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

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

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

April 25, 2025

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But wait. It gets worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

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

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

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

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

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

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

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

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

Parting Poem

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

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

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

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

April 24, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 23, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

April 22, 2025

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oilman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unqualified?

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

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

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

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

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

April 21, 2025

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

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

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

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

April 18, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rule aims to carry out this mandate by:

directing the agency to prioritize landscape health in all decision making, which is what it’s already supposed to do when assessing grazing allotments;

creating a mechanism for outside entities — states, tribes, or nonprofits — to lease public land for restoration projects, much as a rancher or oil and gas company might lease BLM land (but only on parcels that aren’t already leased/claimed for other uses);

allowing firms to lease land for mitigation work to offset impacts from development elsewhere (again, these would not override existing, valid rights);

clarifying the designation process for areas of critical environmental concern, or ACECs, where land managers can add extra regulations to protect cultural or natural resources; and,

directing the agency to incorporate Indigenous knowledge into decision-making, particularly when considering ACECs.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

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

🤣🙄🤔🤪

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

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

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

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

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

April 11, 2025

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

The orders:

Designate coal as a “mineral” so that it qualifies for regulatory relief under Trump’s pro-mining executive order, and suggest designating coal as a “critical material” due to its use in steel making. (As if that’s going to do anything?)

Orders the secretaries of Interior, Agriculture, and Energy to identify coal resources on federal lands and any impediments to extracting them, and propose “policies to address such impediments and ultimately enable the mining of such coal resources by either private or public actors.” (Public actors? Does this mean what I think it means: The feds are going to start coal mining? Maybe they’ll just nationalize the industry — Hello comrade Trump! — to wipe away all so-called impediments, of which there are very few, by the way.)

Orders the Interior Secretary to lift barriers to mining coal on federal lands, including definitively ending an Obama-era moratorium on new coal leasing and the Biden-era halting of new leases in the Powder River Basin. (These are only speculative “barriers” because existing leases hold enough coal to meet current levels of demand for another 40 years — and demand is likely to keep dropping, meaning coal companies probably would never be affected by the leasing freeze).

Encourages coal exports. (Umm, yeah, you should have thought about that before all of this tariff talk, dude.)

Looks to identify regions where “coal-powered infrastructure is available and suitable for supporting AI data centers and assess … the potential for expanding coal-based infrastructure to power data centers … .”

Exempts some coal power plants from Biden-era Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for two years.

Looks to prevent large power sources “from leaving the bulk-power system or converting the source of fuel of such generation resource if such conversion would result in a net reduction in accredited generating capacity.” (He wants to block utilities from retiring or converting or old coal plants to run on cheaper, cleaner fuels.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rise and fall of the U.S. thermal coal industry. For five decades, coal consumption was directly tied to electricity generation, with both peaking in 2007. But the financial crisis slowed electricity demand, and opened the door for burgeoning new supplies of increasingly affordable natural gas to dethrone King Coal from the energy mix, decoupling coal consumption from electricity demand, and it’s been downhill for the industry ever since, with the steepest declines coming during the first Trump administration. Data source: Energy Information Administration. Graphic: Land Desk.

Coal fueled the colonization and industrialization of the Western U.S., but by the 1950s it was in serious trouble as locomotives switched to diesel, homes and businesses chose to cook and heat with natural gas, and utilities opted for hydropower. Government intervention helped spur coal’s revival (see next graph for Wyoming figures and annotations). Source: USGS and EIA. Graphic: Land Desk.

One of the reasons folks like coal is because it’s labor intensive and offers relatively stable, high-wage employment to a lot of people in rural areas without too many other opportunities. But coal industry employment doesn’t always match up with production thanks to automation and efficiency upgrades. Annotations are below. Data Sources: Wyoming State Geological Survey, EIA, Wyoming Workforce Services. Graph: Land Desk.

1920: Wyoming coal industry hits peak employment, with 9,000 employees working in coal mines during a time when less than 200,000 people lived in the state. A few years later, a Wyoming newspaper noted: “Next to food, coal and iron are of first importance to mankind.”
Drilling for natural gas gets underway in New Mexico and Texas, and the gas is piped into towns for heating and cooking, displacing coal. A 1927 Steamboat Pilot headline about a gas pipeline from Texas to Denver, Colorado, read: “Natural gas would injure coal industry.”
1940: Electro Motive Division of General Motors unveils a diesel freight locomotive, but it is slow to catch on and in 1944 the steam engine still dominated, with the railroad industry consuming 152 million tons of coal per year.
Heightened industrial activity during World War II briefly drove up coal consumption and production.
Late 1940s: Development of high-voltage transmission lines that can carry electricity long distances, which will ultimately be a boon for coal power.
1950s: Coal consumption in the West plummets by 40 percent as highways replace rails, and diesel locomotives replace coal-fired ones. More long-distance gas pipelines are built from Texas and New Mexico oil fields to population centers, making it easier for residents and institutions to ditch coal for heating and cooking. More than half of the West’s electricity is generated by hydroelectric dams, with coal only providing 10%. The coal industry had made a lot of cash and built up a lot of political power over the years, however, which they used to lean on government to look for new markets for their product.
1952: Bureau of Reclamation releases A Study Of Future Power Transmission in the West, calling for the buildup of large coal-fired power plants in the Interior West, which would then send electricity to faraway population centers. It said, “… the growth of power in the West will be so great that increasing dependence on its main fuel resource, coal, is inevitable.”
1960: Congress establishes the Office of Coal Research “to encourage and stimulate the production and conservation of coal in the United States…” and to “maximize the contribution of coal to the overall energy market.”
Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups join with the coal industry and coal-state leaders in opposition to new hydroelectric dams. The Sierra Club actively supports the construction of Navajo Generating Station as a preferable alternative to a new dam in the Grand Canyon. Several other coal-fired plants are built across the West.
The Clean Air Act is passed, actually helping Western coal because it’s low in sulfur, and therefore emits less sulfur dioxide when burned.
Energy Crises erupt, spurring calls for “energy independence.” This includes mining for coal and government subsidies to develop synfuels, or gasoline or diesel from coal and other materials, like oil shale.
1977: ARCO opens Black Thunder mine in the Powder River Basin. It will become the largest coal mine in the world and the first to transport 1 billion tons of coal.
1978 Industrial Fuels Power Act more or less kills the construction of new natural gas power plants, locking in coal as the fuel of choice for electricity generation for the long-term.
Even as coal production climbs, the number of employees in the industry drops due to mechanization and the migration of coal-mining from more labor-intensive underground mines to larger, surface strip mines such as those in the Powder River Basin.
Reagan opens up foreign markets, kills subsidies, stops price controls and government prop-ups. Oil, natural gas, and uranium development crash, spreading economic malaise across the West. Coal falters in many parts of the West, including Wyoming, but the mines of the Powder River Basin continue to produce steadily.
1987: The Industrial Fuels Act is repealed, allowing for the buildup of natural gas plants. This doesn’t have an immediate effect on coal because natural gas is still far more expensive, but it sets the stage for utilities to switch fuels in the decades to come.
Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, which limit emissions of acid rain-causing sulfur dioxide, give a big boost to Western coal because of its relatively low sulfur content. Wyoming surpasses Appalachia as the nation’s number one coal producer.
2001: Demand for electricity, and therefore for coal, climbed steadily nationwide for 50 years, experiencing just a few small hiccups in 1982, 1986 and, most dramatically, in 2001, due to a national recession. But it quickly recovered.
2008: The national financial crisis hits, putting a huge dent in consumption of both electricity and coal. At the same time, the price of natural gas plummets when the market is glutted with newly accessed gas from shale formations in Texas, North Dakota and the East.
2011: Wyoming hits peak coal-mine employment, even though electricity demand and coal consumption has yet to rebound.
2012-2016: Although electricity demand has plateaued, coal production goes into freefall as utilities start getting more and more power from natural gas plants and solar and wind. Mass layoffs hit Wyoming’s coal industry, including in the Powder River Basin.
2018: U.S. electricity demand finally bounces back to pre-2008 levels. It doesn’t help coal at all.
2017-2024: Despite the efforts of the Trump administration to prop up the coal industry by meddling in markets and rolling back environmental, public health and worker safety regulations, coal consumption, production and employment continue to fall. Biden’s “war on coal” doesn’t affect the slide.

Wyoming leaders cheered Trump’s pro-coal executive orders, in part because the industry plays such a large role in its economy. But things are changing, even in the Cowboy State. Construction, retail trade, health care, government work, and leisure and hospitality all outpace mining and drilling in terms of employment numbers. Graphic credit: The Land Desk

🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡

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

Sgamma resigned because a watchdog group scandalously revealed that she actually has an inkling of morality. In the days following the Jan. 6, 2021, riots and invasion of the U.S. Capitol, Sgamma wrote that she was “disgusted by the violence” and “President Trump’s role in spreading misinformation that incited it.” She was hoping for a “resurgence of sanity.” That right there is enough to disqualify you from serving in this administration.

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

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

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

April 14, 2025

The Rundown

White House moves to cut funding for keystone federal climate change report and targets “unlawful” regulations.

President Trump signs an order to relax showerhead water efficiency standards.

Another order opposes state laws that impede his “energy dominance” vision and seeks to invalidate them.

Yet another order requires agencies to put maximum 5-year expiration dates into existing energy and environmental laws.

EPA says it will review new studies of health outcomes from fluoridated drinking water.

Mexico says it will immediately release some water in the Rio Grande basin.

April 1, 2025 seasonal water supply forecast summary. Credit: Colorado Basin River Forecast Center

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

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

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

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

By the Numbers

67 Percent of Average: Most probable runoff into Lake Powell this year from the Colorado River, according to a federal forecast. The report covers the April-July period. The down year is not good news for Lake Powell (33 percent full) or Lake Mead (34 percent).

4.1 Million Barrels Per Day: U.S. crude oil exports in 2024, a new annual record. Europe is now the biggest export market, after its decision in 2022 to ban Russian imports.

News Briefs

Rio Grande Water Negotiations
President Claudia Sheinbaum said Mexico would carry out “immediate delivery” of some water to the Rio Grande basin, an instance of trade politics influencing water policy, The Hill reports.

Under a 1944 treaty, Mexico is required over five years to deliver 1.75 million acre-feet from its side of the basin. It is far behind in the current cycle, even as deliveries have picked up this year in response to political pressure.

As of April 5, Mexico had delivered 512,604 acre-feet in this cycle.

Eliminating “Unlawful” Regulations
Recent Supreme Court decisions – Sackett (wetlands), Ohio (air emissions), Loper Bright Enterprises (deference to agency expertise), among others – have curtailed the executive branch’s regulatory powers. The White House now wants to institutionalize those rulings.

It will be action by subtraction, quickly.

Trump signed an executive order giving agencies 60 days to draw up a list of current “unlawful and potentially unlawful” regulations and devise a plan to repeal them.

The order directs agencies to repeal these rules without public notice and comment periods, which are generally required by law. The order claims that because these unnamed rules are unlawful, getting rid of them merits an exemption from notice and comment.

Pressure Politics
Ticking a favored topic, Trump also signed an order to rescind Biden-era water conservation regulations for certain high-end showerheads.

The rule restricted multi-nozzle showerheads to a total flow rate of 2.5 gallons per minute, which has been the federal standard for showerheads since 1992. The flow rate could not apply to each nozzle individually, which would multiply water use.

The Trump administration’s previous attempt to allow multi-nozzle showerheads to flow at higher rates was criticized by the plumbing industry. IAPMO, a trade group, argued that plumbing systems in new buildings, which are built for conservation, could be undersized if higher water volumes are allowed.

Sunset Provisions
Another order seeks to cut existing and future regulations in a different way: by adding “sunset provisions” that set an expiration date.

The order directs agencies to insert sunset provisions into bedrock environmental and energy laws such as the Energy Policy Act, Mining Act, Federal Power Act, and Endangered Species Act. The sunset dates are to be between one and five years after the provision is finalized. Regulations can be renewed “as many times as is appropriate, but never to a date more than 5 years in the future” if they are deemed worthy.

Studies and Reports

Cutting Climate Research Funding
The Trump administration is cutting funding for the federal government’s keystone report on climate change in the United States and its impacts, Politico reports.

The White House is cancelling a contract with the firm that oversees the U.S. Global Change Research Program, which conducts the National Climate Assessment. Ending the contract “forever severed” interagency climate change work, one senior official told Politico.

The National Climate Assessment is mandated by Congress, written by hundreds of academic and federal researchers, and summarizes the most recent science on climate change and its consequences for the country.

Coal Executive Order
To assist the dying U.S. coal industry, Trump signed a proclamation that gives coal-fired power plants a two-year reprieve from stricter air pollution standards.

U.S. coal production has fallen off a cliff, down more than half from its peak in 2008, according to government data. The reasons are structural and interrelated: higher production costs, stricter environmental controls, and cheaper competitors.

On the Radar

Fluoride
Lee Zeldin, the EPA administrator, said the agency will review scientific information about the health effects of fluoride as it considers potential regulatory action under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

The agency will produce “an updated health effects assessment for fluoride.”

A federal judge ruled last year that the agency must update its fluoride regulations due to new research into health risks.

Cybersecurity Drill
The EPA will host a nationwide drill next month to prepare drinking water utilities for a cyberattack.

Sign up for the May 27 drill here.

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

Back to Romancing the River: What’s Your Reality? — George Sibley (SibleysRiver.com) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

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

April 2, 2025

I was chastised by a couple readers after the last post: you’re just giving the Trumpty-Mumpty dynamic duo what it wants by focusing on what it is doing. What we want to know is what this is going to mean for us out here in the arid lands, and thoughts on what we should be doing about that. What does it mean here in the Colorado River region?

This led me to wonder: is focusing too much on what nasty people are doing just another form of surrendering to them? In chess, and probably all other competitive sports, there’s the matter of the ‘impetus’: one player or team of players will achieve the point in a game where they are ‘calling the shots,’ forcing the other player(s) to react to their strategies rather than pursuing the others’ own game plan. Players with that impetus will usually win, so long as they don’t lose that impetus through some misplay of their own.

The Trumpty-Mumpties have certainly seized the impetus in America’s 250-year ‘game’ of trying to work out a collaborative governance for the American nation-state; and our response so far has been railing editorially at them, or suing them, or just kind of watching in shocked silence as they break things. ‘Roll over and play dead,’ was the recommendation of one prominent Democrat for his party; let the Repugnicans dig themselves into a hole they can’t get out of, then get up and kick the debris in on top of them. The trouble with that is the fact that the debris will be our dismantled constitutional government, and as was the case when Humpty-Dumpty had his great fall, all of us (and our horsepower) may not be able to put it back together again. When one of Mumpty’s ‘Space X’ rockets blew up shortly after blastoff a few weeks ago, his company described it as a ‘rapid unplanned disassembly,’ a wonderful bit of euphemistic language. What we are watching happen in our government is a ‘rapid barely planned disassembly,’ giving a little credit to the ‘Project 2025’ planners who knew their Repugnican wet dreams only stood a chance if they hit the ground running and ‘flooded the zone.’

So what can we do besides watch it happen, and express our dismay and horror? While we still can?

One thing we ought to do is to confront our own complicity in what is happening to us. American historian and philosopher Heather Cox Richardson started one of her daily columns (3/21/25) with the recollection of a really interesting commentary on our times reported twenty years ago by journalist Ron Suskind. A commentary that many of us may have encountered before, but it is really worth revisiting in the murky light of what’s happening today – here’s the paragraph from her column:

This is something for us to ‘study,’ the 35-40 million of us who depend to some extent on the water of the Colorado River – First River of the Anthropocene Epoch. Suskind’s unnamed presidential advisor basically articulated the attitude that drove the first century of the Early American Anthropocene – and the development of the Colorado River, one of several places where the imperial business of ‘creating a new reality’ overriding the existing ‘discernible reality’ began. (The Panama Canal and the Columbia River being two other sites for the ‘Early American Anthropocene.’)

The history of the development of the Colorado River in the first two-thirds of the 20^th century is the story of how we began to ‘create our own reality,’ and that story is told in the evolution of the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau came into being as the ‘Reclamation Service’ as part of the ‘Newlands Act’ of 1902. The Service had a modest mission, working with communities of desert homesteaders to develop the irrigation systems that would make their land arable.

The Reclamation Service came into being as part of the United States Geological Survey – very much what Bush’s advisor called a ‘reality-based’ organization, grounded in the scientific belief that ‘people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality.’ The USGS had essentially been given its operating ethos by John Wesley Powell, a consummate scientist whose observations and careful study of the arid lands led him to make policy recommendations as director of the USGS that fell afoul of the West’s industrial movers and shakers, and got him fired from that agency.

The scientists who had escaped the Powell purge, however, continued the ‘reality-based’ scientific discipline Powell had established for the USGS, and that was the science-based agency into which the Reclamation Service was placed in 1902. But the mission of the Reclamation Service was to help farming communities develop irrigation systems – essentially an engineering assignment.

The challenge in the Lower Colorado River deserts, for both the scientists and the engineers in the USGS, was learning to live with a water supply that ran in a flood for two or three months of the late spring and early summer, then became a comparative trickle the rest of year. The scientists and the engineers responded to that challenge in different ways. For the scientist, it was a challenge of adapting crops and plantings to what would grow in flood-mud, and spreading the muddy flood out accordingly. For the engineer, the challenge was to change the water supply, storing it to release it in more manageable full-season flows for growing whatever the farmers wanted to grow.

In short, the challenge was perceived to be either using science to adapt the human culture to whatever nature provided (however erratically), or using engineering and other related skill sets to adapt nature to provide whatever the culture needed or wanted. And in the early 20^th century, with America just really learning how to use fossil fuels to construct an industrial civilization like the world had never seen…. We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality….

Perceiving that choice, the Bureau quickly grew impatient with trying to adapt local community irrigation systems to the wild Colorado River. By 1905 they and their emerging technology were ready to spread their wings, take on the imperial challenge of changing the river. In 1905 they stretched their legislated local charge by taking on three projects with a regional scale: a large (for its day) masonry dam on the Salt River to control flooding and store irrigation water for growth in the Phoenix area; an irrigation weir almost a mile wide across the Colorado mainstem above Yuma, Arizona, to keep water levels up for late-season irrigation water; and a five-mile transbasin tunnel in the upper reaches of the river, carrying water from the Gunnison River to the Uncompahgre River valley.

In 1907, halfway through those larger, more regional projects, the Reclamation Service left the Geological Survey, and became the Bureau of Reclamation, an independent agency in the Interior Department. Basically, the engineers left the scientists to their methodological study of ‘discernible reality’; they were ready to roll their own realities. They dreamed of the structures that would break the Colorado River to harness, and the other really big projects that would put the river to work making the desert bloom.

Eugene Clyde LaRue measuring the flow in Nankoweap Creek, 1923. Photo credit: USGS

This never really became a declared war between the scientists and the engineers, but there was a distinct tension. When the seven Colorado River Basin states sat down in 1922 to divide the use of the river’s waters among themselves, they found conflicting opinions on how much water actually flowed in the river on average. Bureau engineers, including Reclamation Commissioner Arthur Powell Davis, were a frequent presence at the Compact Commission meetings; they had a 25-year record of flows at Yuma going back to 1896, showing an average annual flow of just under 18 million acre-feet for that short period. Meanwhile, E.C. LaRue, a USGS hydrologist and geologist, had been working on that flow problem for years, and had done some early work on tree rings and desert evaporation, leading him to believe that flows between 12 and 14 million acre-feet of usable water were a reasonable long range expectation for the river.

LaRue volunteered his assistance to the Compact Commission, but Commission Chair Herbert Hoover (the federal representative on the Commission, and himself an engineer) thought that would be unnecessary, and the Colorado River Compact used Bureau numbers – and within a decade, certainly within the century, the willful river had demonstrated that scientist LaRue’s stodgy old researched numbers were much closer to the real river we have contended with down to the present. River ‘elder’ Eric Kuhn and journalist-historian John Fleck wrote a book, Science Be Dammed, exploring this tension between the scientists and the engineers in creating the Compact, for those interested in a more detailed account of that.

But for my story here – the Bureau did go on to ‘create its new reality.’ The 1928 Boulder Canyon Act, as it unfolded, became a lamp in the darkness of the Great Depression. Private capitalism – probably our least democratic economic engine – had failed utterly to deal with the Depression, but federal funding coupled with private initiative under the direction of the Bureau put thousands of people to work, building not one but three big structures on the Colorado River mainstem: Hoover Dam capable of storing two year’s flow of the river, Parker Dam to provide water for a huge aqueduct to the Los Angeles-San Diego metropolis, and the Imperial Weir Dam and All-American Canal to carry water to the vast reaches of the Imperial Valley – and every drop of water through the dams generating electric power for the Southwest. The desert reality was transformed for – well, maybe not forever, but for the life of the dams, ultimately proscribed by the inflow of mud as the busy river continued its mindlesstask of reducing the Southern Rockies and the Colorado Plateau to sea level peneplains.

But the Bureau did not stop there. After the second World War, under the aegis of the Colorado River Storage Project, the Bureau continued to build big storage dams with canals to carry water out into the high orographic deserts above the canyons and the hot subtropical deserts below the canyons, remaking most of the river – mountain tributaries collected the melted snowpack into rivers, as with all rivers – but then it went into desert ‘distributaries’ distributing the water to vast farms and rapidly growing cities in regions called ‘Death Marches’ by early explorers. That very little freshwater was left to ‘waste’ into the salty ocean was regarded as a victory – until it wasn’t. Another story there.

What we have to confront today, in the Colorado River region (natural basin plus out-of-basin areas served), is the extent to which the engineered new reality is ultimately dragged down and even stalled by the scientist’s dour desert realities the engineers thought could be transcended. It is unfair to blame the Bureau for the apparently unlimited growth of people moving into the river’s region, but the engineer’s ‘Can Do!’ attitude toward that growth has done little until very recently to bring us to confronting the unavoidable collision of unlimited demand on a limited resource – and now, a shrinking resource, given new concerns raised by those relentlessly reality-based scientists.

The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry. Left to right: Leigh Lint, boatman; H.E. Blake, boatman; Frank Word, cook; C.H. Birdseye, expedition leader; R.C. Moore, geologist; R.W. Burchard, topographer; E.C. LaRue, hydraulic engineer; Lewis Freeman, boatman, and Emery Kolb, head boatman. Boatman Leigh Lint, “a beefy athlete who could tear the rowlocks off a boat…absolutely fearless,” later went to college and became an engineer for the USGS. The Grand Canyon survey party at Lees Ferry in 1923. (Public domain.)

E.C. LaRue of the USGS warned us back in 1922 that storing the river’s water in big open reservoirs would reduce the supply of available water due to evaporation and bank-storage losses, but that seemed like a reasonable trade for water availability year-round over a river whose three-month flood was mostly lost to the sea anyway. The loss could be written off as ‘surplus’ – until the relentless demand ate up the fictional ‘surplus.’ Now it is suddenly necessary for the Lower Basin to count the ~800,000 acre-feet of evaporation from the Lower Basin reservoirs, canals and fields, as well as their half of the Mexican decree, against their Compact decreed 7.5 million acre-feet. Which they have reluctantly agreed to do – so long as the federal government pays them for not using what was not theirs to use anyway. (money that may be threatened by Mumpty’s DOGE).

And on top of that, there is gradual, general, reluctant acceptance of the fact that the burning of fossil fuels that powers nearly all of our civilization, plus the vast tonnage of cooling concrete that has gone into our great works, plus the gases from an increasingly vicious cycle of expanding wildfires and melting permafrost, are adding gases and heat to our atmosphere that are raising temperatures around the planet and causing changes in the global climate – oops.

I forgot; ‘climate change’ and ‘global warming’ have been officially eradicated from the public discourse. We are creating another new reality to pile on top of the old new realities we’ve created over the past century plus: We have grown so accustomed to thinking like George Bush’s advisors that we don’t really notice that our newest new reality is just the child’s belief that putting our hands over our eyes will make the real world go away.

So I think that’s what we can do, at least in the Colorado River region: uncover our eyes, and start adjusting our new realities (which are not entirely bad) with the natural realities that still constrain the engineers – as even most of the engineers seem willing to acknowledge. We need to acknowledge that Becky Mitchell’s advice is now counterrevolutionary – ‘We must learn to plan for the river we have, not the river we wish we had.’ To the Trumpty-Mumpties, that’s almost Unamerican, saints be praised.

Whatever we do along those lines, however, it seems necessary that the scientists and engineers work together on it: both acknowledging the wisdom in the scientist looking carefully before the engineers leap – but both also acknowledging that some leaps will be needed….

***

Margaret Chase Smith in 1950:

President Trump’s administration thaws frozen IRA money: But will #Colorado’s electric cooperatives get all the money they were promised? The answer remains unclear — Allen Best (BigPivots.com)

The main street in Nucla, located in western Montrose County. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

March 28, 2025

Electrical cooperatives in Colorado were informed before Joe Biden left the White House that they would be getting about $3.5 billion from the federal government via programs funded by the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Will they? U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced Tuesday that her department was releasing funds previously committed but also described a “course correction.” Just what constitutes a “course correction” will likely not become fully apparent for weeks, perhaps months.

The release said that electrical cooperatives must first revise their project plans to “remove harmful DEIA and far-left climate features.” DEIA stands for diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

The announcement by the USDA —the department houses the Rural Utility Services, the agency that works with cooperatives — also said electrical cooperatives would be asked several questions and would need to provide a short narrative description of any proposed changes in their projects.

The revised projects must also align with an executive order issued by President Donald Trump on Jan. 20 called “Unleashing American Energy.” Just exactly what those revisions need to look like remains unclear. In that executive order Trump rescinded a long list of executive orders issued by former President Joe Biden, including 10 that had to do with climate change.

Trump’s order made no mention of renewable energy but did order agency heads to identify actions that “impose an undue burden on the identification, development, or use of domestic energy resources – with particular attention to oil, natural gas, coal, hydropower, biofuels, critical mineral, and nuclear energy resources…”

“We are as interested to find out as you are,” replied Alex Shelley, who has the public information job at San Miguel Power Association, when I called him Wednesday afternoon. San Miguel expected to get a $9.8 million grant from the New ERA program to construct a 20-megawatt solar project in western Montrose County. That area of Montrose County includes Nucla, Naturita, and Uravan. Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association operated Nucla Station, a coal burning plant, until 2019.

In a statement posted on Jan. 23, Brad Zaporski, the chief executive of San Miguel Power, called the project a “shining example of partnership in action to help bolster our rural communities.”

The project, said Shelley, is to be on private land that is not useful for agriculture or anything other than light industry.

Brighton-based United Power was to get $262 million for six solar projects in its service territory in northern Colorado and one other project involving hydroelectricity. About 40% of the service territory is in Wattenberg Field, Colorado’s primary oil and gas producing area.

“I think the story is that the RUS wants to get the money moving to help rural communities,” said Mark Gabriel, the chief executive. “We were given the opportunity to make any edits or resubmit, and we chose not to (make changes to our application).”

The original application, he added, made no mention of diversity or inclusion. It asserted the desire to make United’s members more reliant on local resources and with lower-cost electricity.

Tri-State G&T has the most skin in this game. It provides wholesale electricity for 40 electric cooperatives in a four-state area, including 15 in Colorado. Tri-State in 2024 said it was getting a financial package worth $2.5 billion, most of that in loans of less than 2%. Those low-interest loans will allow it to get out from under higher-interest financing as it prepares to close its coal units in Colorado and Arizona during coming years.

In an October announcement, Tri-State said New ERA funding would support financing for 1,280 megawatts of energy from solar, wind and wind-storage projects, and more than 100 megawatts of stand-alone energy storage.

The company also plans a natural gas plant, preferably in northwest Colorado or conceivably southwest Wyoming.

Tri State expects to reach 70% clean energy by 2030. Within Colorado, this will be an 89% reduction as compared to a 2005 baseline.

“We appreciate the work of Secretary Rollins and her team to advance the program, and we will be reviewing the USDA’s guidance and look forward to continuing our work through their process,” said Tri-State CEO Duane Highley in a statement posted on Wednesday.

In Fort Collins, Jeff Wadsworth was cautious about what the final tally will look like. He’s the chief executive of Poudre Valley REA, which is in line to get $9 million to help pay for two solar-and-storage projects. The grant was through Powering Affordable Clean Energy, or PACE, another program funded by the IRA.

“We are thrilled about this development and look forward to collaborating with the dedicated team at the USDA,” he said initially when asked for a response. In a telephone conversation the next day, however, he said that the full story remains to be written.

Wadsworth is optimistic that Poudre Valley will get its money. Demand for electricity has continued to grow for multiple reasons, and these projects will help Poudre Valley meet that demand. But this grant is not the end-all, be-all for Poudre Valley as it moves forward, he said.

“It helps our ratepayers, who are part of rural Colorado, We are excited about that,” said Wadsworth. “But our path is pretty clear as we move forward.”

Still another perspective comes from Eric Frankowski, the executive director of the Western Clean Energy Campaign. He believes that despite the “problematic” language of the announcement, the guidance that RUS has issued for the cooperatives has eased a lot of concerns.

“It appears that the process is completely voluntary and that co-ops do not need to do anything. The language says that RUS will NOT approve proposed modifications ‘that affect the scoring of projects that were competitively scored.’ Since community benefits, decarbonization and lowering rates were all integral to how proposals were evaluated, I think we can take that as a good sign,” he wrote in an e-mail.

That guidance can be found here.

“The guidance also says that if awardees do not respond within 30 days requesting a revision, ‘it will be considered that they do not wish to make changes to their proposals, and disbursements and other actions will resume after the 30 days.’ (emphasis added) It also says that awardees can respond that they are not changing their proposal and processing of payments will begin immediately. Also good signs,” said Frankowski.

“There doesn’t seem to be a pathway where co-ops are punished for staying the course on their clean energy plans,” he added. “Who knows what happens after the 30-day window, but things seem good for now.”

