Protecting the Environment” — would potentially replace proposed wind and solar projects with coal or uranium mines and/or power plants, oil and gas fields, or other non-renewable energy projects.
The order requires land management agencies, when reviewing proposed solar or wind energy projects, to consider “a reasonable range of alternatives that includes projects with capacity densities meeting or exceeding that of the proposed project.”
Capacity density is basically the amount of energy a project can generate per acre. According to the Interior Department’s calculations (we’ll get to the flaws there in a moment), the capacity density (megawatts/acre) for various power sources are:
Advanced nuclear reactor: 33.17 MW/acre
Combined cycle gas plant: 5.4 to 24.42 MW/acre (depending on configuration)
In other words, wind and solar are the big losers, taking up far more space to generate the same amount of electricity as, say, a nuclear plant. According to the new order, this raises the question of “whether the use of federal lands for any wind and solar projects is consistent with the law.”
This isn’t a new argument: The specter of “renewable energy sprawl” has long been wielded to push back against solar and wind development. And certainly the amount of space a project takes up should be one of many considerations in whether to permit it. But should it really have more weight than the amount of damage the project would inflict? How about pollutants emitted per megawatt, or amount of harm to people, the climate, and the environment per megawatt? Is there consideration for the fact that there is a lot of space between the turbines within a wind facility that is minimally affected? And why doesn’t their chart include hydroelectric, which has the lowest capacity density of all?
Also, the Interior Department’s calculations are a bit fishy, or at least incomplete. They say they are based on a 2023 Sargent & Lundy report commissioned by the Energy Information Administration. The report is not on capacity density, but rather the costs of building and operating various power generating technologies. When determining the acreage of the nuclear and fossil fuel plants, they do not take into account the land required for fuel production, which can be extensive.
The supercritical coal plant referenced in the report, for example, would require a mere 600 acres. Yet, the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico — along with its associated Navajo Mine (current mining areas as well as reclaimed areas), Morgan Lake, and coal combustion waste disposal facilities — covers (and wrecks) some 15,000 acres. That acreage will continue to grow for as long as the plant operates, since the mine and waste dumps will continue to expand. Compare that to the 2,400 acres covered by the nearby San Juan solar plant.
I’d also argue that if the goal is to get the most energy out of every acre of public land (which is a silly goal, but whatever), then they should figure in the amount of energy the proposed project consumes. Coal mining and oil and gas drilling require large amounts of electricity and petroleum (along with human labor, which is also a form of energy), as does transporting coal and gas by train and pipeline. Uranium enrichment, which is necessary to produce reactor fuel, is extremely power-intensive.
None of this really matters to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, however. That’s because he knows we’re not really in an “energy emergency,” and that it is merely a fabricated excuse to give more handouts and regulatory relief to his fossil fuel-industry buddies and to get revenge on Trump’s political opponents by punishing cleaner energy sources.
Proposed utility-scale solar and wind facilities on public lands should by all means be scrutinized and subjected to the same reviews as any other projects, contrary to what the Abundance faction might believe. The projects should be denied if their impacts outweigh the benefits, with bonus benefit-points for solar or wind projects that displace or replace coal or natural gas generation.
But judging the projects based on a virtually meaningless metric is not only spiteful, unfair, and stupid, but it also will needlessly hamper the fight against health-harming pollution and climate change. And that’s simply irresponsible, at best. [ed. emphasis mine]
⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️
Speaking of fake energy emergencies … In May, the Bureau of Land Management completed its environmental review and approval of the Velvet-Wood uranium mine in Utah’s Lisbon Valley in just 11 days. The rush, sans public input, ostensibly was necessary to get the mine online quickly to address the supposed uranium shortage.
The mine’s proponent, Anfield Resources, apparently doesn’t share the Trump administration’s sense of urgency. At the end of April, the Utah Division of Oil, Gas, and Mining asked Anfield for more information on its application to commence large mining operations, which was deemed technically incomplete. Anfield has yet to respond. The company is also not rushing forward to get state approval for its water treatment plant permit or to reopen its Shootaring Mill near Ticaboo, where the Velvet-Wood’s uranium would be processed.
In other words, the fast-tracked permitting was merely a ruse, intended to bypass environmental regulations and public input, not to expedite the project, itself.
***
Photo-illustration of the Animas River a few days after the spill from the air. Jonathan P. Thompson photo and illustration.