Granby-based Mountain Parks Electric in January announced that it had executed a letter of commitment with the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a grant prog ram of $100 million across the next 20 years. The announcement said that the money will be used to help procure power through power-purchase agreements and to advance and promote scholarships and apprenticeship programs. The announcement was made two weeks before Mountain Parks left Tri-State and began getting its wholesale power from Guzman Energy in a 20-year agreement.

Sedalia-based CORE Electric Cooperative hopes for $225 million and Steamboat Springs-based Yampa Valley Electric $50 million. Grand Junction-based Grand Valley Power Lines also expected to get federal funds.

In his statement, Highley credited the work of U.S. Representatives Jeff Hurd, Gabe Evans, Lauren Boebert, all from Colorado, and Gabe Vasquez, of New Mexico, as well as Colorado Senators John Hickenlooper and Michael Bennet. Bennet, in particular, had gone to bat for the New ERA provision for cooperatives in the IRA. He spoke in October at Tri-State’s headquarters when a finalized announcement was made.

President Trump’s U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright during #Golden lab visit doubles down on minimizing #ClimateChange — Lindsey Toomer (ColoradoNewsline.com)

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright talks to reporters on April 3, 2025, at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden. (Lindsey Toomer/Colorado Newsline)

Click the link to read the article on the Colorado Newsline website (Lindsey Toomer):

April 3, 2025

Chris Wright said blaming Marshall Fire on climate change is ‘simply to not look at the data’

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, returning to the Denver area Thursday after he was confirmed as a member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet, repeatedly minimized the consequences of climate change when speaking to reporters during a press conference.

Wright, founder of Denver-based fracking services company Liberty Energy, spoke to employees at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden for less than 10 minutes, touching on powering artificial intelligence, electricity production and growth, and supporting national labs.

Talking to reporters after he spoke to staff, Wright said “emotional, not-fact-based stuff” like targeting hydrocarbons — the main components of climate change-causing fossil fuels — for reductions is “disruptive” and led to higher electricity and energy prices during the Biden administration.

Wright said that attributing the Marshall Fire — which in 2021 destroyed more than 1,000 homes in Boulder County, burned over 6,000 acres, caused more than $2 billion in property damage and killed two people — to climate change is “simply to not look at the data.” He said wildfires “peaked over 100 years ago” and that the U.S. government could better manage wildfire devastation through forest management to control wood fuels.

“Calling climate change a crisis is just to say ‘I’m not going to look at the science, I’m not going to look at the economics, I’m just going to run with the politics,’” Wright said.

Drier and hotter conditions in Colorado are widely viewed as having contributed to the severity of the Marshall Fire, making the potential for loss greater. Investigators said one of the fire’s origins was a spark from an Xcel Energy power line, and the utility company has since faced several lawsuits.

Wright has previously expressed deep skepticism of the scientific consensus that climate change is a global crisis.

Department layoffs

The Department of Energy, along with many other federal agencies, laid off probationary staff members, and a judge then ordered the department reinstate them. The Trump administration asked all department heads to plan for additional cuts through a “reduction in force” process.

Wright did not say how many more employees within his department could expect to lose their jobs, but he said downsizing is an “ongoing process” and that “it would be downright irresponsible if we weren’t doing this.” He said department staff grew by 20% over the four years before he took over, and “what we got out of it was a little bit more restrictions in energy production around the country.”

Energy Department leadership told workers this week it will undergo “restructuring.” Wright said each department will undergo “a very detailed organization, bottom up.”

“Every part of the government, we have to look at, how can we make government services as good as they are today or better, but at lower cost,” Wright said. “Like I do with my business, we have to look carefully at the business of where we are today and how can we deliver services at least as good as we are today at lower cost.”

In Wright’s talk to staff at the NREL, he applauded the work and dedication of the employees he spoke with and said their work is “critical.”

“The range of stuff I saw today, different people that spoke on different technologies, incredibly impressive, passionate, smart people that you can see from their heart that believe in what they’re doing, that love what they’re doing,” Wright said.

U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright, right, talks to reporters alongside National Renewable Energy Laboratory Director Martin Keller on April 3, 2025, at the NREL campus in Golden. (Lindsey Toomer/Colorado Newsline)

After he was appointed, Wright said one of his first moves was to bring together leaders of the national labs from around the country to ask what they needed to make their work more efficient. Last week, he issued a secretarial order making changes he said resulted from those conversations.

Artificial intelligence is “the next energy-intensive manufacturing industry,” Wright said in Golden, and the U.S. should not outsource that energy production to other countries. He said he issued a request for information Thursday to gauge developer interest in building on DOE land around the country to power AI.

“We have land at all of our national labs and DOE sites around the country — who wants to come build a data center, build (a) nearby energy system, use the technology and smarts we got at the national lab … Maybe donate some computing power to us, or some lease money for the lands that’ll help fund our research,” Wright said. “We’re trying to find different ways to make the labs faster, smarter, better and more self-sufficient, more funding from other sources as well.”

Wright said he would make “a commercial arrangement” with private data center companies that want to use federal land, because “that’s where the capital is.”

NREL is responsible for researching and developing renewable energy systems and improving energy efficiency in the U.S. It has another campus in Arvada, as well as one in Alaska and in Washington, D.C., with 3,675 employees across the four locations.

10,000 years of CO2, during the time that human civilization arose. Credit: https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/

On President Trump & tirades; April 1 #snowpack update; Also, Oil executives blast White House econ policies — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Horse near Aneth. Photo illustration by Jonathan P. Thompson

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

April 1, 2025

🤯 Trump Ticker 😱

Last week, one of the Land Desk’s more conservative readers cancelled his paid subscription. He wrote that he appreciated my passion for public lands, but was no longer interested in reading what he called a “tirade against Trump.”

This type of thing happens all the time in this business, and, unlike Elon Musk, I’m not looking for your pity. But I was a bit saddened, given that this person had been a paid subscriber since the Land Desk was launched, and because I really do appreciate having readers and commenters from across the political spectrum.

Besides, while I’m prone to a rant now and then, I do think “tirade” is taking it a little too far. Anyway, my point in telling y’all this is to let you know that writing about Trump’s shenanigans every dispatch is just about the last thing I want to be doing with my time. I’d much rather be delving into old maps, getting into the nuances of Western water, exploring the history of floods and droughts and wildfires, taking contrarian views on the housing crisis, or dissecting the contradictions of oil and gas markets. And I will continue to do all of that.

At the same time, it’s impossible for me to ignore the barrage of destruction, corruption, chaos, authoritarianism, and incompetence emanating from the White House. My passion for public lands — and for justice, truth, reason, morality, decency, intelligence, and kindness — demands that I document these egregious acts, and do my part to resist them, even if it is just by informing my readership about what’s happening.

I am not impartial, not by any means. I am partial to the planet and its survival, toward my fellow human beings, toward peace and justice and compassion and truth. [ed. emphasis mine] I am not, however, partisan: I will scrutinize Democrats and Republicans equally, fact-check the left and the right, and give credit where credit is due — even to Donald Trump.

***

Hopi tribal members cross Havasu Creek. Photo credit: From the Earth Studio

And on that note: The Trump administration appears to have unfrozen nearly $4.2 million in federal funding to help the Hopi Tribe build a solar-powered microgrid to run two remote wells and associated infrastructure that will provide water to Upper and Lower Moenkopi. The funding was approved by the Biden Energy Department, Trump froze it as part of a larger stop on Infrastructure and Inflation Reduction law money, but now it has been released. So good on you, Donny!

Now, how about you direct your Environmental Protection Agency to release funding for the Walker River Paiute Tribe to expand access to clean water and electric power infrastructure, and for Navajo Power’s program to bring solar to off-grid homes.

***

Though it may be inadvertent, Trump’s economic policies may ultimately benefit the environment in some ways. The haphazard, on-again, off-again tariffs, for example, along with the gutting of the federal government’s workforce, have sent the stock market into a tailspin. Meanwhile, the tariffs — along with reciprocal tariffs levied by the U.S.’s trading partners — will increase prices on most consumer goods. People will buy less, travel less, which will mean less pollution and environmental impacts.

***

And yet more kudos for Trump! Seriously. Despite all of his bluster, Trump has managed to really piss off oil and gas executives — the same ones that were throwing money at his campaign just a few months ago — and possibly dampen drilling on public lands.

See, the thing about tariffs is that they very well may raise the price you pay for gasoline (depending on where your local refinery gets its crude oil), but the economy-dampening part of tariffs actually brings down the price of oil, while also raising the cost of steel pipes and other supplies. That’s no bueno for petroleum companies, whose profit margins are directly proportional to the price of crude.

Many of these folks won’t criticize Trump in public, given his vindictive and authoritarian leanings, but give them the cover of anonymity, as a Dallas Federal Reserve survey did, and they go off on the White House’s herky-jerky non-policies. Here’s a sampling:

There was only one mention of regulations getting in the way of the oil business, and that wasn’t federal rules, but state ones:

Well, there you have it, folks.

***

Oh, and these oil companies might also be angry that the MAGAs are all buying Teslas — or at least pretending to — in order to “own the libs.” Which is pretty funny, given the amount of gibberish Trump devoted to dissing electric vehicles during his campaign rallies. Tesla also stands to benefit the most from Trump’s tariffs, another dig at the internal combustion fans.

***

Maybe the national parks will be a bit less crowded this summer, as well, as international travel ebbs.

Anyone who’s traveled the Western national park service knows that they are popular with overseas visitors. On a single grocery run at the Page, Arizona, Safeway recently, I heard no fewer than three different languages spoken, in addition to Navajo and English, and that was in the off-season. In 2018 (the last year that data is available), more than 14 million international travelers visited U.S. national parks and monuments. About 14% of the Grand Canyon National Parks’ visitors were from overseas, with about 6% of Zion’s visitation from overseas.

Tourism Economics is predicting that international travel to the U.S. will be down significantly this year, thanks not only to the administration’s hostile economic moves, but also “polarizing Trump administration policies and rhetoric.” Also, there’s that thing where travelers have been detained at the border, even thrown in jail, simply for trying to get a visa. This decline undoubtedly will impact Western U.S. tourism and national park and monument visitation numbers. Not good for the tourism economy, but it might give the parks a much needed rest.

🥵 Aridification Watch 🐫

It’s first-of-the-month snowpack update time again, and this will likely be the last of the season barring some freak climatic shift over the next several weeks. Snowpack levels typically peak in mid-elevation areas in mid- to late-March, and in the high country in mid- to late-April, meaning we are now headed into spring runoff season.

Generally speaking, it’s looking like runoff will be average to paltry, depending on which side of the snow-divide your watershed falls. It is a very jagged line, by the way, with places in the west and north having average to above average snowpack, while the southern-Interior West generally had a super dry winter. But even within those areas there are sort of outliers: The Grand Traverse ski race between Aspen and Crested Butte was canceled due to lack of snow for the first time in its 26-year history.

And there’s big variations over short distances. Red Mountain Pass is still just below median, for example, while the southern San Juan Mountains, just a few dozen miles away, are experiencing a severely dry winter.

Before I get to the graphics, however, a quick note. The snowpack and precipitation plots I run here come from the USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Service. It’s just one of the valuable services they provide. I haven’t found any stats on whether DOGE has gone after NRCS’s staff, yet. But the DOGE website says it has or will cancel the leases for the following NRCS offices. Whether they and their staffs will simply go away, be absorbed into another facility, or what, isn’t disclosed.

Natural Resource Conservation Service offices slated for lease cancellations: Missoula, Montana; Wasilla and Fairbanks, Alaska; Logan, Utah; Gallup and Raton, New Mexico; Yuma, Arizona; Dayton, Puyallup, and Renton, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Woodland, Yreka, Salinas, Oxnard, and Blythe, California.

Hopefully the staff of these offices and services they provide will endure.

Now to the snowpack plots. I included the plots for 2021 and 2023 because those were the most recent big and crappy years for snowpack.

The watersheds that feed Lake Powell are not in terrible shape, sitting at 88% of the median just six days before the typical peak. However, levels are lower than they were in 2021 at this time, and 2021 was not a good year for the Colorado River. Source: NRCS.

The North Fork of the Gunnison has followed a snow accumulation pattern similar to the Upper Colorado River’s.

Red Mountain Pass is one of the few bright spots in the Four Corners region. Snow levels have tracked right around normal for most of the winter. Though it’s now down to 90% of median, there are potentially still over three weeks left in the snow accumulation season, meaning an above-average season is still possible; snow is forecast for much of this week there.

This SNOTEL site, in the San Francisco Peaks north of Flagstaff, is the comeback story of the year, rebounding from ultra-dry to average over the course of several weeks. It’s one of the only sites in Arizona that received measurable snow accumulation this season.

The drought has spread and intensified over the last year.

And it doesn’t look like it will get better anytime soon …

If you want to know more about the drought and the Colorado River basin, I’d suggest checking out the Wright-Ingraham Institute’s interactive Drought Interfaces app. It’s super cool and informative.

Take your children out into these landscapes” — Kevin Fedarko

My friend Joe’s son and the Orr kids at the top of the Crack in the Wall trail to Coyote Gulch with Stevens Arch in the Background. Photo credit: Joe Ruffert

Kevin Fedarko was the keynote speaker at the symposium and he is as inspirational a speaker as you could ask for. It doesn’t hurt that the landscape that he spoke about is the Grand Canyon. He urged the attendees to, “Take your children out into these landscapes so that they can learn to love them.” He is advocating for the protection of the Grand Canyon in particular but really he is advocating for the protection all public lands.

Kevin Fedarko and Coyote Gulch at the Rio Grande State of the Basin Symposium hosted by the Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center at Adams State University in Alamosa March 29, 2024.

What an inspirational talk from Kevin. I know what he is saying when he speaks about the time after dinner on the trail where the sunset lights up the canyon in different hues and where, he and Pete McBride, his partner on the Grand Canyon through hike, could hear the Colorado River hundreds of feet below them, continuing its work cutting and molding the rocks, because the silence in that landscape is so complete. He and I share the allure of the Colorado Plateau. Kevin was introduced to it through Collin Flectcher’s book The Man Who Walked Through Time, after he received a dog-eared copy from his father. They lived in Pittsburgh in a landscape that was industrialized but the book enabled Kevin to imagine places that were unspoiled.

My introduction to the Colorado Plateau came from an article in Outside magazine that included a panoramic photo of the Escalante River taken from the ledges above the river. Readers in the know can put 2 and 2 together from the name of this blog — Coyote Gulch — my homage to the canyons tributary to Glen Canyon and Lake Foul.

Stevens Arch viewed from Coyote Gulch. Photo via Joe Ruffert

Kevin’s keynote came at the end of the day on March 29th after a jam-packed schedule.

Early in the day Ken Salazar spoke about the future of the San Luis Valley saying, “Where is the sustainability of the valley going to come from.” Without agriculture this place would wither and die.” He is right, American Rivers and other organizations introduced a paper, The Economic Value of Water Resources in the San Luis Valley which was a response to yet another plan to export water out of the valley to the Front Range. (Currently on hold as Renewable Water Resources does not have a willing buyer. Thank you Colorado water law.)

Claire Sheridan informed attendees that their report sought to quantify all the economic benefits from each drop of water in the valley. “When you buy a bottle of water you know exactly what it costs. But what is the value of having the Sandhill cranes come here every year?”

Russ Schumacher detailed the current state of the climate (snowpack at 63%) and folks from the Division of Water Resources expounded on the current state of aquifer recovery and obligations under the Rio Grande Compact.

The session about the Colorado Airborne Snow Measurement Program was fascinating. Nathan Coombs talked about the combination of SNOTEL, manual snow courses, Lidar, radar, and machine learning used to articulate a more complete picture of snowpack. “You can’t have enough tools in your toolbox,” he said.

Coombs detailed the difficulty of meeting the obligations under the Rio Grande Compact with insufficient knowledge of snowpack and therefore runoff volumes. Inaccurate information can lead to operational decisions that overestimate those volumes and then require severe curtailments in July and August just when farmers are finishing their crops. “When you make an error the correction is what kills you,” he said.

If you are going to learn about agriculture in the valley it is informative to understand the advances in soil health knowledge and the current state of adoption. That was the theme of the session “Building Healthy Soils”. John Rizza’s enthusiasm for the subject was obvious and had me thinking about what I can do for my city landscape.

Amber Pacheco described how the Rio Grande Basin Roundtable and other organizations reach out to as many folks in the valley as possible. Inclusivity is the engine driving collaboration.

Many thanks to Salazar Rio Grande del Norte Center director Paul Formisano for reaching out to me about the symposium. I loved the program. You can scroll through my posts on BlueSky here

President Trump hands public lands to the mining industry: Plus: Using public lands for housing — again — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

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

March 25, 2025

⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️

Satellite image of a portion of the Morenci Mine in Arizona. Source: Google Earth.

Last week, President Trump signed an executive order — his 150th so far this term, by my rough count — invoking the Defense Production Act to expedite mining on federal lands. The wording of the order suggests that the aim is not just to cut through some of the red tape hindering proposed projects, but to incite the industry to mine areas that it may not have been considering previously.

The order has understandably alarmed public lands advocates, but it has also spawned some misconceptions, particularly concerning the 1872 General Mining Law.

Green River Basin oil shale deposits via the Bureau of Land Management

While Trump’s attacks on the nation and public lands have been of unprecedented scope and scale so far, his use of the Cold War-era DPA is not unprecedented or even all that unusual. The Carter administration used it to justify pouring billions of dollars of subsidies into “synfuel” production as part of its quest for “energy independence.” This sparked massive oil shale operations in western Colorado (which crashed spectacularly). And Biden used the Act to encourage mining for so called “green metals,” such as lithium, boron, and manganese. He also streamlined permitting for the proposed Hermosa manganese mine in southern Arizona, and loaned the contested Thacker Pass lithium mine in Nevada $2.6 billion.

But Trump’s order goes much further than Biden’s. He is expanding the list of target minerals to just about everything, including “critical minerals, uranium, copper, potash, gold, and any other element, compound or material as determined by the Chair of the National Energy Dominance Council, such as coal.” While Biden wanted a survey of the nation’s mineral production capacity, and promised to adhere to all existing environmental laws and consult with tribal nations, Trump is ordering his agencies to:

Compile a list of all proposed mining projects “in order to expedite the review of those projects in coordination with the National Energy Dominance Council.”

Amend or revise land use plans under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act as necessary to “support the intent of this order.”

“Identify as many sites as possible that might be suitable for mineral production activities that can be permitted as soon as possible.”

Prioritize mineral production activities over other types of activities on federal lands.

Provide financing, loans, and investment for new mines, including from a “dedicated critical minerals fund established through the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.”

“New recommendations will be provided to Congress regarding treatment of waste rock, tailings, and mine waste disposal under the Mining Act of 1872.”

Instead of adhering to environmental laws, Trump would simply alter them to support mining. He not only wants to help out proposed projects with regulatory and financial subsidies, but also wants to spur on new projects on “as many sites as possible.” And he is prioritizing mineral extraction over all other activities on federal lands, a blatant violation of the Federal Land Policy Management Act’s multiple-use mandate.

That would mean not only that mining would take precedence over conservation and recreation, but also livestock grazing and other extractive uses. The OHV crowd that’s worried about the BLM closing a few roads to motorized vehicles around Moab might just find themselves ousted from a lot more areas by potash ponds, uranium mines, or lithium operations.

Trump’s recommendations to Congress likely will be to tweak the 1872 Mining Law to ensure that mining companies can store waste on public land mining claims that aren’t valid, meaning that they have not proven that the parcels contain valuable minerals. This was actually the norm for decades until 2022, when a federal judge ruled that the proposed Rosemont copper mine in Arizona could not store its tailings and waste rock on public land. That ruling was followed by a similar one in 2023, leading mining state politicians from both parties to try to restore the pre-Rosemont Decision rules.

It’s around the General Mining Law that misconceptions have arisen. The folks at More Than Just Parks say the new order “doesn’t create a new legal framework. It exhumes an old one — a fossil from the 19th century … It’s the Mining Act of 1872, back from the dead, and now wearing body armor.” Which is a nice way to put it, but the Mining Act never died, so this order can’t revive it.

The other misconception appeared in Lands Lost, another great Substack focusing on public lands, which wrote: “… there are no meaningful environmental safeguards in place because public land mining is a free-for-all governed only by an 1872 law that’s never been modernized.”

It’s true that the 1872 Mining Law is inadequate, allows mining companies or individuals to stake a claim to any public land without public input or environmental review, conduct exploratory work with a minimum of review, and pay no royalties on hardrock minerals they extract. However, the federal agencies do have additional regulations governing mining. Before a company can do any actual mining, it must get an operating permit from the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, or Department of Energy (depending on the land’s jurisdiction), which includes an environmental review (either an EA or a more extensive EIS, depending on the scope of the project). A mine may also need a Clean Water Act permit for any water discharges, including draining adits, and many states require additional permits as well.

By ordering the agencies to alter the FLPMA land-use plans to accommodate mining, Trump is essentially doing away with these additional safeguards, which really is scary. That would take us back to a time when the 1872 Mining Law was the only federal regulatory framework, which would give mining companies a free rein to trash public lands. However, Trump can’t do much about state requirements, except to try to bully them out of existence. [ed. emphasis mine]

The order applies only to federal lands, so mining projects that are on patented mining claims — which are entirely on private — would not be affected (although they might be eligible for the government handouts).

Proposed projects this fast-tracking could affect include:

Resolution Copper’s proposed massive copper mine at Chi’chil Biłdagoteel, aka Oak Flat, in central Arizona.

Copper World Complex née Rosemont Mine in the Santa Rita Mountains south of Tucson, Arizona. After a judge kiboshed Canada-based Hudbay’s plan to dump mine waste on U.S. Forest Service land, the firm decided to base the initial phase on patented, i.e. private, mining claims and later expand to public lands.

South32’s proposed Hermosa Mine in the Patagonia Mountains of southern Arizona. Biden already fast-tracked permitting for this battery-grade manganese mine, but Trump’s order could speed it along even more.

Energy Fuels’ Roca Honda uranium mine and Laramide Resources’ La Jara Mesa uranium project, both on Forest Service land near Grants, New Mexico.

Anson/A1’s proposed lithium extraction projects and American Potash’s lithium and potash projects on BLM land east and north of Moab and south of Green River, Utah.

Lithium, copper, and uranium projects on BLM land in the Lisbon Valley in southeastern Utah.

Numerous proposed uranium mining projects on Energy Department leases and BLM land in the Uravan Mineral Belt in western Colorado.

Atomic Minerals’ uranium prospects on Harts Point, just outside the boundaries of Bears Ears National Monument.

Metallic Minerals is only doing exploratory drilling on its mining claims in the La Plata Mountains of southwestern Colorado, and have yet to make any mining plans public, so it’s not clear whether Trump’s order would affect this contested project.

Learn more about these and other projects with the Land Desk’s Mining Monitor Map.

Those links up ^^ there? A lot of them are to paywalled Land Desk archives. Break down the paywall and support oligarch-free journalism by becoming a paid subscriber now.

Satellite image of Phoenix-area sprawl and adjacent BLM land. Source: Google Earth.

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

Also last week, in a short-on-details Wall Street Journal opinion piece, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner unveiled a plan to transfer or lease “underused” public lands to states or localities for affordable housing. An Interior official then told Bloomberg Law’s Bobby Magill that the Bureau of Land Management is considering selling about 400,000 acres of federal land within 10 miles of cities and towns with more than 5,000 people for housing development.

This isn’t surprising: Republicans and Democrats have both been itching to grab some public land for housing for a while. And the stated intent, to add affordable housing to increasingly unaffordable public lands-gateway communities, is noble.

And yet, the plan — as scant in particulars as it is — is still riddled with problems.

Burgum has made it clear that he distinguishes between “special” and “our most beautiful” public lands, i.e. those that are in national parks or national monuments, and the remaining “underused,” “inhospitable or unoccupied” lands. The lands on the urban fringes he intends to take out of the American public’s hands belong to the latter category, apparently.

But those same lands are valuable, especially to the nearby communities. They provide an easy-to-access refuge — for humans and wildlife — from the urban din, as well as recreational opportunities. In fact, the close proximity of these public lands makes the communities more desirable and therefore more expensive: think Animas Mountain in Durango, the Slickrock Trail in Moab, Jumbo Mountain in Paonia, the Lunch Loop trails in Grand Junction, the Buckeye Hills near Phoenix, or the Juniper Woodlands trails outside Bend. Now imagine them covered in houses.

Because BLM lands are almost always outside the urban boundaries, developing them will lead directly to sprawl and all of its impacts, including more traffic and associated pollution and safety issues.

So far, the Interior Department hasn’t given any indication that it would require the land to be used for affordable housing. And, as Center for Western Priorities points out in a statement on the plan, the administration hardly seems interested in fixing the housing crisis, given that it is planning to eviscerate HUD and has frozen some $60 million in funding for affordable housing.

Which leads me to think they are using Sen. Mike Lee’s stalled HOUSES Act, which also calls for putting houses on “underutilized” federal land, as a model. But that legislation has no affordability restrictions and its density requirement — a mere four houses per acre — is just more sprawl.

That’s because Lee and company are going with the supply side theory, which posits that simply building more houses will lower costs enough to make them affordable. While this theory does hold in certain cases, it does not apply to most Western public lands-gateway, amenities communities, where seemingly unlimited demand is always bound to outpace supply. And that means this plan is just another scheme to take public lands out of Americans’ hands and give them to the private sector.

On the housing supply-side theory JONATHAN P. THOMPSON SEPTEMBER 19, 2023: https://www.landdesk.org/p/on-the-housing-supply-side-theory

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

LOVE windmill. Near Leupp, Arizona. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Tommy Beaudreau on “The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now”: Challenges to Energy Transition on Public Lands — Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly (Getches-Wilkinson Center) #ActOnClimate

Tommy Beaudreau at the 2025 Schultz Lecture in Energy. Photo credit: Getches-Wilkinson Center

Click the link to read the article on the Getches-Wilkinson Center website (Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly):

March 20, 2025

On Tuesday, February 25th, Tommy Beaudreau, former Deputy Secretary of the Interior, delivered the Schultz Lecture, offering a sobering analysis of the structural, legal, economic, and political hurdles to the energy transition on public lands. His talk, “The Lords of Yesterday and the Imperatives of Now,” constituted a tribute to the late Charles Wilkinson’s coined phrase. Harkening back to Wilkinson’s work, Beaudreau traced these contemporary challenges to the legacy of westward expansion and Indigenous displacement, illustrating how outdated laws and entrenched interests continue to shape today’s energy policies.

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

Beaudreau framed public lands as a political flashpoint in the energy transition. While state and private lands—particularly in North Dakota and the Southwest—have played significant roles in the oil and gas boom, debates over renewables, permitting, and leasing disproportionately focus on federal lands. Ironically, legal tools once used to block fossil fuel projects are now being turned against renewables, complicating efforts to decarbonize.

Beyond regulatory hurdles, fossil fuel revenues remain deeply embedded in state economies, funding schools, public safety, and infrastructure. Many Tribal nations, too, rely on fossil fuel revenues, balancing economic interests with environmental concerns. Beaudreau stressed that a “just transition” must provide financial alternatives before communities can fully embrace renewables.

Outdated laws, like the 1872 Mining Law, remain a major obstacle to energy reform. Beaudreau highlighted the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) as a key step in shifting energy policy, but legal battles persist over leasing rights, mineral access, and state-federal control. He pointed to Louisiana’s lawsuit over the Biden administration’s oil and gas lease moratorium, which raised critical questions about governmental statutory and commercial contractual rights in energy development.

Economic arguments also dominate the debate. Critics claim renewables are too costly for federal subsidies, mirroring past fights over offshore oil incentives. Meanwhile, global competition—especially China’s control of solar panel and battery supply chains—adds geopolitical complexity to the transition.

Despite these challenges, Beaudreau offered a measured note of optimism. He pointed to Western landowners and ranchers, historically conservation advocates, as potential allies in sustainable land management. Their interest in wildlife migration corridors and outdoor access could foster new conservation coalitions.

Ultimately, Beaudreau underscored that energy transition requires modernizing laws, addressing economic realities, and building broad political consensus. As attendees left Wittemyer Courtroom, they carried with them a clear message: the road ahead is uncertain, but public lands remain central to shaping America’s energy future and, as Wilkinson’s “lords of yesterday” remain, the imperatives of change have arrived.

The recording of the 16th annual Schultz Lecture can be found here.

Native land loss 1776 to 1930. Credit: Alvin Chang/Ranjani Chakraborty

From email from the Getches-Wilkinson Center (Annie Carlozzi):

Thank you for joining the Getches-Wilkinson Center and the Center of the American West for the Schultz Lecture in Energy on February 25th! We are so grateful to Tommy Beaudreau for making time in his schedule to spend lunch with our law students and the evening with all of our attendees in person and online.

We have a few things to share with you:

Conference Photos

Barb Colombo of 11:11 Productions Photography has provided us with wonderful images of the lecture with Tommy Beaudreau. We’ve added them to a Flickr album for easy viewing here.

Conference Recordings

The Law School IT Team has released the recording from the lecture.

GWC Blog
Current Colorado Law students Victoria Matson and Oliver Skelly shared their reflections on Tommy Beaudreau’s visit to the Colorado Law School on the GWC blog. You can read their piece here.

Upcoming Event

We hope you will consider joining us for the annual Colorado River Conference co-convened by GWC and the Water & Tribes Initiative. You can find more information on our website regarding this year’s theme: Turning Hindsight into Foresight: The Colorado River at a Crossroads.

How Wildfires Reshape Our Landscapes: Insights from Author Dr. Ellen Wohl

East Troublesome Fire. Photo credit: Northern Water

In this interview, Dr. Ellen Wohl describes her book, Landscapes on Fire: Impacts on Uplands, Rivers, and Communities. She explains the importance of an integrated approach to studying wildfires, bringing perspectives from across disciplines to understand how they reshape natural, biological, and human environments. Watch the full interview to find out more about the book. 🔗 Browse or order Landscapes on Fire: http://lite.spr.ly/6006GDM0. 👉 Access Landscapes on Fire via institutional subscription: http://lite.spr.ly/6008GDM2 📚 Explore all AGU books: http://lite.spr.ly/6000GDM4 #wildfire #climate #geomorphology #Rivers #EarthScience #STEM #Books #Publishing #AGUPubs

Walking the fine line of ‘all of the above’: Two Republicans from #Colorado add names to letter calling for restraint in gutting of #climate legislation — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #ActOnClimate

On March 13, 2025 Gabe Evans visited a five-megawatt solar installation near LaSalle. *Photo courtesy of Rep. Gabe Evans*

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

March 21, 2025

Colorado sends four Democrats and four Republicans to the U.S. House of Representatives. Of them, Jeff Hurd, a Republican from Grand Junction, and Gabe Evans, a Republican from Fort Lupton, will be the most interesting to watch during the next two years.

These two representatives, both new to Congress in January, were among 21 Republican signatories in the House to a letter calling for restraint in efforts to gut the Inflation Reduction Act.

The letter expresses concern about “disruptive changes to our nation’s energy tax structure.” The New York Times and Utility Dive both interpreted the language as a reference to the IRA, the landmark climate legislation adopted in August 2022. President Donald Trump, the Times notes, often talks about repealing the law.

Atlas Public Policy, a research firm, reported in February that 80% of funds authorized by the law have gone to Congressional districts represented by Republicans.

Hurd, an attorney who formerly was chief counsel for the Delta-Montrose Electric Association, essentially replaced Lauren Boebert in the Third Congressional District. Boebert was almost certainly headed for defeat had she tried to run against Aspen’s Adam Frisch a second time in the Western Slope-dominated and Republican-leaning district after squeaking out just 50.6% of votes in the strongly Republican-leaning district. With a new home in Windsor, she easily won election in Colorado’s Fourth Congressional District.

While Boebert inevitably echoes Trump, Hurd signaled his measured distance from MAGA hat-wearing positions when he criticized Trump’s blanket pardon of rioters who had invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. At the same time, his bill, Productive Public Lands Act, rhymes with Trump’s drill-baby-drill slogan. Never mind that the United States has already been setting records for oil and gas extraction.

As long as he can survive Republican primaries. Hurd can probably return to Washington for a good many terms. His drill bill is likely part of that political dance.

Evans has a more tricky path to negotiate. He narrowly beat the incumbent Democrat, Yadira Caraveo, in the Eighth Congressional District. The district extends from the edge of Denver to the farm country of northern Colorado. Although a former police officer in Arvada, he nonetheless refrained from criticizing Trump’s pardons of the rioters, as Denver TV newscaster Kyle Clark pointed out.

Most of Weld County lies in his district. The county delivers 82% of Colorado’s crude oil and 56% of its natural gas extraction. The district also has the Vestas factory in Brighton that produces nacelles for wind turbines. Vestas has 1,800 employees in Colorado between that factory and another in Windsor. Evans’ district also has many solar energy installations.

On March 13, Evans visited the Vestas factory, a five-megawatt solar installation near LaSalle, and an oil installation. Bayswater, operator of the latter, proclaims itself a producer of “some of the cleanest energy molecules in the country and world.”

Invited to tag along, Channel 4 gave Evans the time to say that he favored an “all-of-the-above safe, affordable, secure energy supply to bring costs down to consumers and jobs back to the United States.”

That “all-of-the-above energy approach” was a key element of the letter signed by Evans and Hurd. Combined with a robust advanced manufacturing sector, the approach “will support the United States’ position as a global energy leader,” the letter said. “Both our constituencies and the energy industry alike remain concerned about disruptive changes to our nation’s energy tax structure.”

Tax credits adopted over the last decade “allowed energy developers to plan with these tax incentives in mind. These timelines have been relied upon when it comes to capital allocation, planning, and project commitments, all of which would be jeopardized by premature credit phase outs or additional restrictive mechanisms such as limiting transferability.”

The Evans all-of-the-above tour was arranged by a former Republican state senator, Greg Brophy. Brophy grows watermelons north of Wray and operates an organization called The Western Way. Brophy has been a strong supporter of renewable energy for eastern Colorado and also has a presence on the Western Slope.

Brophy told me that he has organized a similar tour for another member of Congress from Colorado, but it has not been scheduled. He declined to identify the representative.

What if Trump succeeds in rolling back the federal energy tax credits? Energy Innovation, a think tank, estimates increased average household energy costs in Colorado of $180 per year by 2030.

Will other Republicans in Colorado’s congressional delegation join Evans and Hurd? After all, renewable energy didn’t start out as a partisan issue.

Colorado’s energy industry has had a slightly rougher go of it, mainly because it specializes in natural gas, not crude oil, and methane prices have been low since the 2009 crash. Note to Jeff Hurd: Revenues were substantially higher under Biden than under Trump I. Just sayin’. Source: ONRR via The Land Desk/Jonathan P. Thompson

We see the climate change in #NewMexico — Laura Paskus (WritersOnTheRange.org) #ActOnClimate

Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Laura Paskus):

March 10, 2025

Here in New Mexico, our growing season has lengthened since the 1970s, even as stream flows have decreased. Fire season starts earlier, lasts longer, and in some years, ignites the forests into record-breaking blazes, like the gargantuan Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon and Black fires in 2022.

If you look at the last century in New Mexico, stretches of higher temperatures have lengthened; heat waves are hotter and nights, consistently warmer.

Rising heat and expanding aridity harm ecosystems and wildlife and hotter days are dangerous for anyone outside, especially people without housing or access to cool spaces. Extreme heat even interacts with certain medications people need for their physical and mental health.

It should be no surprise that we’re facing another crackly-dry spring, summer, and fall. Fans watching the March 2 Oscars on Albuquerque TV saw flashing red-flag fire warnings. The next day, high winds and dust storms blasted the state; near Deming, a haboob of fast-moving dust shut down highways.

West Drought Monitor map March 11, 2025.

As of early March, 92 percent of New Mexico was experiencing drought, with almost 30 percent of the state in severe to extreme drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

Arizona is in even worse shape: 100 percent of the state is in drought, with 87 percent in severe to exceptional drought. And the interior West’s three-month outlook is for warm, dry conditions — especially in Arizona and New Mexico.

Here in New Mexico, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District—which supplies water for farms—is warning runoff season will be short and river flows, low. The district’s leaders are urging farmers to plan for extended periods between irrigation deliveries and say that without summertime monsoons, they will not meet everyone’s needs this year.

During the 1900s—including during the infamous 1950s drought and earlier in this century—armers could often still expect full water allocations in a dry year.

Now, when farmers don’t receive water—and the Rio Grande dries for long stretches—it’s not only because there isn’t enough snow melting off the mountains. It’s also because consistently dry soils suck up any moisture, making both forests and croplands thirstier.

Not only that, but decades of persistent drought and warming temperatures have desiccated reservoirs along the Rio Grande and its tributary, the Chama River.

On the Chama River, Heron Reservoir is 14 percent full; its neighbors, El Vado and Abiquiu, are at 14 percent and 51 percent respectively. Further down the watershed, on the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico, Elephant Butte Reservoir is only 13 percent full, and its neighbor, Caballo, nine percent full.

In New Mexico, some water users, including the irrigation district, rely on water piped from the Colorado River watershed into the Chama and then the Rio Grande. This year, most of that supplemental water won’t be there.

The view upstream on both watersheds is also troubling, especially in Arizona, New Mexico and southern Utah where the snowpack is “below to well-below median.” Last month, the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs, Lake Powell and Lake Mead, were 34 percent full, the lowest they’d been in early February for the last 30 years of records.

I’m alarmed by many things happening right now, including the disappearance of climate data from federal websites and the gutting of federal workforces and budgets. We need wildland firefighters, scientists, and the staffers who kept our parks and public lands functioning.

But as a reporter who has covered climate change and its impacts in my state for more than two decades, I take the long view along with a local view.

We have known for decades that the planet is steadily warming and that the impacts of climate change would intensify. And we must resist focusing solely on the current chaos of the federal government. [ed. emphasis mine]

Laura Paskus. Photo credit: Writers on the Range

There’s never been a better time to become immersed in local politics or organizing, and to hold state and local leaders accountable for action on climate.

We can collaborate on local solutions and work together to better deal with the crises we face. Really, we have no choice.

Laura Paskus is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about Western issues She is longtime reporter based in Albuquerque and the author of At the Precipice: New Mexico’s Changing Climate and Water Bodies.

#Colorado West Slope Letdown: U.S. Representative Lauren Boebert left, MAGA stuck around — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Sky with oil and gas infrastructure, Greater Chaco Region. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

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

March 15, 2025

Data Dump: Setting baselines to monitor “energy dominance” under Trump

When Republican Jeff Hurd was elected to represent Colorado’s third congressional district, I believe I heard a bipartisan, collective sigh of relief. Democrats may have been sad that their candidate didn’t win, but at least the new guy wasn’t Lauren Boebert. And, many of us hoped, Hurd would represent a return of the independent and pragmatic Western politician of old to western and southern Colorado.

We were wrong.

So far, Hurd’s performance in office has pretty much followed Boebert’s lead, politically, albeit without the gun-slinging and other outrageous antics. When one of his aides showed up to meet with constituents in Dolores, she fled after seeing the size of the crowd assembled there. Hurd, himself, chickened out from attending a town hall in Grand Junction for similar reasons. Instead of apologizing for refusing to listen to the people he represents, he accused the crowd of being George Soros-funded activists — a false and worn-out, right-wing anti-semitic trope that really needs to be retired. In fact, the folks were his constituents, including members of Indivisible and the League of Women Voters. These weren’t exactly molotov cocktail hurling radicals.

And when CPR’s Ryan Warner asked him about the mass federal employee firings that have hit his district especially hard, Hurd gave mealy mouthed answers, saying efficiency is good, acknowledging he had no idea how many employees had lost their jobs, and lamenting the possibility that some good people may have been terminated, too, though it was also clear that he wasn’t going to do anything about it, especially if it meant questioning or, God forbid, standing up to Musk and Trump.

Hurd introduced a bill that would move the Bureau of Land Management headquarters to Grand Junction because it’s better to have management staff on the ground, yet he has not pushed back on DOGE’s plans to close federal offices throughout his district, including the Bureau of Reclamation and Army Corps of Engineers offices in Durango. He has teamed up with Boebert to criticize Colorado for importing “foreign wolves” into the state and has parroted MAGA’s anti-immigrant hysteria in regards to Denver’s tolerance.

Now Hurd has introduced the Productive Public Lands Act to “unlock resource development on some of our most productive lands.” It would toss Biden-era Bureau of Land Management resource management plans — which he claims “locked up access to viable lands” — and replace them with fossil fuel-friendly ones with the aim of putting “us on a path to energy dominance.” Talk about inefficient: Those RMPs took years to develop and are the result of extensive studies, public input, and compromise. Trashing them is a perfect example of government waste. [ed. emphasis mine]

Note to Rep. Hurd: Public lands are not locked up. Quite to the contrary. Unfortunately Hurd — like his predecessor — has chosen to let MAGA ideology and disinformation blind him to the facts. Still, I’ve got to try, so here I go again: The United States is producing more oil and gas — much of it from public lands — than it ever has before, and is the world’s leader in hydrocarbon production. Read that again. Then again. And keep doing so until it penetrates your thick skull so that you can stop wasting all of our time with your “war on energy” nonsense.

While drilling has shifted away from Colorado and is now centered on the Permian Basin, it has nothing to do with BLM regulations or resource management plans. It’s because western Colorado is rich in natural gas, not so much in oil, and there’s far less money in natural gas production than there is in crude oil. Nevertheless, oil, gas, coal, and carbon dioxide production from federal lands in Colorado (much of which are on the Western Slope) generated $205 million in revenue last year. Locked up? I don’t think so.

***

As long as I’m on the topic of “energy dominance,” I figured it would be a good time to set out some baseline data for tracking the progress of Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda. As has been established, the Trumps and Hurds of the world believe that energy production from federal lands has been “locked up,” and that by “unleashing” it — i.e. rescinding environmental protections — the oil and gas industry will bring in a battalion of drill rigs, send oil and gas production through the roof, and bring down prices at the pump to make it cheaper to drive those gas-guzzling behemoths that now dominate the roadways.

It’s too early in Trump’s term to determine whether that’s actually happening or not, so let’s just check in on where we are and what has happened over the last four years. And we’ll keep updating these graphs periodically. Land Desk readers have seen some of these before. Sorry about that.

This one shows U.S. crude oil production. It was in steady decline until about 2009, kicking back up again just as Obama took office. Is that because Obama slashed regulations on drilling? No. It’s because that’s when horizontal drilling-multistage hydraulic fracturing, i.e. fracking, came into its own and oil prices increased. Production dipped at the end of Obama’s second term because OPEC decided to wage a price war on U.S. producers, glutting the market with crude in hopes of driving some U.S. companies out of business. And it dipped again at the end of Trump’s first term because of COVID. In December, while Biden was still in office, U.S. fields produced 418 million barrels of crude, an all-time record high. Source: Energy Information Administration.

Production goes up after drilling activity increases. Drilling activity generally responds to crude oil prices. When prices are high, it’s more profitable to develop new oil and gas wells, so the drilling rigs are dusted off and head out into the fields. When prices are low, they are folded up and hauled back to the storage yard.

And lest you think that maybe all of that production is coming from private or state lands since, after all, the federal land has all been “locked up” by Biden’s purported war on energy, check out the revenues from federal land resource production for New Mexico and Colorado. Funny how they shot up right after Biden was elected, no?

Oil production from federal lands in New Mexico generated $4.65 billion last year, down slightly from 2022 but still significantly more than during any other time during the last two decades. Source: Office of Natural Resource Revenue.

The best way to get a feel for drilling activity is to check out the weekly rig count. So here it is. But a note to all you statisticians out there: The time intervals are uneven on this graph, in part due to my own laziness. But it still gives a fairly accurate picture of drilling activity over time, so it works.

This gives a good illustration of the level of drilling activity and where it’s taking place. This shows the OPEC price war dip in 2015 and 2016 and the COVID dip in 2020. Again, these are driven almost entirely by the price of crude oil, which is determined by the global market. North Dakota dominated for a while, but never recovered from the 2015 crash. Instead, activity moved to the Permian Basin in New Mexico and Texas. The rig count for Western states remained remarkably stable during the Biden administration. Source: Baker-Hughes.

The thing about production and rig counts, though, is they don’t really reflect White House policy. So how about the number of drilling permits approved by the Bureau of Land Management?

On average, Biden’s BLM issued around the same number of drilling permits as Trump I. This may have something to do with policy, but it is also driven by how many firms apply for permits and how well-equipped and staffed the field offices are to process those applications. Note that during the last four months of Biden’s term, the BLM issued over 1,300 permits. So far, the Trump II administration has issued 774 permits in just over two months. Source: BLM.

Now that we have a snapshot of where we’ve been and where we are in terms of oil and gas development, we can track where we might be headed under Trump 2.0. My guess? We’re going to see all of the above indicators begin falling soon. Sure, rig counts are staying steady, meaning production will continue to rise for a few more months. But after that, lower oil prices are likely to kick in, dimming companies’ enthusiasm for drilling, which will hit the rig count first and then production.

Oil prices are dropping — they hit sub-$70/bbl this week for the first time since 2021 — because OPEC decided to start pumping more crude and because the economy is struggling, which will likely dampen demand. The economy is struggling because markets are reacting unfavorably to the chaos Trump, Musk, and company are wreaking from the White House. Turns out that tariffs, trade wars, and haphazard termination of critical federal employees is bad for the economy. Gasoline prices will likely fall, too, except in places that rely on Canadian crude, where they might increase. So there is that. Of course, if you lose all your money in the plummeting stock market, it won’t really matter much, I suppose.

Speaking of tariffs, remember when I wrote about Trump’s trade wars and predicted that American whiskey and bourbon makers would be casualties? Turns out I was right. Kentucky distillers, especially the small ones, are already feeling the pain, and even large ones are smarting from Canada’s retaliatory moves. I suppose Trump will claim the Canadians started the trade war, just as he’s ridiculously asserting Ukraine invaded Russia.

📸 Parting Shot 🎞️

St. Joseph’s Church, San Fidel, New Mexico. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

#Colorado lawmakers eye new task force to boost water funding — Jerd Smith (Fresh Water News)

Republican House members recite the Pledge of Allegiance as Colorado lawmakers returned to the Capitol January 8, 23025, for opening day at the General Assembly. Photo credit: Fresh Water News

Click the link to read the article on the Fresh Water News website (Jerd Smith):

March 13, 2025

Colorado lawmakers, worried that a key source of money for water projects is too easily tapped for other programs, want to create a special task force to examine ways to stabilize and boost funding for things like new water pipelines and conservation programs.

Under Senate Bill 40, a nine-member panel would examine new options to replace severance tax money that is collected on nonrenewable resources, such as oil and gas and some minerals, and is highly variable. A portion of the revenue is used to help Colorado address looming water shortages.

According to state forecasts, by 2050 those shortages could be as high as 740,000 acre-feet of water, under a worst-case planning scenario, or much lower if growth slows and climate change impacts are less than expected. One acre-foot of water equals nearly 326,000 gallons, enough water to serve at least two urban homes for one year.

Like other Western states, Colorado is racing to shore up aging water systems and make existing supplies stretch further as drought and rising temperatures shrink water supplies.

The bill comes as lawmakers wrestle with how to cut $1.2 billion from a state purse hurt by slowing growth and revenue caps.

The measure, sponsored by Sen. Dylan Roberts, D-Frisco, Sen. Cleave Simpson, R-Alamosa, Rep. Karen McCormick, D-Longmont, and Rep. Matthew Martinez, D-Monte Vista, is stalled in the Senate appropriations committee until the legislature completes its budget work, Roberts said.

Roberts said the current budget crisis and previous fiscal storms have resulted in severance tax revenue being tapped to help resolve budget shortfalls in nonwater programs, a situation that hits hard at the state’s ongoing efforts to ensure there is enough water to go around.

“The joint budget committee has swept severance taxes in the past. Not too often, but I worry that it will become a common practice. I and my cosponsors want to get the best minds together on how we better plan for the future,” he said.

Lawmakers plan a new tax force to find ways to replace the state’s reliance on severance taxes. Credit: Colorado Legislative Council

The Colorado Water Conservation Board is the state’s primary water planning agency, and helps fund an array of water projects and planning initiatives. Its revenues come from interest on loans, money from the state’s general operating fund, sports betting tax revenues, and severance tax revenues, among other sources.

Late last year, Gov. Jared Polis proposed a budget that largely shielded water programs from major cuts, but it is lawmakers who will make the final decision on how the state’s budget will be balanced this year.

The severance tax has generated $412 million for the CWCB over the past 10 years, according to Kirk Russell, the CWCB’s finance section chief. Most of that goes into a revolving loan fund that helps finance such things as irrigation ditch repairs and pipelines. It isn’t typically used to finance the water agency’s operating budget.

But he said the severance tax fund experiences “a great deal of variability” from year to year.

A bright spot in the funding picture, according to Roberts, is the growth in revenue collected from gambling on sports. According to the Colorado Division of Gaming, sports betting has generated $98 million in revenue since May 2020, when sports betting became legal in Colorado. The majority of that money is now used to help fund the Colorado Water Plan.

Roberts said lawmakers are open to considering a range of options to stabilize water funding, and he said there may be potential to expand the revenue generated by sports betting. In January, the program hit a new high, generating $4.4 million. The previous high occurred in January 2024, when $4.1 million was generated, according to the Division of Gaming.

If the bipartisan task force measure is approved, members would be selected this summer and a final report would be due back to lawmakers by July 15, 2026.

#Colorado Will Require Oil and Gas Companies to Increase Water Recycling for Fracking — Jake Bolster and Martha Pskowski (InsideClimateNews.org) #ActOnClimate

Directional drilling from one well site via the National Science Foundation

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Jake Bolster and Martha Pskowski):

March 13, 2025

Freshwater use in oil and gas drilling has come under scrutiny in Colorado as the state faces a historic drought. On Wednesday, March 12, state regulators announced new rules that will require drillers to use more recycled water in their operations and, hopefully, relieve pressure on scarce freshwater resources.

As Colorado continues to produce fossil fuels at record pace, the Centennial State has become awash in a caustic, brackish and chemically-laden fluid known as produced water, a byproduct of the drilling and fracking process.

Diagram of Hydraulic Fracking Machinery and Process. By Emiliawilkinson – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=132536012

This water can have high levels of salts, metals and other contaminants, making it more difficult and expensive to treat for reuse than for disposal. Oil and gas companies in Colorado typically dispose of produced water by pumping it back into old, out-of-service wells and other geological formations using injection wells, permanently severing it from the hydrological cycle. Meanwhile, freshwater demand for oil and gas production in Colorado is forecasted to rise in the coming decade as the industry drills deeper vertically and farther horizontally.

The oil and gas industry, whose activity in Colorado accounts for almost 4 percent of U.S. total crude oil output, uses about 11 billion gallons of fresh water annually in Colorado, according to data collected by the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission (ECMC). That’s comparable to the amount of water stored behind a small dam, but accounts for less than one percent of all fresh water used in the state.

“Things are changing quickly” for Colorado as climate change intensifies, said Harmony Cummings, a director of the Green House Connection Center, an environmental nonprofit party to the rulemaking. “How low the reservoirs are is terrifying to me.”

Turning Waste Into a Resource

In 2023, the Colorado state legislature passed HB23-1242 (Water Conservation In Oil And Gas Operations: Concerning water used in oil and gas operations, and, in connection therewith, making an appropriation), which required the ECMC to adopt rules “requiring a statewide reduction in usage of fresh water and a corresponding increase in usage of recycled or reused water in oil and gas operations.”

The bill also created Colorado’s Produced Water Consortium, a body of 31 people including regulators, industry representatives, environmentalists and scientists. The group is studying how produced water that comes to the surface during drilling can be reused in other oil and gas operations to reduce freshwater consumption, and its reports served as the basis for its recommendations to the ECMC.

“The consortium started out with everyone coming in with an agenda,” said Hope Dalton, the consortium’s director. “Then they began to learn from each other and trust each other and really work to create these data-informed recommendations…I think the recommendations are very solid.”

Produced water is a catch-all term for water that flows out of oil and gas wells after conventional drilling or hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. This liquid waste can contain drilling chemicals injected into wells, toxic hydrocarbons like benzene, a known carcinogen, and water dislodged from deep underground that carries sediments, salts, metals like barium, manganese and strontium, and Naturally Occurring Radioactive Materials (NORM).

The Produced Water Consortium compiled data on existing water practices in Colorado’s oil and gas industry to inform the rule-making. It found that water diverted for fracking in Colorado totals about 26,000 acre feet a year, or 0.17 percent of the state’s total water use. One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons of water, meaning the oil and gas industry holds rights to about 8.5 billion gallons of freshwater annually.

Between July 2023 and March 2024, according to the consortium’s findings, operators reported to the state that they disposed of 87 percent of their produced water and recycled the remaining 13 percent. Companies reported that 93.2 percent of produced water disposal was into underground injection wells. Much smaller volumes of water are disposed of in pits or discharged into state surface water bodies. The initial data on recycling rates is self-reported by the companies and only reflects the short period of time that reporting has been required.

The Denver-Julesburg basin, or DJ Basin for short, along Colorado’s Front Range is home to a vast majority of the industry’s development and water demand. It is also home to the vast majority of the state’s population, including the metro areas of Denver, Boulder and Fort Collins. From 2019 to 2024, an average of two new fracking wells were completed daily in the DJ Basin, five-and-a-half times the industry’s rate in other basins in the state, according to ECMC data.

Companies in the DJ Basin account for almost three quarters of the industry’s total water use, according to ECMC data from 2022. In the DJ Basin, only 0.4 percent of that water is recycled. The Western Slope, which is more rural, has fewer drilling companies but a much higher rate of recycling produced water for operations, sometimes as high as 100 percent.

Under Colorado’s new regulations, by the beginning of 2026, oil companies must use at least 4 percent recycled produced water across their operations in the state. In 2030, that requirement increases to a minimum of 10 percent.

The ECMC will convene again in 2028 to draft new benchmarks beyond 2030. If a consensus fails to emerge, minimum averages of 20 percent recycled water in 2034 and 35 percent in 2038, as recommended by the Consortium, will become law.

If an operator is unable to meet these thresholds, they would be allowed to purchase “credits” for excess produced water recycled by other operators, but only if those credits would be used in the same basin.

“Increasing recycling doesn’t necessarily equate to a decrease in freshwater” use, said Cummings. If the rate of fracking in Colorado rises faster than the produced water recycling thresholds, it’s possible that produced water reuse and freshwater use could both go up, she said.

Other new rules require oil and gas companies to make quarterly reports on what freshwater is used for, the total amount of water and produced water used in each basin, and figures on emissions from truck traffic, among other statistics. Operators will also be required to report how they would meet produced water reuse thresholds. The ECMC could issue penalties to companies that don’t comply with the new rules.

But Cummings worried those penalties aren’t onerous enough. There are “no real teeth” in the enforcement mechanisms, said Cummings, who spent eight years working in the oil and gas industry. If given the proper combination of regulation and incentives, she is confident companies could recycle produced water at greater rates than Colorado is requiring.

“I’ve seen them do incredible projects when profits are on the other side of that,” she said.

On DOGE and Keystone XL and lost jobs — Jonathan P. Thompson

Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk

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

February 28, 2025

🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡

The last thing I want to do is devote every dispatch to the madness and inanity flooding out of the White House. Seriously. Nevertheless, today I feel the need to devote some words to responding to Land Desk reader and frequent commenter Dennis Pierce’s comment on Tuesday’s dispatch, which read:

I’m glad Pierce brought that up, because I think it’s an important and valid point and one worthy of discussion — especially considering that Trump recently announced that he wants Keystone XL built “NOW!” Pierce’s comment was similar — though more accurate than — a post widely shared on Facebook that said:

I’ll get to the factual problems here in a minute, but first let’s just clarify what these folks are trying to say, which is a little bit of what-about-ism, but also: If you’re so worried about jobs, how could you celebrate the Keystone XL’s cancellation or, for that matter, the closure of a coal power plant or mine? After all, that hurts real people, too.

It’s a valid point.

But DOGE’s rampage is very, very different than Biden’s Keystone XL cancellation.

First off, Biden didn’t fire anyone. He cancelled a permit for the Keystone XL pipeline, which led the developer, TC Energy, to abandon the project and lay off about 1,000 temporary construction workers. While DOGE is slashing jobs as an end in itself, Biden cancelled the permit because:

When the Trump administration approved the permit in 2019, it was defying a court order to take a “hard look” at the pipeline and the effects of current oil prices (they were super low at that point), potential increases in greenhouse gas emissions (the oil carried by the pipeline would emit 178 million tons of carbon dioxide annually when burned), new data on oil spills (the XL’s sister pipeline, the Keystone, had already experienced nearly 1,500 spills during its first seven years of operation), and potential effects on cultural resources (the diluted bitumen carried by the pipe is harder to clean up than conventional crude).

The line would cross huge swaths of tribal and private lands. Many of those tribal nations and landowners didn’t want the line on their lands, and Indigenous advocates and the Rosebud Sioux Tribe and the Fort Belknap Indian Community had sued the administration to stop the line.

The line would have cut through sage grouse habitat and the 378 miles of new power lines needed to run pumping stations would have crossed whooping crane habitat, thereby imperiling the endangered birds.

The line was being built by a Canadian company to carry Canadian crude from the tar sands to U.S. refineries. That oil wasn’t needed — the market was glutted in early 2021 — and it would have competed against U.S. producers, damaging the oilfield-reliant economies in the Permian Basin and elsewhere.

Had TC Energy gone forward with the project, it would have created about 6,000 jobs over the three-year development phase. Those jobs, of course, never came to be. While that’s a lot, its nothing near the 14,000 that social media posters are throwing around. Nor is it even close to the job toll DOGE has racked up so far. The Keystone jobs were temporary; after the three years they would all go away, leaving just 20 to 35 permanent, full-time workers to operate the line. So comparing the Keystone cancellation to the current chainsaw-butchering of the federal workforce is way off.

But the larger point stands: When Biden cancelled Keystone XL, he also put a lot of folks out of well-paying jobs that, even though they were only temporary, could not easily be replaced. That hurt real people. And it was naive, even a bit callous, for Keystone XL opponents to suggest that the laid off workers could get jobs in the clean energy industry, or that fossil fuel workers in general could simply learn to code — as Biden said in 2019. A few years before, Hillary Clinton was skewered for telling an Ohio audience that “we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business.”

It’s almost as bad as Musk. Right? Not quite. Clinton followed up that statement with this: “We’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories. Now we’ve got to move away from coal and all the other fossil fuels, but I don’t want to move away from the people who did the best they could to produce the energy that we relied on.”

Policies aimed at reducing fossil fuel use and cutting climate-altering and human health-harming pollutants will and do have an economic impact. Closing a coal mine or power plant can be devastating, both economically and culturally, for the communities that rely on them, even if it does improve the lives of people who live nearby by cleaning up the air and water.

While some environmental groups and the politicians that support them don’t care about those job losses — their goal is to protect the environment, human costs be damned — these days most green groups not only care, but fight just as forcibly for a just transition as they have to make facilities clean up their acts. For example:

After the Mohave coal plant and its associated mine on Black Mesa shut down at the end of 2005, the Grand Canyon Trust helped spearhead the creation of a Just Transition Coalition that then pushed regulators to require Southern California Edison to invest revenues from the sale of sulfur credits into economic and clean energy development benefitting the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe. The plant had sullied the air for years, and the coal mine was rapidly depleting the Navajo aquifer by using huge volumes of water to slurry the coal across Arizona to the plant.