It’s the tenth anniversary of the Gold King Mine blowout that affected the Animas and San Juan rivers in Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah. A few folks have asked if I’m going to write anything about it — since I did write a book about it — but I don’t think there’s much more to say, really.
The Gold King Mine continues to drain acidic, heavy metal-laden water — though it is being treated before it’s released into the watershed — and neighboring mines continue to do the same (though they aren’t being treated). Superfund designation hasn’t been the boon to water quality that some hoped for, nor did it stigmatize Silverton as many feared it would (property values continue to soar into the unreachable zone).
While the event did bring more attention to the problem of abandoned mine sites (even though the Gold King wasn’t technically abandoned when it blew out), and injected “acid mine drainage” into the public’s vocabulary, it hasn’t led to mining law reform or any widespread effort to address the issue. That said, Congress finally did pass a Good Samaritan bill, that might clear the way for volunteer groups to do some additional cleanup without being sued for it. Still, they need funding, and that’s in short supply these days.
If you’d like to read more on it, check out this piece by Peter Butler. And you can check out past stories in the Land Desk for more information (links below, but they are behind the paywall). Better yet, go down to your local bookstore and buy River of Lost Souls.
This image was taken during the peak outflow from the Gold King Mine spill at 10:57 a.m. Aug. 5, 2015. The waste-rock dump can be seen eroding on the right. Federal investigators placed blame for the blowout squarely on engineering errors made by the Environmental Protection Agency’s-contracted company in a 132-page report released Thursday [October 22, 2015]
An image of the Sharp Fire near Cahone, Colorado, from the Benchmark fire lookout. Source: Watch Duty.
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
Fire season is really heating up, along with the summer temperatures. The relatively dry spring was followed by higher than normal temperatures in July and zero to minimal precipitation in many places, turning low- and mid-elevation forests to kindling. Officials working the Leroux Fire west of Paonia said the relative humidity was just 2%, contributing to rapid fire growth.
The Leroux blaze was just one of many new starts on Colorado’s Western Slope over the last several days. The Sharp Canyon Fire north of Cahone, Colorado, grew rapidly to 400 acres on Monday, forcing evacuations, but it seems to have quieted down overnight. The Lee and Elk fires in Rio Blanco County blew up to 13,000 and 7,700 acres, respectively, over a couple of days. The Middle Mesa Fire east of Navajo Reservoir and just south of the Colorado-New Mexico line grew to 2,500 acres as of Monday night.
Meanwhile, the Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has lived up to its name, reaching 126,445 acres as of Tuesday morning with only 13% containment a month after it ignited.
The situation is probably going to get worse before it gets better. The National Weather Service has issued red flag warnings for parts of Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and Wyoming, with extreme heat warnings in parts of Arizona and southern California. The mercury in Moab is expected to reach 100° F or more every day this week, and there’s no significant rainfall in sight.
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…in his second administration, President Donald Trump is not just approaching climate science with skepticism. Instead, his administration is moving to destroy the methods by which his or any future administration can respond to climate change. These moves, which are sure to be challenged in court, extend far beyond Trump’s well-documented antipathy toward solar and wind energy and his pledges to drill ever more oil even though the US is already the world’s largest oil producer. His Environmental Protection Agency announced plans this week to declare that greenhouse gas emissions do not endanger humans, a move meant to pull the rug out from under nearly all environmental regulation related to the climate. But that’s just one data point. There are many others:
Instead of continuing a push away from coal, the Trump administration wants to do a U-turn; Trump has signed executive orders intended to boost the coal industry and has ordered the EPA to end federal limits on coal- and gas-fired power-plant pollution that’s been tied to climate change.
Tax credits for electric vehicles persisted during Trump’s first term before they were expanded during Joe Biden’s presidency. Now, Republicans are abruptly ending them next month.
The administration is also ending Biden-era US government incentives to bring renewable energy projects online, a move that actually appears to be driving up the cost of electricity.
Republicans in Congress and Trump enacted legislation to strip California of its authority to ban the sale of new gas-powered vehicles beginning in 2035.
Trump is also expected to overturn national tailpipe standards enacted under Biden’s EPA and is also to challenge California’s long-held power to regulate tailpipe emissions.
The authors of a congressionally mandated report on climate change were all fired; previous versions of the report, the National Climate Assessment, which showed likely effects from climate change across the country, have been hidden from view on government websites.