Tó Nizhóní Ání is leading the effort to push Arizona utilities to help fund a just transition for the communities most affected by the December 2019 closure of the Navajo Generating Station and the Kayenta coal mine on Black Mesa, as well as the imminent shutdown of the Four Corners power plant.

When Public Service Company of New Mexico announced it would shut down the San Juan Generating Station in 2022, environmental groups and Democratic state lawmakers passed the Energy Transition Act, which allows PNM to issue bonds to fund the power plant’s abandonment, which included about $40 million for local economic development and displaced worker assistance and another $30 million for coal mine reclamation, which kept some workers employed. The Act also required PNM to build some of the replacement power facilities in the same area. The San Juan solar installation employed hundreds of workers during its construction and helped replace property tax revenues for the Central Consolidated School District.

And while Biden may have been a little oblivious about the ease of switching careers, he not only showed empathy toward those who are losing their jobs in the energy transition (he never brandished a chainsaw or insulted the folks who lost their jobs), but also pushed through legislation — i.e. the Infrastructure and Jobs and the Inflation Reduction acts — which poured billions of dollars into clean energy development and manufacturing and abandoned mine and oil and gas well cleanup programs, creating hundreds of thousands of jobs in the process.

The new New Deal is a pretty good deal — Jonathan P. Thompson November 24, 2021 Read full story

That’s in contrast to the Trump administration, which is not only slashing jobs at a frenzied rate, but has also frozen and even tried to claw back funding from those job-creating laws, which is not only illegal, but also jeopardizes thousands of jobs in the private sector.

I suppose Trump believes that if he can convince some company to come back and build Keystone XL, perhaps by promising them a blank check to tear up the environment and private and tribal lands, then it will replace a fraction of those lost jobs. At least for a little while.

That may be a little more difficult than he thinks, however. The pipeline’s original developer is no longer interested in the project. And anyone else looking to build it would run up against another one of Trump’s harebrained policies. On the same day that he posted about reviving Keystone XL, Trump also announced that he was going ahead with tariffs against imports from Mexico and Canada, including on the oil that a future Keystone XL would carry. That diminishes if not destroys the economic case for anyone who might be considering building the pipeline. It’s typically oblivious behavior from the oligarchs running our country.

***

When reports started coming in that the Trump administration was unfreezing its hold on seasonal National Park Service employees or rehiring some federal workers it had fired only days earlier, I began to think — or at least hope — that the bloodshed was almost over. Mmmm … nope. Two days ago Russel Vought, the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, sent a memo to all federal agencies ordering them to “promptly undertake preparations to initiate large-scale reductions in force.”

Here’s the way he introduced the memo:

Which is a long way of saying that Russell Vought is an a&%hole. He’s also an architect of Project 2025. It’s funny, because I remember a few months ago when a certain commenter chiding me for predicting that Trump would follow Project 2025 if elected. Well, guess what: The Trump administration is following Project 2025 to the letter. That includes eviscerating public agencies, like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, where 800 employees were fired yesterday and more may lose their jobs today. This is bad. Very bad.

***

If you’re in the Durango area and you’d like to support public employees, you’ve got options! On March 3, at 3 p.m., there will be a peaceful demonstration to support public lands employees, many of whom were illegally fired under the Trump administration’s cuts to federal agencies, outside the San Juan National Forest Headquarters at 15 Burnett Ct in Durango. There will be concurrent events in Bayfield and Dolores (see flier below). Attendees are invited to bring thank-you cards and small gifts for remaining staff and participate in sign-waving to show solidarity. This event will support both the San Juan National Forest Headquarters and the local Bureau of Land Management (BLM) office, which have each lost employees in these cuts.

And beer! Ska Brewing in Durango is rolling out a special stout today to support forest service workers — or help them drown their sorrows (20% alcohol … holy cow). Check out the logo:

Colorado College’s 15th annual (February 2025 State of the Rockies Project Conservation in the West Poll

A bunch of Utah public lands. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Click the link to read the release on the State of the Rockies Project website (Cyndy Hines and Jacob Hay):

Westerners Who Prefer Public Land Conservation Over Energy Development Reaches All Time High

Fifteenth annual Conservation in the West Poll reveals there is no mandate from voters in the West to roll back public lands protections or expand oil and gas development

COLORADO SPRINGS—Colorado College’s 15th annual State of the Rockies Project Conservation in the West Poll released today shows Western voters continue to support strong conservation and protection policies as a new presidential administration takes power, promising rollbacks, budget cuts, and expanded energy development.

The poll, which surveyed the views of voters in eight Mountain West states (Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming), found Westerners prefer public land conservation over oil and gas development at the highest margins measured in the poll’s 15-year history.

Western voters continue to express concern about issues related to land, water, and wildlife. Strong majorities of Western voters – including self-identified “MAGA” voters – support policies that focus on the protection and conservation of public lands and oppose policies that would open public lands up to drilling, mining, or other development.

Given a choice between protection and development, 72 percent of Westerners prefer their elected officials to place more emphasis on protecting clean water sources, air quality, and wildlife habitat while providing opportunities to visit and recreate on public lands. By contrast, only 24 percent prefer their elected officials to prioritize the production of more domestic energy by maximizing the amount of national public lands available for responsible oil and gas production. Self-identified MAGA voters are split on the question, with 51 percent favoring an emphasis on protecting public lands and 44 percent wanting to maximize oil and gas production on public lands.

The first Trump administration reduced the size of national monuments, an unpopular decision in the West at the time. Reducing or removing national monument protections are even more unpopular now, with 89 percent of voters opposing the idea, compared to 80 percent when the question was asked in
January 2017.
Similarly, proposals to give state governments control over national public lands are more unpopular now,
with 65 percent of Westerners in opposition, compared to 2017 when 56 percent were opposed.

“The consensus favoring public lands conservation remains consistent and strong in the West,” said Katrina Miller-Stevens, Former Director of the State of the Rockies Project and an Associate Professor at Colorado College. “Westerners do not want to see a rollback of national monument protections and there is no mandate for oil and gas development. Voters from all political ideologies are united in support of public land conservation in the West.”

Proposals to reduce protection and expand energy development on public lands are deeply unpopular in
the West:

72 percent oppose removing protections for parts of existing national public lands to allow more drilling, mining and other development.

63 percent oppose reducing protections for some of the rare plants and animals under the Endangered Species Act.

60 percent oppose expanding the amount of national forest and other public lands available to private companies for logging.

Instead, Westerners are supportive of initiatives to protect public lands and natural resources from the impacts of development:

92 percent support keeping the requirement that oil and gas companies, rather than taxpayers, pay for all of the clean-up and land restoration costs after drilling is finished.

88 percent support continuing to require oil and gas producers that operate on public lands to use updated equipment and technology to prevent leaks of methane gas during the extraction process and reduce the need to burn off excess natural gas into the air.

71 percent support only allowing oil and gas companies the right to drill in areas of public lands where the likelihood of actually producing oil is high.

84 percent support maintaining or increasing the royalty rates that oil companies pay for producing oil and gas on national public lands.

89 percent support managing public lands to ensure there are more outdoor places free of light pollution to see the stars at night.

86 percent support ensuring Native American Tribes have greater input into decisions made about areas within national public lands that contain sacred or culturally significant places to their Tribes

With hiring freezes and a reduction of the federal workforce underway, Westerners are clear about who they prefer to make decisions about public lands, water, wildlife and other natural resources. 87 percent prefer these decisions be made by career professionals such as rangers, scientists, fire fighters, and other specialists in the field, compared to just 9 percent who prefer decisions be made by new political appointees.

Overall, voters gave positive marks – ranging from 61 percent approval to 86 percent approval – for the federal agencies charged with protecting public lands and the environment, including the U.S. Forest Service, National Park Service, Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management. Three-quarters of Western voters – including bipartisan majorities – are opposed to reducing funding to these agencies. More than two-thirds (69 percent) of MAGA voters oppose funding reductions for these federal agencies as well.

Despite 81 percent expressing serious concern about the rising cost of living, Westerners do not want to sacrifice public lands to build more housing. 82 percent of Westerners prefer building more housing within or close to existing communities, compared with 14 percent who favor selling off public lands to develop housing on natural areas.

Westerners value the natural beauty of their states, with more than three-in-ten naming nature as the thing they like most about living in the West. 67 percent of Westerners report visiting national public lands three or more times in the past year, and 24 percent visited them more than 10 times.

That connection translates into concern around the loss of habitat and natural areas, wildlife declines, pollution, and inadequate water supplies. All the land, water, and wildlife issues tested in the poll are viewed as extremely or very serious problems by more than half of Western voters, with a level of concern that is consistent with prior years.

Against that background of concern, voters support a variety of efforts to reduce or mitigate the impacts of climate change:

72 percent support the federal government taking action to reduce the carbon pollution that contributes to climate change.

71 percent support the federal government taking action to ensure the reliability of water supplies that may be threatened by climate change.

91 percent support allowing private landowners the ability to conserve their lands as working farms, ranches, natural areas, and wildlife habitat through voluntary land conservation easements.

92 percent support promoting nature-based solutions to improve water quality, such as conserving forests and lands along rivers, lakes, and streams.

94 percent support allowing trained fire teams to use controlled burns to remove growth in forests that could fuel wildfires when and where it is safe to do so

This is the fifteenth consecutive year Colorado College gauged the public’s sentiment on public lands and conservation issues. The 2025 Colorado College Conservation in the West Poll is a bipartisan survey conducted by Republican pollster Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy and Democratic pollster Dave Metz of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates. The survey is funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The poll surveyed at least 400 registered voters in each of eight Western states (AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT, & WY) for a total 3,316-voter sample, which included an over-sample of Black and Native American voters. The survey was conducted between January 3-17, 2024 and the effective margin of error is +2.46% at the 95% confidence interval for the total sample; and at most +4.9% for each state. The full survey and individual state surveys are available on the State of the Rockies Project website.

About Colorado College
Colorado College is a nationally prominent four-year liberal arts college that was founded in Colorado Springs in 1874. The College operates on the innovative Block Plan, in which its 2,200 undergraduate students study one course at a time in intensive three and a half-week segments. For the past eighteen years, the college has sponsored the State of the Rockies Project, which seeks to enhance public understanding of and action to address socio-environmental challenges in the Rocky Mountain West through collaborative student-faculty research, education, and stakeholder engagement.

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

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

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

New Poll Finds Broad Support for #Conservation and Action on #ClimateChange Across the West — Jake Bolster (InsideClimateNews.org)

People walk through the Red Cliffs National Conservation Area, designated during Obama administration, in Washington County, Utah. Credit: Bob Wick/BLM

Click the link to read the article on the Inside Climate News website (Jake Bolster):

February 19, 2025

Colorado College’s annual survey included residents of 8 Western states, the majority of whom identified as politically conservative or moderate.

As oil and gas production in the U.S. continues to reach record highs, the margin of Westerners who support public land conservation over increased oil and gas development also continues to climb.

In a new “Conservation in the West Poll” released today by Colorado College, 72 percent of respondents from eight Western states said they would prefer their member of Congress to emphasize protecting clean air, water and wildlife habitat while boosting outdoor recreation over maximizing the amount of public land used for oil and gas drilling.

The figure marks a two-percent increase from last year’s poll, and only 24 percent of those surveyed expressed interest in more oil and gas drilling and mining on public lands. The 48-point margin in favor of conservation is the highest in the poll’s fifteen-year history.

“The consensus favoring public lands conservation remains consistent and strong in the West,” said Katrina Miller-Stevens, an associate professor at Colorado College and the former director of the State of the Rockies Project, which runs the annual polls, in a statement. “Westerners do not want to see a rollback of national monument protections and there is no mandate for oil and gas development. Voters from all political ideologies are united in support of public land conservation in the West.”

Colorado College worked with Lori Weigel of New Bridge Strategy, a Republican pollster, and Dave Metz of Fairbank, Maslin, Maullin, Metz & Associates, a Democratic pollster, to survey 3,316 respondents, most of whom identified as politically conservative or independent. The poll, funded by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, included at least 400 voters each from Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Montana, Utah and Wyoming. Just under 40 percent of the survey-takers said they supported President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” platform.

The results come at a time when politicians in the nation’s capital and across the West are drumming up expansive, divisive plans for public lands.

Last Friday, the Trump administration fired over 5,400 employees across the departments of the Interior and Agriculture, most of whom worked for the National Park Service and U.S. Forest Service. The date of the firings have led them to be called a “Valentine’s Day Massacre,” a reference to the murders in Chicago nearly a century ago by gangsters working for Al Capone.

Since taking office, Trump has appointed people with close ties to the oil and gas industry to lead key federal agencies overseeing public lands. His secretary of the interior, Doug Burgum, who ordered last week’s Interior Department firings, was previously the governor of North Dakota, where he joined industry lawsuits to halt or overturn Biden-era regulations on oil and gas production. The Associated Press reported that he has relationships with several oil and gas executives and lobbyists.

Kathleen Sgamma, who, as Trump’s nominee to lead the Bureau of Land Management would be responsible for stewarding hundreds of millions of acres of public lands, has spent close to two decades lobbying for oil and gas companies across the West.

Lawmakers in Utah and Wyoming have demanded the federal government give control of public lands in their states, including areas protected by the National Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service, back to state legislatures. Neither initiative went very far—Utah’s was rejected by the courts and Wyoming’s failed to make it out of the state’s Senate after a series of dramatic revotes.

“A lot of the actions that the Trump administration has taken or has proposed to take are pretty far out of step with what Westerners want to see in terms of our public lands,” said Rachael Hamby, policy director at the Center for Western Priorities. “Westerners care about public lands a lot and want to see them protected.”

No more than 40 percent of residents in any of the eight states offered approval for state-based land grabs, and an overwhelming majority of Westerners—87 percent—supported career officials at various federal departments making decisions regarding public lands; only nine percent wanted to see elected representatives appoint new officials “who come from other industries and may have different perspectives” on public land, water and wildlife decisions.

Nearly three-quarters of Westerners agreed with federal efforts to combat climate change, though state-by-state levels of approval varied widely. Of the respondents from New Mexico, which has voted for Democrats in all but one presidential election since 1992, 77 percent backed federal action to combat climate change; in Wyoming, the only state where a majority of respondents said they supported President Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, 52 percent of those surveyed said they agreed with federal action on climate change.

Just under 90 percent of those surveyed expressed a desire to keep national monument designations implemented in the last decade in place. The new administration has begun to review those monument designations, and Trump shrunk some of them during his first term.

Other measures enjoying broad support across the West included giving private landowners the ability to conserve their land through conservation easements, using nature-based solutions to improve water quality and allowing the use of controlled burns to thin overgrown forests and lower the threats posed by wildfires.

As a new administration sets a different direction for public lands, Hamby warned that diverging from Westerners’ preferences would carry consequences.

“If elected officials are straying too far from what their constituents want to see,” she said, “they’re going to have to answer to their voters.”

Messing with Maps: Pipeline edition — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

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

February 11, 2025

🗺️ Messing with Maps 🧭

Detail of a 1931 New Mexico oil and gas map showing part of the San Juan Basin, where commercial drilling began in earnest in the early 1920s. Note that there were already pipelines running from Bloomfield to Albuquerque, from the Ute Dome to Durango and from the Rattlesnake Dome to Gallup.

On the afternoon of December 5, 2024 at least seven homes were evacuated in rural La Plata County, Colorado, after a major pipeline ruptured and spilled some 23,000 gallons of gasoline 1. Two months later, lingering fumes and contamination kept at least one of the evacuated households from returning home, according to the Durango Herald.

The spill tainted nine domestic wells with benzene concentrations of up to 300 parts per billion; the carcinogen’s maximum allowable level is 5 parts per billion. And the nearby Rainbow Springs trout farm suffered an 80,000 fingerling die-off in the days following the spill, according to the Herald, though a conclusive link between the two has yet to be made.

That a bunch of hydrocarbons broke free from their confines in that part of the country didn’t shock me: La Plata County is in the San Juan Basin, where oodles of natural gas has been pumped from the ground over the last century or so, and leaks, breaches, and spills have been frequent — sometimes with deleterious results. But I was a bit taken aback to read that the material that spilled was gasoline that came from a major, interstate pipeline.

In fact, several Facebook commenters expressed their doubts, saying it must have been drip condensates or liquid natural gas, instead, coming from one of the lines associated with the gas fields or the processing plant nearby. But the Herald reporter got his info directly from the pipeline operator (and they should know). And I double-checked the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration incident report, which said Enerprise Products’ Four Corners Lateral Loop pipeline, which was installed in 1980, had spilled 544 barrels (or 22,848 gallons) of non-ethanol gasoline.

Curiously, both Energy Information Administration and PHMSA records show that only natural gas-carrying lines pass through the county. But apparently the line now carries auto fuel from Texas to New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, where it helps keep pump prices affordable, or so the pipeline operator told the Herald.

It’s one of seven natural gas, carbon dioxide, or hazardous liquids pipelines — totaling 225 miles — that cross La Plata County. The Western states contain about 93,024 miles of these long-distance methane and petroleum carrying lines (this does not include local gathering systems that web their way through the oil and gas fields or natural gas distribution lines that run through towns and cities).

The top 15 counties in the Western U.S. in terms of gas transmission and hazardous liquid pipeline mileage. Source: PHMSA.

That’s one of those things about pipelines. You might be subtly aware they exist, thanks to the strips of land that have been cleared of vegetation and the signs warning you not to dig there. But the fact that there are large quantities of flammable, sometimes explosive, climate-altering substances rushing beneath your feet on their way to distant destinations is not something that is often at the top of one’s mind. At least not until they leak, rupture, or explode.

And they do, more often than most of us would hope. Usually the cause is corrosion, a failed weld, or some other type of equipment or material failure, though excavation-caused ruptures are also up there. Cars and trucks run into pipelines and break them, floods or seismic activity can tear them apart, and sometimes lightning strikes them.

Natural gas is composed mostly of methane, a potent greenhouse gas with about 86 times the atmospheric warming potential than carbon dioxide. So every release is contributing to climate change. A major breach or a slow leak that goes undetected can emit massive amounts of methane; in April, a construction worker breached a pipeline that released 118,000 MCF (thousand cubic feet) of natural gas before it was shut off 2. Plus, when the stuff builds up it can explode, which makes gas line leaks especially dangerous. Crude oil and gasoline spills, meanwhile, can harm wildlife, waterways, and people, and even carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures can be fatal.

So it’s good to have strong regulations around pipelines, as well as a well-staffed agency to enforce those regulations. It’s also nice to know where the major pipelines are around you. And for now, at least, you can find out by consulting the PHMSA’s National Pipeline Mapping System. Just enter your state and county and you get a map of the big hazardous liquid and natural gas transmission lines. You can also do an accident query and see where there have been accidents near you. One drawback is that the system limits how far you can zoom in on the map, apparently because they’re worried about saboteurs using it to locate targets. Here’s what the zoomed in map looks like. This is about the same view as the opening image from 1931.

Here are some zoomed out maps to give you a sense of where the pipelines are concentrated, with the highest densities in the Permian Basin and Louisiana.

DATA DUMP:

122 Number of U.S. interstate natural gas transmission system incidents, accidents, and spills in 2024, resulting in 7 injuries.

1.82 million MCF Volume of natural gas released during those incidents.

Corrosion The leading cause of natural gas transmission pipeline incidents.

13, 28 Number of fatalities and injuries, respectively, resulting from natural gas distribution system incidents nationwide in 2024.

309,560 MCF Volume of natural gas released during distribution system incidents.

$549,000 Total damages, as of early February, resulting from the Enterprise pipeline spill in La Plata County in December.

192 Number of incidents reported on Enterprise Products Operating pipelines between 2017 and 2025.

294 Number of incidents in interstate hazardous liquid pipelines nationwide in 2024.

80 Number of hazardous liquids incidents in 2024 that occurred in pipelines that were installed prior to 1985. Ten of the damaged lines were installed prior to 1940.

16,708 Barrels of crude oil spilled in 2024 pipeline incidents.

3,333 Barrels of refined petroleum products spilled or lost in 2024 pipeline incidents.

$70 million Total damages resulting from hazardous liquid (crude oil, gasoline, and other products) pipeline incidents in 2024.

Parting Poem

Now for something completely different, I’d like to leave you with this lovely poem by Richard Shelton. It’s from his Selected Poems, 1969-1981, which is easily my most read book, as I come back to it time after time. No one captures the essence of the desert like Shelton.

1 Which is about enough gasoline to fuel the ol’ Silver Bullet (the Land Desk’s official mascot) for another 800,000 miles or so.

2 The average U.S. residence uses about 65 MCF of natural gas per year.

Webinar: Turning Waste into Resource – New Rules for Reusing Produced Water in Oil and Gas — Water Education #Colorado (Caitlin Coleman) #fossilfuel

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

Feb 13, 2025

This webinar, aired on February 11, 2025, focuses on produced water. We cover some basics about water in the oil and gas industry, learn about proposed new rules focused on reusing that water (which are expected to be adopted in early 2025) — and the negotiations that have surrounded them, hear about the Colorado Produced Water Consortium, and explore opportunities and challenges as the industry and environmentalists look at what it means to stretch freshwater use and to reuse more water. With speakers: Harmony Cummings, the Green House Connection Center Hope Dalton, Colorado Produced Water Consortium Josh Kuhn, Conservation Colorado John Messner, Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission Grant Tupper, Select Water Solutions

The #SaltonSea’s weirdness is what’s appealing — Dennis Hinkamp (WriterOnTheRange.org) #ColoradoRiver #COriver #aridification

*Bales of straw along the banks of the Salton Sea, Hinkamp photo*

Click the link to read the article on the Writers on the Range website (Dennis Hinkamp):

February 3, 2025

Fascinating and fetid, the Salton Sea in southern California lures me back, every year.

Driving south from Utah, I take bits of historic Highway 66 and then skirt Joshua Tree National Park to cruise through little known Box Canyon to Mecca, California. When the landscape opens up, I see the beautiful wreck of the Salton Sea, created by the collision of geology and bad luck.

Southern Pacific passenger train crosses to Salton Sea, August 1906. Photo via USBR.

The sea occupies a much smaller footprint of what used to be Lake Cahuilla, which disappeared in the late 1500s. Then, in a wild spring runoff in 1905, the Colorado River blew out a diversion dam and for three years, and the mighty Colorado drained into the Salton Sink. Agriculture runoff replenished the shallow lake over the following decades, though recently lined canals, courtesy of San Diego, in the Imperial Valley resulted in diminished flows. Its run as a bombing range ended in the 1970s.

If the lake were to completely dry up there would be a horror to behold. While at shrinking Lake Mead a few gangster cadavers showed up in the mud, the Salton Sea contains crashed planes and practice bombs, the targets simulations during the 1940s for the real atomic bombs dropped on Japan.

The lake is bracketed by opulent Palm Springs to the north and the arty squalor of Slab City to the south, home to about 150 full-time residents but temporary home to as many as 4,000 in the winter. In between there are hot springs RV resorts, date palm groves, geothermal energy plants and the town of Bombay Beach sitting atop the San Andreas fault.

Is the diminished sea worth saving? It’s too late to ask the question because, like the great Salt Lake, the cost of not saving it is likely higher than the rescue. Like many invasive species around the West, there is no easy way to get rid of it. Yet most of its fish are already dead and migrating birds have little to eat.

Dust is the issue, and most conservation programs attempt to mitigate dust.

Salton Sea screen shot credit Greetings from the Salton Sea — Kim Stringfellow.

The 1950s and 60s brought out the excesses of post-war revelers to the Salton Sea. You can see the salt-encrusted remains of former resorts and second homes of the Los Angeles fancy people. You can imagine the ghosts of boat races and cocktails.

Those folks even named the local wildlife refuge after swinging Sony Bono, but what came next was toxic salinity and decay as less water came in and the water that remained increased in salinity.

Still, the sea persists. Its salt-encrusted shores circle about 340 square miles of sea. A silo-full of conspiracy theories features the Salton Sea: The military may have accidently dropped a real bomb that did not explode, and the bomb might even be under the water along with hundreds of other dummy bombs and fallen planes. Bodies may still sit in the planes. We know for certain that Slab City is what’s left of a decommissioned military base built about 70 years ago.

Most of the people I meet around the lake seem happy. The place brings pleasure to pre-apocalyptic people like me and those creating outsider art on the actual beach near Bombay Beach. Thousands of Canadians migrate there each winter because the highest temperatures rarely top 80 degrees.

I look forward to my week at the hopefully named Fountain of Youth Spa RV Resort. I joke that I have been coming there since 1906 so it must be working.

It attracts so many Canadians that the resort hosts U.S. vs. Canada Games featuring geezer sports of pickleball, horseshoes, bocce and karaoke. Poutine and box wine flow freely, and people sometimes stay up into the double-digit hours of the evening.

Dennis Hinkamp. Photo credit: Writers on the Range

The Salton Sea will likely remain a curiosity and hiding place for the weird until some real monster beneath the sea emerges, which could be a rush to start mining lithium made by the sea.

On the other hand, the San Andreas fault might just swallow the whole thing in one glorious gulp. Meanwhile, it’s my refuge, my winter solace away from anxious headlines, and just strange enough to be hospitable.

Dennis Hinkamp is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, the independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He writes in Utah.

Map of the Salton Sea drainage area. By Shannon – Background and river course data from http://www2.demis.nl/mapserver/mapper.asp and some topography from http://seamless.usgs.gov/website/seamless/viewer.htm, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=9707481

Copernicus: January 2025 was the warmest on record globally, despite an emerging #LaNiña — World Meteorological Society #ActOnClimate

Surface air temperature anomaly for January 2025 relative to the January average for the period 1991-2020. Data source: ERA5. Credit: C3S/ECMWF.

Click the link to read the report on the Copernicus website:

February 6, 2025

January 2025 – Surface air temperature and sea surface temperature highlights

Global Temperatures

January 2025 was the warmest January globally, with an average ERA5 surface air temperature of 13.23°C, 0.79°C above the 1991-2020 average for January.

January 2025 was 1.75°C above the pre-industrial level and was the 18th month in the last nineteen months for which the global-average surface air temperature was more than 1.5°C above the pre-industrial level.

The last 12-monthsperiod (February 2024 – January 2025) was 0.73°C above the 1991-2020 average, and 1.61°C above the estimated 1850-1900 average used to define the pre-industrial level.

*Datasets other than ERA5 may not confirm the 18 months above 1.5°C highlighted here, due to the relatively small margins above 1.5°C of ERA5 global temperatures observed for several months and differences among the various datasets.

Europe and other regions

The average temperature over European land for January 2025 was 1.80°C, 2.51°C above the 1991-2020 average for January, the second warmest after January 2020, which was 2.64°C above average.

European temperatures were most above the 1991-2020 average over southern and eastern Europe, including western Russia. In contrast, they were below average over Iceland, the United Kingdom and Ireland, northern France, and northern Fennoscandia.

Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over northeast and northwest Canada, Alaska, and Siberia. They were also above average over southern South America, Africa, and much of Australia and Antarctica.

Temperatures were most notably below average over the United States and the easternmost regions of Russia, Chukotka and Kamchatka. The Arabian Peninsula and mainland Southeast Asia also had below-average temperatures.

Sea surface temperature

The average sea surface temperature (SST) for January 2025 over 60°S–60°N was 20.78°C, the second-highest value on record for the month, 0.19°C below the January 2024 record.

SSTs were below average over the central equatorial Pacific, but close to or above average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, suggesting a slowing or stalling of the move towards La Niña conditions. SSTs remained unusually high in many other ocean basins and seas.

Monthly global surface air temperature anomalies (°C) relative to 1850–1900 from January 1940 to January 2025, plotted as time series for each year. 2025 is shown with a thick red line, 2024 with a thick orange line, 2023 with a thick yellow line, and all other years with thin grey lines. Data source: ERA5. Credit: Copernicus Climate Change Service /ECMWF.

According to Samantha Burgess, Strategic Lead for Climate at ECMWF:

“January 2025 is another surprising month, continuing the record temperatures observed throughout the last two years, despite the development of La Niña conditions in the tropical Pacific and their temporary cooling effect on global temperatures. Copernicus will continue to closely monitor ocean temperatures and their influence on our evolving climate throughout 2025.”

January 2025 – Hydrological highlights

January 2025 saw predominantly wetter-than-average conditions over regions of western Europe, as well as parts of Italy, Scandinavia and the Baltic countries; heavy precipitation led to flooding in some regions.

Conversely, drier than average conditions established in northern UK and Ireland, eastern Spain, and north of the Black Sea.

Beyond Europe, it was wetter than average in Alaska, Canada, central and eastern Russia, eastern Australia, south-eastern Africa, southern Brazil, with regions experiencing floods and associated damage.

Drier than average conditions established in southwestern United States and northern Mexico, northern Africa, the Middle East, across Central Asia and in eastern China as well as in much of southern Africa, southern South America and Australia.

January 2025 – Sea Ice highlights

Arctic sea ice reached its lowest monthly extent for January, at 6% below average, virtually tied with January 2018.

In the Arctic region, sea ice concentration anomalies were well below average in the eastern Canadian sector, including Hudson Bay and the Labrador Sea, and in the northern Barents Sea.

Antarctic sea ice extent was 5% below average and thus relatively close to average compared to other recent years. This contrasts with the record or near-record values observed in 2023–2024.

In the Antarctic region, sea ice concentrations were above average in the Amundsen Sea and generally mixed in other ocean sectors.

More information about climate variables in January and climate updates of previous months as well as high-resolution graphics can be downloaded here.

Other useful links:

Answers to frequently asked questions regarding temperature monitoring can be found here.

Follow near-real-time data for the globe on Climate Pulse here.

More on trends and projections on Climate Atlas here.

The #ColoradoRiver is salty. But where does salinity come from, and what’s being done about it?: Among river disputes, salinity is an issue that all seven basin states agree is worth solving together — The Summit Daily #COriver #aridification

Colorado River. For over 50 years, stakeholders throughout the Colorado River basin have worked to address challenges caused by salinity. Photo credit: Abby Burk via Audubon Rockies

Click the link to read the article on the Summit Daily website (Ali Longwell). Here’s an excerpt:

February 6, 2024

Since 1974, the seven Colorado River basin states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — have coordinated efforts to implement salinity control in the waterway as part of the Colorado River Basin Salinity Control Forum. The forum was created by the U.S. Congress, flowing funding through the Bureau of Reclamation to reduce the salt load in the river and research the issue…While salinity is naturally occurring, there are a few reasons that states and river stakeholders have long kept an eye on it.A baseline amount of salinity is OK. Too much salinity can have adverse effects on drinking water, water infrastructure and treatment, appliance wear, aquatic life, the productivity of certain agricultural crops (including wine grapes, peaches and other salt-sensitive products) and more. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates that salinity causes between $500 and $750 million annually in damages and could exceed $1.5 billion per year if future increases are not controlled…

Much of the Upper Basin geology — specifically Mancus and Mesa Verde shale formations — was created when it was covered by an inland sea, [David] Robbins added. Therefore, they contain salt deposits that through natural erosion and runoff, make their way to the rivers and downstream. In Colorado, natural salinity sources include the geothermal hot springs in Glenwood Springs; shale cliffs and evaporating salt deposits in the Eagle and Roaring Fork valleys; and the salt domes in Paradox Valley in Montrose County along the Dolores River. Human activity can also exacerbate challenges by accelerating the release of compounds from these natural geologic materials and increasing the salt load in the river and tributaries, according to the 2009 U.S. Geological Survey report. This includes activities like mining, farming, petroleum exploration and urban development. For example, with some agricultural irrigation practices, by adding more water to the soil that naturally contains salts, “increases the rate of dissolution above the natural signal,” [Dave] Kanzer said. The use of road salts — solid and liquid — to clear snow and ice can also lead to increased salt loads as the salt dissolves and makes its way into snowmelt and streams.

The West’s Sacred Cow: Public land grazing makes it through another administration unreformed — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Click the link to read the article on the LandDesk.org website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 31, 2025

🌵 Public Lands 🌲

The Joe Lott-Fish Creek grazing allotment sprawls across nearly 78,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land in western Utah. It contains a variety of ecosystems, ranging from arid juniper-piñon forests in the lower elevation sections that straddle I-70, to aspen and conifer glades, to 11,000-foot peaks, as well as several streams.

Until just over a decade ago, the primary grazing permittee was Missouri Flat LLC, which was allowed to run 744 cow-calf pairs on the land. Another rancher had a maximum herd of 40. The cattle were supported by 14 cattle ponds and troughs.

Sometime between 2013 and 2016, Missouri Flat’s permit was taken over by Pahvant Ensign Ranches. Over a period of about three years around the same time, the Fishlake National Forest upped the maximum number of cattle allowed to graze the allotment by 604, to a total of 1,388 cow-calf pairs, without notifying the public until 2021. The Forest Service said favorable conditions following the 2010 Twitchell Fire justified the increase, but they didn’t provide any scientific backing for the decision. Then, last April, the Forest Service approved a proposal to add 17 water troughs and 13 miles of new pipeline to the Pahvant Ensign allotment, granting the project a “categorical exclusion,” meaning it isn’t subjected to the usual environmental review.

“Functionally,” wrote Mary O’Brien, a botanist and longtime defender of public lands, ecosystems, and pollinators, “Joe Lott-Fish Creek Allotment is being transformed into a private ranch.”

O’Brien brought the story of the Joe Lott allotment to my attention several months ago. She wanted to show me, in part, that while environmentalists tend to focus on the Bureau of Land Management when pushing back on public lands livestock grazing, they shouldn’t forget that grazing is also widespread on Forest Service lands. And that the Forest Service is no better at managing it than the BLM.

I also find it to be a sort of snapshot of how public lands grazing — under any agency — has come to be the West’s untouchable sacred cow, something that neither Democrats nor Republicans dare to mess with or reform, no matter how obsolete the current regulations or how much harm is being done. I’m not just talking about the Biden or Trump administrations, either: This bipartisan inaction has been going on since the Taylor Grazing Act was passed in 1934.

Data Dump: Cows, cows, cows… (Jonathan P. Thompson): https://www.landdesk.org/p/data-dump-cows-cows-cows

When the white colonial-settlers invaded the Western U.S. in the 19th century, they brought along oodles of cattle and sheep. In some places, the settlers were even preceded by the giant herds of big-time cattle companies and their minders. A good portion of southeastern Utah, for example, was once blanketed by grass that reached an elk’s belly. But then the huge livestock operations, including New Mexico and Kansas Land and Cattle Company and the Carlisle outfit, brought in tens of thousands of head of sheep and cattle beginning in the 1870s. Before long the Hole-in-the-Rock Mormon settlers also got into the livestock business, pasturing their cows and sheep on Elk Ridge near the Bears Ears buttes.

By the 1890s, as many as 100,000 sheep and cattle were chomping their way across San Juan County, reducing large swaths of the formerly abundant grasslands to denuded, dusty, gullied, flash-flood-prone wastelands. Plus, the sheepmen and the cattlemen were constantly fighting over who got access to what portion of range, a conflict that had disastrous outcomes. At one point, allegedly out of spite, the Carlisle livestock concern turned out thousands of sheep on the upper branches of Montezuma Creek, Monticello’s source for drinking water. Bacteria from the sheep feces contaminated the water, leading to a typhoid outbreak in Monticello that killed eleven people.

This sort of free-for-all and its consequences was not unique to the region; it was being repeated all over the West. The destruction and chaos inspired the federal government to try to get a handle on things, and in 1891 Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act (which would later become the Forest Service), giving the president the authority to withdraw areas from the public domain where grazing and other activities would be regulated. In response to the typhoid outbreak, Monticello residents petitioned the feds to create a forest reserve in the La Sal and Abajo Mountains. This would become the Manti-La Sal National Forest.

That still left millions of acres in the virtually lawless public domain, where livestock operators continued to run cattle and sheep without restraint. Finally, in 1934 Congress passed the Taylor Grazing Act to “stop injury to the public grazing lands by preventing overgrazing and soil deterioration,” to impose order, and to stabilize the livestock industry. A new agency, the Grazing Service (which was merged with the General Land Office to become the BLM in 1946), would manage a permitting and fee system on about 140 million acres of land, mostly sagebrush country, in the arid West. The lands were divided into grazing districts, each of which had an advisory board mostly made up of ranchers within that district, thus giving it an element of home rule and easing concerns that the federal landlord was taking too much control.

Nearly 12 million animals were permitted to graze on Taylor Act land across the West that year, yielding just $1 million in revenue—meaning ranchers were paying, on average, just eight cents per year to fatten up each of their bovines or ungulates on taxpayer-owned grass. Seventy-five percent of the revenue went back to the states and grazing districts, where the advisory boards determined how it would be spent. Nearly all of the funds went to so-called range improvement projects, which ultimately benefitted the ranchers, such as killing predators and rodents and construction of stock trails and diversion dams.

Still, even though many ranchers were in denial regarding the true causes of the ruination of the range—they attributed it to drought—they were generally ambivalent towards the act because it imposed order on the chaos that resulted from competing uses of the public domain. But the good feelings would soon vanish as the cattlemen felt threatened by proposals to designate new national monuments on public lands, including on a 4.5-million-acre swath roughly following the Colorado River in southern Utah. Back then, after all, grazing was generally prohibited in national monuments and parks.

And in the mid-1940s, when the Bureau of Land Management endeavored to raise grazing fees, the National Wool Growers Association and the American National Livestock Association gathered in Salt Lake City and launched a revolt with the backing of Western lawmakers. They demanded not only that grazing fees be capped, and national monument and park designations be halted, but also that all of the lands governed by the Taylor Act be transferred to the states or privatized. It was an early version of the Sagebrush Rebellion that is now being repeated by Utah and Wyoming. In a 1947 Harpers column, Bernard DeVoto reminded his readers, “Cattlemen do not own the public range now; it belongs to you and me,” adding that because federal grazing fees were so much lower than those for private land, they amounted to a subsidy.

The land-grab legislation that grew out of this revolt died. And grazing fees were raised, jumping from the original five cents per animal-unit-month1 for cattle to eight cents. The revolt did halt the giant Utah national monument, however, and the BLM continued to bow to the demands of the livestock industry.

It looked like things might change in the 1970s, however, when Congress passed the Federal Lands Policy Management Act, or FLPMA, which required the BLM to manage public land for multiple uses, including recreation and conservation. And in 1977, then President Jimmy Carter named Cecil Andrus as Interior Secretary. Andrus came into office with a bang, noting in a 1977 speech: “The initials BLM no longer stand for Bureau of Livestock and Mining. The days when economic interests exercised control over decisions on the public domain are past. The public’s lands will be managed in the interest of all the people because they belong to all the people. For too long, much of the land where the deer and the antelope play has been managed primarily for livestock often to the detriment of wildlife.”

A sign on Cedar Mesa in Bears Ears National Monument illustrating the way one BLM field office sees livestock grazing. Photo courtesy of Rose Chilcoat.

And yet, public land grazing reform has been minimal, at best, in the ensuing five decades. The grazing fee, is only one small piece of the public lands grazing controversy, but it’s good proxy for the situation as a whole. In 1978, Congress established a formula for setting grazing fees, but also said they couldn’t drop below $1.35 per AUM (or $6.82 in 2024 dollars, if you were to adjust for inflation). While the fee climbed as high as $2.31 in 1981, it has remained at or near the minimum nearly every year since (in 2024 it was $1.35 once again). Nearly everyone agreed that the forage was worth far more than that, and the data made clear that fees would have to be substantially higher for the grazing program to pay for itself.

Cows, climate, and public land grazing: And more (Jonathan P. Thompson): https://www.landdesk.org/p/cows-climate-and-public-land-grazing

And yet, efforts to increase the fee and bring it in line with market rates have consistently flopped. The Clinton administration proposed upping the base charge to $3.96 per AUM (along with a host of other reforms). That sparked widespread outrage amongst ranchers and Western politicians, yet went nowhere. Obama wanted to tack an administrative charge on top of the regular fee. It never happened.

Early in its term, the Biden administration launched a review of and promised reforms to the public lands grazing program. For conservationists, this was an opportunity for the feds to re-implement environmental reviews before renewing lapsed grazing leases, to allow leases to be bought out and permanently retired, to use rangeland health to determine whether grazing can continue on a specific allotment, and to consider grazing’s impacts on climate change. While the administration made admirable moves to set aside public lands and regulate oil and gas drilling, it quietly smothered any effort to reform grazing.

Instead, the administration not only kept grazing fees at $1.35 during all four years, but it also included active grazing lands under its “30 by 30” program. And, in creating the management plans for Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, it essentially leaves livestock grazing untouched. In fact, in the case of Bears Ears, the land may have had more protection from livestock before it became a monument. The same amount of land is available to grazing now, and the plan only makes vague prescriptions to manage grazing in a way that “ensures consistency with protection of monument objects.” It’s a good goal, but is totally subjective, and leaves plenty up to overworked monument managers and rangeland conservationists. That’s in spite of the fact that numerous studies have found that unfettered grazing not only damages soil, native plants, riparian areas, and wildlife habitat, but also takes a big toll on cultural and archaeological resources. If a national monument plan is not going to close all sensitive areas to grazing, it should at least set tangible, science-based minimum land health standards.

This same sort of willful ignorance of grazing’s impacts is repeated across BLM-managed national monuments, including Canyon of the Ancients in southwestern Colorado.

Bears Ears final management plan drops as lawsuit drags on (Jonathan P. Thompson): https://www.landdesk.org/p/bears-ears-final-management-plan

So why do politicians of all stripes bend over for these public lands ranchers? I suppose it could be that Big Beef is throwing around its financial and political heft and buying off policymakers in Washington D.C. Maybe. But I suspect the multi-administration inaction has more to do with culture and myth — the old Cowboy Myth, to be specific — and their leeriness of being seen as harming it.

There’s a widespread perception — which is partly accurate — that the folks grazing their cattle on public lands are small-time family farmers who are carrying on a multi-generational tradition and livelihood and producing the nation’s food — even though only about 2% of U.S. beef comes from public lands cows. They’re also sustaining a certain rural culture, i.e. cowboy culture.

Running cattle in Bears Ears National Monument, where grazing will go on largely as it did before the monument was established. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Keeping federal grazing fees low, and regulations lax, is therefore a sort of social or cultural subsidy — socialism, if you will. It’s not meant to support the livestock industry, per se, or even food production. Rather, it supports a certain culture. A 1947 amendment to the Taylor Grazing Act appears to codify this concept, directing fees to be set partly according “to the extent to which such [grazing] districts yield public benefits over and above those accruing to the users of the forage resources for livestock purposes.” If you try to raise the fees to match private or state fees, you’ll make ranching too expensive for family ranchers, and make it an exclusive domain for the wealthy and corporations. If you look to make the program pay for itself, you’re monetizing public lands at the expense of rural culture and communities. Or so the argument goes.

For an Obama or Biden, who are already portrayed as coastal elites, to do anything that might be construed as damaging or stifling that culture or livelihood — or devaluing those “public benefits” — does not make for good optics. They instead have used their political capital to (hesitantly) push back against Big Oil, while trying to get folks to forget about grazing.

I’m all for this type of socialism, especially when it’s supporting family farmers, and for pushing back against the notion that public lands programs have to pay for themselves2. I also support the idea of considering public benefits above and beyond the value of the forage or anything else on public lands. But if you do, you also have to consider the public costs of whatever that use is, whether it’s a new trail, an oil and gas well, or a grazing lease renewal. And grazing’s costs on the land and climate can be every bit as high as an oil well or a surge in recreational use.

The Joe Lott-Fish Creek story I opened this piece with also demonstrates that the beneficiaries of the public lands grazing socialism and subsidies aren’t always struggling families. The biggest leaseholder on that allotment, Pahvant Ensign Ranches, is owned by the Ensign Group, which is in turn owned by the Freed and Robinson families. The Ensign Group is a Utah-based investment firm, whose stated mission is to “build and manage a portfolio of primarily real estate-based businesses that are profitable, durable, environmentally sensitive, and of high reputation in their respective fields.”

So, yes, we, the taxpayers, are subsidizing family farmers and ranchers. But our taxes are also helping out the Robinson-Freed families. They are the nation’s 33rd largest landholder, according to the Land Report, and own 350,000 acres in Utah, Idaho, and elsewhere, run more than 10,000 head of cattle, and hold grazing permits on more than 1 million acres of private and public lands.

1 The amount of forage required to feed a cow and her calf for one month.

2 If Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative is honest — and I’m not saying it is — it will seemingly have no choice but to kill the public lands grazing program, since it spends far more money on rangeland improvements (for grazers’ sake) than it brings in from grazing fees.

Water, water everywhere … ?: USGS water assessment, data center water use, and some good news — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

Photo credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/Land Desk

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

January 28, 2025

In the closing days of the Biden administration, the U.S. Geologic Survey released its National Water Availability Assessment Report, which is a whopper of a study not only on how much water Americans use and for what, but also on the quality of that water and whether and by how much demand is exceeding supply.

Most of what it says won’t be too surprising to Land Desk readers. Demand exceeds supply in swaths of the Southwest, and climate change threatens to exacerbate the imbalance. Irrigated agriculture is by far the biggest water guzzler nationwide, with Western farms consuming more than those in any other region. Municipal water consumption is staying fairly flat, even as populations increase. Thermoelectric power plants withdraw massive amounts of water, but then return much of it to the water body, keeping consumptive use relatively low.

I’m not going to try to sum up the report for you, though. Rather, I’ll give you a few of the more interesting morsels of data and maps and charts from the assessment, in no particular order, and you can make of them what you will.

This little chart sums up most of the consumption part of the report. The most surprising thing to me about this was that, in the West, groundwater withdrawals in equal or exceed surface water withdrawals for irrigation and public supplies. That means that for every gallon sucked out of the Colorado River or its tributaries, there’s roughly another gallon being pumped up from wells — and in a lot of places, like parts of Arizona, groundwater use isn’t monitored or regulated. Note that these are withdrawals, not consumptive use (which is the difference between withdrawals and water that is returned to its source). Source: USGS

This is a more detailed breakdown of agricultural water use in the West. The top number in each area is millions of gallons per day; the bottom number is millions of cubic meters per month. Notice that about 60-70% of total withdrawals are counted as consumptive use, with the remainder being returned to the water system as runoff. Source: USGS

This is a good one because it clearly shows the effects of drought on water consumption, i.e. we tend to use more water when there’s less of it available.

In this assessment, the USGS looked at how much water is used for coal and uranium mining and hydraulic fracturing oil and gas wells. They found that in 2020, fracking used about 317 million gallons per day. Since then drilling has increased, especially in the arid Permian Basin, so those numbers have likely shot up as well.

This is a striking one from the climate change chapter, showing how the number of extreme and very extreme fires has grown over time.

This is just a small sampling of what’s in the assessment. If you want to read more, check it out here.

The USGS assessment doesn’t break out data centers’ water use, but I imagine if the agency survives the current administration intact, it may get there in a decade or so. The computer processing centers suck up massive amounts of electricity to process those Google searches, Facebook posts, Twitter rants, and, especially, AI queries — not to mention for “mining” cryptocurrency. Less known is that they also can use large quantities of water to keep the processors cool.

A new report out of the Berkeley Lab is mostly focused on quantifying current and forecasting future energy use by data centers. But it also talks water. And the numbers are alarming: In 2023, U.S. data centers directly1 consumed about 66 billion liters (or 17.4 billion gallons) of water. The report’s authors expect that figure to double — at least — by 2028.

Hyperscale data centers are the type that power AI. Source: 2024 United States Data Center Energy Usage Report, by Arman Shehabi et al, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, December 2024.

That is a crap-ton of water, for sure, especially given the large number of data centers located in the Phoenix and Las Vegas areas, neither of which has a lot of liquid to spare. But some perspective is warranted here. As Len Necefer points out in an All At Once By Dr. Len dispatch warning against AI-alarmism, data centers still use a heck of a lot less water than, say, growing hay or fracking oil and gas wells.

66 billion liters is 53,507 acre-feet (sounds a lot less alarming, yeah?). For some context, alfalfa and other hay growing in the Great Salt Lake Basin alone consumes about 900,000 acre-feet per year, and hydraulic fracturing gulps up about 353,000 acre-feet (a little over Nevada’s total allotment of Colorado River water) annually.

I’m still frightened by the invasion of the data centers, however. In his last days in office, Biden signed an executive order opening up federal sites and public land to new AI data centers and accompanying “clean” energy installations (which includes nuclear and even natural gas and coal, so long as they capture carbon). And Trump is now encouraging data center developers — i.e. tech-broligarchs like Musk and Bezos — to burn coal to power their AI bots (and Trump and Melania both issued their own cryptocoins).

A Dog Day Diatribe on AI, cryptocurrency, energy consumption, and capitalism: https://www.landdesk.org/p/a-dog-day-diatribe-on-ai-cryptocurrency — Jonathan P. Thompson

🤯 Crazytown Chronicle 🤡

Look, I don’t like writing about Trump any more than you like reading about him. Believe me. But he is the president, and the things he does and says sometimes have consequences. He also just makes stuff up. Like this “Truth” Social post:

Whaaaaaaat!?! I guess all that water assessment stuff is irrelevant, now, eh? I mean, here we’ve all been fretting about the Colorado River, and little did we know that Trump could make it all irrelevant by sending the military in to turn some valve somewhere and deliver all the water from the Pacific Northwest directly to the fire hydrants of L.A.

The first person who sends me a genuine picture of the giant faucet and who can mark on a map where the military turned the water on and where the pipelines or canals that carry it go gets a free Land Desk t-shirt.

But, in all seriousness, as Dr. Genevieve Guenther pointed out on her BlueSky social media feed, it’s kind of scary what’s being implied here (aside from the pure fabrication): A president is suggesting sending the military into a blue state to force his policy preferences on them. Not good.

(On that note, we’re over at BlueSky, too: @landdesk.bsky.social)

😀 Good News Corner 😎

And, finally, even the commissioners of Garfield County — or at least two out of three of them — realized it was a really bad idea to rename the Burr Trail after Trump. After a heated public hearing, they voted not to name any road in the county after him, for now.

The Burr Trail as it approaches the western boundary of Capitol Reef National Park. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

U.S. Supreme Court kills #Utah land grab — Jonathan P. Thompson

Click the link to read the article on the Landdesk.org website (Jonathan P. Thompson):

January 14, 2025

The latest public-land grab attempt is dead — at least for now. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear Utah’s lawsuit attempting to seize control of 18.5 million acres of “unappropriated” federal lands in the state. This effectively ends Utah’s bid to take its case directly to the Supreme Court1, albeit not before it had spent over $1 million of the state taxpayer’s cash on legal expenses and a goofy PR campaign that included this bizarre ad aimed at inducing nostalgia for an era that never really was.

One might hope that this defeat at the hands of a conservative court would teach Utah’s elected officials to give up and be grateful for the abundance of public land in their state, which is actually the envy of folks everywhere. But alas, I kind of doubt they’d be that wise, because, well … Utah. So after licking their wounds, they’re likely to come back with some other strategy for purloining public lands.

Perhaps they’ll follow the lead of the Wyoming legislature, which just introduced a resolution “demanding that the United States Congress … extinguish federal title in those public lands and subsurface resources in this state that derive from former federal territory.” Which is to say that Wyoming is ordering the U.S. — i.e. all Americans — to surrender public lands within the state, with the exception of Yellowstone National Park, to the state, thus opening it up to be privatized.

Yes, the hard-right Freedom Caucus has taken control of the Wyoming legislature and, according to reporting by WyoFile, they plan to introduce “bold policies that probably have never had the opportunity to see the light of day” and that are based upon “godly principles.”

This would include public land grabs and repealing gun-free zones because, you know, Jesus was all about AR-15s. And it includes the — I kid you not — “Make Carbon Dioxide Great Again” law that would bar the state from designating or treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. It would also nix Gov. Mark Gordon’s efforts to establish the state as a leader in carbon capture and sequestration technology and actually would relinquish any primacy over carbon storage to the feds. Go figure.

And just in case Congress isn’t cowed by the threat of a Wyoming-lawmaker-led revolt, then Rep. Harriet Hageman will step in with her own federal legislation. While it doesn’t attempt to transfer public land, it is aimed at neutering the Bureau of Land Management by nullifying management plans that have been years in the making. Hageman recently introduced a bill that would block implementation of the Rock Springs and Buffalo field office resource management plans.

Stay tuned. I’m sure we haven’t heard the last of these shenanigans.

#Utah goes for the ultimate public land grab: Lawsuit would seize control of 18.5 million acres of your land — Jonathan P. Thompson (www.landdesk.org)

⛏️ Mining Monitor ⛏️

The Paradox Valley in western Colorado. The proposed Mustang, née Piñon Ridge, uranium mill would be located on the far side of the valley (center right in the picture). Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

For the past few years, Western Uranium & Vanadium, based in Canada and Nucla, Colorado, has been making a lot of noise about plans to bring its Sunday Mine Complex in the Uravan Mineral Belt into production. It’s also proposing to establish a new uranium mill just outside Green River, Utah — thereby furthering the industrialization of the melon-farming town. So far, however, the mine has not produced any ore, nor has the mill progressed beyond the “baseline data collection” stage.

But that hasn’t stopped the company from keeping the hype going. Yesterday it announced it would begin data collection at the former Piñon Ridge uranium mill site in the Paradox Valley, which it’s now calling the Mustang Mineral Processing Facility.

You may recognize the Piñon Ridge name. Back in 2007, Energy Fuels — the current owner of the White Mesa Uranium Mill — purchased the site and proposed building a uranium mill there. At the time, George Glasier, who currently helms Western Uranium & Vanadium, was Energy Fuel’s CEO. A lot of locals were not so psyched about having a new radioactive site in their midst, and opposition to the proposed mill was fierce.

A twisted saga ensued, finally ending when the state revoked the mill’s permit in 2018. In the interim, Glasier had stepped down from the helm of Energy Fuels, which had acquired the White Mesa Mill, started his own company, and purchased the Piñon Ridge project. Last year, Western U&V acquired the Piñon Ridge project from Glasier’s company. And now Glasier seems to think he can get a newly designed mill permitted (he has yet to apply for a permit). Or maybe he’s just fishing for more investors’ dollars. In any case, the folks who led the resistance to the mill last time are ready to push back once again if necessary.

📖 Reading Room 🧐

Here come those Santa Ana winds again …

The National Weather Service has issued an extreme fire danger bulletin for a good chunk of the greater Los Angeles metro area, including a “particularly dangerous situation” alert, through tomorrow as the Santa Ana winds kick up again. This as the Palisades and Eaton fires continue to burn, having already taken 24 lives and an estimated 12,300 structures.

It’s been stunning to watch the destruction from afar and heartbreaking to imagine the collective sense of loss rippling across the sprawling metropolis of 18 million. The immensity of it all, the rate at which the fires spread, and the way the Santa Anas send flaming embers into the air to spawn their own blazes miles away is horrifying. Equally baffling is the way the tragedy seems to have opened up a firehose of stupidity, finger-pointing, and grandstanding, issuing forth from the President-elect, Elon Musk, political pundits, and and even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who asked: “Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California? They know how to do it.”2

I considered spending a bunch of words explaining how and why these folks are wrong. But even acknowledging their existence and repeating their inane lies makes me vomit a bit in my mouth, and trying to debunk even a fraction of the claims is to play a futile game of whack a mole, though that’s not stopping California’s government from trying. As an antidote, I’ve been reading some smart things about the fires, the Santa Ana winds, and Los Angeles, and I figured it would be nice to share some of them with you.

Start out with Joan Didion’s essay on the Santa Ana winds, in which she reminds us that this month’s raging Santa Anas aren’t entirely unprecedented. A two-week long Thanksgiving-time Santa Ana event in 1957 included 100-mph gusts that toppled oil derricks, propelled heavy objects through the air (some of which killed people), and drove a blaze through the San Gabriels for well over a week. She writes:

Then check out the opening lines of Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind (and how can you stop reading after this!?):

And the late Mike Davis’s “The Case for Letting Malibu Burn” should be required reading in these times. And yes, it’s quite a bit more nuanced than the title might suggest. Davis gives a good history of post-colonial fires in the Malibu area and explains how in 1930 Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., called for turning 10,000 acres there into a public park (that could have burned in natural cycles, without destroying homes).

Alas, that didn’t happen. Instead, Malibu was developed, and fires roared through there in 1930, 1935, 1936, 1937, and 1938. The city had the opportunity to acquire 17,000 acres for just $1.1 million and turn it into a preserve in 1938 — it passed up the chance. Housing came, instead, along with more destructive fires. He writes:

Each fire, then, was followed by reconstruction on a larger, more exclusive scale. Malibu went from being a ranching, rural area, to a bohemian enclave, to a high-end suburb. “Two kinds of Californians will continue to live with fire:,” Davis writes, “those who can afford (with indirect public subsidies) to rebuild and those who can’t afford to live anywhere else.”

Joshua Frank mentions Davis’s essay in a poignant piece for CounterPunch in which he asks folks to stop their victim-blaming and have a bit of compassion, even if they don’t like L.A.. He writes:

At his Public Lands Media Substack, George Wuerthner talks about how these are really urban wildfires, not forest fires, and so the old mitigation and prevention techniques don’t necessarily apply.

He argues that prescribed burns and thinning wouldn’t have worked, because the fires started in the chaparral, which has a natural fire regime of about 30 to 100 years. Prescribed burns tend to eliminate native species that are then replaced by more flammable grasses.

In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, fire experts Jack Cohen and Stephen Pyne also talk about how these fires don’t fit into conventional notions of wildfire. In both the Palisades and Eaton fires, there were unburned trees sitting right next to homes that had been totally destroyed. Cohen:

Here’s hoping for an ember-free day for Los Angeles.

1 This was corrected from saying it effectively ended their legal bid. As reader Slickrock Stranger pointed out, that’s not necessarily the case. Utah could still take its case to the lower courts and keep losing until it ends up at the Supreme Court (which could again decline to hear the case, or something else). But SCOTUS did shoot down this particular strategy of going straight to the Supreme Court for a decision.

2 Oh, that’s right, because “they” modified the weather so that Hurricane Helene would wreck the southeast and keep all those Republicans from voting. Yeah. No. First off, Marge, while the theory behind cloudseeding is legit, there is scant evidence that it significantly increases precipitation. And, even so, it only works if there are already moisture-laden clouds present to seed. Thus the name. Now, maybe if They sent a hurricane to L.A. blowing inland from the Pacific, it would cancel out the Santa Anas, which blow toward the ocean, and then we’d be fine. Alas, They can’t control the weather.

Gen Z Fears Clean Water Shortages, Displacement Due to #ClimateChange — Walton Family Foundation

Click the link to read the release on the Walton Family Foundation website (Mark Shields):

January 28, 2025

74% of Gen Zers say climate change threatens the clean water supply in the U.S.

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Jan. 28, 2025 — The Walton Family Foundation and Gallup released a new report today examining Gen Z’s experiences with climate change and water issues, shedding light on their concerns about climate events and the potential impact on their generation’s future. The research finds water issues top the list of Gen Z’s climate worries, with individual perspectives shaped by diverse experiences and beliefs.

Of 12 climate-related issues measured in the study, majorities of Gen Zers express “some” or “a great deal” of worry about nine, including five related to water. This is true regardless of location, with water pollution and the health of fish and oceans ranking among the top three concerns in every U.S. Census region. While a majority of Gen Zers nationwide (61%) have reported experiencing a water-related climate issue in the past two years, water-related problems are more commonly reported by those in the Central and Western U.S.

When considering how these issues may affect their future, Gen Zers report concern about the availability of clean water and the potential need to relocate. Those who have experienced climate-related events at a higher rate are more likely to worry about these impacts . T here are notable differences across demographic groups. Hispanic (36%) and Black (34%) Gen Zers are more likely than their White (27%) peers to have experienced unsafe tap water . They are also more likely to believe there will not be enough clean water for their generation to live in the future (41% of Hispanic and 34% of Black Gen Zers, compared with 24% of W hite Gen Zers). Adult Gen Zers are significantly more likely to worry about needing to move due to climate change compared with their 12- to 17-year-old counterparts (40% vs. 27%, respectively).