Other countries, large and small, will gather in Brazil later this year for a consequential meeting on how the world should respond to climate change. Rather than play a leading role — or any role at all — the US will not attend.
Click the link to read the article on The Land Desk (Jonathan P. Thompson):
August 1, 2025
🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫
The monsoon is on its way, apparently, but seems to be delivering more lightning than rain to many areas that are grappling with wildfires. Meanwhile, the drought is intensifying and spreading in almost all parts of the West, especially in the deep Southwest.
Streamflows are dropping, too. The Animas River in Durango has fallen to about 200 cubic feet per second, and it’s only at about half that by the time it gets to Farmington, New Mexico’s, new surfing wave. The Rio Grande already dried up in Albuquerque a couple of weeks ago (but got a good boost from a thunderstorm early this morning). WyoFile reports that the Snake, Wind, and Bear Rivers are all at record low flows for this date, even though the snowpack was about average this winter.
And, of course, the wildfires continue to burn. The Dragon Bravo Fire on the Grand Canyon’s North Rim has burned through 112,000 acres so far, with only 9% containment. The Monroe Canyon Fire in southwestern Utah is at 55,642 acres with 7% containment, and is causing power outages in surrounding communities. The Turner Gulch Fire northeast of Gateway is still growing “due to continuous hot and dry conditions and erratic winds.” And the Elkhorn Fire north of Durango has settled down a bit at 317 acres, but officials worry forecasted hot and dry conditions could reawaken it.
Below are some satellite moisture index maps, with blue being moist and red indicating dryness. The top image shows Dove Creek and areas south of there. This was dryland farming country for many years (Pinto Bean Capital of the World), but irrigation from McPhee Reservoir on the Dolores River was later extended out to Dove Creek. Problem is, their water rights are junior to the farmers in the Montezuma Valley near Cortez, so when reservoir levels are low, they tend to get less irrigation water. Here you can see the difference between 2023 (on the left), when snow, river, and reservoir levels were high, and this year (right), when they are not. What stands out to me is that some fields are still being irrigated this year, despite the drought, as is indicated by the circles of bright blue. But there are more fallow fields now, and the areas around the fields are especially dry.
Here are two more images showing the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe’s farms south of Ute Mountain in 2023 compared to 2025. Again, some irrigation is still reaching the fields, but apparently far less, given the number of fields that are apparently fallow.
📈 Data Center Watch 📊
The Land Desk is adding another beat to its roster, the Data Center Watch, which is just to say that I’ll be covering data centers and their economic and environmental ramifications a bit more frequently from here on out. Why? Because they currently are proliferating throughout the West: There are 93 data centers in the Phoenix area, 54 in the greater Denver area, and eight in Albuquerque, with many more on their way. And every one of them uses outsized quantities of electricity and water, straining power grids, and throwing utilities’ resource planning into disarray.
Cheyenne, Wyoming, is already home to six data centers. That doesn’t count Meta’s $800 million center that is under construction there, or energy firm Tallgrass’s proposed facility that would pull 1,800 megawatts of electricity from new, dedicated natural gas plants and renewable power installations (presumably solar and wind). Down in Tucson, city officials are considering Amazon Web Services’ proposed Project Blue, a massive complex that is poised to consume up to 2,000 acre-feet of water per year and become Tucson Electric Power’s largest single customer.
In Alaska, a company is looking to build a large data center and a dedicated natural gas plant that would run off of oilfield methane. Numerous data centers can be found along the banks of the Columbia River, drawn there in part by the relatively cheap and abundant hydropower. In Montana, a proposed data center would use all of the powergenerated by NorthWestern Energy’s existing resources. And Pacific Gas & Electric expects new data centers in Silicon Valley to drive a 10 GW increase in electricity demand over the next decade, which is about one-third of today’s forecast peak demand for California’s grid.
The biggest concern with these sprawling warehouses packed with processors is their power consumption. Each one can draw as much electricity as a small city — the proposed Cheyenne server farm would use more power than all of the state’s households. As recently as half a decade ago, most utilities weren’t expecting the speed and magnitude of the big data center buildout. Now it’s hitting hard, and coinciding with increased demand from a growing number of electric vehicles and electrified homes, and utilities are scrambling to bring new power sources online to meet the projected demand growth. This includes geothermal, wind, and solar power — each with impacts of their own — but also new natural gas plants and even small nuclear reactors. Some utilities are cancelling plans to retire coal plants to keep enough generating capacity online.