Denver School Strike for Climate, September 20, 2019.

There is large-scale unity among young people on the importance of protecting water quality. Seventy-four percent of Gen Zers say it is “very important” to protect oceans, lakes and rivers from pollution, with another 19% saying it is “somewhat important.” Gen Z acknowledges the adverse effects of climate change on water resources: 74% of Gen Zers say climate change impacts the amount of clean water available in the U.S. “somewhat” (47%) or “a great deal” (27%). There is solid bipartisan agreement on the inadequacy of current water protection efforts: M ajorities of both Democratic (88%) and Republican (63%) Gen Z adults say the U.S. is “probably” or “definitely” not doing enough to protect water.

“Gen Z is united in their deep concern for water protection and availability, recognizing it as a critical issue that touches us all — regardless of where we live or who we are,” said Moira Mcdonald, Environment Program Director at the Walton Family Foundation. “As we look to the future, there’s a growing sense of urgency. Young people fear inheriting a world where clean water is scarce and climate change continues to worsen. We need to work on solutions to ensure clean, safe water remains accessible for generations to come.”

Looking ahead, Gen Zers are pessimistic about the trajectory of climate change — 67% believe climate change will worsen in their lifetime. And rates of pessimism are about 10 percentage points higher among those who have recently experienced a climate-related issue such as flooding, drought or unsafe tap water. Among voting-age Gen Zers, majorities of both Democrats and Republicans believe it is very or somewhat unlikely that climate change will be stopped.

Methodology

Results are based on a Gallup Panel™ web survey conducted Aug. 6-14, 2024, with a sample of 2,832 12- to 27-year-olds from across the U.S. The Gallup Panel is a probability-based panel of U.S. adults. Data were weighted to match demographic targets of age, gender, education, race, Hispanic ethnicity and Census region for 12- to 27-year-olds, using the most recent five-year population estimates from the American Community Survey.

Twelve- to 17-year-old children, as well as some 18-year-olds, were reached through adult members of the Gallup Panel who indicated they had at least one child aged 18 or younger living in their household. The remaining 18- to 27-year-old respondents are members of the Gallup Panel.

For the total sample of 2,832 respondents, the margin of sampling error is +/-2.9 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error for subgroups are higher; selected subgroups are reported below. All margins of error reported are adjusted to account for the design effect.

Trump unravels US climate agenda as he promises to ‘drill, baby, drill’ — Joseph Winters & Naveena Sadasivam (Grist.org)

John Kerry, then U.S. secretary of state, with China’s special representative on climate change, Xie Zhenhua, at the 2015 Paris climate conference. FRANCOIS MORI / AP PHOTO

Click the link to read the article on the Grist website (Joseph Winters & Naveena Sadasivam):

January 20, 2025

Within hours of being sworn into office on Monday, President Donald Trump announced a spate of executive orders and policies to boost oil and gas production, roll back environmental protections, withdraw from the Paris climate accord, and undo environmental justice initiatives enacted by former president Joe Biden.

Conventional wisdom — and political donations — would indicate that Republicans are friendlier than Democrats to the oil and gas industry. And, in fact, that’s probably true: Democrats are more likely to pass regulations on drilling; Republicans are more likely to give oil corporations massive tax cuts. But in spite of all of that, Over the last fifty years, Republican presidents have been more likely to oversee crude oil production declines, while production has generally increased under Democrats, with the exception of the Clinton administration. In fact, the current surge in production began during Obama’s first year, and has continued through Biden’s entire term. This doesn’t mean that Democrats spur production. What it means is that more regulations don’t hamper production, and rescinding those regulations — and corporate tax cuts — don’t spur production. There are many forces in play, and the occupant of the White House is merely one of them, and a relatively insignificant one at that. Source: EIA, Land Desk.

Trump has called climate change a “hoax,” and appointed oil industry executives and climate skeptics to his Cabinet. His first-day actions represent a complete remaking of the country’s climate agenda, and set the tone for his administration’s approach to energy and the environment over the next four years.

‘Drill, baby, drill‘

Among the most significant actions Trump took Monday was declaring “an energy emergency,” which he framed as part of his effort to rein in inflation and reduce the cost of living. He pledged to “use all necessary resources to build critical infrastructure,” an unprecedented move that could grant the White House greater authority to expand fossil fuel production. He also signed an executive order “to encourage energy exploration and production on federal lands and waters, including on the Outer Continental Shelf,” and another expediting permitting and leasing in Alaska, including in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

“We will have the largest amount of oil and gas of any country on Earth, and we are going to use it,” Trump said during his inaugural address. “We are going to drill, baby, drill.”

The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve can store 714 million barrels of crude oil, but currently holds about 395 million. Under his administration, he said, the cache will be filled “up again right to the top.” He also said the country will export energy “all over the world.”

“We will be a rich nation again,” he said, standing inside the Capitol Rotunda, “and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help.”

Richard Klein, a senior research fellow for the international nonprofit Stockholm Environment Institute, noted that fossil fuel companies extracted record-high amounts of oil and gas during the Biden administration. Even if it is technologically possible to boost production further, it’s unclear whether that will reduce prices.

Dan Kammen, a professor of energy at the University of California, Berkeley, said it is a “direct falsehood” that increasing fossil fuel extraction would drive down inflation. He agreed that the U.S. should declare a national energy emergency — but for reasons exactly the opposite of what Trump had in mind. “We need to quickly move to clean energy, to invest in new companies across the U.S.,” Kammen told Grist.

Exiting the Paris Agreement (again)

Trump delivered on his promise to once again withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agreement, the United Nations pact agreed upon by 195 countries to limit global warming that the new president referred to on Monday as a “rip-off.” In addition to signing an executive order saying the U.S. would leave the agreement — titled Putting America First in International Environmental Agreements — Trump also signed a letter to the United Nations to set the departure in motion. Due to the rules governing the accord, it will take one year to formally withdraw, meaning U.S. negotiators will participate in the next round of talks in Brazil at the end of the year. By this time next year, however, the U.S. could join Iran, Libya, and Yemen as the only nations that aren’t part of the accord.

“It simply makes no sense for the United States to voluntarily give up political influence and pass up opportunities to shape the exploding green energy market,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO of the nonprofit World Resources Institute, said in a statement. Only 2 in 10 Americans support quitting the Paris Agreement, according to a poll by the Associated Press.

Trump’s announcement came just 10 days after the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared 2024 Earth’s hottest year on record, one marked by life-threatening heat waves, wildfires, and flooding around the world. Experts say things will only get worse unless the U.S. and other countries do more to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

“Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled,” climate scientists wrote last October. They noted then, even before Trump’s election, that global policies were expected to cause temperatures to climb 2.7 degrees Celsius (6.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100. One analysis by Carbon Brief estimated that a second Trump administration would result in an extra 4 billion metric tons of climate pollution, negating all of the emissions savings from the global deployment of clean energy technologies over the past five years — twice over.

Coyote Gulch’s Leaf in Byers Canyon on the way to Steamboat Springs August 21, 2017.

Reversing course on electric vehicles

Trump also took action to revoke “the electric vehicle mandate,” in keeping with his campaign promise to support autoworkers.

“In other words, you’ll be able to buy the vehicle of your choice,” he said during his inaugural address — even though there is no national mandate requiring the sale of electric vehicles and consumers are free to purchase any vehicle of their liking. [ed. emphasis mine] The Biden administration did promote the technology by finalizing rules that limit the amount of tailpipe pollution over time so that electric vehicles make up the majority of automobiles sold by 2032. Under Biden, the U.S. also launched a $7,500 tax credit for consumer purchases of EVs manufactured domestically and planned to funnel roughly $7.5 billion toward building charging infrastructure across the country.

“Rolling back incentives to build electric vehicles in the United States is going to cost jobs as well as raise the price of travel,” said Costa Samaras, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Carnegie Mellon University who served as a senior policy leader in the Biden White House. “Fueling up an electric vehicle costs between one-third and one-half as much as driving on gasoline, not to mention the benefits for reducing air pollution. Ultimately, to lower the price of energy for U.S. consumers, we need to diversify the sources of energy that we’re using and ensure that these are clean, affordable, and reliable.”

Youth activists rally for climate justice in front of the US Capitol in Washington,DC (photo from earlier in the year). Image: Lorie Shaull,CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Rescinding environmental justice initiatives

Trump signed a single executive order undoing nearly 80 Biden administration initiatives, including rescinding a directive to federal agencies to incorporate environmental justice into their missions. The Biden-era policy protected communities overburdened by pollution and directed agencies to work more closely with them.

That move was part of a broader push that Trump described as an attempt to create a “color-blind society” by stopping the government from “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life.” Klein said the objective was “embarrassing.” Kammen said it was a “huge mistake” to move away from environmental justice priorities.

Cheyenne Ridge, located between Burlington and Cheyenne Wells, near the Kansas border, is one of many wind projects on Colorado’s eastern plains. Soon, new transmission will enable far more wind and solar projects. Photos/Allen Best Photo credit: Allen Best/The Mountain Town News

Blocking new wind energy

Trump officially barred new offshore wind leases and will review federal permitting of wind projects, making good on a promise to “end leasing to massive wind farms that degrade our natural landscapes and fail to serve American energy consumers.” The move is likely to be met with resistance from members of his own party. The top four states for wind generation — Texas, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Kansas — are solidly red, and unlikely to acquiesce. Even Trump’s pick for Interior secretary, Doug Burgum, refused to disavow wind power during a hearing last week, saying he would pursue an “all of the above” energy strategy.

Many state and local policymakers, including the members of America Is All In, a climate coalition made up of government leaders and businesses from all 50 states, pledged to take up the mantle of climate action in the absence of federal leadership.

“Regardless of the federal government’s actions, mayors are not backing down on our commitment to the Paris Agreement,” said Phoenix Mayor Kate Gallego, in a statement. “Our constituents are looking to us to meet the moment and deliver meaningful solutions.”

Trump Ticker: “Unleashing energy” edition: Looking at the discombobulated slew of early-term executive orders — Jonathan P. Thompson (LandDesk.org)

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

Januray 24, 2025

Trump Ticker

After last year’s presidential election, I — and many others — predicted that a second Trump term would be even more destructive than the first because this time the administration would be better prepared, and would not be plagued by the same incompetence, legal shoddiness, or misdirection as last time.

I was wrong. During his first few days in office, Trump issued dozens of executive orders, resolutions, pardons, and other “presidential actions.” Some were mere bluster. Others blatantly unconstitutional. Almost none displayed any evidence of forethought or, well, thought. It’s more like a hastily sketched, grievance-laden wish list penned on the back of a faux-silk napkin by lobbyists, ideologues, and oligarchs at one of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago soirees. The list, so far, is the product of greed, spite, right-wing ideology, and power-hunger. Rather than approaching policy — if you can call it that — with more competence and intelligence than before, it appears that Trump and friends are relying on the sheer volume of action to overwhelm any legal challenges.

I’m not going to even try to list them all here. Rather, I’ll take a look at a small sampling that fit under the Land Desk’s usual beat.

Declaring a National Energy Emergency: It takes a few paragraphs to even figure out what is meant by “energy” or, for that matter, “emergency” here. The preamble makes it sound as if the nation’s collective gasoline pumps could run dry at any moment. But that can’t be it, because the U.S. is pumping more crude oil than ever before from the Permian Basin and other fields, it is the largest petroleum producer in the world, and it is a net exporter of petroleum products. There is no danger of any sort of fossil fuel shortage. Surely they know that, right?

Then at paragraph six, we finally get a hint:

Okay, then, they’re talking about electricity. Yeah, that actually makes some sense. No, there’s not an electricity shortage. But the growing number of power-sucking AI and cryptocurrency-mining data centers, electric vehicles, and electrified buildings are significantly increasing demand for power, which threatens to strain the grid and raise electricity prices for everyone else.

That’s why, for better or worse, the Biden administration encouraged utility-scale solar and wind facilities on federal lands, subsidized enhanced geothermal research and development, and subsidized and fast-tracked huge transmission projects — despite hefty opposition and environmental and cultural impacts — such as SunZia. And it’s why both the Biden and California’s Newsom administrations poured billions of dollars into keeping Diablo Canyon nuclear plant running.

In the West, utilities and grid operators are trying to address these issues by creating a regional transmission organization and day-ahead and real-time power markets. These will help get power from where it’s generated to where it’s needed.

Trump’s order, on the other hand, does nothing tangible to address growing electricity demand, strain on the grid, or aging infrastructure. One of the only specific actions is to order the Secretary of Energy to consider allowing the year-round sale of E15 gasoline to meet nationwide fuel shortages. Huh? Did these guys just dust off some order from the 1970s energy crises and add new dates, or what?

Anyway, the good thing about this one is that it will probably have minimal on-the-ground effects, though it may give agencies some cover to ignore rules and regulations. As one energy analyst told RTO Insider, “They are press releases on fancier paper … directions to the agencies, but they’re not specific legal actions.”

Unleashing American Energy: Anyone who has been paying attention knows that if American energy is on a “leash,” it’s a very long and flimsy one. I really hate having to repeat this, but a lot of folks seem to be immune to facts: America is producing more oil and natural gas than ever before. Period. Eliminating environmental protections will not increase production, nor will it decrease prices. It will only increase profits for the petroleum corporation. This is not rocket science.

Among the “action” items in this order:

“… eliminate the electric vehicle mandate.” That one’s pretty easy, since there is no federal electric vehicle mandate and there never was one. The administration will consider axing federal EV incentives, and looks to revoke California’s waiver allowing it to phase out gasoline-powered vehicle sales.

“Safeguarding the American people’s freedom to choose from a variety of goods and appliances.” Again, Trump’s tiny hands are swatting at straw men. Go into any Home Depot and you will find a virtually unlimited variety of washers, driers, lightbulbs, shower heads, ranges, and toilets. You may or may not be able to find efficient ones, but you can certainly find wasteful ones.

Immediate review of all agency actions that potentially burden the development of domestic energy resources. This one’s funny because in another first-day order, Trump halts all offshore wind leasing and blocks the approval of the Lava Ridge wind facility in Idaho. Isn’t that burdening energy resources?

Terminates the American Climate Corps.

“Unleashing Energy Dominance through Efficient Permitting” and “to expedite and simplify the permitting process.”

Gets rid of analyzing the social cost of carbon and other greenhouse gases.

Terminates the “Green New Deal” (there is no such thing, by the way) and “immediately pauses the disbursement of funds appropriated through the Inflation Reduction Act and Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.” Again, Trump’s orders contradict one another, demonstrating their shoddiness: Billions upon billions of dollars in these acts were aimed at building up energy infrastructure and addressing grid and power shortfalls. And nearly $1 billion of it was just loaned to the Rhyolite Ridge lithium mine in Nevada, which would advance Trump’s quest to increase domestic critical mineral production. This throws all of that into doubt.

Restarts reviews of proposed LNG export projects. Again, the U.S. is currently exporting more LNG than ever before and if the volume continues to increase it will lead to higher natural gas prices in the U.S. That, in turn, will lead to higher electricity prices. Just saying.

“Restoring America’s Mineral Dominance” by removing “undue burdens” on domestic mining. Are you kidding me?

Orders the Interior and Agriculture secretaries to review any mineral withdrawals, which would include the Thompson Divide in Colorado and around Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.

Unleashing Alaska’s Extraordinary Resource Potential: Trump wants to “maximize the development and production of the natural resources” within Alaska by expediting oil and gas leasing and revoking restrictions on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and National Petroleum Reserve and to rescind protections on subsistence resource values. And he wants to reopen the Tongass National Forest’s roadless areas to logging. Basically, Trump wants Alaska to be corporations’ natural resource colony.

While this might conjure horrifying images of a battalion of drill rigs pummeling the Arctic tundra, it’s probably not worth worrying too much yet. The oil and gas industry hasn’t shown all that much interest in drilling in ANWR — a lease sale earlier this month drew zero bids — and petroleum company officials say they would prefer to focus on more accessible hot spots like the Permian Basin, which Biden basically offered up as a sacrifice zone.

The state’s elected officials mostly are bubbling with joy over the orders, but they aren’t all on board with Trump’s renaming of Denali, the nation’s highest peak. Trump has switched its title back to Mount McKinley, after the 25th U.S. president known for … well, not much, aside from implementing tariffs — one of Trump’s pet policies and a sure way to increase U.S. consumer prices.

Sens. Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan, both Republicans, are against the name change.

It’s not an executive order, yet, but Trump and some Republicans in Congress have threatened to withhold federal aid for victims of the Los Angeles fires unless California changes its water policies. And no, they’re not talking about the Imperial Valley alfalfa farmers guzzling up a monster’s share of the Colorado River. Truth is, they don’t really know what they’re talking about.

Basically, Trump has bought into his own lie that diverting water from the northern part of the state to SoCal would have enabled firefighters to easily extinguish the flames. And that Newsom’s environmental policies are to blame. This is patently false. And even if it were true, it’s inexcusable and morally wrong for a president to withhold aid based on a state’s political leanings. In his Los Angeles Times Boiling Point column, journalist Sammy Roth hits the nail on the head:

Heartless and cruel, indeed.

On that note, I’d urge all of you who have not yet done so to watch the Right Rev. Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the Washington National Cathedral as part of the inauguration ceremonies.

As one might expect a reverend to do, she calls for unity and asks the Trump administration to have mercy on those less fortunate than them. Basically, she’s asking the president to practice compassion and empathy, sort of like Jesus — or any other civil and decent human being — might do.

At no point did Budde condemn Trump, or call him a fascist, or burn him in effigy, or make fun of his orange makeup or small hands. She just asked him to show a bit of mercy. And yet, the reaction from Trump and his supporters has been rather ugly and angry. Trump demanded that she apologize to him, while others condemned Budde for uttering, well, Christian teachings. Silly me: I thought that was her job.

How do President Trump’s Executive Orders Impact Your Clean Water? — Leda Hua (AmericanRivers.org)

Merrimack River, New Hampshire | Merrimack River Watershed Council

Click the link to read the article on the American Rivers website (Leda Hua):

January 22, 2025

Following his inauguration, President Trump issued a number of executive orders focused on climate and energy—actions that could have major impacts on the rivers and clean water that all Americans depend on. President Trump has said he wants our country to have “the cleanest water,” which is why we must prevent any actions that harm our rivers and drinking water sources.

That’s why we need a responsible national energy strategy that is considerate of our water resources. Responsible energy development means meeting the needs of people without damaging the environment that our health and water wealth depend on.

No matter who you are or where you live, we all need clean, safe, reliable drinking water. Most of our country’s water comes from rivers. Public opinion research shows that Republican, Democrat, and Independent voters of all ages and races overwhelmingly support protections for clean water.  Clean water is a basic need, a human right, and a nonpartisan issue we can all agree on.

The details and implementation of these executive orders will matter as we pursue the dual goals of energy and water security.

We cannot return to days where polluters were allowed to devastate rural and urban communities and their natural resources. But these executive orders eliminate efforts to safeguard communities from environmental harm, putting their drinking water at risk.

In addition to protecting Americans from pollution, we also need to help families and businesses prepare for increasingly extreme weather. As Asheville, North Carolina and other communities in the Southeast continue to recover from Hurricane Helene, and thousands in Los Angeles are without homes following recent catastrophic fires, we should be bolstering policies to fight climate change and working to strengthen communities in the face of severe floods, droughts, and fires.

Created by Imgur user Fejetlenfej , a geographer and GIS analyst with a ‘lifelong passion for beautiful maps.’ It highlights the massive expanse of river basins across the country – in particular, those which feed the Mississippi River, in pink.

EVs 31.5% of all #Colorado new-car sales during Q4 2024: The latest news from Colorado’s transition in vehicles — Allen Best (BigPivots.com) #ActOnClimate

EVs charging at Tri-State. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

January 24, 2025

EVs and plug-in hybrids constitute 31.5% of all new-car sales during Q4

During the fourth quarter of 2024, electric vehicles and plug-in hybrids constituted 31.5% of all new car sales in Colorado, according to the Colorado Automobile Dealers Association.

As of mid-January, according to Atlas Public Policy, Colorado had 169,117 EVs and plug-in hybrids on the road. Colorado has a goal of 940,000 EVS by 2030.

Pueblo gets $11.5 million for 260 EV charging ports

Pueblo is getting $11.5 million in federal grants for installation of 260 EV charging ports near low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.

Pueblo has plenty of low- and moderate-income neighborhoods. It also has a new city administration that in December requested that the city scrap the resolution adopted in 2017 that called for 100% renewable energy by 2035. The ostensible reason given by the mayor was a dislike of the EV fleet for vehicles.

The grant was among 11 announced by the U.S. Department of Transportation totaling $112 million. The money is coming from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

Denver, Greeley, and Commerce City are also getting transportation grants. The single biggest grant will go to southeastern Colorado, where 12 individual passing lanes are to be created between Pueblo and the Kansas state lane. Total aid: $40 million.

The Roaring Fork Transportation Authority is to get a little over $1 million to help create a new alignment for the VelociRFTA Bus Rapid Transit lane through Glenwood Springs to I-70.

Easier to get EV chargers in multifamily housing

Colorado is now allowing for property developers, managers and contractors seeking state grants to install EV charging stations to apply once for multiple locations.

The applications are due no later than Feb. 14. Eligible projects include multifamily housing, work places, tourist destinations and community charging. The standard grants are for up to $250,000, with up to six level-2 charging ports per application.

More information here.See the full list of grants here.

Coyote Gulch’s Leaf in the hotel parking lot upon arriving in Grand Junction May 21, 2023.

Article: The 2024 state of the #climate report: Perilous times on planet Earth, “This is a global emergency beyond any doubt” — BioScience

Unusual climate anomalies in 2023 and 2024. Ocean temperatures (a, b) are presently far outside their historical ranges. These anomalies reflect the combined effect of long-term climate change and short-term variability. Sources and additional details about each variable are provided in supplemental file S1. Each line corresponds to a different year, with darker gray representing later years. All of the variables shown are daily estimates. Credit: BioScience

Click the link to access the article on the BioScience website (William J Ripple, Christopher Wolf, Jillian W Gregg, Johan Rockström, Michael E Mann, Naomi Oreskes, Timothy M Lenton, Stefan Rahmstorf, Thomas M Newsome, Chi Xu, Jens-Christian Svenning, Cássio Cardoso Pereira, Beverly E Law, Thomas W Crowther). Here’s the opening few paragraphs:

We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis. For many years, scientists, including a group of more than 15,000, have sounded the alarm about the impending dangers of climate change driven by increasing greenhouse gas emissions and ecosystem change (Ripple et al. 2020). For half a century, global warming has been correctly predicted even before it was observed—and not only by independent academic scientists but also by fossil fuel companies (Supran et al. 2023). Despite these warnings, we are still moving in the wrong direction; fossil fuel emissions have increased to an all-time high, the 3 hottest days ever occurred in July of 2024 (Guterres 2024), and current policies have us on track for approximately 2.7 degrees Celsius (°C) peak warming by 2100 (UNEP 2023). Tragically, we are failing to avoid serious impacts, and we can now only hope to limit the extent of the damage. We are witnessing the grim reality of the forecasts as climate impacts escalate, bringing forth scenes of unprecedented disasters around the world and human and nonhuman suffering. We find ourselves amid an abrupt climate upheaval, a dire situation never before encountered in the annals of human existence. We have now brought the planet into climatic conditions never witnessed by us or our prehistoric relatives within our genus, Homo (supplemental figure S1; CenCO2PIP Consortium et al. 2023).

Last year, we witnessed record-breaking sea surface temperatures (Cheng et al. 2024), the hottest Northern Hemisphere extratropical summer in 2000 years (Esper et al. 2024), and the breaking of many other climate records (Ripple et al. 2023a). Moreover, we will see much more extreme weather in the coming years (Masson-Delmotte et al. 2021). Human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gases are the primary drivers of climate change. As of 2022, global fossil fuel combustion and industrial processes account for approximately 90% of these emissions, whereas land-use change, primarily deforestation, accounts for approximately 10% (supplemental figure S2).

Our aim in the present article is to communicate directly to researchers, policymakers, and the public. As scientists and academics, we feel it is our moral duty and that of our institutions to alert humanity to the growing threats that we face as clearly as possible and to show leadership in addressing them. In this report, we analyze the latest trends in a wide array of planetary vital signs. We also review notable recent climate-related disasters, spotlight important climate-related topics, and discuss needed policy interventions. This report is part of our series of concise annual updates on the state of the climate.

Screenshot from “The 2024 state of the climate report: Perilous times
on planet Earth”

The American Oil Industry’s Playbook, Illustrated: How Drillers Offload Costly Cleanup Onto the Public — Mark Olalde, illustrations by Peter Arkle (ProPublica.org) #ActOnClimate

Abandoned gas well located in Lower Rio Grande Valley National Wildlife Refuge. By Hillebrand, Steve, USFWS – https://digitalmedia.fws.gov/digital/collection/natdiglib/id/13540/rec/9, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=113189594

Click the link to read the article on the ProPublica website:

by Mark Olalde, illustrations by Peter Arkle, special to ProPublica

December 30, 2024

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

Series: Unplugged:Will Taxpayers Foot the Oil Industry’s Cleanup Bill?

More in this series

In December 1990, officials in the federal agency tasked with regulating offshore oil and gas drilling received a memo with a dire warning: America faced a ticking time bomb of environmental liability from unplugged oil and gas wells, wrote the agency’s chief of staff. Those wells and their costly cleanup obligations were being concentrated in the hands of cash-strapped drillers at the same time as production was shrinking. (The document, unearthed by public interest watchdog organization Documented, was shared with ProPublica and Capital & Main.)

More than three decades later, little action has been taken to heed that warning, and the time bomb is threatening to explode.

More than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged across the country. Many leak contaminants like brine, methane and benzene into waterways, farmland and neighborhoods. The industry has already left hundreds of thousands of old wells as orphans, meaning companies walked away, leaving taxpayers, government agencies or other drillers on the hook for cleanup.

America’s oil fields are increasingly split between a small number of wells producing record profits and everything else. Researchers estimate roughly 90% of wells are already dead or barely producing.

Consider the Permian Basin, the world’s most productive oil field, stretching from West Texas across southeastern New Mexico.

“The Permian is the oil patch’s Alamo — that’s where it’s retreating to,” Regan Boychuk, a Canadian oil cleanup researcher, said of the oil industry. “That’s their last stand.”

Even here, many wells sit idle and in disrepair. It’s time to plug them, according to a growing chorus of researchers, environmentalists and industry representatives.

The question of who pays for cleanup remains unanswered. Time and again, oil companies have offloaded their oldest wells. Their tactics are not written down in one place or peddled by a single law firm — but companies follow an unmistakable pattern. The strategy, which is legal if followed properly, has become such a tried-and-true endeavor that researchers and environmentalists dubbed it “the playbook.”

Clark Williams-Derry, an analyst with clean-energy-focused think tank the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, studies fossil fuel companies’ cleanup costs. “There’s almost a cheerleading squad for shedding your liabilities, like a snake sheds its skin and just slithers away,” he said.

Should you want to become an oil executive and try this strategy yourself, here’s how it works …

As you launch your business, begin by collecting subsidies, tax breaks and other incentives from the government to guarantee you can pump oil and gas profitably. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies total in the trillions each year, according to organizations such as the International Monetary Fund.

Next, start pumping and profiting.

As you set up your business, create layers of shell companies. Down the road, they’ll provide a firewall between you and your liabilities — key among them, cleanup costs.

Once oil and gas production slows, sell low-producing wells. Smaller drillers operating on thinner margins, known in the business as “scavenger companies,” will be happy to take them off your hands.

Rinse and repeat by selling wells as their profits slow to a trickle. They’ll be sold again to ever-smaller companies that teeter on the edge of insolvency. Maintenance and environmental stewardship will usually fall by the wayside as companies eke out a profit. Studies show that the number of environmental violations rises as wells pass to less-capitalized drillers. But these wells aren’t your problem any longer.

Pull any remaining profits before regulators hit you with violations and fines for your remaining wells that aren’t pumping and may be leaking.

Then, idle the wells — pausing production, but not plugging them or cleaning up — and walk away. Regulators are typically tasked with ensuring that as much oil as possible is pumped out of the ground, so rules allow wells to sit idle, instead of being plugged, in case prices surge and it becomes profitable to restart them. However, a study in California found that, after wells are inactive for only 10 months, there’s a 50-50 chance they will never produce again.

Regulators will likely grow tired of asking you to clean up your wells, but you can make the case for leaving them unplugged for now. Pitch grand plans, as other drillers have — maybe repurposing the wells for bitcoin mining, carbon sequestration or the synthesis of hydrogen fuel — that require the wells to remain open.

When regulators’ patience has reached its limit, remind them what will happen if they come down hard on you. Fines or other extra costs could force your business into bankruptcy, leaving your unplugged wells as orphans and taxpayers on the hook. Ask them if they want to be responsible for that catastrophe.

“The root of the problem is there’s no regulator of the oil industry across North America,” Boychuk said, adding that “the rule of law has never applied to oil and gas.”

When regulators finally act, declare bankruptcy. The Bankruptcy Code is meant to protect businesspeople like you who took risks. More than 250 oil and gas operators in the U.S. filed for bankruptcy protection between 2015 and 2021, according to law firm Haynes Boone. (Industry groups estimate there are several thousand oil companies in the country.)

Regulators only require oil and gas companies to set aside tiny bonds that act like a security deposit on an apartment. Because you didn’t clean up your wells, you’ll lose that money, but it’s a fraction of the profits you’ve banked or the cost of the cleanup work. ProPublica and Capital & Main found that bonds typically equal less than 2% of actual cleanup costs.