In other words, the data center boom is likely to radically reshape the energy landscape of the West, and will spur more debates over the costs of this sort of economic development and the impacts our cyber-world has on the environment and humanity.
📈 Data Dump 📊
In some ways, I guess you could say that as alfalfa is to the Colorado River, data centers are to the Western power grid: they both suck up a lot of the resources. That doesn’t make them bad. Alfalfa mostly goes to dairy cows, which make cheese and ice cream and other really good things. Data centers power annoying AI art, sure, but they also make everything internet possible, including me sending this newsletter to you.
Anyway, it’s worth tracking both — alfalfa and data centers, I mean. So here’s a quick update on hay exports from the U.S. (which includes alfalfa and other hay), as well as a look at acreage planted in alfalfa (excl. other hay) over time. Exports seem to have peaked in 2022 and are now in decline. Nevertheless, sending alfalfa and other hay overseas is big business.
🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡
You might think that our federal agencies under Trump would be content to wreck the environment and trample civil liberties in a quiet, not-so-noticeable way. But no, of course not: They’re so proud of their racism and fetishization of fossil fuels that they plaster social media with their proclamations thereof — they are trolling us, in other words.
Above are just two recent examples. In the first one, the Department of Energy fawns over a sparkling chunk of coal. In the other, the Department of Homeland Security posts an 1872 painting by John Gast titled “American Progress.”
Both are gross in their own way.
What the hell kind of sexualization of coal — i.e. “She is the moment” — are they going for in that first one? Friggin’ perverts, if you ask me.
As for the second, it glorifies the crimes the American military and white colonial settlers perpetrated against the Indigenous peoples in order to get more Lebensraum, one might say (it makes sense to use Hitler’s term given that he was inspired by the U.S.’s policies toward Native Americans). Not only is the use of the word “Heritage” in this way a dog whistle to white supremacists, but it’s also kind of weird to be talking about defending the “Homeland” against immigrants when, in the image, the immigrant invaders are the white settlers, and the folks trying to defend themselves and their homeland are the Indigenous people (and wildlife) fleeing from the settlers.
📸 Parting Shot 🎞️
I don’t want to leave y’all with that awful taste in your mouth, so here are a couple of nicer images of one of my favorite flowers out there.
A satellite view of Mesa, Arizona, showing a handful of the 91 energy- and water-intensive data centers in the greater Phoenix metro area. Source: Google Earth.
When I first read a recent headline in Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boringnewsletter, I assumed it was a sort of joke to rope me into reading. “There’s plenty of water for data centers,” it said, reassuringly. “Probably the last worry you should have about either water or AI.”
Unfortunately, he wasn’t joking. But he opened his piece with a line that should have warned his readers to take everything else he said with a grain of salt:
Before I continue with my rant, I’d just like to encourage Yglesias to do a little more thinking about water scarcity before writing about it. Oh, and also, maybe consider spending a little bit of time in the water-starved West before committing punditry about it. (This is the same guy who tweeted that Sen. Mike Lee’s proposal to sell off public land was “pretty reasonable” and an “okay idea on the merits”).
Yglesias acknowledges that data centers use water, and that more data centers will lead to more water consumption. But it’s okay, he says, because “We’re not living on Arrakis, and rich countries are not, in general, abstemious in their water usage.”
No, we are not on Arrakis, but have you seen the lower reaches of the Colorado River or even the mid-reaches of the Rio Grande lately? It’s looking pretty Dune-like if you ask me.
Well, sure, Yglesias argues, but even in those places, people are doing frivolous things with water, like filling up their Super Soakers or using it to make ice cubes for their cocktails. Yes, he used those actual examples. Never mind that the potable water used each day by a single Microsoft data center in Goodyear, Arizona, could yield more than 35 million ice cubes or fill about 223,000 Super Soakers. That would be one big, drunken water fight.
Yglesias also notes that agriculture, especially growing alfalfa and other feed crops for cattle, is an even larger water consumer than Big Tech. True, for now. And he writes:
His logic appears to be: People are currently using a lot of water for all sorts of things — frivolous or otherwise. So, it should be fine to use a lot more water for data centers in perpetuity, since water is “sufficiently plentiful.” This is the sort of thinking that got the Colorado River Basin into its current mess, in which there actually may not be enough water to drink very soon if its collective users don’t change their ways. Adding a fleet of water-guzzling hyperscale data centers to places like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and Tucson, where water is anything but “sufficiently plentiful,” will only exacerbate the crisis.