And as you finalize your exit, the labyrinth of shell corporations you set up should act as corporate law intends, protecting you from future responsibility. Such companies, little more than stacks of paper, will be responsible for your liabilities, not you. Even if regulators know who is behind a company, it becomes increasingly difficult to penetrate each layer of a business to go after individual executives.

“It’s the essence of corporate law,” Williams-Derry said.

Now that you’ve offloaded your wells, you’re free to start fresh — launch a new oil company and buy some of your old wells for pennies on the dollar, a proven option. Maybe you leave oil entirely — that’s also tried-and-true. Or become a vintner and open a winery just down the road from the wells you left as orphans — you wouldn’t be the first.

For its part, the oil industry downplays the so-called playbook and the country’s orphan well epidemic. “There’s a general trend, which is there are very few orphan wells,” said Kathleen Sgamma, who has been among oil companies’ most vocal proponents as president of the Western Energy Alliance, an industry trade group. Plus, she said, companies’ bonds and states’ orphan well funds help pay for plugging.

But those tasked with addressing the reality of the country’s orphan wells disagree. “We have a welfare system for oil and gas. I hope you understand that,” said New Mexico Commissioner of Public Lands Stephanie Garcia Richard, who oversees the state’s public lands. New Mexico has already documented more than 1,700 orphan wells across the state. “We have oil and gas welfare queens.”

In New Mexico, Garcia Richard is trying to hold accountable one of the myriad drillers that have followed key steps in the playbook, the oil company known as Siana.

Siana is made up of two related entities — Siana Oil and Gas Co. LLC and Siana Operating LLC — based in Midland and Conroe, Texas. The company operated 11 wells in southeastern New Mexico in the heart of the Permian Basin.

In reality, Siana is the corporate shield for a man named Tom Ragsdale. After he aggregated his few wells, he generated cash through a trickle of oil and gas production and set up a business injecting other companies’ wastewater into his wells to dispose of it. But the state worried that Ragsdale’s operations were polluting the environment and that he was refusing to pay royalties and rental fees he owed the state, according to State Land Office staff.

Ragsdale did not respond to repeated requests for comment from ProPublica and Capital & Main. He also did not appear for a pretrial conference after the state brought legal action against Siana, court records show, and a state court judge ruled against his companies.

Siana was responsible for at least 16 spills, according to New Mexico Oil Conservation Division data, mainly spilling what’s called produced water, a briny wastewater that comes to the surface alongside oil and gas. “Corrosion” and “Equipment Failure” were among the causes.

The State Land Office hired an engineering firm to study the damage. The firm produced a damning 201-page report in 2018, finding oil and salt contamination exceeding state limits at Siana’s most polluted site. At high enough levels, these substances can kill plants, harm wildlife and impact human health.

The State Land Office estimated that cleaning up that site alone would cost about $1 million.

In 2020, New Mexico won a judgment against Ragsdale’s companies that, with interest, is now worth more than $3.5 million. But it won’t cover the cleanup cost. Between a small bond and the judgment, the state has been able to recover a mere $50,000 or so from Siana and related entities.

When the state tried to collect the rest, Ragsdale placed Siana Oil and Gas in bankruptcy protection in June 2023. Although he listed the company as having millions in assets at the time of the bankruptcy, the company had only $20,500 in a bank account. Court records show Siana is responsible for between $1 million and $10 million in liabilities, including money owed to the state of New Mexico, other oil companies, various counties and others.

Stickers plastered around Siana’s drill sites — on which the company’s name is misspelled — provide phone numbers to call in case of leaks or other emergencies. None went to Ragsdale or Siana employees. A man named William Dean answered one number. He owned a local oil field services company called Dean’s Pumping that was contracted to work on Siana’s wells, but Ragsdale stopped paying its bills, ultimately owing his company tens of thousands of dollars, Dean said.

“He was trying to half-ass things,” Dean said of Ragsdale. “I don’t know what happened to Tom.”

Siana’s bankruptcy case is ongoing, but Ragsdale has been largely unresponsive even in those proceedings.

Siana is, Garcia Richard said, “an exemplar of how our system has failed.” Although he was very nearly free of his old wells, Ragsdale flouted the playbook and ignored the bankruptcy judge’s demands that he participate in the case. In an unusual move, the judge in late September issued a warrant for Ragsdale’s arrest to compel him to hand over certain data. The U.S. Marshals Service was investigating Ragsdale’s whereabouts but had not taken him into custody as of mid-December, according to an agency representative.

The day after the judge issued the arrest warrant, the bankruptcy trustee filed a complaint alleging Ragsdale had committed fraud, siphoning about $2.4 million from Siana to purchase real estate in Houston.

That money could have gone toward cleaning up the mess left to New Mexico taxpayers.

ProPublica and Capital & Main visited Siana’s 11 wells in late 2023. At one drill site, methane leaked from a wellhead that had also stained the surrounding land black from spilled oil. The air was sour with the smell of toxic hydrogen sulfide. A nearby tank that held oil for processing was rusted through. Another had leaked an unidentified liquid. There appeared to be hoofprints where cattle had tracked through the polluted mud.

ProPublica and Capital & Main found oil spills at multiple Siana wells. At others, the idle pump jacks stood silent — corroded skeletons at the end of the line, the detritus of another run through the playbook.

Efforts to reform the system that has shielded oil companies from liability have been haphazard. When the federal government rewrote its rule setting bond levels on federal public land earlier this year, a simple math error meant the government would ask oil companies to set aside around $400 million less in bonds than it would’ve otherwise. And when states have tried to pass reforms, they’ve been stymied by state legislators’ and regulators’ chummy relationships with the industry.

As an ever-greater share of wells go offline and the economy transitions to cleaner forms of energy, policymakers face a choice: Do they focus attention on propping up or cleaning up the industry?

Sgamma of the Western Energy Alliance gives voice to one path forward. “Any time a well goes into an orphan status, it’s not a good thing,” Sgamma said, yet her group has been instrumental in killing efforts to address the orphan well epidemic and the oil industry’s contributions to climate change. Her organization is suing to halt the federal rule that sought to bring bonding levels closer to true plugging costs.

Sgamma co-authored the energy section of Project 2025, the conservative policy paper with deep ties to the first Trump administration that lays out policy priorities for a conservative White House. The plan would “Stop the war on oil and natural gas,” reopen undeveloped habitat from Alaska to Colorado for drilling, increase the number of sales for oil leases on public lands and shrink federal environmental agencies. President-elect Donald Trump has repeatedly indicated this closely aligns with his vision for pumping America’s “liquid gold.” He has begun staffing his administration with pro-oil and gas figures.

The future for which Sgamma is fighting sees a resilient American oil and gas industry, able to “take a lot of punches” while continuing to grow unabated.

Or there’s the future Garcia Richard, who oversees New Mexico’s public land, envisions. She has paused the leasing of public land to drillers until the Legislature forces oil companies to pay state taxpayers higher royalties that reflect fair market rates. She directed her staff to aggressively pursue companies like Siana. And her office is preparing to raise required bonding levels. As she talked about this work, she held up the literal rubber stamp that imparts the State Land Office’s seal on documents, suggesting that’s not how business is done anymore. She also held up a small notebook where she tracks the numerous companies her office is pursuing for polluting the state’s land and water.

In her future, Garcia Richard said, oil drillers wouldn’t behave like Siana and Ragsdale. “A good-acting company is a company that understands there’s a cost of doing business that shouldn’t be borne by the landowner, shouldn’t be borne by the taxpayers,” she said. But in the modern American oil industry, she added, the playbook and the still-burning fuse of the cleanup time bomb represent little more than “Wild West behavior.”

#Colorado to start regulating emission of 5 air toxics that make people sick: The new regulations will be rolled out in phases over the course of 2025 and into 2026 — The #Denver Post

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

January 13, 2025

Five new compounds soon will be listed as priority toxic air contaminants in Colorado and, over the next two years, the state’s Department of Public Health and Environment and Air Quality Control Commission will determine out how to regulate them. The state’s Air Pollution Control Division will recommend five compounds to be regulated to the commission during its two meetings that begin Thursday. The creation of the list of toxic air contaminants is the result of a years-long effort from environmentalists and public health advocates who want the state to do more to protect people from the pollution that can cause cancers, such as leukemia and lymphoma, and lung diseases, such as asthma, and can harm women’s reproductive health. For years, environmentalists have complained that air pollution permits issued by the federal and state governments allow companies to pollute with little attention given to how much of those contaminants are dangerous to human health…

The five toxic air contaminants being proposed for regulation are:

Acrolein, which is created when fossil fuels are burned by wood-burning, industrial boilers and reciprocating engines, and it is also used to make a polymer for paints, coatings and adhesives. Acute, short-term inhalation can cause eye and respiratory tract irritation. It is not considered a cancer risk.

Benzene, a carcinogen released when fossil fuels are burned, including in car exhaust and oil and gas extraction and production. It also is created by cement manufacturing, waste disposal and wood burning. Acute exposure may cause drowsiness, dizziness and headaches, as well as eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, and unconsciousness at high levels. Chronic inhalation has caused cancer, various blood disorders and affects women’s reproductive organs, the Environmental Protection Agency has reported.

Ethylene oxide, which is used to make other products such as antifreeze, textiles, adhesives, plastics and detergents. It’s used to sterilize medical equipment, including at Terumo BTC in Lakewood to sanitize medical equipment. It causes cancers in humans, including lymphoma, myeloma, leukemia and breast cancer.

Hydrogen sulfide, highly toxic gas that smells like rotten eggs. It is released by wastewater treatment facilities, meat processing facilities, petroleum refining, manufacturing of asphalt and roofing material and places where large quantities of manure are stored. It can cause people to pass out due to high exposure. Low exposure can cause headaches, memory loss, balance problems and fatigue. It is not considered a carcinogen but data is limited on how it affects children’s health or women’s reproductive health, according to the EPA.

Hexavalent chromium is a by-product of industrial processes such as metal fabricating and by burning coal for electricity. It can leak into water systems and into the air. It can cause cancer and impact the respiratory system, kidneys, liver, skin and eyes, the EPA’s website says.

Supreme Court rejects #Utah, #Wyoming claims on federal public lands — Angus M. Thuermer Jr. (WyoFile.com)

US Flag at Hoover Dam as the Olympic Torch passed over the dam in 1996

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

January 14, 2025

It took the U.S. Supreme Court 12 words and one period to dismiss more than 300 pages of legal arguments in which Utah, Wyoming and other Western states sought to establish control and ownership of millions of acres of federally managed public land.

Utah, Wyoming’s lone U.S. Rep. Harriet Hageman, state legislators, Gov. Mark Gordon and many others sought an emergency hearing to argue that the federal government illegally owns property that rightfully belongs to Western states. Wyoming and other parties filed briefs of their own supporting the Beehive State’s assertion that federal ownership was detrimental to those commonwealths.

The filings appear to be unappreciated by the justices.

“The motion for leave to file a bill of complaint is denied,” the court said in an order filed Monday.

Utah’s petition generated another 424 pages of legal entreaties by its supporters and critics, a count that includes rebuttals by the United States and the Ute Tribe.

Utah claimed the federal government could not own and control “unappropriated lands,” which are those not specifically designated for use by an enumerated federal power. Utah targeted 18.5 million acres of Bureau of Land Management property belonging to all Americans.

Beehivers first said they wanted the court to “dispose” of the BLM property, then clarified that the state just wanted the court to say it is unconstitutional for the government to hold “unappropriated” acreage.

Hageman claimed that federal ownership is an occupation equivalent to a casus belli, a situation that justifies war or conflict between nations. “[T]he standard is whether the federal government’s actions would amount to an invasion and conquest of that land if—assuming a counterfactual—Utah were a separate sovereign nation,” Hageman’s filing states.

Twenty-six Wyoming lawmakers also saddled up for Utah, urging the court to take up the case and saying their support does not mean they will not seek other federal property for the Equality State. The perturbed posse said its claims could extend to “all former federal territorial lands … now held by the United States … [including] parks, monuments, wilderness, etc.”

Six of the sympathetic signatories — Sens. Tim French (R-Powell), Larry Hicks (R-Baggs), Bob Ide (R-Casper), John Kolb (R-Rock Springs), Dan Laursen (R-Powell) and Cheri Steinmetz (R- Lingle) — voted for a draft bill that would allocate $75 million for the Legislature, independent of the executive branch or other state entities, to litigate against the federal government. Senate File 41 “Federal acts-legal actions authorized” will be considered when the Legislature convenes today.

Gordon was more reserved in Wyoming’s official state plea, alleging “harms that federal ownership … uniquely imposes on western States on a daily basis” as a reason for the Supreme Court to immediately take up the case.

AI has an environmental problem. Here’s what the world can do about that — United Nations Environment Programme #ActOnClimate

Click the link to read the article on the UN Environment Programme website:

September 21, 2024

There are high hopes that artificial intelligence (AI) can help tackle some of the world’s biggest environmental emergencies. Among other things, the technology is already being used to map the destructive dredging of sand and chart emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

But when it comes to the environment, there is a negative side to the explosion of AI and its associated infrastructure, according to a growing body of research. The proliferating data centres that house AI servers produce electronic waste. They are large consumers of water, which is becoming scarce in many places. They rely on critical minerals and rare elements, which are often mined unsustainably. And they use massive amounts of electricity, spurring the emission of planet-warming greenhouse gases.

“There is still much we don’t know about the environmental impact of AI but some of the data we do have is concerning,” said Golestan (Sally) Radwan, the Chief Digital Officer of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). “We need to make sure the net effect of AI on the planet is positive before we deploy the technology at scale.”

This week, UNEP released an issue note that explores AI’s environmental footprint and considers how the technology can be rolled out sustainably. It follows a major UNEP report, Navigating New Horizons, which also examined AI’s promise and perils. Here’s what those publications found.

First of all, what is AI?

AI is a catch-all term for a group of technologies that can process information and, at least superficially, mimic human thinking. Rudimentary forms of AI have been around since the 1950s. But the technology has evolved at a breakneck pace in recent years, in part because of advances in computing power and the explosion of data, which is crucial for training AI models.

Why are people excited about the potential of AI when it comes to the environment?

The big benefit of AI is that it can detect patterns in data, such as anomalies and similarities, and use historic knowledge to accurately predict future outcomes. That could make AI invaluable for monitoring the environment, and helping governments, businesses and individuals make more planet-friendly choices. It can also enhance efficiencies. UNEP, for example, uses AI to detect when oil and gas installations vent methane, a greenhouse gas that drives climate change.

Advances like those are fostering hope that AI could help the world tackle at least some aspects of the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.

So how is AI problematic for the environment?

Most large-scale AI deployments are housed in data centres, including those operated by cloud service providers. These data centres can take a heavy toll on the planet. The electronics they house rely on a staggering amount of grist: making a 2 kg computer requires 800 kg of raw materials. As well, the microchips that power AI need rare earth elements, which are often mined in environmentally destructive ways, noted Navigating New Horizons.

The second problem is that data centres produce electronic waste, which often contains hazardous substances, like mercury and lead.

Third, data centres use water during construction and, once operational, to cool electrical components. Globally, AI-related infrastructure may soon consume six times more water than Denmark, a country of 6 million, according to one estimate. That is a problem when a quarter of humanity already lacks access to clean water and sanitation.

Finally, to power their complex electronics, data centres that host AI technology need a lot of energy, which in most places still comes from the burning of fossil fuels, producing planet-warming greenhouse gases. A request made through ChatGPT, an AI-based virtual assistant, consumes 10 times the electricity of a Google Search, reported the International Energy Agency. While global data is sparse, the agency estimates that in the tech hub of Ireland, the rise of AI could see data centres account for nearly 35 per cent of the country’s energy use by 2026.

Driven in part by the explosion of AI, the number of data centres has surged to 8 million from 500,000 in 2012, and experts expect the technology’s demands on the planet to keep growing.

Some have said that when it comes to the environment, AI is a wildcard. Why is that?

We have a decent handle on what the environmental impacts of data centres could be. But it’s impossible to predict how AI-based applications themselves will affect the planet. Some experts worry they may have unintended consequences. For example, the development of AI-powered self-driving cars could cause more people to drive instead of cycling or taking public transit, pushing up greenhouse gas emissions. Then there are what experts call higher-order effects. AI, for example, could be used to generate misinformation about climate change, downplaying the threat in the eyes of the public.

Is anybody doing anything about the environmental impacts of AI?

More than 190 countries have adopted a series of non-binding recommendations on the ethical use of AI, which covers the environment. As well, both the European Union and the United States of America have introduced legislation to temper the environmental impact of AI. But policies like those are few and far between, says Radwan.

“Governments are racing to develop national AI strategies but rarely do they take the environment and sustainability into account. The lack of environmental guardrails is no less dangerous than the lack of other AI-related safeguards.”

How can the world rein in the environmental fallout from AI?

In the new issue note, UNEP recommends five main things. Firstly, countries can establish standardized procedures for measuring the environmental impact of AI; right now, there’s a dearth of reliable information on the subject. Secondly, with support from UNEP, governments can develop regulations that require companies to disclose the direct environmental consequences of AI-based products and services. Thirdly, tech companies can make AI algorithms more efficient, reducing their demand for energy, while recycling water and reusing components where feasible. Fourthly, countries can encourage companies to green their data centres, including by using renewable energy and offsetting their carbon emissions. Finally, countries can weave their AI-related policies into their broader environmental regulations.

UNEP is focused on helping the world better navigate the environmental challenges of tomorrow. To do that, we have ramped up our work on strategic foresight, scanning the horizon for emerging threats to the planet. This process culminated in the development of Navigating New Horizons – A Global Foresight Report on Planetary Health and Human Wellbeing, which was published earlier this year. Produced in collaboration with the International Science Council, it examined eight global shifts accelerating the triple planetary crisis of climate change, nature and biodiversity loss, and pollution and waste.

2024’s extreme ocean heat breaks records again, leaving 2 mysteries to solve — Annalisa Bracco (The Conversation) #ActOnClimate

Click the link to read the article on The Conversation website (Annalisa Bracco):

January 9, 2025

The oceans are heating up as the planet warms.

This past year, 2024, was the warmest ever measured for the global ocean, following a record-breaking 2023. In fact, every decade since 1984, when satellite recordkeeping of ocean temperatures started, has been warmer than the previous one.

A warmer ocean means increased evaporation, which in turn results in heavier rains in some areas and droughts in others. It can power hurricanes and downpours. It can also harm the health of coastal marine areas and sea life – coral reefs suffered their most extensive bleaching event on record in 2024, with damage in many parts of the world.

Warming ocean water also affects temperatures on land by changing weather patterns. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service announced on Jan. 10 that data showed 2024 had also broken the record for the warmest year globally, with global temperatures about 2.9 degrees Fahrenheit (1.6 Celsius) above pre-industrial times. That would mark the first full calendar year with average warming above 1.5 C, a level countries had agreed to try to avoid passing long-term.

Many regions of the world were much warmer than the 1991-2020 average in 2024, including large areas of ocean. C3S / ECMWF, CC BY

Climate change, by and large, takes the blame. Greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere trap heat, and about 90% of the excess heat caused by emissions from burning fossil fuels and other human activities is absorbed by the ocean.

But while it’s clear that the ocean has been warming for quite some time, its temperatures over the past two years have been far above the previous decades. That leaves two mysteries for scientists.

It’s not just El Niño

The cyclic climate pattern of the El Niño Southern Oscillation can explain part of the warmth over the past two years.

During El Niño periods, warm waters that usually accumulate in the western equatorial Pacific Ocean move eastward toward the coastlines of Peru and Chile, leaving the Earth slightly warmer overall. The latest El Niño began in 2023 and caused global average temperatures to rise well into early 2024.

Sea surface temperatures have been running well above average when compared with all years on record, starting in 1981. The orange line is 2024, dark grey is 2023, and red is 2025. The middle dashed line is the 1982-2011 average. ClimateReanalyzer.org/NOAA OISST v2.1, CC BY

But the oceans have been even warmer than scientists expected. For example, global temperatures in 2023-2024 followed a similar growth and decline pattern across the seasons as the previous El Niño event, in 2015-2016, but they were about 0.36 degrees Fahrenheit (0.2 Celsius) higher at all times in 2023-2024.

Scientists are puzzled and left with two problems to solve. They must figure out whether something else contributed to the unexpected warming and whether the past two years have been a sign of a sudden acceleration in global warming.

The role of aerosols

An intriguing idea, tested using climate models, is that a swift reduction in aerosols over the past decade may be one of the culprits.

Aerosols are solid and liquid particles emitted by human and natural sources into the atmosphere. Some of them have been shown to partially counteract the impact of greenhouse gases by reflecting solar radiation back into space. However, they also are responsible for poor air quality and air pollution.

Many of these particles with cooling properties are generated in the process of burning fossil fuels. For example, sulfur aerosols are emitted by ship engines and power plants. In 2020, the shipping industry implemented a nearly 80% cut in sulfur emissions, and many companies shifted to low-sulfur fuels. But the larger impact has come from power plants reducing their emissions, including a big shift in this direction in China. So, while technologies have cut these harmful emissions, that means a brake slowing the pace of warming is weakened.

Is this a warming surge?

The second puzzle is whether the planet is seeing a warming surge or not.

Temperatures are clearly rising, but the past two years have not been warm enough to support the notion that we may be seeing an acceleration in the rate of global warming.

Analysis of four temperature datasets covering the 1850-2023 period has shown that the rate of warming has not shown a significant change since around the 1970s. The same authors, however, noted that only a rate increase of at least 55% – about half a degree Celsius and nearly a full degree Fahrenheit over one year – would make the warming acceleration detectable in a statistical sense.

Chart: The Conversation/CC-BY-NDSource: NOAAGet the dataEmbed Download imageCreated with Datawrapper

From a statistical standpoint, then, scientists cannot exclude the possibility that the 2023-2024 record ocean warming resulted simply from the “usual” warming trend that humans have set the planet on for the past 50 years. A very strong El Niño contributed some natural variability.

From a practical standpoint, however, the extraordinary impacts the planet has witnessed – including extreme weather, heat waves, wildfires, coral bleaching and ecosystem destruction – point to a need to swiftly reduce carbon dioxide emissions to limit ocean warming, regardless of whether this is a continuation of an ongoing trend or an acceleration.

Can “Floating Pools” be the template for future management of the #ColoradoRiver? — Jack Schmidt and Eric Kuhn (InkStain.net) #COriver #aridification #CRWUA2024

Attendees of the Colorado River Water Users Association watch negotiators Estevan López of New Mexico and Becky Mitchell of Colorado speak on a panel Thursday, December 5, 2024, at the Paris Hotel and Casino. The Upper and Lower basin states are at an impasse about how cuts will be shared and reservoirs operated after 2026. CREDIT: LUKE RUNYON/THE WATER DESK

Click the link to read the article on the InkStain.net website (Jack Schmidt and Eric Kuhn):

January 9, 2024

The press coverage of the December 2024 Colorado River Water Users Association (CRWUA) meeting mostly focused on the ongoing stalemate between representatives of the Upper and Lower Division States over their competing proposals for how the Colorado River Systems’ big reservoirs will be operated after the 2007 Interim Guidelines terminate in 2026. The headlines included words such as “turbulent”, “bitter”, “bluster”, and “spar”. Indeed, there was tension in the air, and the potential for interstate litigation was a topic of much discussion both on the formal agenda and in the hallways where, traditionally, progress is often made between competing interests.

While the press focus on the tension and divisiveness was unavoidable, I believe that there were good reasons for some guarded optimism.

For the ongoing effort to renegotiate the post-2026 operating guidelines, a consortium of seven environmental NGOs has also made a detailed proposal. Their proposal is referred to as the “Cooperative Conservation” proposal. One of the four action alternatives that Reclamation will analyze, Alternative #3, is patterned after the NGO submittal. At CRWUA, John Berggren of Western Resource Advocates, who along with Jennifer Pitt and others prepared the proposal, made a presentation on the proposal. Like the other submitted proposals, the cooperative conservation alternative proposes sophisticated operational rules for Lakes Mead and Powell based on combined system storage and actual hydrology. Where the Cooperative Conservation proposal breaks new ground is the concept of a Conservation Reserve Pool, and this idea could lead the basin toward a practical on-the-ground solution. Indeed, the Gila River Indian Community introduced at CRWUA a similar concept in the form of a Federal Protection Pool made up of stored water in both Lake Powell and Lake Mead. These proposals, taken separately, together, or in some combined and moderated form, might serve as a catalyst for compromise.

As proposed, both the Conservation Reserve Pool and the Federal Protection Pool would be filled with water conserved by reductions in consumptive use and perhaps augmentation from programs in both basins and this water could be stored anywhere in the system. This water would be “operationally neutral” and thus invisible to the underlying system management operating rules. From an accounting perspective, this Pool would “float” above other water in the reservoirs. Floating Pools operate separately from and above the prior appropriation system of water allocation on the Lower River and are invisible to the rules that dictate annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam. Thus, these proposals impart important operational flexibility. In many ways, Floating Pools split the baby—they incentivize innovative conservation measures that allow participants to find value they would not have been able to realize under the prior appropriation system—yet they insulate the prior appropriation system and thus are more protective of higher-priority water users than operationally non-neutral ICS. It’s a stretch to say there is something here for everyone, but there may be enough to kick-start otherwise stalled conversations.

In their proposal, the Lower Division States have offered to take up to 1.5 maf/year of mainstem shortages. Where the two basins remain deadlocked is what happens in those years when shortages exceed the amount the Lower Division States are willing to accept. The Lower Division States have proposed that the two basins share the additional required shortages up to a maximum shortage of 3.9 maf/year. The Upper Division States have said, “No, because we already suffer large hydrologic shortages in dry years, and we have not used our full compact entitlement; the Lower Division should cover all of the shortages.” In their presentation, however, the Upper Division Commissioners (UCRC members) left the door open for continuing discussions between the two divisions. In his remarks, New Mexico Commissioner Estevan Lopez stated that under what he referred to as “parallel activities”, the Upper Division States might be willing to discuss conserving “100,000, maybe 200,000 acre-feet per year.”

Water in Floating Pools could be used for a variety of purposes including environmental management, fostering binational programs, and supplementing scheduled water deliveries. During his CRWUA presentation, John Berggren mentioned an obvious use for this pool. Water stored in the Pool by conserved consumptive use programs in the Upper Division States could be used as an Upper Division contribution during years when mainstem shortages to the Lower Division States exceed a negotiated amount. Of course, the Lower Basin is unlikely to accept Upper Basin creation of Floating Pools made up of water for which there is no current consumptive use. This water is already “system water” and is now being used by existing Lower Basin water agency. Thus, it would be necessary to develop a program to account for and certify savings in the Upper Basin. Further, the thorny problem of shepherding (legally protecting the conserved water so that it ends up in system storage) needs to be overcome. For a perspective on this issue, see Heather Sacket. Undeveloped Tribal water is a controversial sticking-point in this regard, with strong feelings and strong arguments on all sides.

If the Upper Division States were to conserve 200,000 acre-feet per year for five years and deposit that saved water in a conservation reserve “Floating Pool”, something like 900,000 acre-feet could be available for shortage sharing (after accounting for reservoir evaporation). (We use 900,000 af as an example only, how much water the Upper Division States would have to contribute and maintain in a Floating Pool would have to be negotiated between the two divisions.) In their presentation, the Lower Division principals pointed out that had their proposal been in place beginning in 2007, there has yet to be a year when shortage sharing would have been required. Note, this conclusion is very sensitive to “initial conditions.” In 2007, total storage in Lake Mead and Lake Powell was about 8 maf more than it is today. If the 21^st century hydrology continues, shortages greater than 1.5 maf/year are likely to occur.

What would the Upper Division States get in return? During the term of the new post-2026 operating guidelines (which we all assume will also be “interim”), the Upper Division would benefit by the Lower Division agreeing to remove the threat of litigation over a “compact call.” For a perspective on the potential impacts of a “call” in Colorado see The Risks and Potential Impacts of a Colorado River Compact Curtailment on Colorado River In-Basin and Transmountain Water Rights Within Colorado.

Carefully crafted with appropriate guardrails, Floating Pool concepts can be a catalyst for compromise between the two divisions that give both parties something they need.

How do Floating Pool alternatives fit with the Schmidt, Kuhn, Fleck management approach? Based on our conversations with the authors of the cooperative conservation proposal, we believe the two approaches agree — that our management proposal fits on top of and complements their proposal quite well. In my presentation at CRWUA, I emphasized that, like future hydrology, there is great uncertainty in the future needs of the river’s ecosystem and society’s values. It’s almost a certainty that in the future, prescribed annual releases from Glen Canyon Dam will cause an unacceptable and unanticipated outcome to some river or reservoir resource. When that happens, our flexible management approach and accounting system keeps the basins “whole.”

Is using the concept of Floating Pools as a catalyst to break the stalemate between the two basins without warts? – of course not. There are important considerations regarding the use of undeveloped water—Tribal or otherwise, and the devil is in the details when it comes to developing appropriate guardrails for annual and total accumulation in such a Pool, the number and type of participants, annual debits, and other important qualifications. Even conserving 100,000 acre-feet per year in the Upper Division States, with acceptable verification, could be a stretch, especially if there is less federal money in the future, as there almost certainly will be. Finally, it might put off addressing fundamental problems with the law of the river until the new post-2026 operating rules again expire. When they do, the 1922 Compact and 1944 Treaty with Mexico will still be in place, and these agreements collectively allocate 17.5 maf/year of consumptive use on a river that is only producing 13-13.5 maf/year of water at the international boundary (and runoff continues to decline). What the Floating Pool concept might accomplish is to significantly reduce the temptation and threat of unpredictable interstate litigation, keep the basin’s stakeholders talking to each other, and give us time to move toward more foundational change in how the river is managed.