Researchers have tried various methods to determine how much water a single ChatGPT query or AI-assisted Google search uses as compared to, say, streaming a Netflix video or writing a standard e-mail. So far the estimates diverge wildly. An early calculation came up with a whopping 500 ml for each AI query, but the estimates have since gone down. The difficulty is due in part to the fact that water use data isn’t always publicly available, and also because data centers’ water use can vary depending on location, as do their carbon footprints.
What is clear is this: Data centers use large quantities of both energy and water, no matter where they are. The massive server banks churning away in warehouse-like buildings on the fringes of Phoenix and Las Vegas, and even in rural Washington and Wyoming, each gobble as much electricity as a small city to process AI queries, cryptocurrency extraction, and other aspects of our increasingly cloud-based society. The harder they work, the hotter they get, and the more power and water they need to cool off to the optimum operating temperature of between 70° to 80° F.
Evaporative or adiabatic cooling, where air is cooled by blowing it through moistened pads (i.e. high-tech swamp coolers), works well in arid areas like Phoenix, Tucson, or Las Vegas. They use less energy than refrigerated cooling, but also use far more water.
Data centers can also indirectly consume water through their energy use, depending on the power source. Thermal coal, nuclear, or natural gas plants need water for cooling and steam-production (some of this water may be returned to the source after use, except with zero-discharge facilities); natural gas extraction uses water for hydraulic fracturing; and solar installations can require large amounts of water for dust-suppression and cleaning. This explains how Google’s data centers withdrew 8.65 billion gallons of water globally in 2023 1.
A 2023 study found that a single Chat GPT-3 request processed at an Arizona data center uses about 30 milliliters of water, compared to 12 ml per request in Wyoming. That doesn’t seem like much (it’s less than a shot-glass) until you consider that there are at least 1 billion ChatGPT queries worldwide per day and growing, using a total of some 8 million gallons of water daily, worldwide. And, training the AI at an Arizona data center would use about 9.6 million liters — or 2.5 million gallons — of additional water.
Another estimate finds the average data center uses between 1 million and 5 million gallons of water per day, onsite, which would be far more than the aforementioned Goodyear center (56 million gallons/year), but in line with a planned Google data center in Mesa, Arizona. When Google was first planning the facility back in 2019, the city of Mesa guaranteed delivery of nearly 1 million gallons of water per day. If they reach certain milestones they can use up to 4 million gallons daily, or about 4,480 acre-feet per year.
Now multiply those numbers by the more than 90 data centers of various sizes and water and energy intensity in the Phoenix area, alone, which would amount to somewhere between 14 million to 450 million gallons per day. No matter how you add it up, they collectively are sucking up a huge amount of water and power, and enough to strain even Yglesias’s purported “sufficiently plentiful” supplies (which do not exist in Arizona, by the way).
The average Phoenix-area household uses about 338 gallons of water per day, or almost 123,000 gallons per year. One of these big data centers, then, could guzzle as much water as some 10,000 homes. And yet housing developments in groundwater-dependent areas on Phoenix’s fringe must obtain 100-year assured water supply certification before they can begin building. The same is not the case for data centers.
According to Open ET maps, a 75-acre alfalfa field in Buckeye (western Phoenix metro area), uses about 156 acre-feet — or 50.8 million gallons — per year. That’s far less than the 28-acre Apple Data Center in Mesa consumes. Of course, there are the equivalent of about 3,470 alfalfa fields of that same size in Arizona (260,000 acres), meaning the total water consumption of hay and alfalfa is still greater than that of data centers. But it shows that while replacing an alfalfa field with houses would result in a net decrease in water consumption, replacing those same fields with data centers would substantially increase consumption.
And don’t forget that the 75-acre alfalfa field produces about 690 tons of alfalfa per year, which could feed quite a few dairy cows, which in turn would produce a bunch of milk for making cheese and ice cream. Just saying. Maybe it’s time to update the old saying: “I’d rather see a cow than a data center.”
Data centers aren’t going away. After all, they are the hearts and brains of the Internet Age. Many of us may wish that AI (not to mention cryptocurrency), which are more water- and energy-intensive than other applications, would just up and vanish. But that’s probably too much to ask for. Besides, AI, at least, does have real value.