Map of the Colorado River drainage basin, created using USGS data. By Shannon1 Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0

Global Warming Surges Well Past 1.5-Degree Mark in 2024: International agencies coordinate release of annual climate data to highlight the past year’s “exceptional”—and dangerous—climate conditions — Bob Berwyn (Inside #Climate News)

Sunset September 10, 2024 in the San Luis Valley. Photo credit: Alamosa Citizen

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

January 9, 2024

Nearly all major global climate datasets agree that, in 2024, human-caused global warming for the first time pushed Earth’s average surface temperature to more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial average for a full calendar year, a level that countries around the world had agreed to do all they could to avoid.

And when last year is averaged with 2023, both years together also exceed that level of warming, which was noted as a red line marking dangerous climate change by 196 countries in the 2015 Paris Agreement. A 2018 special report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed that warming beyond that limit threatens to irreversibly change major parts of the physical and biological systems that sustain life on Earth, including forests, coral reefs and rainforests, as well as oceans and their major currents.

The temperature figures were seen as so significant that the new annual climate data for 2024 was presented Thursday night as part of the first-ever internationally coordinated release by several institutions that track global temperatures, in part to mark the “exceptional conditions experienced in 2024,” according to a report published today by Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service.

On Friday, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the World Meteorological Organization will follow up with similar reports, all of which will emphasize not only the record global temperatures, but also the record amount of water vapor in the atmosphere that contributed to severe and record flooding in some parts of the world last year, and also helped supercharge tropical cyclones and hurricanes.

Rather than being fatigued by the barrage of news about heat records and other climate extremes, people should see the information as an opportunity to be thankful that we are not flying blind into dangerous climate change, said Carlo Buontempo, director of the Copernicus Climate Change Service.

Thanks to international science, “We do know something about what’s happening,” he said. “We can make some predictions about what’s coming in the future. So rather than being overwhelmed … we should also take this as an opportunity to do something about it, to react to and to inform our decisions in the best possible way with facts and evidence.”

Even with those facts, he added, “We are facing a very new climate and new challenges that our society is not prepared for. … This is a monumental challenge for society.”

According to the Copernicus data, 2024 didn’t just edge past the previous record-warm year, 2023, but surged more than a tenth of 1 degree Celsius all the way to 1.6 degrees Celsius (2.8F) above the pre-industrial level. That was one of the biggest year-on-year jumps on record, said Samantha Burgess, co-director of Copernicus.

She said some of the other global datasets may actually still show the 2024 warming relative to the pre-industrial 1850-1900 average at just below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7F), but that the global synthesis of six major datasets by the World Meteorological Organization will also come out to more than 1.5.

Still, she said, that doesn’t mean the limit set by the Paris Agreement has been broken, because it refers to a long-term average over 10 to 30 years.

If the 1.6 degrees Celsius of warming over the pre-industrial average doesn’t seem like a huge deal to some people, she said human bodies provide a good analogy.

“The temperature of the human body is around 37 [degrees Celsius],” she said. “If we have a fever at 39 degrees, it doesn’t sound like much, but the body responds in very negative ways, and we feel terrible. We’re feverish, and the body is doing everything possible to fight that infection.

“The reality is that at a global average change of 1.5 degrees, the frequency and the intensity of extreme events gets more likely,” she said. “Extreme events like wildfires, heat waves, severe storms, droughts, are likely to get more frequent, and they’re likely to be more intense. This is why, when you’ve got this small number but over a very large global average, it’s incredibly important.”

The Copernicus scientists said that the world’s oceans, in particular, were one of the biggest factors driving Earth’s overall annual temperature to a new record. That ocean warmth also had direct impacts like a global wave of coral bleaching and reef die-offs, as well as mass die-offs of marine mammals and seabirds.

On land, the persistently high global fever of the last few years led to deadly heat waves, with more than 47,000 heat-related deaths in Europe alone during 2023. Final figures for the number of such deaths in 2024 are yet to be calculated.

The new data on record warmth comes at a time when some governments and companies are already rolling back previous climate action pledges. The internationally coordinated release of global climate data could also be seen as an acknowledgment that global warming isn’t going to slow down and wait for humanity to solve other vexing social, political and economic problems.

Asked if those rollbacks in the face of record heat are worrying to him as a climate scientist, Buontempo said that, “From a physical point of view, the mechanism is well explained. What drives this warming temperature is, to a very large extent, increasing greenhouse gases.”

If the goal is to stabilize the global temperature, then governments need to move toward reducing emissions to zero “in the most rapid possible way,” he said.

What will the future of the warming stripes be?2024 could be the start of a stabilisation of global temperatures, or it might appear to be a cool year.Which one of these stories becomes reality depends on our choices today, and every day until then.We are likely to regret not acting sooner.
— Ed Hawkins (@edhawkins.org) 2025-01-10T11:13:06.384Z

Looming questions about data centers — Allen Best (@BigPivots) #ActOnClimate

QTS Data Center Aurora June 2024. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots

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

January 2, 2025

Gov. Polis and many utilities say that data centers can benefit just about everybody in Colorado. But others fear impacts to rates and potential setbacks in reduction of emissions.

Under the umbrella of the energy transition were dozens of interesting, important stories in Colorado during 2024, including:

Tri-State Generation and Transmission Association got the lifeline it so desperately needed to make the transition from coal in the form of $679 million in assistance from the federal government. Sen. Michael Bennet — a key partner in the Inflation Reduction Act sausage-making in D.C. in 2022 — was there to commemorate it. And United Power, itself independent of Tri-State on May 1, is getting $261.6 million.

Pueblo talked a lot about nuclear — and inexplicably began cleaving itself from the renewable energy that had been very nearly the sole bright spot of its economy in recent years.

Holy Cross Energy achieved 90% renewable generation for a month this fall.

United Power broke ground on a natural gas plant, and Platte River Power Authority and everybody else laid plans similar plans for natural gas.

Seeds were planted for geothermal to become a viable part of Colorado’s energy story in Vail, Steamboat and easily a dozen other places across Colorado.

Important stories — these and many others in this energy transition. But easily surpassing them was the story of data centers and their voracious hunger for energy. Could their looming demand derail Colorado’s decarbonization plans? Defenders say no, but they are not convincing. And will interests of ratepayers be protected?

Figuring out the public policy to balance public interests and private gain will be a major issue in the 2025 legislative session.

Three years ago, few people outside of Virginia’s data center alley were talking about data centers. In 2019, there was a half- or less-baked idea of a cryptocurrency mill in Pueblo. Later came a crypto outfit near Montrose.

The era of hyperscale data centers — hyperscale is often defined as having “massive” power needs — arrived in early 2022 when Microsoft purchased a 260-acre parcel in Aurora, south of DIA, for $63.5 million.

In February 2023, Mile High CRE, an online news site about commercial development, described the purchase as the first in metropolitan Denver for a hyperscale data center.

“Denver has an edge over more established markets like Silicon Valley or Northern Virginia in that cost of power, cost of land, and cost of construction are lower, environmental risks are not as high, and the central location grants access to a plethora of networks,” it said. What Colorado lacked, the article added, was a competitive incentive package.

In February 2024, State Sen. Kevin Priola introduced a bill that would have extended more tax breaks to data center developers. Big Pivots did write about that in a column that got broad play across Colorado. See: “Why do data center need tax breaks in Colorado? They’re coming anyway.” A few weeks later came news that the data center s ubsidy bill was postponed. It never got one committee hearing.

Colorado already has one hyperscale data center. It’s in Aurora, and Mark Jaffee of the Colorado Sun broke the story about QTS in October 2023. (Big Pivots was too busy on a series about water and urban landscapes to chase it).

Two guest columnists in Big Pivots weighed in on the value of data centers. Morey Wolfson, a one-time staffer at the Colorado Energy Office and at the PUC, in September argued against subsidies. Jeff Ackermann, a former chair of the PUC as well as director of the state energy office, in October argued that data centers can have upsides. Meanwhile, the Economist, the New York Times and the Washington Post began writing frequently about data centers — including this story from last week: “Energy hungry AI firms bet on these moonshot technologies.”

Xcel Energy in October delivered the statistics that made this a compelling Colorado story. The electrical utility, responsible for more than half of electrical sales in Colorado, said it needed a staggering 12,500 to 14,000 megawatts of new generation to meet rising demand. To put that into perspective, Rush Creek, Xcel’s wind farm between Limon and Colorado Springs, has a capacity of 600 megawatts.

After average annual growth of 0.7% during the preceding five years, said Xcel, it projected 4% growth compounded annually from 2023 to 2031.

Data centers lie at the center of this projected growth, 62% for energy growth overall and 72% for peak demand, according to Xcel’s Jack Ihle. In an Oct. 15 filing with Colorado regulators, he also said the same base-case forecast saw electric vehicles producing 19% and building electrification 12% of its new demand.

Even without this new demand, Xcel has had trouble getting renewable energy across the finish line. These are projects approved through the electric resource plan from 2021. Supply chain issues have something to do with that.

How will Xcel be able to meet burgeoning demand? And does this imperil Colorado’s drive to meet its 2030 goal of 50% economy wide reduction in emissions? The state’s existing modeling already showed the state falling short, and that was without the data centers becoming a major part of the equation. Now comes speculation — and, at this point it is merely that, speculation — that Xcel may find it necessary to keep Comanche 3, its newest and largest coal-fired unit, operating beyond 2030.

That speculation is not completely out of the blue. That is indeed what has happened in Virginia.

Here, I have described Xcel Energy. But data centers could be part of the stories of Tri-State and its members as well as Platte River Power Authority, Black Hills Energy and perhaps others. Even Fort Morgan — a town of 12,000 northeast of Denver, which is supplied by electricity by the Municipal Energy Agency of Nebraska. A Wyoming company, Prometheus Energy, says it intends to create a data center there as well as in Pueblo in 2026, according to one report.

Chris Hansen, one of Colorado’s most important state legislators in the energy transition, told Big Pivots in November that one of his larger disappointments in leaving the Legislature to manage La Plata Electric was that he wouldn’t be able to advance legislation to address the data center issue and help Colorado avoid the problems of Virginia. Hansen has handed the work off to State Rep. Kyle Brown, a Democrat from Louisville. Brown has a background in health care, and he will never have the adroit voice of a Chris Hansen or a Steve Fenberg, but he has demonstrated in his two years that he is a capable, solid legislator.

Yesterday, Gov. Jared Polis was in my neighborhood, and I got in a few minutes to talk with him about passenger rail and data centers. I asked him explicitly whether the growth in demand from data centers would imperil Colorado’s goal of achieving 50% economy wide decarbonization.

No, he said. Done right, growth in data centers can be a win-win for consumers and the utilities.

“Data centers are a broad category of electricity users, but I would say in the right time, in the right place, data centers can play a very important role in improving the reliability and sustainability of the grid, just like if they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, they can add transmission costs,” he replied. “It’s really about what, when and where, and how that factors into grid resiliency as we move towards clean energy.”

I persisted with a question about the need for legislation. He did not answer directly:

“If there’s a way to bring in more data centers working with some of the larger providers in areas that make sense, that help us reduce costs for Colorado consumers and improve grid resiliency, then we should explore those.”

I suspect Xcel would be happy with his phrasing. However, we are already seeing upward price pressures in renewables because of supply chain and other issues. If that upward migration coupled with rapid growth in demand produces sharply higher consumer costs, there could be strong pushback. That could delay Colorado’s progress toward its decarbonization goals. The debate in the PUC proceedings about Xcel’s just transition electric-resource plan in coming months should be lively. That applies, too, to the debates in the Colorado Legislature.

There’s lots of good journalism to be had here for Big Pivots going into 2025. It’s one of many good stories across Colorado deserving deeper dives.

Xcel was reluctant to go forward with its first major wind farm, completed in 2004, but now has much wind — and will add far more in the next few yeas. Photo near Cheyenne Wells, Allen Best

Report: When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather In 2024 — World Weather Attribution #ActOnClimate

Click the link to access the report on the World Weather Attribution website:

December 27, 2024

When Risks Become Reality: Extreme Weather in 2024 is our annual report, published this year for the first time.

Every December, people ask us how severe the year’s extreme weather events were. To answer this question, we’ve partnered with Climate Central to produce a report that reviews some of the most significant events and highlights findings from our attribution studies. It also includes new analysis looking at the number of dangerous heat days added by climate change in 2024 and global resolutions for 2025 to work toward a safer, more sustainable world.

Key messages

Extreme weather reached dangerous new heights in 2024. This year’s record-breaking temperatures fueled unrelenting heatwaves, drought, wildfire, storms and floods that killed thousands of people and forced millions from their homes. This exceptional year of extreme weather shows how dangerous life has already become with 1.3°C of human-induced warming, and highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

Climate change contributed to the deaths of at least 3,700 people and the displacement of millions in 26 weather events we studied in 2024. These were just a small fraction of the 219 events that met our trigger criteria, used to identify the most impactful weather events. It’s likely the total number of people killed in extreme weather events intensified by climate change this year is in the tens, or hundreds of thousands.

Globally, climate change added on average 41 additional days of dangerous heat in 2024 that threatened people’s health, according to new analysis by Climate Central. The countries that experienced the highest number of dangerous heat days are overwhelmingly small island and developing states, who are highly vulnerable and considered to be on the frontlines of climate change. The analysis highlights the wide reaching impacts of extreme heat that are underreported and not well understood.

Many extreme events that took place in the beginning of 2024 were influenced by El Niño. However, most of our studies found that climate change played a bigger role than El Niño in fueling these events, including the historic drought in the Amazon. This is consistent with the fact that, as the planet warms, the influence of climate change increasingly overrides other natural phenomena affecting the weather. [ed. emphasis mine]

Record-breaking global temperatures in 2024 translated to record-breaking downpours. From Kathmandu, to Dubai, to Rio Grande do Sul, to the Southern Appalachians, the last 12 months have been marked by a large number of devastating floods. Of the 16 floods we studied, 15 were driven by climate change-amplified rainfall. The result reflects the basic physics of climate change — a warmer atmosphere tends to hold more moisture, leading to heavier downpours. Shortfalls in early warning and evacuation plans likely contributed to huge death tolls, while floods in Sudan and Brazil highlighted the importance of maintaining and upgrading flood defences.

The Amazon rainforest and Pantanal Wetland were hit hard by climate change in 2024, with severe droughts and wildfires leading to huge biodiversity loss. The Amazon is the world’s most important land-based carbon sink, making it crucial for the stability of the global climate. Ending deforestation will protect both ecosystems from drought and wildfire, as dense vegetation is able to absorb and retain moisture.

Hot seas and warmer air fueled more destructive storms, including Hurricane Helene and Typhoon Gaemi. Individual attribution studies have shown how these storms have stronger winds and are dropping more rain. Research by Climate Central found that climate change increased the intensity of most Atlantic hurricanes between 2019 and 2023 – of the 38 hurricanes analysed, 30 had wind speeds that were one category higher on the Saffir-Simpson scale than they would have been without human-caused warming, while our analysis found that the risk of multiple Category 3-5 typhoons hitting the Philippines in a given year is increasing as the climate warms.

Figure 1: World Weather Attribution studies in 2024.

Resolutions for 2025

A faster shift away from fossil fuels – The burning of oil, gas and coal are the cause of warming and the primary reason extreme weather is becoming more severe. Last year at COP28, the world finally agreed to ‘transition away from fossil fuels,’ but new oil and gas fields continue to be opened around the world, despite warnings that doing so will result in a long term commitment to more than 1.5°C and therefore costs to people around the world. Extremes will continue to worsen with every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming. A rapid move to renewable energy will help make the world a safer, healthier, wealthier and more stable place.

Improvements in early warning – Weather disasters in 2024 highlighted the importance of early warning systems, which are one of the cheapest and most effective ways to minimise fatalities. Warnings need to be targeted, given days ahead of a dangerous weather event, and outline clear instructions on what people need to do. Most extreme weather is well forecast, even in developing nations. Every country needs to implement, test and continually improve early warning systems to ensure people are not in harm’s way.

Real-time reporting of heat deaths – Heatwaves are the deadliest type of extreme weather. However, the dangers of high temperatures are underappreciated and underreported. In April, a hospital in Mali reported a surge in excess deaths as temperatures climbed to nearly 50°C. Reported by local media, the announcement was a rare example of health professionals raising the alarm about the dangers of extreme heat in real-time. Health systems worldwide are stretched, but informing local journalists when emergency departments are overwhelmed is a simple way to alert the public that extreme heat can be deadly.

Finance for developing countries – COP29 recently discussed ways to increase finance for poor countries to help them cope with the impacts of extreme weather. Developing countries are responsible for a small amount of historic carbon emissions, but as our research has highlighted this year, are being hit the hardest by extreme weather. Back-to-back disasters, like the Philippines typhoons, or devastating floods that followed a multi-year drought in East Africa, are cancelling out developmental gains and forcing governments to reach deeper and deeper into their pockets to respond and recover from extreme weather. Ensuring developing countries have the means to invest in adaptation will protect lives and livelihoods, and create a stabler and more equitable world.

#Colorado’s environmental efforts could be in grave peril: 2024 is likely to be hottest year on record. It’s no time for science deniers to be in charge of country’s future — Pete Kolbenschlag (Colorado Newsline) #ActOnClimate

An aerial view of Assignation Ridge in the Thompson Divide area of Colorado. (Courtesy of EcoFlight)

Click the link to read the commentary on the Colorado Newsline website (Pete Kolbenschlag):

December 31, 2024

Some people say that the movement toward renewable energy cannot be stopped by a single regressive administration. But Colorado could be badly harmed if its efforts to transition to clean energy are put on hold. Millions of dollars in investments for rural co-ops, community-based solar, and grid hardening could be in jeopardy, striking a heavy blow to our more resilient future. Worse still, that’s only one piece of what could be coming under a new federal regime.

Colorado’s public lands and water supplies are also in grave peril under the incoming Congress and president. This is despite decades of hard, locally-driven work to secure protections for vital headwaters, hunting lands, forests and habitat, many from a century-long history of extraction. And it’s regardless of rapid warming, persistent drought and an imperiled Colorado River system with no good solutions in sight.

Healthy natural systems guard against ecological collapse. But now various environmental tipping points, that moment in a system where it moves into a new norm and change becomes irreversible, appear at their most precarious moments. During 2024 humans pumped out more climate-choking pollution than ever before. That’s almost 10 years after the acclaimed Paris Agreement, which our president-elect and his cabinet have vowed to abandon.

Global warming presents a clear and present danger to all our livelihoods and well-being. And the United States is already the No. 1 oil and gas producer in the world and a top polluter behind only China. 2024 is likely to be the hottest year ever recorded. Without the sufficient response we careen toward calamity. To meet this moment, the incoming administration and Congress have pledged to pollute more and care less.

That is bad news not only for our lands and water supplies, but for the economic future, too. Our ledgers will already never be free of climate risk. Which is why the debate at the global climate summits is now about who ends up with the bill for loss and damages done and coming. That matters here, too: A recent study correlates rising insurance costs with climate vulnerability and puts much of Colorado in the dark red hazard zone.

In a state where housing is increasingly unaffordable, putting science deniers in charge of our future is just a bad idea. Moving federal agency offices or installing Colorado-based cabinet-members won’t matter if the new administration is just rearranging deck chairs to ensure its patrons have the best seats to watch this escalating disaster.

In fact, fossil fuel “dominance” could make a mess of Colorado, as it does most places it asserts itself. This puts at risk our lands and communities with oil trains, backdoor schemes to subsidize legacy polluters, policies that favor extraction over conservation, and more pipelines for more fracked gas exports. The alternative to slamming head on into a worst future is to stop the harm now and to make systems more resilient to coming disruptions. That means less fossil energy and more conservation of natural places. [ed. emphasis mine]

Milkweed, sweet peas, and a plethora of other flora billow from Farmer’s Ditch in the North Fork Valley of western Colorado. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

Standing up for Colorado’s liveable future means fighting the expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure and defending places Coloradans have fought for decades to protect – such as Thompson Divide, the Dolores River canyons, or the forests and public lands surrounding critical watersheds and farmlands in places like the North Fork Valley.

That will best limit the extent of further harm and will better secure our natural capital as a hedge against future disruption. By investing in ecological systems through resilient watersheds and healthy lands we guard against uncertainty. By defending these cherished places, we will keep intact critical sources of sustenance and enjoyment for the future and return dividends to those who live, work, and visit here today.

The Dolores River, below Slickrock, and above Bedrock. The Dolores River Canyon is included in a proposed National Conservation Area. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism.

Critical water quality permits designed to protect streams remain backlogged, but numbers are improving — Jerd Smith (Fresh Water News)

Metropolitan Wastewater Reclamation District Hite plant outfall via South Platte Coalition for Urban River Evaluation

Click the link to read the article on the Water Education Colorado website (Jerd Smith):

January 2, 2024

Colorado health officials say a massive permit backlog that has left hundreds of water systems in administrative limbo has shrunk in the past year, though more work remains.

Last year, 75% of wastewater discharge permits had expired. This year that figure has dropped to 50%, according to the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), with 1,384 permits classified as expired. The permits regulate and set standards for removing pollutants from wastewater before it is discharged to streams.

The state’s Water Quality Control Division has wrestled with the problem for several years. In the past two years the state has provided several million dollars to help eliminate the backlog. Major dischargers, such as the City of Aurora and Metro Water Recovery, are among those that have been impacted by the problem.

Under the federal Clean Water Act, entities that discharge fluids into streams, including wastewater treatment plants and factories, must get approval from water quality regulators to ensure what they’re putting into the waterways does not harm them.

Though holders of expired permits are legally allowed to continue discharging, the expiration means dischargers face major uncertainty about what future requirements may be and how much it will cost to meet them, according to the CDPHE.

Protecting streams from pollutants is a tough problem and is getting more difficult as populations grow and climate change reduces the amount of water flowing in rivers, intensifying contamination. Emerging toxins, such as PFAS, also now require treatment. PFAS make up a large class of chemicals used in everything from firefighting foam to Teflon. They are known as “forever chemicals” because they last decades in the environment and the human body. The EPA has just begun setting regulatory standards for them.

The agency has hired a consultant to help it examine new ways of managing the permitting process. It expects to have recommendations for new procedures by midyear 2025, CDPHE spokesperson John Michael said.

“We are committed to finding solutions to address more of the backlog,” he said via email.

The agency is under the gun to do so, in part, because its performance lags the standards set by the EPA, which state that 75% of all discharge permits under the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, or NPDES, should be current.

“Timely issuance and reissuance of NPDES permits are important because they can provide greater certainty to the business community and ensure that permits improve environmental protection by reflecting the most recent scientific information,” said Marisa Lubeck, a spokesperson for EPA’s Region 8, which includes Colorado.

“The EPA has encouraged and continues to encourage CDPHE to decrease its NPDES permit backlog, and we are aware the state has acquired additional resources to help with this effort,” Lubeck said via email.

States across the country have wrestled with monitoring and renewing the discharge permits. According to a 2024 EPA analysis, Colorado had the largest permit backlog nationwide, with 81% expired. The average nationwide is 22%. The EPA’s estimate is higher because the state’s method for classifying permits differs from the federal government’s, according to the EPA.

With the new funding, the CDPHE has hired additional staff to address the problem and to shore up long-term finances for the regulatory work by increasing fees the state can charge for the permits.

Colorado State Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Republican from Brighton and a member of the legislature’s Joint Budget Committee, said she remains concerned that the health department hasn’t fully resolved the problems.

“The bottom line is that there are still a lot of permits in that backlog,” Kirkmeyer said.

And she said cities and wastewater utilities continue to complain about the permitting process, calling it cumbersome and time-consuming.

The Colorado Wastewater Utility Council, which represents municipalities and wastewater treatment providers, did not respond to a request for comment.

More by Jerd Smith

Atlantic Ocean is headed for a tipping point − once melting glaciers shut down the Gulf Stream, we would see extreme climate change within decades, study shows

Too much fresh water from Greenland’s ice sheet can slow the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Paul Souders/Stone via Getty Images

February 9, 2024

René van Westen, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Utrecht University

Superstorms, abrupt climate shifts and New York City frozen in ice. That’s how the blockbuster Hollywood movie “The Day After Tomorrow” depicted an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation and the catastrophic consequences.

While Hollywood’s vision was over the top, the 2004 movie raised a serious question: If global warming shuts down the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, which is crucial for carrying heat from the tropics to the northern latitudes, how abrupt and severe would the climate changes be?

Twenty years after the movie’s release, we know a lot more about the Atlantic Ocean’s circulation. Instruments deployed in the ocean starting in 2004 show that the Atlantic Ocean circulation has observably slowed over the past two decades, possibly to its weakest state in almost a millennium. Studies also suggest that the circulation has reached a dangerous tipping point in the past that sent it into a precipitous, unstoppable decline, and that it could hit that tipping point again as the planet warms and glaciers and ice sheets melt.

In a new study using the latest generation of Earth’s climate models, we simulated the flow of fresh water until the ocean circulation reached that tipping point.

The results showed that the circulation could fully shut down within a century of hitting the tipping point, and that it’s headed in that direction. If that happened, average temperatures would drop by several degrees in North America, parts of Asia and Europe, and people would see severe and cascading consequences around the world.

We also discovered a physics-based early warning signal that can alert the world when the Atlantic Ocean circulation is nearing its tipping point.

The ocean’s conveyor belt

Ocean currents are driven by winds, tides and water density differences.

In the Atlantic Ocean circulation, the relatively warm and salty surface water near the equator flows toward Greenland. During its journey it crosses the Caribbean Sea, loops up into the Gulf of Mexico, and then flows along the U.S. East Coast before crossing the Atlantic.

Two illustrations show how the AMOC looks today and its weaker state in the future — How the Atlantic Ocean circulation changes as it slows. IPCC 6th Assessment Report

This current, also known as the Gulf Stream, brings heat to Europe. As it flows northward and cools, the water mass becomes heavier. By the time it reaches Greenland, it starts to sink and flow southward. The sinking of water near Greenland pulls water from elsewhere in the Atlantic Ocean and the cycle repeats, like a conveyor belt.

Too much fresh water from melting glaciers and the Greenland ice sheet can dilute the saltiness of the water, preventing it from sinking, and weaken this ocean conveyor belt. A weaker conveyor belt transports less heat northward and also enables less heavy water to reach Greenland, which further weakens the conveyor belt’s strength. Once it reaches the tipping point, it shuts down quickly.

What happens to the climate at the tipping point?

The existence of a tipping point was first noticed in an overly simplified model of the Atlantic Ocean circulation in the early 1960s. Today’s more detailed climate models indicate a continued slowing of the conveyor belt’s strength under climate change. However, an abrupt shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation appeared to be absent in these climate models. https://www.youtube.com/embed/p4pWafuvdrY?wmode=transparent&start=0 How the ocean conveyor belt works.

This is where our study comes in. We performed an experiment with a detailed climate model to find the tipping point for an abrupt shutdown by slowly increasing the input of fresh water.

We found that once it reaches the tipping point, the conveyor belt shuts down within 100 years. The heat transport toward the north is strongly reduced, leading to abrupt climate shifts.

The result: Dangerous cold in the North

Regions that are influenced by the Gulf Stream receive substantially less heat when the circulation stops. This cools the North American and European continents by a few degrees.

The European climate is much more influenced by the Gulf Stream than other regions. In our experiment, that meant parts of the continent changed at more than 5 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius) per decade – far faster than today’s global warming of about 0.36 F (0.2 C) per decade. We found that parts of Norway would experience temperature drops of more than 36 F (20 C). On the other hand, regions in the Southern Hemisphere would warm by a few degrees.

Two maps show US and Europe both cooling by several degrees if the AMOC stops. — The annual mean temperature changes after the conveyor belt stops reflect an extreme temperature drop in northern Europe in particular. René M. van Westen

These temperature changes develop over about 100 years. That might seem like a long time, but on typical climate time scales, it is abrupt.

The conveyor belt shutting down would also affect sea level and precipitation patterns, which can push other ecosystems closer to their tipping points. For example, the Amazon rainforest is vulnerable to declining precipitation. If its forest ecosystem turned to grassland, the transition would release carbon to the atmosphere and result in the loss of a valuable carbon sink, further accelerating climate change.

The Atlantic circulation has slowed significantly in the distant past. During glacial periods when ice sheets that covered large parts of the planet were melting, the influx of fresh water slowed the Atlantic circulation, triggering huge climate fluctuations.

So, when will we see this tipping point?

The big question – when will the Atlantic circulation reach a tipping point – remains unanswered. Observations don’t go back far enough to provide a clear result. While a recent study suggested that the conveyor belt is rapidly approaching its tipping point, possibly within a few years, these statistical analyses made several assumptions that give rise to uncertainty.

Instead, we were able to develop a physics-based and observable early warning signal involving the salinity transport at the southern boundary of the Atlantic Ocean. Once a threshold is reached, the tipping point is likely to follow in one to four decades.

A line chart of circulation strength shows a quick drop-off after the amount of freshwater in the ocean hits a tipping point. — A climate model experiment shows how quickly the AMOC slows once it reaches a tipping point with a threshold of fresh water entering the ocean. How soon that will happen remains an open question. René M. van Westen

The climate impacts from our study underline the severity of such an abrupt conveyor belt collapse. The temperature, sea level and precipitation changes will severely affect society, and the climate shifts are unstoppable on human time scales.

It might seem counterintuitive to worry about extreme cold as the planet warms, but if the main Atlantic Ocean circulation shuts down from too much meltwater pouring in, that’s the risk ahead.

This article was updated on Feb. 11, 2024, to fix a typo: The experiment found temperatures in parts of Europe changed by more than 5 F per decade.

René van Westen, Postdoctoral Researcher in Climate Physics, Utrecht University; Henk A. Dijkstra, Professor of Physics, Utrecht University, and Michael Kliphuis, Climate Model Specialist, Utrecht University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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On the housing supply-side theory JONATHAN P. THOMPSON SEPTEMBER 19, 2023: https://www.landdesk.org/p/on-the-housing-supply-side-theory

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The new New Deal is a pretty good deal — Jonathan P. Thompson November 24, 2021 Read full story

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January 2025 – Hydrological highlights

January 2025 – Sea Ice highlights

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