So what can be done to keep the data center boom from devouring the West’s water and driving its power grid to the snapping point? Here’s where Yglesias had a good point: Policymakers and utilities should adjust water and power pricing for large industrial users, i.e. data centers, to discourage waste, incentivize efficiency and recycling, and push tech firms to develop their own clean energy sources to power their facilities.
It’s imperative that utilities force data centers to pay their fair share for infrastructure upgrades made necessary by added water or power demand, rather than shifting those costs to other ratepayers, as is usually the case. Arizona should make data centers prove out their water supply, just like they do with housing developments. Plus, states should stop trying to lure data centers with big tax breaks, which ultimately are paid for by the other taxpayers. And local governments and planners should subject proposed data centers to the highest level of scrutiny, and not give in to promises of jobs and economic development if it means sacrificing the community’s water supply or the reliability of the power grid.
Proper policy isn’t a cure all, by any means. But it could mitigate the impacts of the imminent data center boom. Meanwhile, Mr. Yglesias, I will reiterate that the West, at least, does not have plenty of water for data centers, and I will continue to worry about them guzzling up what little water remains.
📖 Reading Room 🧐
The Land Desk is reading all of y’all’s great responses to last week’s open thread about forms of resistance. Check it out and weigh in if you haven’t already.
Len Necefer has had some really strong pieces on his All At Once by Dr. Lennewsletter recently, including this one musing about the opportunities for the Navajo Nation to build a recreation economy on the San Juan River (great idea!). He writes about how strange it is that he, a Navajo Nation citizen, must get a permit from the BLM to raft the river, when it borders his homeland (and is at the heart of Diné Bikeyah). I also like that he sees boating/recreational opportunities along the entirety of the river, not just from Sand Island to Clay Hills Crossing. I’ve always thought it would be super cool to boat the reaches between Farmington and Bluff (actually, I’ve always wanted to boat from Durango to Farmington to Bluff).
Another Substack that’s been getting my attention is Time Zero, a podcast and Substack on “the nuclearized world.” The Wastelanding series is about the legacy of uranium mining and milling on the Colorado Plateau, the Navajo Nation, and on Pueblo lands. Very powerful stuff.
The Colorado Sun’s Shannon Mullane has a good story about the Southern Ute Tribe finally getting some of its Animas-La Plata water, which was the whole reason the last big Western water project, as it’s known, was finally built.
1 This is not the same as consumption, which is the amount of water withdrawn minus the amount returned to the source.
Udall/Overpeck 4-panel Figure Colorado River temperature/precipitation/natural flows with trend. Lake Mead and Lake Powell storage. Updated through Water Year 2024. Credit: Brad Udall
DENVER – Today, by repealing the 16-year-old “Endangerment Finding,” 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.
An idle drill rig with Raplee Ridge in the background near Mexican Hat, Utah, an oil and gas hotspot back in the early 1900s. Jonathan P. Thompson photo
Remember back in the pre-Trump II days, when every six months or so the environmental community would harp on Biden for issuing more oil and gas drilling permits than Trump did during his first term? If so, you probably also remember the Land Desk harping on the greens for making the comparison in the first place, saying it 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Delaying Coal Ash Compliance The EPA granted states and utilities more time to meet federal rules for cleaning up waste pits at coal-fired power plants that pollute groundwater and rivers.
Groundwater monitoring requirements will not be mandatory until August 2029, according to the new timeline. It is a 15-month extension.
Senate Approves Foreign Aid, Public Broadcasting Cuts Joining the House, the Senate endorsed the 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.
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.
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.
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 ⤵️
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.
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.
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.
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 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 ⤵️
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
NorthWestern Energy, which was given the Bureau of Land Management green light to build a 74-mile natural gas pipeline between Helena and Three Forks, Montana.
Ormat got the BLM go-ahead to move forward on three separate geothermal projects in Nevada: • Exploration work at the Diamond Flat project near Fallon; • Upgrades at the McGinness Hills project in Lander County; • Exploration drilling at the Pinto Geothermal Project near Denio.
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.
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.
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.
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
[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.
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.
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)
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:
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.”
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.
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).
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.
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.
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)
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, 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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.”
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:
Home Energy Squad Plus Visit. The current cost is $100 (limited-time discounted rate; the cost without the discount is $150)
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.
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 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.
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.
